The Old Blighty has well over one percent of its land mass devoted to roads even considering most of the rural roads are barely wide enough for two draught horses to squeeze past one another, however that made them excelent for highway robbers. As a matter of interest, highway robbers rode horses which made them a cut above your common or garden brigand and so it was far more preferable to be robbed by a highwayman.
A Jacky Winter in flight showing off its tail pattern. Moira Forest NSW.
Meanwhile back in Australia... long before what alternated between interminable stretches of muddy tracks or blistering hot dustbowls got the entitlement to be called roads, were wide corridors of land where drovers and bushrangers could move their cattle and sheep from place to place, some of which they actually owned... the cattle and sheep that is! They needed to be wide enough to provide grazing for the stock on their journey. When drought came they also provided grazing land for the local cockies... and so they became known as the "long paddock". These days the long paddock brings utopian images of bucolic drovers moseying along on their horses, across the wide open spaces of the Australian outback under bright blue skies with the cattle moo-ing their way peacefully as they went off to be slaughtered at some distant meat works or stolen by another gang of bushrangers or these days taxed out of existence by modern day bushrangers.
The mountainous and craggy bark of the Red Iron Bark tree. Also known as Mugga Ironbark Eucalyptus sideroxylon. They grow in infertile soils in areas of low rainfall and sometimes can be seen on the long paddock. The dark black bark of the Red Iron Bark is contrasted with red fissures of amber coloured sap; gives the name of this distinctive eucalyptus.
Australian has just under one million kilometers of unmaintained and deteriorating roads and only about a third of them are paved and no one really cares how much of the continent are roads. Unlike the country lanes of Europe, Australia's country roads are much wider, less crowded and have grassy verges more than wide enough to swing a cat. Incidentally, they say that the inspiration for the idea of painting a stripe down the middle of the road to separate the traffic came from someone travelling behind a milk truck that was leaking a trail of milk down the centre of the road. No doubt many cats got run over in the aftermath.
None of this as anything to do with what I was supposed to be writing about! Moving on... I had a bucolic meander across NSW and Victoria... as they say in Texas... big hat - no cattle!
Evening reflections in the dam at the Honeyeater Picnic Area... it's full, but not a lot of bird activity... a solitary Australasian Grebe and some Scarlet Robins and Yellow-tufted Honeyeaters.
It sort of began at the Chiltern - Mt Pilot National Park on the way from Canberra with a evening visit to the Honeyeater Picnic Area and the following brisk morning in the northern section of the park at Ryans Road and Klotz Track. Not a lot of bird activity in the forest at this time of the year, the usual hoardes of maraurding honeyeaters were having a holiday and there was little evidence of flowering Iron Bark and Grey Box to keep them there.
A slightly unkempt Fan-tailed Cuckoo on Magenta Rd. While the forest was generally quiet, groups of mixed species hung around together as they do...
Driving west from Chiltern there was lots of standing water, lakes and ponds full and roadside ditches brimming with water.
Similar to a previous post I made about finding large numbers of birds congregating in and around an ephemeral pond beside the highway in western Victoria a few months ago; I once again came across large numbers of birds on two adjacent ephermeral lakes; this time beside the Midland Hghway north of Bendigo. One was just to the west of Greens Lake and the other at Horseshoe Lake just a bit further to the south down Darrigans Rd. The nearby more permanent lakes... Lake Cooper and Greens Lake had by comparison much less birds. On these shallow bare looking ephemeral lakes there were large numbers of Australian Black Swans, rafts of Australasian Grebes, coots, cormorants, ducks of various sorts and a few other odds and sorts such as twenty or so Red-necked Avocets.
Horseshoe Lake. Rafts of Coots... about 1,500 of them... a couple of hundred Australian Black Swans, Australian Pelicans, Little Black Cormorants were among the other birds found here.
Travelling north from there I made my first visit to the Moira Forest after crossing the Murray at Echuca and following the old stock route north along what is now the Cobb Highway. This highway follows one of the traditional "long paddocks". The sealed highway is bordered on each side by a very wide grass reserve bigger than most European farms. The long paddock features widely in the literature and poetry of Australia.
Now this is the law of the Overland that all in the west obey,
A man must cover with travelling sheep a six-mile stage a day;
But this is the law which the drovers make, right easily understood,
They travel their stage where the grass is bad, but they camp where the grass is good;
They camp and they ravage the squatter's grass till never a blade remains,
Then they drift away as the white clouds drift on the edge of the saltbush plains.
Banjo Paterson
The Cobb Highway sits on the top of a fault line that got in the way of the Murray River and created a huge floodplain; swamps, lakes and wetlands in now what is the largest red gum forest in Australia. It's part of the Bahmah - Millewa Forest; the Bahmah Forest is on the Victorian side of the River Murray and the Millewa forest is on the New South Wales side. The Moira Forest is part of the Millewa Forest. It includes Red Gum forests, Black Box and Callitris Pine.
Red Gums growing in the wetlands of the Moira Forest.
About forty White-faced Herons were roosting in this one dead tree in the Moira Forest among White-necked Heron, Great Cormorant and some Straw-necked Ibis.
