Matt Kei

May 13, 2013May 14, 2013

Ginkgo biloba, autumn and anomalies

I live on a continent without the visual cues for autumn that naturally occur on others. Sure, Australia has some deciduous trees but there aren’t many and the lack of a show from plants that marks autumn is one of its many anomalies. Anomalies like hopping animals with their young in pouches, montremes, swans that are black or megapodes – birds that bury their eggs in a carefully tended compost and there are many more. The lack of mountains, let alone glaciers, the absence of volcanoes and a climate that features drought, floods and vast arid river systems that lie dormant for years until the floods occur. t’s anomalies like these that generate in me, an awe and wonder, an endless fascination with what this land holds.

So my beacon for autumn is the Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), I have at my front door. I love the Ginkgo’s story, it is an anomaly amongst plants. Land plants that produce seeds can be split into angiosperms (flowering plants) and gymnosperms (non-flowering plants). There are estimated to be between 250,000 – 400,000 species of flowering plants but just 800 – 900 non-flowering. These 800 – 900, occur in four divisions, Pinophyta which includes Pine trees and our own Araucaria, Cycadophyta which includes the cycads we easily recognise, Gnetophyta (Gentales) of which they are perhaps 70 or so seriously weird plants, but none in Australia, and the Gingkophyta of which there is just one, Ginkgo biloba. I am intrigued by this anomaly, just one remaining species from China, in one genus, in one family making up one division of the gymnosperms. A division that’s as different as a cycad is to a pine.

In the fossil record, the Ginkgo left abundant traces of its distinctive leaf throughout geological time. These records tell us that there were Ginkgo, clearly relatives of our only species, 270 million years ago. The records also tell us that there were widespread Ginkgo forests containing perhaps 60 or more Ginkgo species. They also tell us that they commonly occurred in Australia throughout our geological past.

Ginkgo have been cultivated in Chinese monasteries for thousands of years and there has been some speculation that wild populations may have also been planted. But a recent study has shown that a south western chinese wild populations exist in glacial refugium, along with other species that are also commonly found together in the fossil record.

Ginkgo can grow to over 50 metres and live for 5 centuries or more. A 50 metre beacon of autumn in my local bushland is an anomaly I wouldn’t care for. I am going to keep mine in a pot, as a 1 metre bonsai, as an anomalous symbol of autumn in my Australian garden.

Resources

There is a great website on the Ginkgo by a Dutch School Teacher http://kwanten.home.xs4all.nl/index.htm and she also has an interesting blog http://ginkgopages.blogspot.com.au/

An illuminating paper on Ginkgo in the Australian Fossil record is Steven McLoughlin’s ‘Ginkgo in Australia’ which can be accessed freely online http://www.academia.edu/1135523/Ginkgo_in_Australia

May 4, 2013May 5, 2013

Female Golden Whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis)

I live in suburban Sydney close to the CBD and it’s usual that with monotonous regularity, aggressive birds dominate. Despite my proximity to bushland, it seems few species of birds are around. So, any change to this scene, such as a new visitor the Golden Whistler, I greet with joy.

I updated my Canon 5d Mark III this week with the new firmware which allows me to get an auto focus (AF) function with my 300mm and 2X extender along with clean HDMI out. I produce video. The video capability is why I bought this camera and I am pleased with the clean HDMI, it is just that the stills capability has me more excited.

This Golden Whistler has been around the patch of degraded urban bush below my house for a while. She seems to be a daily visitor, feeding on insects amongst a patch/thicket of Pittosporum (Pittosporum undulatum), Small Leaf Privet (Ligustrum sinense), Broad-leaf privet (Ligustrum lucidum) and Cheese tree (Glochidion ferdinandi) that has an understory of Fish-bone fern (Nephrolepis cordifolia).

I saw a flock of Grey Fantails there during the week and my neighbour says that small birds are more common since the death of his neighbour’s cat. One thing for sure is the importance that this degraded bushland represents as habitat for bird species that need a refuge from the more common, dominant and aggressive birds.

Golden Whistler in the thick of it — Habitat

the Golden Whistler in the tangle of branches — Difficult to focus

It was dark this morning and the (AF) function wasn’t really able to cope with the complexity of the scene and the low light. It is a joy to get the functionality of audio feedback for focus with the lens but I was disappointed with the technology. I am no expert, I am still learning how to use the 5D and perhaps it is the operator’s expectations rather than the firmware/camera.

Nonetheless, I got a few pictures I am pleased with of a bird that I haven’t been familiar with. The female Golden Whistler is a fairly plain bird particularly when compared to it’s male counterpart which I am yet to see. The sexual dimorphism that birds often exhibit is incredible. The sexual competition that makes males exhibit their fitness so wonderfully is one of the joys of life. I can’t wait to see and photograph the male, there has to be one around.

April 29, 2013

A history of where I live – (part 1)

What can we know about something? Once we know something it opens up the world of what that we don’t know.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson explains that the inspiration for the book came from the concern he had about what he didn’t know. When taking off in a plane he looked down at the sea and thought of the things that he didn’t know, like where the salt in the sea came from. This blog seems to becoming more and more about the world that surrounds me and like Bill I don’t know a lot, but unlike Bill, I will remain ignorant of much. Still, I have made and continue to attempt to make sense of what is what. Like where I live.

I live in Castlecrag, a suburb of Sydney, a few kilometres from the CBD and Opera House. I describe this distance as a few hills. The hills help me create a map of where I live now and where I grew up, in Killara another few hills north. It helps me to understand the flora that would have been here not so long ago and the topography, soils and geology that influenced it. But Sydney is flat. Rather than hills, I live on a vast sandstone plateau, into which have been carved valleys. 220 million years ago, this sandstone plateau was a braided river system on Gondwana, a delta of intersecting water courses on a scale seen no where else in the world today. The sand was delivered from an eroding mountain range somewhere to the south.

In the past decade, I have studied with geologists and I may do them an injustice by trying to put some of what they have told me into a factual account. But in places, this sand was formed in a night of a deposition, these nights became a continuum of formation and collapse. This speculative history can be seen in road cuttings. Over millenia, once the sand had been deposited, it was overlain with material perhaps a couple of kilometres thick. This eventually exerted the amount of pressure and delivered the increased temperature required so that it would become the hardened stone we see today.

When the New Zealand continent broke off from Gondwana around 80 million years ago, it created cracks in the sandstone. The biggest cracks became the biggest rivers, like the Lane Cove and Parramatta. The sand that eroded in the formation of the valleys became the beaches of our coastline. I live in a valley where a small crack formed a creek that would drain into what would become Middle Harbour. Middle Harbour is a drowned valley, a short distance from open ocean. During the last ice age, within aboriginal history, it would have been a dry valley almost twenty kilometres from the ocean.

The history of where I live influences so much of what is around me. The flora, fauna and landscapes that this blog seems to be increasingly about.