Skipton

The first field nats trip of the year took us to various sites around Skipton, a town about 50km to the west of Ballarat. We met up at Skipton Common, a 74ha reserve managed by Ballarat Environment Network.

Last year Wadawurrung people conducted a traditional burn at the common. You can read about it and see a video on the CFA website here: Skipton Common Traditional Owner Burn. Part of the purpose of our visit was to see what effect the burn has had on wildflowers. Many native wildflowers are stimulated to bloom after fire.

Some field nats looking for wildflowers:

The wildfowers are generally quite tiny, although once you start walking through the grass you see that they are everywhere. Here are a few we found.


Blue devil, Eryngium ovinum.

Lemon beauty heads, Calocephalus citreus.

Yellow star lilies, Hypoxis glabella?

Magenta stork's bill, Pelargonium rodneyanum.

Our next stop was Stewart Park, which contains the Skipton Historic Precinct and a platypus viewing point. Unfortunately there was no sign of any platypuses, but a swamp wallaby did hop right past us. No photo, it happened too fast. From the viewing point you can see this house, which was the childhood home of Sir Henry Bolte:

Another famous resident of the area was Francis Ormond, who founded the college that became RMIT, and donated huge sums for the building of Ormond College at Melbourne uni. This is the rather scary "Francis Ormond Bridge":

The scariness comes from how much it sways just from being walked on. Hold on tight!

Our next stop was lunch at Jubilee Park, where the trees were full of hundreds of corellas:

Waterlilies were flowering

and a family of non-native ducks followed us, hoping for food, as we walked around the lake:

Our last stop for the day was some wetlands along the Skipton Rail Trail, about 6km east of the town.

A few birds were spotted away in the distance, and some flowering eucalypts were attracting huge numbers of pollinating insects.

It was another interesting field naturalists excursion. I've never been to Skipton before, but will have to return to check out the op shop and the "old wares" (junk) shop that we didn't have time to see today.