Closer carnivores:
We continued along the trail, ascending through mostly dry forest. There was very little water present, so I was surprised
when Robert waved us over to a small patch of sundews growing in the leaf litter! Very cool!
Drosera auriculata (or, if you prefer,
Drosera peltata subsp. auriculata).
Several plants were poking through the litter; they were flowering and also in fruit, so the identification was easy.
(The sepals of this subspecies are glabrous, while the sepals of Drosera peltata are pubescent.)
Along this trail we saw a number of nice birds, including a roller and a brush turkey high in tree. One would think a brush
turkey would restrict itself to the brush, and not the top of a tree (where you might expect a tree turkey to reside,
if there was such a beast, which there is not).
This sparked much excited conversation amongst the birding elements of our little troupe. Brush turkeys--tree dwelling or
not--are not plants, so I avoided contributing to the conversation.
Another point of conversation was the large pyramidal glasshouse at the Sydney Botanical Gardens
that we had toured the previous day. Robert supplied us with the fact that the glasshouse was portrayed on the cover
of the 1980 album "Lost in Love" by Air Supply. Why did Robert know this? This was an alarming revelation about
Robert's music-listening-habits.
