Jezebels and painted ladies

In my suburban garden a butterfly or two occasionally wander through but here on the farm it's lovely to see them in numbers flying low over the grass.

The most common are the male Common Browns and the Cabbage Whites but I've seen a few Painted Ladies and several Spotted Jezebels on the Agonis in the garden (see below). The flowering Agonis is attracting a lot of native bees, flies and beetles.

And this Mantis Fly arrived inside with the washing off the line. I took it outside to have its portrait taken and then let it go.

Colourful cloud

Phew! Holidays at last. It's six weeks since I last blogged. The last few weeks have been busy but now we're down at our farm near Heywood for a couple of weeks. Lots of family will be coming and going and its going to be a busy but in a different way and there will still be lots of time to get out into the bush.

As we left Geelong this afternoon I saw this cloud over Highton. The rainbow colours only lasted a few minutes and then the colour was gone. It was very warm and sunny, no showers, and the photo was taken almost looking into the sun. I seem to remember reading in my cloud book that this phenomenon has a name but that book's at home and I only have limited internet access here. [Update: My friend Marilyn tells me it's an iridescent cloud http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/irid1.htm ]

Bryophytes

Last weekend, Victoria's unofficial extra long weekend because of the melbourne Cup, we went down to the Otways to explore the wet forest.

Our main aim was to relocate the Thismia rodwayi that we found last year, which we did, and a specimen will be collected for the herbarium - and then we explored around the Forrest area for the following day or so. Then we went home to dry out.

We found some lovely plants and animals but these are some of the lichens and liverworts from that area. It was lovely to see the wet forest actually wet.

Moth caterpillars

While Trevor, Craig and Grace poked around the rocks looking for lizards and snakes I took a break (from the tension!) and poked around under the bark of some eucalypts - and found this interesting caterpillar. It's Oenosandra boisduvalii Boisduval's Autumn Moth. Apparently it lives in southern Australia, including Tasmania, and the male and female moths look quite different from each other and were thought to be separate species at one stage.

But it doesn't do as much damage as another species that is in plague proportions around the coast at Anglesea at the moment. Painted Cup Moth caterpillars, Doratiphora oxleyi, are everywhere, chewing on leaves of various species of shrubs and trees. They're doing a lot of damage but presumably the plants will recover. I'll be down there again soon and will look for the cup-shaped cocoons on twigs.