Hidden valley

It's actually quite difficult to get a view of Geelong's second river, the Moorabool.
This river has had a hard life – in the past it has been diverted because of the huge limestone quarry for the cement works at Fyansford (since closed but the council has just approved a big housing development on the site), dammed at Lal Lal for Ballarat's water supply, weed-infested and polluted with salt, agricultural sprays and fertilisers. Upstream a lot of restoration work is being done by landholders guided by Landcare and the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority, but very little water actually runs down the river at present because of the dam and the drought. The very wide and deep valley tells a story of past floods. Since European occupation there have been a number of devastating floods resulting in loss of property and stock.
Now there are major roadworks at Fyansford where the Moorabool meets the Barwon River. Geelong is finally getting a ring road – a bypass to take the beach-goers and transports around the city instead of through it. To build it the engineers have had to design bridges to cross the two rivers.
I set out to get a photo and found myself in courts, no-through roads and suburbia, finally finding a promising spot near Dunwinnie Crt in Hamlyn Heights and climbing though a fence to get to the edge of the road excavations. The photo below shows the start of the bridging of the Moorabool River.
Travellers in a year or so will get a completely different view of Geelong, or rather, the western edge of Geelong, and the bonus will be views of a previously hidden valley.

Can't see for looking

Yesterday Duncan at http://bencruachan.org/blog/ posted a photo of a tiny snail on an orchid - he only spotted the snail when he looked at his photos on the computer monitor. And check out this one by Pamela on August 17 at http://thomasburg-walks.blogspot.com/. There's a lovely photo of a yellow spider that you can only see because it is eating a fly.
I've done the same thing. Missed seeing what is perfectly obvious when I see the photo on screen. I wonder sometimes if I'm blind to detail or concentrating too much on the technicalities of focus, shutter speed or in too much of a hurry. It's a nice surprise when it happens though. And an even better surprise is when the insect is actually in focus, accidentally. Here are some of my camouflaged invertebrates.

Step over the cracks

I had to go back to the campus on a weekend. Even in a place of learning I would have felt very conspicuous on a week-day kneeling on a footpath to get a close-up photo of the moss Tortula muralis growing in the mortar between the bricks. The steps leading down to the computer lab are narrow and shaded and I would have been a major obstacle while I took photos of Bryum argentium that grows in the corner of each step. And Bryum torquescens grows really well on the brick wall outside the library. The normally quiet path around the lake had a visitor on Saturday, a student fishing, who must have wondered what I was doing - the tiny Grimmia pulvinata was spectacular in its sunny spot on the rock.

I'm used to seeing luxuriant moss in the forest but this is a different environment. Everywhere I look in the city I see moss. Some species of moss have adapted very well to city living. We've provided nooks and crannies, built our homes, pathways, headstones and factories out of granite, sandstone and limestone so the mosses feel quite at home. It amazes me to see moss growing on busy pathways, carparks, steps and walls, keeping its head down. So small that even when it sends up its sporophytes its barely noticeable. It amazes me that it can survive for long periods of heat and drought in such hostile environments and then flourish after the first rain.

I've read that moss it very susceptible to pollution so perhaps we should feel reassured as long as the moss is happy to be there – a bit like taking a canary down a mine to test the air. When I was a child we played the game of stepping over the cracks in a footpath because to step on one was bad luck. Bad luck for the moss maybe, but I never thought of that at the time.

An isolated treasure

The owners are very proud of their one-hectare property not very far from Ocean Grove on the Bellarine Peninsula. Their road is quiet and tree-lined, and their home is new. They have planted mostly Australian plants on what was formerly a farm paddock, and most are growing well in spite of the drought. Lots of birds are visiting and we were shown quite a few nests tucked away in the foliage of shrubs and creepers. While we were having a cuppa a pair of Maned Goose landed in the swimming pool - a curious choice because there was a dam only 50 metres away.

Alison and I were visiting the property as volunteer assessors for the Land for Wildlife (LfW) scheme run by the Government. The scheme encourages landholders to create or protect habitats for wildlife on their property and if they 'pass' the assessment they get a large metal sign to put on their front gate and regular newsletters.

We didn't give these owners a sign though. Why not? Because they had no understanding of the concept of planting local plant species to protect local wildlife, because they didn't know the names of any of the birds that visited the property while we were there, because they were planting species that have the potential to become weeds in the area, because they had an endangered species of tree on their property and didn't realise it. Our task with owners like this is to put them on the mailing list for LfW newsletters, provide them with advice, addresses of indigenous nurseries, pamphlets.

The endangered tree on the property is Eucalyptus leucoxylon subsp. bellarinensis, a local form of the Yellow Gum. It was first described in 1998 and the type specimen grows in the grounds of the Anglican Church, Ocean Grove. It appears to be confined to the Bellarine Peninsula but there aren't very many in the highly modified environment. It is listed as endangered in Victoria because the population is so low you can actually count each individual tree. A few isolated trees are on private property and roadsides, a few in reserves. They aren't regenerating very well naturally, so seed is collected and propagated in community and indigenous nurseries - the local Landcare group is doing a wonderful job persuading people to plant them. The tree on this property looks quite old but is still healthy. Alison and I were able to tell the owners that they were the protectors of something special.