This cocoon was on a post at the start of the Little Blue Gum Creek walk. It’s large, about 15cm long, with sticks woven into the sides. I remember seeing many like this when I was growing up but had never known what animal made them.
Saunder’s Case Moth Cocoon at the start of the Little Blue Gum Creek boardwalk.
A quick search pointed to it being a Saunder’s Case Moth cocoon. During their caterpillar phase case moths make their cocoons out of silk, most species attach sticks, leaves or other debree as camouflage. Each species had a distinct type of cocoon, but they are also constrained by available materials so even within a single species cases can vary in materials and appearance.
Cocoon close up, I wonder how they break up the sticks.
Case moths don’t just use the cocoon to metamorphose, they live there throughout their Caterpillar phase which lasts 1 – 2 years. Even after changing to a moth the females continue to use it as a home.
I really enjoyed looking at the photos of the construction of Lady Game Drive, something that kept popping up in them was Little Blue Gum Creek. I must have driven down there a million time but I couldn’t place it.
Little Blue Gum Creek : Lane Cove National Park (1939 ?)
After a quick search I found were it is, and also that there is a short boardwalk through the bush at the creek. It’s nearby so in between rain showers last weekend we ducked down there with the kids to take a look.
There’s a small parking lot right out the front on the corner of Lady Game Drive and Grosvenor Rd. It’s a really nice little walk, raised boardwalk the whole way weaving through lush vegetation and what must be a grove of tall straight blue gums. Information plaques say the area is also home to a colony of microbats, there is a sculpture at the end of the walk that doubles as a bat refuge.
It really is a short walk, can’t have been longer than a few hundred meters. You can hop off the boardwalk at the end and continue along a narrow bush trail, I would have liked to have done it but it had started raining again while we were there so decided to leave that to next time.
The boardwalk at Little Blue Gum Creek, Lane Cove National ParkBlue Gum at Little Blue Gum Creek, Lane Cove National Park
Ku-Ring-Gai library has been posting old photos from the area ( including some from Garigal ) to it’s Flickr account . What a great way to make access to it’s archives more convenient. I didn’t even know the library had the photos until I came across one of their online postings by fluke when searching for pictures of Bungaroo.
William Henry, the first settler in the Lane Cove Valley. circa 1860.
There are well over 1000 photos in their stream, and they seem to post a new batch every few weeks. Having lived in the area for a while I’ve found it addictive to browse through them and recognize familiar locations back when they were a rugged frontier.
Road filling work being undertaken in Vale Street, Gordon. A Dennis truck can be seen tipping. Mr C. Bowes Thistlethwayte and three children can be seen standing near his car in the foreground.
Unfortunately many of the photos are not labeled making them hard to identify, and also hard for people to discover when searching. ( I was lucky to be searching for one of the few photos with a label. ) I wrote to the library asking them if they had any information on the unlabeled photos. They do! They are working on linking the images back to the library catalog and then posting some of the information back to their Flickr stream. Apparently a large and time consuming job, not something that will be done anytime soon. But they did give information on how to search the catalog for information on each photo myself!
Go to http://library.kmc.nsw.gov.au
Click on the “Find information” link on the left hand side and chose catalog. Next, select the advanced search. In the fourth drop down menu labelled “Dewey class”, change this to “Call number”. Type in “photo” in the field along with the last four digits of the flickr photograph title and press search.
For example for the photo labelled “0044593“. Follow the above sets and type in photo 4720.
Awesome!
Their latest batch of posts are mostly on the constructions of Lady Game Drive and Lane Cove National Park. Here’s a selection with annotations from the catalog:
Shows three men including Mr. C. Bowes Thistlethwayte standing at Horse Shoe Bend on Bradfield Road above the Lane Cove National Park. ( 1937? )Shows the stone wall of the culvert at De Burgh Creek being constructed. Two horse and cart teams can be seen in the background. The culvert was part of the construction work for Lady Game Drive. ( 1934 )Qarryman working at Pymble Quarry circa 1930 ( where was this? that looks like columnar basalt )Shows men working on the construction of Lady Game Drive. Site is above Little Blue Gum Creek, Lindfield. 1937Shows tents on the Australasian Scout Jamboree site at Bradfield (now West Lindfield), which ran from December 1938 to January 1939.
The Cascades is located at the junction of Middle Harbour and Frenches creeks inside Garigal National Park. Here both creek beds open from narrow winding channels onto wide expanses of potholed and weathered sandstone. It’s a picturesque and popular location with 3 well maintained fire trails leading into the area from Belrose, Davidson and St Ives.
In another exchange with John I learned that the Cascades has an interesting history. As a depression era work project a dam wall was built at the base of one of the two large natural pools to create a large public swimming pool. John sent a photo of how it looked when it was in operation. It reminds me of the ocean pools that occupy the rocky headlands of the nearby northern beaches.
Cascades pool at St Ives. 1934. During it’s use it was known as Bungaroo pool, however Bungaroo is several Kms downstream. ( photo from Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/picture/result?q=+bungaroo+pool&l-format=Photograph)
Today the wall has been washed away, but the remains are clearly visible, along with some other structures and artifacts from it’s time as a public swimming pool.
The upper pool at the CascadesRemains of the pool wall that kept the water in.I tried to take this photo at the same location as the 1934 one. There were some large trees blocking the view, this is the best I could getThe Ladies Room – See the inscription in the rock at the lower left. Could this have been the ladies change room, or toilet? There was a small bowl carved out of the rock slab inside the cave.
During it’s time there was a public road leading down to the pool, it must have been a very tough journey, especially for the cars of the day. It was notorious enough that it was used as a test for several new model cars being reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Motoring section in the mid 1930’s.
“On the freak hill at Bungaroo swimming pool, near St. Ives, the car gave a good demonstration of its ability to climb, without wheel-spin, as nasty a slope as any motorist might encounter.” – Motoring, SMH Dec 24th, 1935
