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Trotters, Arabians, Donkeys and Other People

268K views 3K replies 53 participants last post by  SueC 
#1 · (Edited)
2021 NOTE TO ANYONE NEW READING

Come talk to us on the last page! :) It's enough to skim a couple of pages there and you can jump right in if you're looking for a friendly group discussion. This journal is part of a group of journals we run more like a social thread than a private journal, and it's populated by interesting characters who think outside the square and who respect other animal species and their needs for expressing natural behaviours like, in the case of horses and other social grazing mammals, free socialising with buddies, trickle grazing, and an ability to explore their environment, which sometimes has to happen with human "backpacks" if you're not incredibly fortunate to have access for wide free-ranging spaces for your horse(s).

My husband and I are lucky that we do. We're on Red Moon Sanctuary, a 62 hectare smallholding comprised of 50 hectares of incredibly biodiverse nature reserve we manage for conservation, and 12 hectares of pasture across which our horses and donkeys free-range along with our small herd of beef cattle, and wildlife like kangaroos and emus. We've been here 10 years (as of 2020) and in that time have owner-built an off-grid strawbale farmhouse in which we host eco-stays (see here and here), which is a fantastic way to meet all sorts of lovely people who care about the planet and the concept of community. ❤

We've also planted shelter belts and rehabilitated our roadsides from invasive weeds back to wildlife habitat, and established a permaculture F&V garden which increasingly feeds us and our guests. And, we've got three retired ex-harness racing horses, one of which I ride and give lessons on, another of which I'd love to saddle train and ride as I did his half-brother (time is an issue), and a 27-year-old who is truly retired, but a total sweetheart.

I grew up across two continents, in three countries; from age 11 I was on a horse breeding and racing farm in Australia because that's what my family chose to do. I personally don't like horse racing, for a number of reasons - most of them to do with industry-standard poor animal management practices and because anything which involves lots of money seems to foster corruption and bring out the worst in people. Also because I find it boring to just race horses around ovals, and prefer disciplines in which there is more communication and camaraderie with the horse - like trail riding, classical dressage (done sensitively), endurance riding (I had an Arabian mare on whom I rode endurance in my teens and 20s) and gymkhanas. In those disciplines, horses can participate well into their 20s, instead of being a use-and-throw-away type item.

When I grew up, I became a biologist/environmental scientist, and later an educator and writer. When we hit 40 we decided to "tree change" to a smallholding, which is where we are now. I've got a keen interest in mental/emotional health from growing up in a difficult family and from seeing similar fallout to my own in friends and in students I was teaching. These days I write about that, and a number of other subjects, on a regular basis. Recreationally, I write here and on an alternative music forum. I also write professional articles for independent magazines when the mood is upon me.

I will be creating an INDEX for this journal soon, because it's so long!

Things like:
  • Learning to ride in Europe
  • Educating my first horse from scratch - an Arabian yearling bought half-price in the summer of 1983, when I was 11
  • Re-educating my current riding horse from harness to saddle in 2009
  • Assorted trail rides in the Australian bush, where I took the camera
  • Many more reports on gorgeous mountain and coastal hikes because we live in a wonderful natural walking area on the pristine South Coast of Western Australia and love getting out and stretching our legs
  • Rehabilitating "institutionalised" horses at Red Moon Sanctuary - here's a link to our last adoptee's first day here with us - he'd spent 17 years since weaning not allowed any social contact with other horses and was kept solitary in the same yard day in, day out
  • Various philosophical reflections
  • Various mental/emotional health pieces to support fellow survivors of family dysfunction
  • Pieces on building our house and managing our farm and nature reserve, which are "re-prints" from magazine articles
...and lots more...

Watch this space.

Returning you to historical journal now, from back in 2104 (and please note, when I started this journal I was glossing over my birth family situation because I had not yet started talking frankly about such problems in public - that happened here.)

♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣​


This is going to be a combination of show-and-tell, reflective journal and place for SB appreciators to hang out. I am a default Standardbred appreciator because my parents started breeding, training and racing them when I was still at school. My father is still training and racing a trio of young horses and at age 75 is, as far as I know, the oldest reinsman still driving in races in Western Australia.

I am in the 40+ social group at HF and, when DH and I recently exchanged farms with my parents for a long weekend to give them a change of scenery for my mother's 75th, and I brought photos back to my group, the idea dawned on me that this might make a nice general thread starter on Standardbreds and other Trotting breeds, their harness and ridden training, converting an OTSB for riding, etc. So here goes, starting just with that, cut-and-paste, and I'll fill in the history with more detail later, and answer any questions that might arise.

____

Here are some photos of the horses at my parents' place, which we took last weekend:



Stable row: Chip, (Frog not looking), Dezba, La Jolie, Rosie, La Cherie.



Shed: Baralu, Torrific Girl, Sunset Coast. (Classic Julian opposite, not in photo.)

Two other horses use walk-in-walk-out night quarters, not photographed here.

My father was around the same age I am now when, 30 years ago, he decided he'd had enough of working in an office fulltime, bought a very inexpensive piece of bush in Australia, and built the stables and shed himself, with one offsider. He taught himself to lay bricks and to do roof framing and cladding. Then he started training and racing trotters. He even bred them at one point, but did much better with horses he bought in or rescued, often horses that needed "fixing" in some way: He said recently that when you breed, you don't know what you're going to get; when you buy, you can see what you're going to get.

This is Chip, along with my Romeo the last of the old generation of horses he brought in to race:



Chip was impulse bought inexpensively at a yearling sale, was small and wasn't particularly famously bred, but Dad just liked the look of him and his nature. I was in my early 20s and said to him, "Did you really need another horse?" and he said, "If he doesn't go you can have him, he's so pretty and a real character." As it turned out, he did go all right: Was my father's most successful horse - won 10 times, including 4 metropolitan races, and placed 19 times. We also rode him. I took him to a 25km short endurance event between metropolitan races once and he breezed home in that as well. He was retired paddock sound with a spinal injury he got from running head-first into a tree when playing. He is now 23.



Koolio, Celeste, Northernstar and 8 others like this.
Blue, Roadyy, NickerMaker71, Eole, tjtalon, Maryland Rider, ellen hays, RegularJoe
 
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#3,080 ·
I'll try to send some your way, @knightrider - how do you do an anti-raindance / send-the-rain-where-it's-needed dance?

@egrogan, I saw that too. 😲 Thought it was a horse place also. All the buildings stayed intact so far which is good, though no doubt they'll have to be abandoned...have a look at the human residence and imagine the view out of their front windows adjacent to the massive breakaway... I don't think anyone is going to be able to fill that hole in and make it structurally sound again. Perhaps if you could divert some lava from an active volcano through a wormhole...and even then you'd only have a plug, and erosion could continue around the edges of it...

One hopeful thing here is - any animals in buildings would have been OK (except they were locked in buildings, which you know I think isn't a good way for horses to live). Paddocks that crumbled at the edges lost 1/3 maximum. So now we're down to probabilities if any animals were in those fields, but I think the chances of horses surviving in that situation are greater than 2/3 because they seem to be able to sense things like this coming and react to it - if they have the space to run.

Our horses here went for a very fast run around the back of the house yesterday. It sounded more urgent than when they run for fun. Three minutes later there was a sudden short rainstorm. They could sense it coming and ran into the forest for cover. They do this a lot - I remember a time Brett and I were working in the "hill paddock" about 300m from the house. Then the horses, who'd been grazing near us, as an orchestrated group suddenly ran flat out for the trees. We weren't wearing raincoats, and I immediately ran with them. We nearly made it to the house before we were deluged... 😄
 
#3,084 ·
Good music is supposed to do just that. 🌈

I've got an idea, @gottatrot. You're more advanced at violin than I am...I don't know if you find playing soothing when you're grieving (I do) but if you do, you could go one step further and noodle around a bit and maybe compose a little tune (or even a few) that you think expresses the spirit you saw in Amore. Probably works best if you just improvise without thinking too much about composing - thinking about your mare instead. You'll never know what might come to you.

Many years ago I saw a lovely TV series called Down To Earth in which a city family moved to the British countryside so they could live a completely different life. There was a teenage daughter and a little girl who played violin. She was practicing Greensleeves for one of her tests one week, and her father died suddenly just before her test, which was next day. Her mother asked if she wanted to stay home that day but she went and performed the song for her father, and it was such a heartfelt version I cried buckets watching. Music can be such a lifeline, and such a tribute, and so so many things. It can give voice to a beauty we knew as well, and keep that alive this way.

I've found that performance of Greensleeves by doing a bit of digging. If the "timer" I've set on the clip doesn't work, it's at 20:47.

 
#3,085 ·
I am late to everyone’s journals. Things have been good, just busy in a way. I’ve been riding, but nothing interesting.

No, I’ve never seen foam! I haven’t seen a lot of things though. In reality I’ve been pretty secluded to my own area.
 
#3,086 ·
Ah, @Knave, but if you're secluded to a particular area you will get a deeper view of that than if you travel the globe 24/7 and see everything superficially and without time for any of it to truly seep into your bones! :)

It's why I tend to read new work by authors already known to me over just lots and lots of authors - and ditto music - because otherwise I can't make a deep connection. I'd rather be connected deeply to a few things than superficially to infinite amounts of things...
 
#3,088 ·
SAND PATCH/GRASMERE

Yesterday there was enough interruption in the downpours to be able to have a decent 2.5-hour walk of about 10km through the dunes and along the clifftops of the Torndirrup peninsula coast. This is the twin of the Muttonbird to Grasmere return walk we did a fortnight ago, where we came into our turn-around point in Grasmere (Turbine 19) from the west. So this time we walked in from the east, from the entrance point at Albany Wind Farm.


There was drizzle on and off, but the wind chill was the biggest issue - we were walking between 11.30am and 2pm when temperatures peaked at 15 degrees Celsius but the wind had the apparent temperatures down to 1-2 degrees Celsius - and that was at the airport where such data is recorded; not out on the windiest edge of our wild coast, where the town's 19-turbine wind farm is located. There it was brutal and certainly felt below freezing, but we're equipped with outdoor thermals including gloves, and within 15 minutes of walking at a decent pace you're fine, as long as you've got enough calories on board.

This is the view down the tourist lookout platform at the ocean, which was properly roiling not just with wind speeds peaking well over 50km/hour, but mostly from the long stormy fetch between the South Coast and Antarctica.

To see this on a photo doesn't actually give you any idea, because it doesn't quite give you the scale - everything about the coast is huge, so you feel like a tiny ant walking around. The cliffs tower, dunes are massive, ocean and sky are infinite, and the waves are enormous, with king waves known to exceed 10 metres in height and sweeping unwary anglers off the coastal rocks every year. Even the "ordinary" surf crashes into the cliffs with a force that makes the earth shake. We used to live a mile inland from Sand Patch and we could hear the waves thundering from there. Standing on the edge of the coast, you physically feel their force; in your ears, in your legs, in your ribcage.

On the South Coast, massive wind turbines with nacelles the size of buses and 35-metre blades look like children's toys in the landscape, just as huge cargo ships entering King George Sound look like toy boats in a bathtub.

Walks like this in nature make me happy. Not just the healthy exercise in ultra-fresh air, but being able to do that in this wild, majestic landscape, where you understand that the human species is not quite as clever and powerful as it likes to think it is. In view of the decidedly un-sapiens-ness of our species, it comforts me to know nature in the raw, and to know that it will still be here in some form when we've wiped ourselves and lots of other species off the planet with our un-sapiens-ness. (For more on that, see the last photo in this post.)



The coastal heathlands of the South Coast are a botanical wonderland - near-pristine pieces of ancient Gondwana and a world biodiversity hotspot. We oooh-aaah our way through this stuff even now, after decades of acquaintance. It's like walking in a botanical garden, and the best kind - one not put in place by humans as a collection, but a place where staggering species diversity occurs naturally. Here at the edge of the world, you can get a pretty good idea of how life used to be before humans industrialised the planet, and you can mourn for what people have destroyed, and what they will yet destroy with their so-called progress. But eventually, by doing this, they will destroy themselves.

Wildflowers are beginning to come out in a steady stream that will become an explosion in spring.

These are Banksia flowers in varying degrees of expansion:


When their filaments first come out - between the two stages shown - Banksia flowers make a good "bushman's compass" because they unfold on the north side first - facing the sun, here in the southern hemisphere. There are hundreds of Banksia species in Australia.



The Roaring Forties don't just shape the waves, coastline, general landscape and vegetation here, they're also pretty good for line-drying your washing on a winter's day without actual precipitation - such as today; laundry day is also when I write up walking reports in-between tending to the twin tub (a hippie washing machine popular in Japan) and the line drying. 😜

Next is someone's idea of a practical joke - carrying off the car park sign and placing it in an interesting spot, especially for car park directions:

Interesting car park indeed - and no, it wasn't us; I prefer to prank people with ultra-realistic fake huntsman spiders. Humans are the deadliest species on the planet but recoil at something a thousand times smaller than them that has a lower chance of killing them than a flying champagne cork, and about the same level of interest. Look in the mirror and be afraid, people - not for yourselves, but for our fellow creatures and the planet. 😮 It's just as ridiculous as all those stereotypical "hostile aliens coming to kill you" movies - don't people love to project.

Brett with a Roaring Forties hairstyle:

See, Robert Smith could save so much hairspray doing it like this (with the slight inconvenience of having to remain on location). 😇

A tunnel of Banksias:

Slowly creeping up on the Grasmere extension (Turbines 14-19) - and creeping because I'd forgotten to have morning tea and it was now lunchtime. I'd been so full from breakfast I'd blithely only brought morning tea - fruit, peanuts, a slice of lemon meringue pie to share - but now I was full-on fantasising about a nice roast beef and cheese sandwich made with wholemeal mixed-grain home-made bread and a whole shrubbery of salad leaves, including Wasabi and Red Mustard (which are leaf varieties, if you grow heirlooms, which we do), slathered in whole-egg mayonnaise and dusted with freshly ground four-colour peppercorns, and with a dollop of home-made tomato sauce between the cheese and the beef.

Alas, I would have to wait until 3.30pm to get my jaws around one of those. Meanwhile, we had a snack break in which I attempted to re-fuel on peanuts and fruit. This did improve my walking speed again (but nowhere near when I'm walking after a good lunch with a cup of coffee in me - I can walk many hours on a good lunch and as I rarely have coffee, it increases my walking speed around 25% - woohoo).

Later on, we got to Turbine 19 and had another food stop - more peanuts and fruit and the lemon meringue, but my beloved husband also produced a surprise bar of chocolate I didn't even know we had, because he'd bought it on the sneak and sequestered it away for an emergency (which he says he sees as being part of his job). Sadly, my body was screaming for a decent lunch and didn't want chocolate, but I ate some anyway because I didn't want to crawl home. Therefore we made a decent pace back.
 
#3,089 ·
These walks are one part of what our dog considers a perfect day: A drive in the broom-broom with outraged barking if we have to slow down, a lengthy walk preferably in new territory where she can say, "All of this is now mine!" with her frequent territorial marking (she's an alpha female and actually lifts her leg to do this), another drive in the broom-broom surveying further opportunities for expanding her personal kingdom, and then a nice big dinner, after which she curls up between her pillows on her personal sofa, getting her belly rubbed by the Useful Monkey (a dog's life indeed) while the Useless Monkey pontificates at her ("Where's your dignity?" etc) and the Useful Monkey reminds him that he has precious little dignity himself when it is he who is getting his belly rubbed, etc, to which the Useless Monkey always says, "I don't know what you mean."

The sun smiled upon our backs on the return walk, which warmed us nicely. There was even a rainbow.

The fungi, and the amphibians, just looove this super-wet winter. Fungi out everywhere.

The dog always wonders why I'm stopping again when the camera is out...


And then we were back at the starting point (from which the total displacement was zero, you might like to know 😋).

Here's a good closing thought:
 
#3,090 ·
Some music to go with the scenery, from one of my favourite bands.



Bheir mi sgriob do Thobar Mhoire
Far a bheil mo ghaol an comann

Sèist:
E o hi urabho o hi u
E o hao ri ri
E o hao ri sna bho hu o
E o hi urabho o hi u

Far a bheil mo ghaol an comann
Luchd nan leadan 's nan cul donna

Luchd nan leadan 's nan cul donna
Dh'oladh am fion dearg na thonnan

Bheir mi sgriob dhan Lochaidh luachrach
Far a bheil mo ghaol an t-uasal

Far a bheil mo ghaol an t-uasal
Gheibhinn cadal leat gun chluasag

Gheibhinn cadal leat gun chluasag
'S cul mo chinn am bac do ghuala


More about folk music and connection to landscape here.
 
#3,091 ·
LIGHTS BEACH TO HANGING ROCK

This little expedition was done on the Thursday just before the Sand Patch/Grasmere trek, but it can be hard to keep up with writing these things up if you're potentially doing 2-3 of these a week because you're on holidays. We don't photograph and write up every big walk we do, only the ones we've not done before, not done in a while or not documented previously. Sometimes we just walk.

Because we've not been "away" on holidays for ten years - ever since we bought our smallholding, planted 5,000 trees, built our own house, started growing our own fruit & vegetables and doing general farm, nature reserve and livestock management - we decided to have a genuine holiday closer to home by doing a lot of new-to-us remote walks on the South Coast. We're really enjoying this - what was driving us mad was doing the same 30-odd walks (Stirling Ranges, Porongurups, Albany Coast) all over again and never exploring anything fresh.

One day we hope to go to Tasmania again for, you guessed it, more walking - but right now there's the pandemic. However - we've got the maps for another 150km of Bibbulmun trail we've mostly not done before, between Denmark and Pemberton. The Forest of the Ents walk was a sample from there; with more to come soon.

Lights Beach to Hanging Rock is just west of Denmark, and another good place for a Roaring Forties hairstyle:

I last did this particular walk with a colleague called Sharon over 15 years ago, pre-Brett. I've long wanted to show him this one, but we have a dog, and this section has "dogs forbidden" signs because of 1080 baiting of feral animals and other avoiding-lawsuit-related reasons from the managing government department. I used to be a law-abiding citizen, and then I moved to the country, and started doing things like buying milk straight from a person with a cow (forbidden) instead of letting the truck take it up to Perth for bottling and then bring it down again so I can buy it from the supermarket with 500 "food miles" and most of the profit going to middlemen instead of the cow owner. Rebel that I am. I now do lots of things that are verboten, mostly as a form of protest against unjust regulations that favour the wealthy, and actually remove ordinary citizens' rights to do useful things that were lawful for most of human existence, like grandmothers selling jam at the markets (now forbidden, unless she's hired or bought a stainless steel kitchen to make the jam - of course, McDonalds can legally make people ill from their stainless steel kitchens...).

The trail leading out:




If that bit seems easy and straightforward, look again at the first photo in this series: Because it's been so wet, we had to make our way across that stream, and upon leaping across, we landed in quicksand. Not very bad quicksand, just the type that makes you go, "Oh, it's quicksand!" as your foot suddenly slides into it up to your knee.

We love the vegetation tunnels regularly encountered on the Bibbulmun trail...

Also the shapes of trees when they're wild things growing in their own wild way:

You just don't see them like this in parks.

As mentioned on recent walk reports, there are a lot of fungi in the landscape at the moment. This is a coral fungus.


The landscape is full of water this winter. Even the higher-up areas are like saturated sponges; in the low areas there's inundation. We're about to break "wettest ever July" records.



More fungi:

Some of these are hallucinogenic, and this is the time of year police in Nannup deploy two full-time people for several months to discourage mushroom tourism in the local tree plantations. As if they have nothing better to do. As a taxpayer I object to the expense of this operation. The "really-bad-consequences" they are citing here include some dude high on mushrooms selling his $10,000 car for $1,000 (squarely his own problem), someone walking around nude in the centre of Balingup (I'm sure we've seen it all before), and someone else going missing for four days sleeping in the forest thinking he was in a bear cave. Ho hum. Personal responsibility, natural selection, etc, and I for one would rather these two police were chasing burglars or breath testing drunk drivers instead of pontificating about fungi while we pay their salaries.


Lake William:


Mushrooms everywhere...

 
#3,092 ·
On the way to Hanging Rock:




The view back to Mt Hallowell and Monkey Rock:

The coastal heathland is like a Japanese garden... only better!

Here's some photos of Hanging Rock.



There's more on the Flickr page but I'm going to abbreviate the rest; too many photos and I've got chores to go do. So if you'd like to see the full set, just click on any photo to go to the photopage.

It's not officially called Hanging Rock but I called it that when I went there with Sharon many years ago, because it's reminiscent of the scenery of the classic Australian gothic horror flick Picnic at Hanging Rock.



Tomboy foolishness indeed. OMG. Speaking of, the track to Hanging Rock actually had an official diversion around it, with a sign saying it was "dangerous" - we duly ignored it, and went to see for ourselves if there really was a problem. There wasn't - one fallen tree it was easy to clamber over, a couple of exposed roots, nothing to worry hikers who do the Bibbulmun, which is a serious track, not a park cakewalk. We later worked out that the real reason they had put a diversion around it was because a new tourist access road was constructed a little further up from Hanging Rock two years ago, and they apparently forgot to take the sign down when the construction project was finished over six months ago. This explains why other hikers before us had removed the barrier that had been erected on the track. Honestly, hello.

But it was Hanging Rock I had wanted to show Brett for years, and so I wasn't abandoning that trail without good reason, which it turns out there wasn't anyway. And we had our picnic at Hanging Rock.


We went a bit further, towards the new tourist access road - down a steep, densely vegetated valley and back up into dunes with lovely sea views. Then we turned back. Those photos you can see on Flickr directly.

Something abstract from the way home:

This is just sand patterns in a temporary stream which has tannins in it. Brett loves these sorts of photographs because they could be alien planets etc - there's no sense of scale. Here's the context:

And I conclude with another fungus - this is a Brain Fungus...

Another happy walk.
 
#3,093 ·
More demonstrations of the low-intelligence/low-empathy levels of the anti-lockdown protestors:

Total posterior orifice hurting a horse during lockdown protests in Sydney this week. What has the horse done to hurt this guy? Just about the worst thing you can do is yank the metal bit in their mouth painfully against their jaw (and he punched the animal in the face). Let's put a nose ring in this guy and then attach a lead to it and yank on it suddenly and see whether he likes that kind of treatment. 😡

His T-shirt is making it pretty clear that his personal free-dumb is more important than anyone's feelings/welfare, whether horse, human or anything else apparently. Refer to this week's Guardian article on how the far right, and the plain stupid too I think, call their own selfishness "freedom"...

That guy is now in jail, where he belongs. And of course, refusing a COVID test. This means he's being kept in isolation, as is the health protocol - and his lawyers are whining about it. No sympathy from me - animal abuse on top of complete disregard for the safety of the Australian community. Typical bully, and like all bullies, only know about their own rights, not anyone else's - and protest loudly when there are consequences for their cruelty and antisocial conduct.
 
#3,094 ·
WALPOLE ADVENTURES

Sandwiched between Monday/Tuesday's destructive severe cold front and the next one like it forecast to come in Thursday, we grabbed the chance to go on an outing to Walpole on Wednesday. However, we hadn't been entire slouches during the severe weather and did a 5km hike through the local valley floor in our wet weather gear on Tuesday morning. Mostly this was in sheltered woodland and not so bad - not like being out on the coast, where 100km/h wind gusts were occurring and could have blown people off the cliffs. All the normal animal paths through the bushland had turned into creeks though, so we had to pretty much hop from bushgrass clump to bushgrass clump to avoid the water in many places. 😮

Today the rain hasn't set in yet, but the wind gusts inland where we live are now working themselves up past 80km/h and are forecast to potentially go past 100km/h; not a good time to be on the road, and later tonight the next deluge will hit. So we are happy to have gotten out yesterday. Walpole is just over an hour west of us past Denmark and home to tall Karri and Tingle forests (and lots of historical and modern clearfelling 😩); it also has houseboats on an estuary, and lots of scenic coastline we've only explored a fraction of so far (meaning, on foot, in the wilderness areas etc, not just driving from tourist car park to tourist car park).

We got to Walpole at morning teatime and decided to warm up for a slated Bibbulmun track section in the afternoon by doing a circuit walk around and into Walpole itself. If you only ever drive into a town, you don't really get to know it, so we decided to park at Coalmine Beach out of town (marked X on map below) and take walk trails from there to the inlet and then through town (mostly the yellow tracks) and back out again on a circuit (red dashed line), as a way of getting to know the place better.


1. THE CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF WALPOLE

These are our "setting out on another happy adventure" photographs at the Coalmine Beach car park.


This, by the way, is typical happy body language from Brett and he did exactly the same at our wedding nearly 14 years ago... 😋

From Coalmine Beach, a walk track runs through a conservation area to the Walpole Inlet and the outskirts of Walpole. This is typical coastal heathland grading into woodland.

The trees, as is so typical for what grows wild on the South Coast, have all sorts of sculptural qualities.




A rather impressive bridge/boardwalk over the Collier creek brought us to the town periphery.

The ants have been building their nests higher out of the ground than usual with all this wet weather we've been having. These mounds are now everywhere and are presumably in aid of an ant colony not drowning below ground level, where all the soil is like a saturated sponge.

Coming up to the Inlet:



Paperbark trees:


This is on the Swarbrick Jetty:

...and this is the amused reaction when the photographer says, "You've got a spider on your nose!"...
 
#3,099 ·
The trees, as is so typical for what grows wild on the South Coast, have all sorts of sculptural qualities.
We finally have a rain free afternoon, and I was thinking of this post when I went out to feed. There are a few tree sculptures I love along the wood line right outside our house, and I admire them every day when I go out to the horses:
1116095


1116096
 
#3,095 ·
Metropolitan Walpole!




Walpole feels like a cross between a typical small SW-WA country town, and a holiday-shack village (e.g. Windy Harbour, Peaceful Bay, Tasmania's Doo Town). We walked through the residential streets to the main street where craft and gift shops and coffee shops cater for visitors. There we had fish and chips and bought some treats to take on the afternoon's forest walk. Then we completed the circuit walk back to Coalmine Beach.

This is Coalmine Beach:


Then we drove a short way to the Hilltop Forest car park to begin the afternoon's walking in quite a different environment.


2. HILLTOP LOOKOUT WALK

The section of Bibbulmun track we ended up doing is bounded by double arrows on the walk map in the above post. We had meant to start at the base of the hill but couldn't find parking there - and the track which led to the Bibbulmun there wasn't signposted. So we drove up the main track.

This is regrowth Karri forest, which a lot of people who don't spend much time in old-growth forests oooh and aaah about. If you live in a city, or if you live in Europe where there really isn't any pristine wilderness left, you may be overjoyed by walking or driving through a forest like this - beautiful tall trees as far as the eye can see.

But if you're a biologist or keen amateur naturalist, and you live in a place where you can spend a lot of time in old-growth and near-pristine ecosystems, this kind of forest makes you grieve. It's closer to a plantation than to what it was before industrialisation: The understorey, where most of the species in these kinds of systems reside, has become hugely impoverished, causing local extinction of species and contributing to world biodiversity loss. The species diversity of the canopy trees is also reduced, and the trees you do see tend to be of fairly uniform size and age, because they were all seedlings who regenerated in what was essentially a humanly caused natural disaster area, and all grew up together, competing for light as they went and growing more closely together, taller and straighter than trees do in what's called a climax forest - and of course, the foresters prefer that kind of regrowth because it suits their commercial purposes better.

Old-growth forests (and other pristine ecosystems, such as Western Australia's coastal woodlands and heathlands) took thousands of years to evolve into their present degree of diversity of species, form and ages, and to become intricately interconnected. As a European I'd never seen an ancient ecosystem before I came to Australia. Even the remnant bushland we have on our farm represents millions of years of largely uninterrupted evolution from ancient Gondwana - never were the woodlands on it clearfelled, and never was the understorey or the heathland bulldozed: Unlike the majority of the planet's land surface, especially since human industrialisation which started about 1760 - less than 300 years ago.

We're destroying everything. It's hard enough to get some people to care about genocide and refugees when they're in human form, but what about all the other species we share the planet with? That's even more difficult, because modern humans feel culturally entitled to take what they want from nature, and to exterminate so-called "lesser" species. My problem, by the way, isn't with being part of a food chain (in both directions), it's in the complete imbalance as each day, more and more of the general biomass is replaced with human biomass, as the human population grows exponentially like a pandemic, devouring not just individuals from other species, but whole other species, either as food or as convenience. Humans as a species are behaving exactly like bacteria in a laboratory culture - they explode exponentially until they exhaust their resource base and die in their own wastes.

It's because advances in medicine and sanitation increased infant survival and the general human life span, and modern human beings still don't effectively limit their family sizes to replacement-only levels with contraception (and many would be mortally offended were they asked to do so). Actually, these days even replacement is too much - as we've already exceeded the planet's long-term carrying capacity, and are now irreversibly damaging the biosphere.

And it's not talked about, because we're drowned too deep in the narcosis of civilisation; most of us don't see it. Our economic system pretends that you can have infinite "growth" in a finite system with limited resources and space. Societies like Australia have a financial elite who thrive on land speculation; who parasitise scarcity and property booms, and they won't let up until they've carved up every acre they can claw their way into for "development" - agriculture initially, and now mostly creating more and more suburbia for booming migrant populations. This makes millions and millions of dollars for real estate agents, real estate speculators, construction companies, "investors" (people who have enough surplus money to own more than just their own home, and out-compete a lot of people who can't afford a home of their own), councils who can charge land rates, etc.

People only rarely seem to feel they have enough - enough stuff, enough prestige, enough money in the bank. Westerners expect constantly rising living standards - i.e. constant increases in the energy and resources available to them, and to their children, no matter how many, on a finite planet. We talk scathingly of parasites, of freeloaders - and yet as a species, that's exactly what we are. We're the very worst parasites and freeloaders who have ever inhabited the surface of this planet, and most of us can't see it. We're eating everything else alive.

But I digress. To see real old-growth forest, have a look at our Forest of the Ents post. That is what the forest either side of the access road in the picture above used to be like, less than 200 years ago.

We drove up this access road until we got to the Hilltop Lookout car park. It was a one-way road, so we couldn't backtrack. Therefore we decided to walk in both directions from there, not from the bottom up as we'd originally planned to. Here's some views off the Hilltop Lookout, where a section of the forest was removed so people could see the coastline.



The ribbon of blue is the Frankland River leading to the Walpole-Nornalup Inlets, and the views across are to East Point and Rocky Head, and beyond that Saddle Island and other offshore islands.

The section of forest we began to walk through to the east and south of the Hilltop Lookout was ecologically better than what we'd driven in through. There were still old "giants" in it - not everything had been cut down by forestry; logging had been more selective, and some trees had been left standing.





This last group of photos, Brett took with a proper camera (which he first got out on the lookout) - most of our recent walks I've just documented with a little iPod camera, for convenience. Makes me think it's worth taking my own proper camera in again too. The iPod is fine for "sketching" quickly, but you'll be able to see its limitations for yourself by comparing the photo qualities in the mixed batch to follow!
 
#3,096 · (Edited)

You'd just not get shapes like this in plantations, or in ground-zero regrowth - they take a long time and a complex environment to form.

It's nice to come across old "survivors" like this. ♥

Here's what the bases of these trees look like when they eventually fall over...

I just loved this next tree...

Brett took photos of bark textures.


This tree had a little window through it...


It takes many years for these tunnels, hollows and cavities to form - and they are ultra-important as shelters and nests for native birds and arboreal marsupials. You won't find these in the kind of regrowth forest we drove in through. One of the many reasons our Black Cockatoos are endangered is because many thousands upon thousands of their erstwhile nesting hollows have been cut down with the old trees. Black Cockatoos have a life span of around 60 years, so it took people a while to notice that most of the population that was left were essentially pensioners.

The blue Cortinarius is one of the prettiest fungi in the forest...

It grew near a "tunnel" in the base of a tree you could have sat in.

You can just see this little tunnel in the broader "porch" behind Brett.

Here was an attempt to photograph a sort of pond in a fallen tree trunk, which was a bit impeded by taking it with an iPod...

Everywhere you turn there's something amazing.

Like a fern growing in a "natural flower pot" high up in a tree, and catching the sun.

We walked back to the lookout and then in the other direction, down the hill. There Brett did some lovely studies of shelf fungi.




That last close-up was hand-held and would have benefitted from a tripod. So, Brett should bring his tripod in future, and I my proper camera! 😋

Our final photo from the walk was meant to demonstrate an unusual phenomenon: As we stood there, it was raining significantly behind the tree with the fungi on it, but not at all where we stood maybe 10 metres away - and it went on like this for quite a while!

The sunlit gap behind the tree was actually filled with a shower of raindrops. None of it ever moved further south to start raining on us. We kept on walking downhill, and when we got near the highway, turned around and made our way back up. When we came to the same spot, the same thing was still happening! We then made our way through that extremely narrow stationary rain band, continuing up the incline.

Something else I saw a demonstration of, and wanted to relate, since we're in a pandemic and all that: Just how much aerosol you exhale when you're exercising heavily! At one point I stopped and leaned against a mossy fallen log, trying to catch my breath, when the slanting sunlight combined with the high humidity in the forest made the aerosol I was breathing out (through my mouth, because I'd been climbing for a while) clearly visible, and we could see it drifting for over three metres away from me on a light breeze. Wow! If I had SARS-CoV-2 and you breathed that in, you'd highly likely get it. Under the right conditions, from more than three metres away, and in an outdoors environment.

Breathing out through the nose cut it down, but breathing straight out through the mouth made truly spectacular amounts of aerosol. Proper layered masks are really good for cutting down on aerosols (and even better with droplets), whether produced by heavy exertion, coughing, sneezing or just speaking. Works best if both parties are wearing them - the aerosol-maker, and the bystander. I'd not generally wear masks exercising outdoors because we walk quite remote trails, but I would in a higher-density outdoors situation, and I'd certainly move a few metres off the track to let someone else pass when I'm not wearing a mask - and face away from them. I've already done that out of an abundance of caution, in supermarkets as well - but I was quite amazed just how far those aerosols can carry.

I have, by the way, finally had my first vaccination. Brett is still waiting. We're doing second worst of all the OECD countries in the vaccine rollout. But even fully vaccinated, I'd still consider wearing masks under certain circumstances. Like, it's not actually fun to catch ordinary colds or flus either, so I'd from now on wear masks if I had any kind of respiratory infection and for some reason had to venture into public - or if I was around such people. And, people can still catch, harbour and transmit virus when fully immunised - what the vaccines are good at is preventing serious illness. (At least until the virus evolves new spike proteins. Then we'll be playing vaccine catch-up again.)
 
#3,097 ·
I'll close these posts with some photos of the very swollen Frankland River at its intersection with the South Coast Highway, that we took on the way back. This is the river we couldn't cross further upstream on our Ent walk because the Sappers Bridge was flooded (plus it had foam all over it).


 
#3,098 ·
Love all the tree photos.
I just snapped a shot of a “fern flowerpot” while walking with Hugh the other day. As you can probably tell, we were walking on a logging road in a section that was recently cut-with just a few trees left to anchor the regrowth. But I liked the spirit of the happy fern growing from the cut trunk.
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#3,100 · (Edited by Moderator)
Beautiful, @egrogan! ❤

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