Just outside the building I work in is a tree with seeds that King Parrots obviously consider gourmet food.

The male parrot is flashy with his red head and belly.

This is either a female or a juvenile. Both images are cropped from larger ones, hence being a little grainy.

On a recent trip to Torrington, a couple of hours north of here, we found these small flowers on the granite outcrops. I loved the delicate colouring of the petals.

Early sunlight slanting through the trees, with the mist over the paddocks in the background.

Perhpas it’s the weaver in me, but I do love the sight of spiders’ webs highlighted by dew, visible in the early sunlight. This small tree had many of them!

(You’ll notice I said I love the sight of them – as well as the delicate beauty, being able to see them avoids the unpleasantness of walking face-first into one!)

Summer is drawing to a close, and overnight was a little cooler than it’s been lately. This morning a light misty rain dressed the scenery – and the many spiders’ webs – with delicate droplets.

The grass seed heads with a sheen of moisture – I liked the contrasts of creams, browns and greens in this mix of grasses.

When I was coming home last night, I had to stop the car because this lizard was right in the middle of the driveway, and I didn’t want to run it over. I got out of the car to shoosh it away, but it took sometime to convince it to move. At one stage I got the head-tilted-to-the-side ‘what are you on about?’ kind of look, but when I got a bit closer and nudged it with a stick, it ‘blew’ up into its ‘I’m big and scary’ defensive mode – as it is here, with sides and the ‘collar’ puffed out. Eventually, after several minutes, it ran off and I was able to proceed on my way home.

This is the same kind of lizard (perhaps even the same lizard) that I posted in the previous post.

This lizard, lying very still, is well-camoflaged amongst the dry leaves of the bush floor. I had the dogs with me, and they were sniffing just a few feet away – fortunately, I was the only one of us who saw it.

Five years or so back, a friend gave me a geranium in a pot as a house-warming present. A leaf got broken off, and I stuck it in another pot and put it out on the verandah, and, as geraniums do, it grew well… until a local wallaby decided that geraniums were quite tasty, and munched every bit of green leaving only a few thick brown stalks. The geranium has now sat for a few years on our (wallaby-free) kitchen window, delighting us with it’s gorgeous colourful flowers.

This isn’t a great picture – the light behind made it a challenge for my middling photographic skills, and it was early morning – but just imagine emerging blurry-eyed in the morning to the cheerful burst of colour against the bush backdrop:-)

I came across two clumps of caterpillars this evening on the eucalypt beside our little dam. Unfortunately, the evening light meant that I had to use the flash to photograph them, rather than natural light.

I have no idea if they have any connection with the swarms of insects that I saw on the same area of the same tree and that Gordon photographed a week or so back; my knowledge of insects and other creepy-crawlies is minimal!

(And yes, that leaf on the right is not a eucalypt;  there is a blackberry growing up through the tree which we cannot spray because it would kill the tree. So, we try to eat the produce – sadly, this year the birds seem to keep on getting in first!)

I went out to prune the rosemary bush, and found this small green frog hiding in it. There were actually three on the branch, in varying shades of green, but the others were at an awkward angle to photograph.

Yesterday we did a day trip to Warrabah National Park, Barraba and home via Kingstown.

No, not an upside-down image – a reflection of a tree in the shallow waters of a Namoi River crossing, downstream from Warrabah National Park.

In the Park, the Namoi River winds through the granite hills.

This red fungus was growing on the river bank, a couple of metres from the water’s edge. There were about half a dozen others nearby, past their best.