Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Tall Timber


This is the lemon scented gum in our front yard. It's a big tree but it is dwarfed by the gum tree across the road. Late this afternoon there were quite a few Rainbow Lorikeets (you'd think there were more by the noise they make!) feeding on the flowers, but because they are so high up, and surprisingly well camouflaged they are not perceptible in the photo. Last year we had a number Flying Foxes feeding in the tree, I'll have to check latter on tonoght to see if they are back. We are only about 2 km from the Yarra River so it's not unusual to see the dark silhouette of Flying Foxes overhead at night. The only problem with these trees is that they occasionally decide to drop limbs for no apparent reason. For some reason they always land on our neighbours telephone wire, luckilly last time the wire was there to save our neighbours shiny new car.

Something I discovered while writing this is that the lemon scented gum is in fact not a Eucalyptus but a member of the closely related Corymbia family.

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