Soaking rains liven up the East St Wetland!
With impressive winter rains, many of the often inconspicuous, and often dry wetlands of the region have come to life including our little swamp scrub restoration site at East St in Narrawong!
As a lot of the area is now holding water, the plants and animals have come to life (or ‘chorus’ in the case of our resident frogs). With moist soils, we had the opportunity last weekend to put in some more seedlings that needed a bit more time in the nursery over winter. Species included Melaleuca squarrosa (Scented Paper-bark), Gahnia trifida (Coastal Saw-sedge) and the rare Eucalyptus kitsoniana (Bog gum).
- Freshwater Burrowing Crayfish (Engaeus sp.) stack at East st Wetland
- Seedlings ready to plant in the soaked soils of East st Wetland
- A young Wooly Tea-tree flourishing with new growth following placement of a protective cage to stop browsing by Swamp Wallabies
- Flowering Water Ribbons (Triglochin procerum) that have emerged within recently inundated areas of the Shallow Freshwater Marsh adjacent to our revegetation site
- Dense stands of Shiny Bog-rush (Schoenus nitens)
- One of the mature Wooly Tea-trees first planted in 2011, dense in flower buds
- One of our ‘Tall Sedge’ (Carex appressa) seedlings that have out-grown tree guards
- The Narrawong District Primary School’s chair on site, created by a local artist
Swamp rats were having a great time making lots of soil mounds, and it was also great to see active burrows of the elusive Freshwater Burrowing Cray, from the genus Engaeus. Hopefully with some investigative work and help from the NGT team we can figure out the which sub-species of burrowing crayfish is present at the site in the future.