Features
The reserve includes a number of walking trails which range from short circular walks up to walks of several kilometres in length, some of which join on to the Great North Walk.
The reserve is home to a wide range of native flora and fauna. It includes a rich diversity of vegetation which includes remnants of Blue Gum High Forest and ridgetop woodlands, but mostly consists of dry sandstone gully forest on sandstone base soils with some areas retaining Wianamatta Shales. The rich understorey includes interesting species like Native Iris (Patersonia glabrata), Native Grape (Cissus hypoglauca) and the Red Beard Orchid (Calochilus paludosus). In recent years there have been reliable recordings of koala, swamp wallaby, echidna, eastern water dragon, and sugar gliders, as well as the ubiquitous brushtail and ringtail possums. Powerful owl have also been seen in the reserve. Foxes have been largely eradicated by a continuing baiting program, leading to a significant increase in the number of native animals in the reserve.
The reserve also includes a local landmark (known locally as the Aboriginal Cave) at Latitude -33.758010 Longitude 151.011660 which is a rock shelter that was apparently described in times of early European occupation as being a cave used by the Bidjigal people. Several other aboriginal rock shelters also lie within Bidjigal Reserve, including one with a midden dated to 10150 bp, which is the earliest human habitation site known in the Sydney area (although older sites are known in the Blue Mountains). There are also reliable reports of other works of Australian aboriginal art, including hand-stencils and rock engravings, but none have been identified in recent years, and they may have been damaged or destroyed.
Read more about this topic: Bidjigal Reserve
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
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“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)