Thursday was pretty good, too

When we got up to a sunny morning on Thursday we put our beach walk back on the agenda. Before long we were on the road to Carlton Beach. We crossed Orielton Lagoon on the way and decided to stop for a few moments. Orielton is a Ramsar site, protected for both nesting and migratory shorebirds. As we’d driven along the causeway we’d seen crested grebes—my first sighting of them. From the trail that goes round the water we could see shorebirds but for the most part they were too distant or backlit to identify—

except for the omnipresent masked lapwings and a couple of muskducks that have unique silhouettes. The backlit shorebirds made lovely if unidentifiable silhouettes.

Pine nuts of some sort, I believe

On the ground at Orielton I found this clump of pine nuts of some sort. Native pines are not much like northern hemisphere pines. I can’t identify them, except for the celerytop pine—not, strictly speaking, a pine but a Podocarpaceae—I grew to recognize when I was at Lake St. Clair in 2009.

When we reached Carlton Beach we puttered along the sand picking up bits of shell and feathers, tuning over the small tangles of seaweed. It's a lovely long stretch of sand, with eucalyptus forest on one side and she oak on the other. 

Pied oystercatchers feeding at Carlton Beach, eucalypts behind

Surf rolling in at Carlton Beach

We walked towards the mouth of the Carlton River. Pied oystercatchers fed, keeping a certain distance from us. 

When we reached their point of tolerance they took off in groups to land further along or behind us. A large patch of the beach was pockmarked with a mix of little holes and little balls of sand. I wondered if the oystercatchers had made the holes,  plunging those orange beaks into the sand as they fed. But then we saw hundreds of tiny crabs (the biggest no bigger than a thumbnail) scuttling about in that patch. The crabs looked like tiny jewels. Perhaps the holes and sand balls were theirs.

Tiny crab

Other birds than oystercatchers use this beach and its banks, as this sign reveals, but we didn’t see any of them.
I do like the new landforms, 'mudf lats' and 'sand lats' -- who knew a font could have such an effect? 









Jellyfish have been in the news here this summer—a kind of plague of small ones, along with some enormous and until now unknown species have washed up on beaches all over the state. We saw two jellyfish as we walked, one perfectly round one partly covered by sand, and this bright red one.

Unidentified jellyfish

We walked for an hour or so, our ears filled with the sounds of the surf and the wind. The sun grew hot and we got hungry—a sure sign it was time to head home for lunch and a breather before heading out to the Hobart Book Shop for the launch of Peter Timms’s novel Asking for Trouble. After the launch we went to Flippers, a  boat at Constitution Dock that sells excellent fish and chips, and bought take-away supper. We brought the steaming boxes home and ate our trevalla at the dining room table while we watched the light grow dim along the Derwent, one of the continual pleasures of being here.