Life on Baw Baw is wild

Butterflies by the thousand, moths flying in the day time, skinks everywhere, ants of course, and grasshoppers - the Baw Baw plateau was alive.

The best butterfly, that we could identify, was a Macleay's Swallowtail. It was flying very strongly and rapidly, especially above the trees on the very top of Mt Baw Baw. Apparently that's what the males do, fly about on the top of hills. It's a very impressive butterfly when seen up close, but never sat still long enough to photograph.

But I did get a photo of these three grasshoppers. They must have very good eyesight because the first one didn't move from his spot when I moved in closer, but kept dodging around the stalk when I tried to get a side view of him. I have no idea what it is, nor the one on my boot, but the last (out of focus) photo is a Spotted Mountain Grasshopper or Southern Pyrgomorph Monistria concinna. The remarkable thing about this particular grasshopper species is that they have a type of anti-freeze chemical called sorbitol in their body fluid, which enables them to survive beneath the winter snows. The male is the smaller of the two.

The tall and the short of it

The tallest plant on the Baw Baw plateau is the Snow Gum, but it is still an open forest - lots of herbs and shrubs grow right up to the trunks of the trees.

One of the smallest is the Apine Ballart Exocarpus nanus. It is a ground-hugger, spreading to a metre diameter and rooting at the nodes. We were lucky, and very excited, to see it growing in a mossy, boggy area next to a track. And lucky to see it fruiting as well, because it is the fruit that is the most interesting thing about ballarts.

As the name 'nanus' suggests, the plant is tiny, but the fruit looks exactly the same as those I am used to seeing on its big cousin the Cherry Ballart Exocarpus cupressiformis. The succulent red pedicel looks like fruit, and the nut sits on top of it. 'Exocarpus' means 'outside fruit'. Cherry Ballart is semi-parasitic but I don't know about the Alpine Ballart.

Ants in your pants

We had great troubles with ants on Baw Baw. Everytime we stopped to investigate something interesting we ended up performing the Ant Dance, a type of stomping and arm flapping rythym designed to rid the lower legs of a few dozen ants that had quickly moved onto boots and trousers.

E O Wilson knows a lot about ants. He's probably the world's expert. I've read a few things he has written but really their astonishing social life is still an enigma to me. An ant is an ant. I'm not going to get too close to study them. But this, on Mt Baw Baw, was a sight - a whole bush covered in winged ants that were moving frantically. Since coming home I've read (Australian Insects: a natural history by Bert Brunet) that 'during summer winged male and female ants, called alates, leave the nest and swarm in nuptial flights, after which they shed their wings and establish new colonies'.

Wilson once said that if he had his life over again he would study microbes (or some such thing), the minute life of the soil. At least they don't bite.

Snow Gentians and Sky Lilies

On every track at Baw Baw we saw Mueller's Snow Gentians Chionogentias muelleriana ssp. muelleriana - Ferdinand Mueller was the Victorian Government's first botanist - and they never failed to delight. What a beautiful plant. But we only saw one flowering patch of the beautiful Sky Lily Herpolirion novae-zelandiae. It grows in moist peaty soil which is where we found it, and is quite common, but the only plants flowering were in the shade under a picnic table near the village! Snow Gentians and Sky Lilies - poetry in their names and beauty in their appearance.

A visit to Victoria's high country

Baw Baw Alpine Resort in summer is a fascinating place to visit. We were there for four days and walked on a lot of the tracks and ski trails within the village and beyond into the Baw Baw National Park. It is a sub-alpine, above 1220 metres, the most southerly on mainland Australia,

The only eucalypt growing there is the Snow Gum Eucalypt pauciflora and even though it is the flowering season for this eucalypt we didn't see any flowering so it lives up to its name. The Snow Gums on Baw Baw have a mallee growth habit in that they are multi-trunked from a lignotuber, and are taller than I have seen elsewhere. The trunks are smooth and white and glow beautifully in the late afternoon sun.

In winter the whole of the vegetation is covered in snow and it's amazing to see it flowering prolifically in the summer. We found over 90 species flowering and a further 30 species not in flower. Some of these plants only grow on this plateau. The heathland areas in the depressions and valleys are dominated by spagnum bogs and these are a significant feature of the vegetation on Baw Baw.