Day 12 Beside the seaside (and the railway line)

The first day in Adelaide doing this and that.

The weather today was not really great.  Very windy all day and reverting to showery squalls late in the afternoon.  As I said the house is rather exposed (it's about where the palm trees are in this image).

We began by walking down, into the wind, to Frances other sister's place (3km North along the beach) where she was going to visit and natter.  I returned along the beach where many citizens were exercising their dogs.  Some were on leads (as was Tammy) while others were enjoying the freedom to run around. 

It appears that the Government has got fed up with carting the sand back from Port Adelaide each year and is building a pipeline from Glenelg to Seacliff to pump it back as slurry.   There seem to be many problems with allowing the sea to do its business and shift the sand north and equally problems with trucking it around.  It must be nice to live in a State where keeping the beaches sandy is the biggest environmental problem.  Obviously Uranium mining is not a problem and neither is urban sprawl nor water quality.

There are attractive signs along the clifftops explaining elements of the marine environment.  They are composed in English, Greek and Vietnamese.

There are other signs reminding us of the innate wowserism of Adelaide.

I then headed (in the camion real) up to Belair National Park where - in an astonishing bit of good sense - dogs are welcome on leads.  (I did recall a Sunday BBQ some 40 years ago when various people in our group had about 10 dogs including 6 puppies.  By the time small children had seen the cute puppies we ended up having no puppies left by the end of the afternoon!) 

Due to the wind I was not optimistic of finding many birds.  This turned out to be reasonably close to what happened.  A few Rainbow Lorikeets were in the trees, waking up other residents (who seemed a little alarmed at the sight of Tammy).

Due to having skulled 500ml of water at the bottom of a hill I found a need to pull off the trail at the top of the hill.  Looking down to check one's shoes, as one does in such circumstances, I noticed, just out of the flood zone a good crop of Helmet Orchids (Corysanthes diemenica).

The Native Orchid Society of South Australia folk have advised that there were another 7 species flowering in Belair NP at this time.  Drat!  I guess that local knowledge is always going to be important!

Other plants photographed included:

Tetratheca pilosa

and a sundew

I also found two interesting fungi

and a lurid lump of slime mould

Bird of the Day                       Pied Cormorant

Plant of the day                      Helmet orchid

Interesting sight of the day    Hordes of dogs on Brighton beach

What we learnt today             Keep hydrated when looking for orchids

And soon I heard a roaring wind:

It's noise was without words;

But with its sound it shook the trees,

And I could seen no birds.