Some interesting bit and pieces from that horehound area.Snake buckle is a great find.If there is a time of year when the horehound dies off,perhaps winter,that would be the time to hit that area again.Cheers mate.
An enjoyable fossick for relics, William. I very much liked your showing the "history digging" that the actual kangaroos are doing! Had you taken this exact natural phenomena cue for the name of your show? We'd noted in England the badgers, hares and rabbits exposing middens of history, with coloured glass and tile fragments glinting in the sun, once, an early Victorian threepenny bit of silver, back in '97, he says, sounding like an old-timer with that datum! The kangaroos and wallabies, we'd looked at what they're digging up and eating:- underground fungus! Wattletree truffles, white and yellow, thought they're psychedelic to humans and the marsupials are unaffected, although one gave a scream of "the fear" when you bobbed up out of the horehound, how funny, but frightening at the same time, the whackers can be quite dangeroos, soz. We're also a buff (rather than a fan) of indigenous foods, and researched early descriptions of what explorer and early naturalists had identified, including those looking at indigenous aboriginal diets. Curiously, there's a type of milk cap mushroom only identified as late as 1996, no history of any indigenous peoples ever using this perfectly edible fungus, nor anyone else finding and eating them, until the scientific description was published in the late 90's! Lactaria eucalypti, I'll share this with you, maybe it's your area it was found, but I wouldn't try anything without a suitable expert leading an expedition for any. We trusted Polish folk for the pinetree related microrrhyzal original of the one I described, it's the saffron milk cap, and the description is in the Latin nomenclature, Lactaria deliciosa! Please pardon yet another blooming essay, but when facing thick undergrowth like the horehound, there's nothing for it but to wear heavy gumboots, avoiding cuts and abrasions, and snakebites, and we'd happily trample weeds like that for excellence in relics like your snake buckle. Happy hunting to you! Cheers from Gabi of Narre Warren.
