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