Yesterday I visited Wandoo National Park [I Love National Parks]
If you remember, my previous Park visit was the Kalamunda National Park. Thick with impenetrable trees
A Wandoo Woodland is so totally different. Open woodland with next to no understory. A vehicle can drive through a Wandoo Woodland as the trees are well spaced. The Whitish mounds are defunct Termite Mounds
A defunct Termite mound with the outer layer worn away.
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This Woodland is the perfect habitat for Numbats though there are no longer Numbats this far North. They have retreated southwards about 150 kms from here. (Not my Photo)
My car amongst the Wandoo Trees
A stand of Grasstrees. Commonly known as Blackboys but now considered politically incorrect to use this name. The small spindly tree on the right is called a SnottyGobble Tree🤧
Open Woodland
A mammal that is quite common here is the Echidna - Spiny Anteater One of only two egg laying Mammals in the world. The other being the Platypus (Not my Photo)
Echidnas can eat 10,000 termites a day. Here is a scratching, evidence of an Echidna in the area.
@reflectingmonkey The final picture is of the Queenstown Airport. Take off heading towards Mt Owen. I was born in Queenstown which is a mining town on the West Coast. It was a Copper mine and had it's own Smelter. To feed the Smelter all the trees were cut down and because of the heavy rainfall, the top soil washed away, plus the acid rain from the Smelter killed any regrowth. Leaving what is today called a Moonscape. The area went from this
To this in the space of 50 years.
Because of this
One of the most magnificent Steam Train rides is the West Coast Wilderness Railway through virgin temperate rainforest following the King River to the Macquarie Harbour Township of Strahan. 35 kms of beauty.
@Gusman damn, what a mess humans can make sometimes. reminds me of some areas in the sierra Nevada in Colombia, I did a 4 day trek in the jungle and I learned that when the U.s. government was trying to stop the production of cocaine they sprayed the mountain with these toxic chemical to kill the coca plants. it was working, but... it also caused birth defects, skin diseases and a bunch of other stuff in the local population but also left the mountains that were sprayed totally barren, many years later you can still see where they sprayed because nothing grows there.
@reflectingmonkey One thing Mankind is good at is destroying nature. The sins of the fathers are born by their offspring almost for eternity. The Queenstown Moonscape will regrow now that the Smelter is no longer operating. This can be seen in these two photos. One of Mt Owen, denuded If you look at the left of the Mountain, there are two towers, then it dips to the right then raises up again. In that dip there is a seasonal Waterfall, Called the Horsetail Falls. Minimal trees in this picture.
This is the Horsetail falls 40 years later. Trees are reestablishing.
In a thousand years, maybe the Mountain will be reforested.
