Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

New growth at Wireless Hill

We've had some heavy showers of rain during the night which augers well for nearby Wireless Hill. Twenty six days have passed since a firebug set the northern slope alight. Rain is just what is needed to wash the ash in and stimulate the process of recovery. There have been a couple of other days of rain since the fire as well.

We went back yesterday to check the progress. The road within the park was also an excellent place on a quiet Monday for our number two teenage daughter to have a driving lesson.

As expected the blackboy/balga grass trees Xanthorrhea preissii have taken the fire in their stride. They had a flush of new growth about a foot high on their topknots. The overall scene yesterday was starting to look much better than the one I described with a selection of photos on 28 March 2008.

Noticeably the rains had washed the ash from the remnant vegetation and the blackboys were no longer a ghostly shade of grey. Some of the casuarina trees had started to shed their layer of charred bark to reveal an orange newness beneath. Similarly, I noticed that a few eucalypts had green clumps at the very top of their scorched canopies and they were loaded with developing flower buds. The trees appeared to have swung into seed production overdrive in order to try to take advantage of the still semi-desolate ground beneath.

The squat zamia 'palms' were showing significant flushes of growth as well. They have a very large tuber beneath the ground and recovery from a bushfire is never a problem, even for very small specimens. Also visible here and there were the first shoots of some catspaw clumps, Anigozanthos humilis, which are low form of kangaroo paw - they'll produce masses of low orangeish flowers when spring arrives in a few months. They sprout from a rhizome beneath the sand, but can also grow from seed. Last spring there were some spectacular displays of these plants on the opposite south eastern side of the hill, which has been recovering from a fire a few years ago.

There were not a lot of signs of animal activity. I saw one bird track and a few small ant nests towards the edge of the fire line. Nothing else.

The park rangers have been busy installing bio-degradable hemp? rolls and mats along the edge of an old access road which led to the original Telefunken radio tower facility. The intent of this effort is to control water runoff and prevent gullies forming. Unfortunately some of the most serious damage to the slope further downhill, which was caused by firefighters' vehicles, still remains. It wouldn't have been difficult to have given these areas a rake over by hand to restore the areas, but now the wheel tracks are filling with the leaf droppings from scorched trees.

One of the other rapid recoveries in the fire zone has been the South African veldt grass Ehrharta calycina. I saw several clumps making fresh growth yesterday. There'll be an excellent opportunity to initiate an eradication program with some carefully applied systemic spot-spraying over the next month or so.

So then, here's the folio of new Wireless Hill images on my Picasa site. (Click the pic.) Also, don't forget to compare them to the earlier ones on 28 March 2008.

There's also a high definition picture from yesterday on my Panoramio site at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9559826

Wireless
Hill regrowth - 21 April 2008

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!