Greg in Caloundra

I owe Stephen Fricker a post after all the work he does so here it is:
The adventure is had, the records have now been uploaded, but I want more!
I drove up from Caloundra on Saturday morning to find a busy hall full of people.
The plan was to join a botany field team. I am more familiar with flora than fauna mostly because plants are present and easy to photograph. I finally met my Facebook friend Gemma who got us into Marc Russell’s team, and we headed out to the open forest and beach ridges of Inskip point. There we met our team full of lovely people including Ann, Joolie, and more.
We hit the jackpot with Marc. He knew all but one or two species in this entire system and spent hours sharing knowledge on the local ecology.
We went through the flora and ticked a list Marc had created as well as build our survey through iNaturalist observations. We paid the most attention to plants but also took photos of anything else we saw.
After the excursion, we came back to HQ to upload our observations, but found the Wi-Fi was a little slow. I heard that Marc was taking a team to the rainforest at Poona Lake the next day and I become very jealous knowing that I had to go home that night. So I decided to upload later and just get out in the field.
The rainforest around Poona lake has a huge diversity diversity of flora. I spent a good 3 hours walking up and then down the road making observations of every different plant, fungus, and invertebrate I could find. The highlights here were the scorpion (Lychas species), the Skyblue pinkgill (Entoloma virescens complex), and the rare Archidendron lovelliae — Bacon Wood. Bacon wood is listed as Vulnerable and has a very restricted range north of Gympie and Fraser Island.

Skyblue Pinkgill Entoloma virescens Lychas spp. (right) © Greg Tasney (left),


Bacon Wood Archidendron lovelliae VN
Out of the rainforest I came at 7:30 with one last stop in mind – Camp Milo Road. Here I found a different habitat once again. On the side of the road was the most interesting and hard-to-find plant of all, a Genoplesium/Corunastylis psammophilum. A very uncommon Midge orchid. There are only 29 records on ALA and this species has restricted distribution from Moreton Island to Rainbow Beach.
I am already looking forward to next year where I will make sure that I stay for the whole weekend, get to more sites, talk to more people and improve my macro photography.
A big thank you to the organisers who hosted a wonderful event.

Post by @gregtasney

Posted on Μάιος 18, 2021 1152 ΠΜ by saltmarshsteve saltmarshsteve

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