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
Tag: Spider
Wolves of Limmen
I had no idea when we set out that I would spend an evening spotlighting for wolves in Limmen, but that’s what happened.
Wolf spiders, that is. (There are no real wolves in the park, although we did see a dingo; feral cattle, buffalo and donkeys, too.) Wolf spiders are “mostly robust, agile hunters, active by day or night, common across all of Australia,” to quote Whyte and Anderson. Most of them wear drab camouflage colours and live on the ground in leaf litter or temporary retreats.
Spotlighting for wolves
Karl, our host at Nathan River, introduced us to the art of spotlighting: if you hold a torch up at eye level (a head torch is ideal), the eyes of roaming wolf spiders will shine back at you like little diamonds.
It works! The key is having the torch close to your own eyes so that the light reflected from theirs comes back along the same path. But the effect is impossible to photograph because there isn’t enough light on the scene, and adding light makes the background brighter than the eye-shine. (There’s a challenge here for obsessive nature photographers. Perhaps it could be done with a macro lens, a flash unit, lots of patience and co-operative wolves.) In real life, one squats down beside the wolf and uses a torch and flash for a photo.
Mount Inkerman
Mount Inkerman rises from the coastal plain just south of Home Hill. There’s a general store beside the highway on its southern side, and a turn-off to the Lookout on the northern side.
A narrow sealed road leads to the transmission towers and the Rotary Lookout at the summit. The views across the canefields are vast – out to the mouth of the Burdekin River (top photo), or to Cape Upstart, Home Hill and the mountains. (Wanderstories has more of them.)
A sign at the carpark announces a Nature Trail of ’30 to 45 minutes.’ Unfortunately, it lies (and someone really should do something about it).
Common names and Latin names
The science community tries very hard, as described in my post about Birdwing butterflies and their food plants, to make sure each species is uniquely identified by a single Latin name. So long as the Latin names are correct, however, we can have as many local vernacular names as we like without causing significant confusion.
One species, one Latin name, many common names
One species may have several common names, even in the same language in the same region, let alone different languages and different countries.
A smallish ground-feeding black-and-white bird is a good local example, being known as a Magpie-lark, Pee-wee, Peewit or Mudlark. None of those names are wrong, and any doubts about the identity of the bird can be resolved by pointing to one or referring to its unique Latin name, Grallina cyanoleuca.
Golden Orb Weaver – a small life well lived
We were pleased to see a big orb web strung between palms, bananas and the cubby-house at the back of our garden towards the end of May.
Its architect, constructor and homeowner was resting, head down, in the middle of it. I introduced our three species of Golden Orb Weaver here so I don’t need to say much about her identity today except that she was an Australian Golden Orb Weaver, Nephila edulis.
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