With a bit of time to spare over the last week, Ali and I headed down the coast again - this time south, to east Gippsland, Victoria. We travelled down from Canberra, passing through Cooma and Bombala before hitting the Victorian border. After a spot of lunch, we decided to do a few quick stops along the highway down to Cann River. The road runs through a valley, passing through fairly remote National Park (Coopracambra NP) as well as more pastoral areas when you get closer to Cann River.
The decision to stop turned out to be a great one - after a bit of searching, we found several Acianthus pusillus, mostly past it but a few still flowering. A little more searching yielded some Corysanthes fimbriata (I've seen a lot of this species in the past month or two!) and finally, something more interesting - a greenhood!
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| Diplodium longipetalum |
At first I wasn't sure what it was - it reminded me of a smaller, daintier version of D. revolutum, with a shorter hood and a long pointed labellum. After a bit of research, turns out they are Diplodium longipetalum. From what I can gather they are a fairly uncommon species, restricted to central and south-east NSW and far eastern VIC. Also in the general vicinity were budding Diplodium grandiflorums and Bunochilus sp. Feeling rather chuffed, we headed down through Cann River and set up camp at Wingan Inlet in Croajingolong.
A few words on Wingan Inlet - it is a beautiful, secluded campsite. However, beware the long drive in from the highway and the resident kookaburras who are keen to steal lunch from unsuspecting campers!
The second day was spent mostly around the campsite. However to our dismay we could find very few orchids! Very few of the tracks along the road in to the Inlet had orchids - I suspect the ground was a little wet and the vegetation a little thick. Thankfully, the walk from the campsite to the beach was better. Here we found several nice colonies of Diplodium grandiflorum and Corysanthes fimbriata, with one lone flowering Pterostylis nutans.
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| Horizontally growing Diplodium grandiflorum |
The following day we headed back out to the Coopracambra NP area. On one particular slope we found had hundreds of leaves, mostly spring orchids I guess. Little was flowering until we finally stumbled across a flowering Bunochilus! I initially thought it was Bunochilus tunstallii, a species I was hoping to see on this trip. However, when we saw B. tunstallii later in the trip, we realised this was definitely different - the flowers were bigger, longer, the labellum larger with more whitish hairs at the base. My photos seem to match ones on the retiredaussies.com site which are labelled B. chlorogrammus. Most other photos of chlorogrammus on the internet show a green labellum but everything else seems to fit, so I shall call it chlorogrammus. We even found a second flower!
UPDATE: I was contacted by Gary Backhouse who informs me that this a separate species to B. chlorogrammus. It is currently undescribed, and is being called Bunochilus sp 'Red Lip'. It seems to be restricted to eastern Victoria and is apparently uncommon/rare. My sighting, at about 300m elevation, represents the highest known record for this species.
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| Bunochilus sp 'Red Lip' |
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| Bunochilus sp 'Red Lip' - front on |
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| Bunochilus sp 'Red Lip' - second plant |
We also found a large colony of wasp orchids, with one lone Chiloglottis reflexa flower:
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| Late-flowering Chiloglottis reflexa |
This seems to be rather late for C. reflexa to be out flowering, and interestingly we saw no evidence of any finished flowers despite the large number of leaves.
That night, we decided to move camp, so in the morning we packed up and headed to Shipwreck Creek. This campsite is still part of Croajingolong NP but is further east than we were before and close to Mallacoota.
As seems to be our custom, we stopped a few times to check the surrounding bush on our drive from Wingan Inlet to Mallacoota. As luck would have it, we hit the jackpot in national park not all that far from Mallacoota. In one particular gully, there were about 500 flowering orchids! The majority of these (over 300) were Diplodium grandiflorums in roughly two loose-ish colonies. There were also well over 100 Bunochilus tunstallii dispersed throughout the gully, along with maybe 30-50 Pterostylis nutans, the odd Acianthus pusillus and one or two Pterostylis acuminata.
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| Diplodium grandiflorum |
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| Diplodium grandiflorum (I can see 17 flowering/budding in this photo alone) |
I found it hard to capture the large numbers of greenhoods in a single photograph, as they were dispersed amongst the bushes.
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| Bunochilus tunstallii labellum variation |
On our last day, we spent more time around the Mallacoota area, exploring some of the great bush there is to be found in that part of the world. We found more Bunochilus tunstallii, one B. sp 'Red Lip' (conveniently located right next to a tunstallii for comparison) and more of the usual suspects.
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| Bunochilus sp 'Red Lip' |
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| Nicely positioned flowers on this Acianthus pusillus |
And that was more or less all she wrote. We returned to Canberra the following day. What a great area though! I must return in spring...
