While there is not much flowering activity at present at Tarra-Bulga National Park. Plenty of species are laden with fruit which must make it a time of abundance for a range of our bird species. Had a walk around yesterday and found the following fruits on offer.
Male Koala recorded by our new machine. Just went out into the field to collect the first set of recording from our new (replacement) Songmeter automatic recording device. The first file I had a look was from 10.30pm one night and it started of with a very nice Boobook Owl call. A few minutes later this scary monster started up, this is the third location in the park were we have recorded one of these lately.
This post is a summary of the Remote Camera Monitoring results over December and January 2012/13
Camera 1 – Still out of action after it was attacked by an aggressive lyrebird.
Lyrebird who got overly interested in one of our Remote Cameras
Camera 2 – Located in mature Wet Forest in the Tarra Valley was quite a prolific site, with the camera picking up lots of small birds e.g. White-browed Scrub Wrens and Bassian and Grey-Shrike Thrushes, as well as mammals such as Antechinus and Long-nosed Bandicoots, unfortunately there were plenty of Foxes and a Feral Cat present. Also plenty of Wombats, Wallabies and some Brushtails.
This video made up from a series of still photos from one of our remote cameras along with some sound recorded by our songmeter shows a Male Superb Lyrebird systematically scratching around for food underneath the leaf litter. This scratching results in the leaf litter being turned over and is thought to improve the rate of nutrient cycling in the forest, helping to create compost that will feed the vegetation.
One area of the park that the Friends of Tarra Bulga are monitoring carefully is an area that has been set back by the occurrence of the Black Saturday bush-fires. The site is on a north-west facing slope and is an area of about 10 ha.It was added to the National Park in 1986 which was part of the process of the merging of the Bulga Park and Tarra Valley reserves. At that time it was in very poor condition, having being abandoned after being cleared for farming. It was reportedly covered in blackberries, introduced grasses and native colonisers such as Fireweed Groundsel and Bracken Fern.
Last Saturday the Friends of Tarra Bulga National Park held another walking activity aimed a giving interested people the opportunity to explore some of the more out of the way areas. This walk aimed to take in the Wild Cherry Track and then head down along a new section of the Grand Strzelecki Track and down through the Warm Temperate Rainforest along Macks Creek is the focus of an impressive restoration project. we were fortunate to be joined on the walk by Richard Appleton, who was a driving force behind the creation of the Grand Strzelecki Track as well as the rainforest restoration.
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The weather conditions were kind and although the walk was mainly down hill it was still a challenge at times to negotiate some of the steep sections of track. We started off down the forest track so we could go through a section of Cool Temperate Rainforest as a contrast to what we would encounter further on. There were many highlights during the walk, they included taking in some of the array of flowering plants happening at this time of year at Tarra Bulga especially the mint bushes, Prostanthera melissifolia and Prostanthera lasianthos. The topography along the wild cherry track is impressive, as you walk down you can look down into the deep valley that contains the headwaters of Macks Creek and spot the rainforest down below. The vegetation is unusual in terms of the park, the ridge which you walk down has thinner soil and instead of wet scleropyhll forest it changes to damp forest. The dominant canopy species are Stringybarks and the weeping Cherry Ballart trees make for an attractive change of scenery.
There are two species of Clematis that occur in Tarra Bulga National Park and surrounding forest areas, Forest Clematis (Clematis glycinoides) and Mountain Clematis (Clematis aristata) and it can be very difficult to tell the difference between them. They are climbing plants that can climb high into trees and produce a mass of attractive white flowers in Spring. Both of them have leaves in groups of three of a similar size, Clematis aristata commonly has teeth or serrations on the leaf margins but both species show variation.
There are two main ways to tell the difference between the two out in the field. The first is flowering time. Clematis glycinoides tends to flower in early spring, with most of its flowering finished by mid-October, then Clematis aristata seems to take over to be the dominant flowering species for a month or so, although locally it is less common. The other way is a key but subtle difference in the flowers. If you look carefully at a flower the tips of the anthers have little appendages, In Clematis glycinoides they are very short <1mm or even absent. In Clematis aristata they are clearly longer usually around 2 or 3mm long.
Friends of Tarra-Bulga National Park 