Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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Duckhole Lake

Tucked away off the now-abandoned forestry roads of southern Tasmania is one of Tasmania’s “Great Short Walks”, a 2km walking track through rainforest/wet sclerophyll along the banks of a little creek that finishes up at the remarkable Duckhole Lake. It has been over seven years since my last visit, and I was glad that Mum and Dad suggested it as a destination when I proposed that we go for an outing today. For reasons which will become apparent I took lots of photos (although for various other reasons I threw half of them out), and so you will end up with quite a few here.

The bush showed evidence for both dampness and drought. As is typical of cool temperate rainforest, there were bracket fungi large and small (the biggest we saw was about the size of a large dinner plate, while the one in the photo below was about 15cm in diameter and the one in the second photo was about 6cm wide).

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There were the usual temperate rainforest species, like myrtles, sassafras, celery top pine, ferns, and leatherwood, but some of them appeared to be suffering from the limited rainfall that they have been experiencing, with the leaf rosettes on some of the laurels looking rather wilted (the one below looked okay, but there were others that were really droopy).

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Sections of the forest had very limited under-storey vegetation and the ground was littered with dead branches.

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The earlier stages of the track are earthen, but since I last visited most of the track has been hardened with boards, to protect the boggier sections which aren’t very boggy at the moment.

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There is evidence of the really old timber industry (not just the recently old timber industry); with massive moss-covered tree stumps bearing the tell-tale notches that the timber-cutters used to make their single-plank cutting platforms, and the remnants of a timber tramway used for log-hauling are visible in a couple of places.

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This area has been protected from recent forestry activity, and so there are still some massive trees to be seen, and looking overhead gives an interesting view of leaf silhouettes.

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There were also plenty of leaf evidence at our feet, with leaf litter strewn across the path, and interesting collections of material coalescing in the slower sections of a creek running well below its usual levels. The second photo shows leatherwood leaves and petals.

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One of my favourite bits of the walk was the last 400m just before the lake, where both sides of the track were teeming with the little reddish-pink flowers of Tasmania’s endemic climbing heath Prionotes cerinthoides.

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Because Duckhole Lake is a sinkhole lake, formed in limestone country, the track just “arrives” at the lake without any preamble that presages the existence of a lake 60m across. Dense bush goes right up to the water’s edge, and on a calm day like today there are beautiful reflections.

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Another of the highlights of today’s visit was the noticeable presence of some birdlife. Two yellow-tailed black cockatoos were certainly making themselves obvious with their raucous cries, and they clambered around on one of the dead trees before flying off again (they were too far away for really good photos; the image below is an enlarged crop from a shot using the 200mm end of my zoom).

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The other bird that we enjoyed watching was a white-faced heron which flew across the lake a couple of times (resulting in quite a few destined-for-disposal blurry photos), and then wandered along the edge of the far shore fishing for food and creating lovely reflections (resulting in quite a few more destined-for-disposal blurry and redundant photos).

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Just for fun, the following photo is upside down, just to highlight how still the water is (you can tell that it’s wrong, but right where reality meets reflection it’s pretty hard to tell the difference).

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