Yackandandah is a nearby 1-street town, another historic gold mining village with a quaint western feel. We were out unescorted for the first time. Scary stuff. We found a place to abandon our rental ship and wandered up and down both sides of the single street. There is a fair collection of coffee shops together with the usual bric-a-brac/antique (i.e. junk) shops in the mix of businesses, some of which looked as if they would benefit from some TLC but a visit made a pleasant little interlude. The best way to describe this is to let a few pictures do the talking.
One curiosity that kept Francine distracted for some time was a series of colourful flaking wooden picture frames artfully arranged in an old, weathered wooden wagon, seen in one of the pictures above.
What kept Franco amused for some time was Commissioner’s Creek, flowing through the village, where I found a few more mature examples of my Australian odo, the Common Flatwing (Austroargiolestes icteromelas). Here, there were some females, as well as males, so now I had the set.
All this tourism and odo-hunting forced us into the Yackandandah Hotel to refresh our feet, trigger fingers and eyeballs before making our return trip to Stanley via Beechworth Historic Park, through which is a narrow one-way road. Michel had driven us through towards the end of yesterday’s return trip so we’d know where we were going when we visited alone. Here, there is Spring Creek, a waterfall area I’d been told about by my Australian dragonfly e-contact. There’s room to park just two or three cars near the bridge over the falls but fortunately there was just one car there already so we managed to get parked. Actually, I’d have preferred no cars to be there ‘cos this one car had clearly delivered a pair of boisterously noisy rugrats that were now splashing in the waters of the falls. Nonetheless, a moderately gentle scramble upstream, beyond the parents of the noise generators, got us to some more gently flowing, calmer odo territory away from said rugrats. Here, we found the same three suspects we’d met at Woolshed Falls, yesterday, plus a new friend: a Blue Skimmer (Orthetrum caledonicum).
We left the odos to their basking away from the rugrats and, on our way back home, called in to another newish water body that Michel had introduced me to: the Stanley Barge Dam/Wetlands Project. A cyclist had beaten us to it. In the conversation that followed we discovered this gentleman had recently completed a cycle ride across Australia from Perth. Double YIKES! Spotting the camera slung across my shoulder on a monopod, “what are you looking for”, he enquired. “Dragonflies”, I responded. “Oh, I haven’t seen any”, he informed. Whoosh! “There goes one”, I smiled, pointing. How many times does that happen? People just tend not to see dragonflies.
It was a good stop to have made; a red job that I foolishly assumed would be the same red job we’d already encountered at Woolshed Falls actually turned out to be a new suspect. Meet the Red Percher (Diplacodes bipunctata).
Time for a beer or two to celebrate another two new friends. 😉
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