Monday, October 1, 2007

52 Walking


The weakness of becoming a photographer of botanical things is that you have to find the plants in the wild and that means lots of walking. Some botanical photographers cheat by hanging around their local Botanic Gardens so they can drop into the cafe for a coffee between photo shots. The other tricky thing is that you can never be sure when the chosen specimen is going to flower so you have to keep going back to the same places to check. Her grid system became quite useful, though I admit my GPS with all the little plants marked and jumping up on the screen as I walked was better.

Instead of cycling, I started walking to work through the Canberra Black Mountain Reserve to check on the plants there during the week to complement observations on the farm at the weekends. There were plenty of species in common despite the locations being 200 km apart. With it being warmer, the Black Mountain plants tended to flower a week to two months ahead of those at the farm. Annoyingly, wildflowers had started to play a large part in our lives.

Lots of interesting questions crystallised out of the air during all this walking, competing for time with my chattering brain spirits. For example, I had noticed that clumps of the native Tree Hakea Hakea eriantha always seemed to be around 900 m above sea level at the farm. I strayed off the farm onto all properties in the Creewah area and this seemed a fair general conclusion. So what was special about 900m?
Looking for tree hakeas was useful in that I found that the distribution of superficially similar trees like Black Wattle Acacia melanoxylon and River Lomatia Lomatia myricoides, had no relationship with elevation; they could be anywhere.

The web couldn’t help solve my question so I decided to do an experiment. This experiment was an excuse to buy some technology and to do even more walking. I argued to myself and the ether that Tree Hakeas were in some way limited in distribution by temperature. The only way to check that would be to put temperature sensors with their associated loggers at places where Tree Hakeas grew and places where they didn’t. I chose three slopes in the area that included Tree Hakeas and placed temperature loggers at and above and below them in a simple transect. One transect was on someone else’s place so the farm had finally burst its borders. Hakeas didn’t respect borders. The owners didn’t know so wouldn’t worry. I had already discovered that nobody walked in the local bush except me and Magoo, and Magoo was usually with me. He was the neighbour’s dog.

I downloaded the hourly temperatures from the loggers in situ onto my portable computer every six weeks for three years and so amassed millions of lovely data points, perfect for transforming into complex graphs. I collected photographs of wildflowers while I roamed between sites. I was gradually becoming familiar with the area and its ecology.

It was getting familiar with me too; the kangaroos and wallabies didn’t run away till I was close, the lyre birds sang on almost unconcerned by my nearness and the Granite Tors became less menacing. That’s what was in my imagination, but that’s all it was. One day I had forgotten my GPS and a heavy mist came down. I was lost not 5 km from home. I thought I knew ever creek, every rock, every tree in the area. In the absence of the sun and its direction objects all took on a sameness and I had no idea which way to go. When the mist started to lift I had been heading in exactly the wrong direction. I concluded the area didn’t care about me one bit. When the Chinese shot down all the GPS satellites, I would stay home.

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Hanging Valley