Illabarook Field Trip

Today we took a trip to Illabarook (where?) to visit two sites, the Illabarook Rail Reserve and Illabarook Nature Conservation Reserve. I'd never heard of Illabarook before, but it isn't that far from home if you could fly there. It is about 30km in a straight line, but by road it is over 50.

This is the rail reserve:

 And this is the conservation reserve:

Neither of them look particularly promising at first glance. But each is full of tiny flowers, moths, caterpillars, spiders, and the occasional bird. It was a bit of a grey day, with rain threatening (despite not being forecast), so the pictures are a bit dull. But here are a few of the things we saw:

Several varieties of sundews:

Although most had only buds, no flowers yet.

A pallid cuckoo which every now and then pounced down to the ground and then back up onto the fence

with one of these in its mouth:

A big hairy caterpillar. I don't know what the caterpillars were eating, as they were much bigger than most of the plants.

A tiny fringe-lily full of water:

Fascinating texture on a fungus:

Common rice-flower

A host of golden... orchids:

It was hard to know sometimes if we were looking at different species of orchid, or if they just looked different because the raindrops were causing the petals to clump up.

A parrot-pea:

Although which parrot-pea it was no-one could decide as it didn't quite match the descriptions in the guide book:

And finally, something much larger at home. A tulip update:

The first layer of tulips (the pale pink ones) have started losing their petals. The middle layer (burgundy with pointy petals) are all looking good. And the third layer (which seemed to be orange but are more of a coral pink) are nearly all open.