Went walking with Ruth, from O'Reilly's along the Lyrebird Lookout track. I haven't yet learned to love the rainforest. When you walk along a track, the trees and vines are so dense about you that you can't see the trees. We were walking among giants, but it is so difficult to see what any tree is. You recognise that there must be a brachychiton near, because, scattered on the forest floor are its bright red flowers. And the forest floor signals the changes in vegetation, as we increased in altitude, with the leaf litter going from large broad leaves to the very much smaller Antarctic Beech leaves. Only the epiphytes, the elkhorns, the crows nest ferns and the orchids finding a place to live in the bark cracks are discernible. And the fungi and lichens. Only when we walked along the road, could we see how magnificent the trees really were.
In the early part of the walk we saw a lot of white-browed wrens feeding in the leaf litter. Along the track, again looking at our feet we saw large snail shells which according to Ruth had been eviscerated by Noisy pittas. And finally, as we were about to leave the track, we saw a satin bower bird near his extremely gaudy bower, decorated in bright bits of blue from human artefacts: the second bower we had seen that day, with the earlier one using the blue tail feathers of scarlet rosellas for its blue accents.
Flame Tree at Moran's Falls
View from Lyrebird Lookout
Walking stick palm & fruit
