Excursion Sunday 18th November 2012 to Rockingham Lakes Regional Park
Lake Coolingup

Nine of us met at 9:00am to walk some of the perimeter track.  Lake Coolingup is Aboriginal for The Place of the Children and nearby is the Children’s Forest.
On Easter Sunday in 2009 there was an intense fire which started opposite the Baldivis School and went west over the railway line and over Innes Avenue to peoples’ verges, pushed by a severe Easterly Wind.  We were there to look at how the Tuarts are recovering, having had a talk on Tuarts from Katinka Ruthof the previous Friday. 

We walked the firebreak as the bush is far too thick to penetrate because of the dense forest of young Tuarts.  We saw that some of the young trees were showing leaders and there were signs of bark starting to develop. The thick forest was inside the Park and on the low ground while there was little revegetation on the higher ground outside the fence where the ground water level is higher.  Many of the plants inside the park are indicators of a wet-winter area, including Paper Barks, Swamp Banksia, rushes and sedges growing in grey sand.

Over three hours we saw 18 birds including Wedge-tailed Eagle, Swamp Harrier, Square Tailed Kite, Golden Whistler, Splendid Wren, Striated Pardalote and Wee Bill.

The plants in flower included Thysanotus growing with Yellow Lily, Globe Pea, Angled Lobelia, Tar Bush with flowers of yellow to orange to red, and the Yellow Tail Flower.  There is a lot of weed such as White Fumitory, Yellow Pigface, Onion Weed , Cotton Bush and Scabious while there are lovely sedges and rushes in flower and the beautiful Feather Speargrass.

Other sightings were of Jewel Beetles, Christmas Spider, a couple of golden-brown Grasshoppers, a lovely Native Bee and a Monarch Butterfly.  Lynette Davies

Photos: Bob Goodale