These photos are the result of a walk around my suburban Townsville garden in peak insect season, a couple of weeks after the very-Wet season ended.
Peak insect season in my garden
Category: Insects and spiders
About insects, spiders and occasionally other small wildlife.
The Town Common in the Wet Season
The weather has been alternately too hot and too wet for enjoyable walking, for what feels like months, but I couldn’t resist going down to the Town Common yesterday morning. It’s looking very lush after the rain (about 1300 mm between Jan 28 and Feb 12) but it has dried out well. The road in to Freshwater Lagoon was already open again, somewhat to my surprise, although the road to the Quarantine Station wasn’t.
I chose to walk in from Pallarenda to Tegoora Rock anyway, and turned left towards Freshwater at the track junction. (I didn’t walk up to the lookout this time although it’s the best spot for views of the park.)
Wallaman wildlife 2024
We visited Wallaman Falls in Girringun National Park again last week. It hasn’t changed much since previous visits in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2022. Those links will take you to all the general information about the falls and the camping area so I won’t repeat it here.
The biggest differences this time were seasonal. All our previous visits were May-June and here we are near the end of October. The creek was still running well so the falls were as good as ever but the flowers and wildlife were somewhat different.
Paluma to Mount Zero
The Townsville branch of Native Plants Queensland has just visited Mount Zero in the Paluma hinterland, one of its monthly jaunts to botanically interesting locations in our region. We often go along, learning a bit about the plants and taking photos of any wildlife that comes our way.
Tiny fly, tinier prey
“But the predators, the carnivores, come in all sizes from Scrub Turkeys down to the tiny metallic green-gold flies we see around the garden all the time. They are aerial hunters, like miniature dragonflies, and if we had a microscope we might even see their prey,” I said in my previous post.
I had included a photo of one of those little Long-legged Flies, Dolichopodidae, in the post before that, to illustrate the limits of my smartphone camera. The flies are about 5 mm long, quite a bit smaller than a house fly, and I wasn’t surprised that the smartphone struggled to capture them.