Damp but delightful: Lane Cove's bushwalk bonanza!

 

Our unseasonably cool and damp summer weather hasn't destroyed  the bushwalking opportunities around here. Between showers it's actually been quite conducive to a pleasant and scenic outing.

 

Yesterday I was introduced to a nice little 20km circuit walk, starting and finishing in Lane Cove village. It took in Swaines Creek, Stringybark Creek, and both sides of the Lane Cove River.

In fact there are dozens of excellent bush tracks in the area, and I'm still discovering them.

 

 

This summer has been an exceptional one for the New South Wales Christmas bush (Ceratopetalum gummiferum). There were many fine specimens lining the banks of the river.

Lane Cove Bushland Park - magic mushrooms and elusive Baza

Lane Cove Council is rather proud of its little Bushland Park, and runs lots of walks and talks about it and about the local natural environment generally.

I went along on one of these yesterday, and it made for an interesting hour and a half.

Bushland interpretation officers Michelle and Valerie did a fine job explaining the history of the reserve. It was rescued from a proposed golf course expansion a few decades back, and was placed on the Register of the National Estate in 2000, following the discovery of several fungal species found nowhere else in the world, and therefore clearly endangered.

We strolled the few hundred metres up and down the tracks beside Gore Creek, and heard about bush tucker, the different vegetative zones, the plants and the wildlife. Not so much about the fungi. This was officially not a fungus walk - the main fungus season doesn't start for another month or two. But my friends and I were subversively focusing on the ones that were there anyway!

At one point we were passing round the skull of a Tawny Frogmouth and the shrunken, dried-up lump of gunk that was a possum after it had been eaten and regurgitated by a Powerful Owl. Our group of oldies enjoyed this sort of thing just as much as the school groups also probably do.

A  mystery bird caught the attention of some of us. It was high in the trees, and my camera and its telephoto lens only yielded a silhouette black shape at the time. Back home, the much-enhanced image showed it to be a Pacific Baza, no less. I wasn't really aware of the Pacific Baza until then. It's also called the Crested Hawk, apparently.

More on the park at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_Cove_Bushland_Park

Lane Cove's famous fungi

My bushwalking group did a great little walk the other day which incorporated a guided tour of the rare and endangered fungi species of the Lane Cove Bushland Park.

Our guide Ray used to be a neurologist. Now he's an enthusiastic expert mycologist, and he expertly pointed out, named, and explained about 20 or 30 different species, all in the space of a few hectares of this inner Sydney suburban park.

Some of them are endemic, in the true meaning of the word - ie they've not been found anywhere else but in this small locality. The little black one (below right) is so rare and endangered that it's not yet been named or scientifically described. The green one is green with a green pigment that's not chlorophyll. The big orange mass at the base of an angophora tree is a parasite that will kill the fully grown tree within two years. The small ones were often so small that we'd never have noticed them at all without our expert help.

And the ones that look like jellybeans are called jellybean fungi, and the ones that look like coral are called coral fungi.

We learnt a lot, and didn't we feel privileged to have been treated to this! (Mind you, I didn't learn quite enough to give you any of the latin names. Sorry about that!)