Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
When I took the featured image it was 4. 03 pm, and we had walked the greater portion of the steep track down from Cobbler Hill to Blowhole Beach.
You can see Blowhole Beach on the right hand side.
Kangaroo Island’s northern edge provided most of the photo’s horizon.
You cannot see a blowhole, because Blowhole Beach has none.
However, over umpteen thousands of years, countless humans have stood on or above this beach and witnessed the “blow” emitted by whales, breathing.
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The featured image looks across to the Cape Willoughby lighthouse which sits atop Kangaroo Island’s eastern edge.
We were standing on the nearest part of mainland Australia.
Mainland Oz is “our” world’s largest island; and smallest continental landmass.
Relative to the mainland, Tasmania is tiny – less than 1% as big.
Tasmania is, however, by far the biggest other Australian island; it exceeds the next ranked – Melville Island – by more than ten times.
Kangaroo Island is a little smaller than Melville, but much bigger than any other of Australia’s more than eight thousand islands.
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Hmmmmmmmm…
Look!… flying, up there, in the sky….is it a pig, or a pie?
Pelican Yoga wishes you all a happy new year, regardless!
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If you browse the internet, looking for “mulla mulla”, you soon realise that many Australians mistakenly think that Ptilotus exaltatus is the only such species.
Ptilotus exaltatus – commonly known as “pink mulla mulla” – is likely the best-known; it is notably tall/large, and has probably the widest range, naturally occurring in “poor” soil in not-very-wet places, across much of the Australian continent.
It is, however, far from the only kind of mulla mulla.
Ptilotus exaltatus is not even the only kind of pink mulla mulla.
This post’s pink-tipped hero – Ptilotus manglesii – is more petite, and its blooms are usually ground-huggers.
Arguably, Ptilotus manglesii is even more beautiful than its “exalted” cousin.
Its natural range is within WA’s southwest, only.
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Thysanotus is a genus within the asparagus family.
All but one of its 50 known species are native to Australia.
45 of them occur in Western Australia alone, and most of those exist only in particular parts of WA’s southwest.
They are generally known as “fringe lilies”
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I think that the featured image’s “bee” is a bee, and also a member of one of the bigger of Australia’s many native bee species.
At 2.15 pm on 30 October 2023 the sun had been shining brightly for six hours or more, so it is probably safe to assume that I was photographing a “working bee”.
However, s/he just might have been a late-awakening “sleeping bee”; some native bees shelter inside flowers that “close” overnight, and whenever else there is an absence of bright sunlight and warmth.
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In Perth, 2023’s final full moon rose 80 minutes before the sun set, on December 25.
By 6.15 pm on Christmas Day it was no longer horribly hot, so we decided to stroll down to Lake Monger – “our” local lake.
I took the photo at 7.26 pm, two minutes after sunset.
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This post’s six-legged hero is not a Christmas beetle, and the flower which s/he is targeting (and, thereby, probably pollinating) is one of several related “devils”.
These handicaps notwithstanding, “handsome beetle + star-shaped flower head” yields a “Christmassy” image…however accidentally!
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In the title-song on her 1974 LP, Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell called Los Angeles city of the fallen angels.
In December 2023 “The Terrace” – the unusually long through street in the non-Scottish Perth’s CBD – has a lot of upstanding angels, along with banners that declare Christmas Lives Here.
Needless to say, their presence will be brief.
And – as you can see in the featured image – they are dwarfed by towers, named after the temporal powers that have prevailed here, year round, since the 1960s.
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Until now, every episode in this series has featured a “local” hero.
In most cases, the relevant flowering plant has been (and will be, in the remaining few episodes) one that naturally occurs only in some particular parts of southwest Western Australia.
Today’s exception is an interloper from the Mediterranean basin.
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