Monday's meander

A hardy bunch of seven braved a pretty bad forecast to enjoy a two hour walk in Mt Worth State Park – what else would you do on a cold and wet day but visit a rainforest? Actually, we timed it just right for the walk and got through to ‘brunch’ back at the shelter just before the hailstorm!

Still smilin'

After donning the rain gear – to protect us from the drips from the trees – we set off on the Giants Circuit accompanied by the glorious serenade of several Lyrebirds. Great start to the day.

We paused several times to get a few shots of the beautiful Kangaroo Fern with their sori packs on the under-leaf and some sturdy shelf-bracket Ganodermas.

Kangaroo Fern – a common rainforest epiphyte in our district. Ganoderma – there’s about 80 species of this wood-decaying fungi. The extract from some Ganoderma species are used for medicinal purposes.

Apart from the Lyrebirds, the avifauna was remarkably quiet, probably due to the conditions. We think we saw a pair of Brown Gerygones but being so wet there were not very many binoculars between us.

Once we got into the patch of Soft Tree Ferns, we found some epiphytic Fieldia and fortunately we even found a couple of flowerheads.

Fieldia – a small, native epiphytic plant that can sometimes be locally common in rainforest gullies.

Some nice examples Strap Water Fern was next.

Strap Waterfern – a Blechnum species that likes to inhabit more fertile and wetter locations in the rainforest.

We passed under some leaves of the Blanket Leaf tree (Bushman’s D…y Paper) and came across a nice colony of Split Gill on the end of a log.

Split Gill – a cosmopolitan mushroom identifiable by the way the gills are longitudinally divided.

Just before getting back to the car park, we encountered the whistling call of the Olive Whistler – a great rainforest species. As usual, this fairly shy bird didn’t show itself. Also found a couple of tree trunks nicely decorated with some Whitewash Lichen.

Whitewash Lichen – A crustose lichen (or is it a fungus or ‘lichenised fungus’?) that looks like spilled paint.

A couple of us decided to engage in a ‘smoking ceremony’ in a vain attempt to get a fire going while we had lunch. Ultimately we could only warm up with our ‘cuppas’.

"Cough, cough".

Still, ‘brunch’ became entertaining when a Bassian Thrush came out into the open to seek its own tasty morsel – or perhaps it was smoke from our failed attempt to start a fire that enticed the bird to approach us. Either way, always nice to see one.

Bassian Thrush - a secretive. cryptic bird that inhabits the leaf litter in damp, densely forested areas

Despite the weather, I think the consensus was it was an enjoyable day – it was nice though to get into the cars and switch the heaters on for the run back home.