Recently I was invited to go with friends Mandy, Amy and Jackie on a bushwalk on the mountain behind where I live. It’s private property, and it’s always good to see such places when you get the chance. We walked along a 4WD track that is the only way for a vehicle to get to the homestead. This track is pretty much impassable by vehicle in the wet summer season. After that, we followed a small foot track down to a waterfall.
The 4WD track through the forest
The property is on the the MacKellar Range and adjoins the Bungabbee State Forest, a 955-hectare forest reserve. (A state forest is managed by the NSW government, as opposed to a national park which is managed by the federal government. This state forest is logged except for steep slopes where it is impractical, but hopefully this private land will never be.) It’s full of huge flooded gums …
Amy in leech-proof gumboots with a big old flooded gum
110 plant species (including 3 threatened species) and 135 animal species (including 10 threatened species) have been recorded in the adjacent state forest, and I assume they live here, too.
Bird's nest fern, Asplenium australascium
Here’s the native ginger (Alpinia caerula), which has purple berries …
Native ginger
The track has an ivy-leaf violet (Viola banksii) groundcover …
Ivy-leaf violet groundcover
The tree below with the droopy leaves is a bollygum, probably Neolitsia dealbata.
Bollygum (rear, with drooping leaves)
There are ferns all over the ground …
One of many species of ferns
A staircase of staghorns (Platycerium superbum) …
Staghorns on a flooded gum
Another fern, possibly Platycerium bifurcatum, clings high up on trees …
Possibly Platycerium bifurcatum
As we descend into the valley, the forest gets wetter and is taken over more by bangalow palms (Archontophoenix cunninghamii) …
The wetter the ground, the more bangalow palms, the denser the canopy
Small bangalow seedlings …
You're small now, but you'll turn into a tall palm
turn into trees with roots like these …
Bangalow palm roots
On the ground are the fruits and seeds of the black apple (Planchonella australis) …
Black apple fruits and seeds
Pothos (Pothos longipes) climbs available trees …
The climber Pothos longipes
Because it’s so damp, there’s an abundance of moss …
Moss on a rotting fallen tree
and snails …
Where there's dead ones, there must be live ones
I was hoping these were the endangered Mitchell’s rainforest snail, but the description doesn’t match. I’ll keep trying to find out what they are.
Part 2 will be about the fungi we found on this walk.
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Hi Joy. Love the snails. What beauties!
Lots of what you’re showing us are also visible (well similar looking trees and plants) a few kms up the road amongst the old logging tracks, near Nulla View (our property) in the Nulla Nulla Five Day National Park (which also used to be a State Forest). If you drive as far as you can (about 25 kms), you get near Mt Killankrankee, the site of protests against logging of pristine forest, about 15 years ago. I think they dynamited the road to stop people coming through from Bellingen way. And that means we can’t get through from the southern roads. They continued to log until about 10 years ago, but that seems to have stopped – that is we don’t see or hear the trucks anymore. Virgin forest is evident if you venture up there, it’s so dark and rainforesty, you can’t get in by foot, and you can’t see much peering in from the edge – it’s great! As good as Lord of the Rings!
When you think about it, as the crow flies, you are probably not that far from us. The fruit bats in your area probably visit us when they run out of foods.
These tree ferns are amazing!