Grass trees
We left Perth heading north, as we wanted to explore Lesueur National Park. It is an important area for flora conservation, home to many endemic plants, and we hoped to get a look at some of them. Those plants, in turn, support a wide diversity of unique animal species. On our way we passed through Nambung National Park, where we explored the Pinnacles, a strange landscape of limestone pillars in a desert of sand next to the Indian Ocean.
On the way we passed a forest of grass trees.
It always strikes me as really strange to see a desert right next to an ocean. Intuitively, the ocean would evaporate some and that water would fall as rain on the nearby land, but sometimes that's not the case — the water is carried over the land and falls farther inland.
The Pinacles are just such a place, and a bizarre looking landscape it is. They have a nice trail that winds around out among the rock pinnacles. It's well marked, which is good, because you might get yourself lost out there.
We found this cool bug-eyed bug. I think it might be a Coryphistes ruricola, a bark-mimmicking grasshopper.
We found a Bob-tailed Skink which can look a little like a pinewood derby racecar when it's on a flat surface due to its apparent lack of "normal" animal curves... Hey! That might make a cool design for a car...
We didn't find a lot of birds, but we were there in the middle of the day so that's not surprising.
We also found some interesting wildflowers.
From the Pinnacles we drive north into Lesueur National Park, where we went bonkers over the wildflowers and some pretty cool birds.
