A Bit More

Tuesday night, on the way back from Atherton, we stopped at a random stream at dusk to go platypussing. We saw three, and I had seen four there the previous day (Merrell stopped on our way home from the doctor's office), which brings the total platypus count up to eleven! Hannah did her fauna presentation on platypuses, and so now we are all well-informed.

Wednesday morning dawned rainy and unpleasant, and I woke up shortly after. We met Tony to go bird watching in some of the forest around the lodge. It was wet, and muddy, and generally miserable. We did, however, see some neat birds, the most impressive of which were probably the pair of King Parrots that flew above us. I am hoping to find a parrot feather to put in my adventure hat, which you will see when I next post pictures. We also saw another cassowary, and got about three feet away from him (he was a young male)!

After bird watching, we discussed our projects for the next few days. My group (Megan, Becca, Shannon and I) decided to look at freshwater invertebrates in the stream. We chose this, of course, before actually walking down to the stream. The stream is only a fifteen minute walk from the house, but my, what a walk. It rains about eighty percent of the time here, so everything is always wet. And the track is always muddy. And hilly. Very, very steep. So, all things considered, one tends to slide downhill for fifteen minutes instead of actually walking. Coming up is quite a challenge. And walking off of the track is not really an option, as there are stinging trees. There is no poison ivy in Australia, but there are stinging trees. When you get stung by a stinging tree (which I've managed to avoid thus far), it sticks its microscopic prickles into your skin where they remain, burning you, for up to six or eight months. Not really dangerous, but extremely painful, I'm told. So, once we made it to the stream, battered and not a little muddy, we set up our transects (we are comparing pool invertebrates to riffle invertebrates) and came up with our experimental design.

Wednesday afternoon we made a large lunch, because we were only having sandwiches for dinner. We made our sandwiches and headed off around four-thirty in the afternoon, for an evening spotting of yellow-bellied gliders, a type of adorable possum related to the sugar glider that people sometimes keep as pets. As it turns out, our resident Ph.D. is a possum expert. Poor Amanda chose possums for her fauna presentation, and realized that John Winter wrote the book. Literally. Two of the books she used, actually. He's Australia's foremost authority on eastern possums, and he also graded all of our presentations. He's a decent fellow, though. I think he's British originally, judging by his accent. And very, very passionate about possums.

On the way to the forest of Monday morning (Tumoulin State Forest, to be precise), the most marvelous thing happened. We were driving along when Tony hit the brakes rather suddenly and said, with a note of surprise in his voice, "I think that's an echidna!" Fortunately, I was in the very front of the bus. I think I probably had my head out the door before he completely stopped the bus, and I jumped out and ran up to the beautiful little echidna at the side of the road. He was very startled by the bus, and scurried down the bank off the side of the road, but I saw his (her?) spiny little face and his long, cute little pointy nose from about five feet away. Echidnas aren't very fast, so instead of running the little fellow began to dig into the ground and curl into a ball, exposing only his sharp spines and spiky tail. So I got to do my fauna presentation with a real echidna, after all (I was afraid that we wouldn't find one or, even worse, find one flattened on the road). I don't think it was the best presentation I've ever done. I was really excited, and had been eating macadamia nuts on the bus and not had time for a drink of water, which made my cough flare up a bit. But I think John and Tony probably understood. Tony said, later, that they had only ever seen two echidnas on SIT trips in the past, so the echidna gods must have been smiling on me.

Tumoulin was amazing, too. The yellow gliders were adorable, and John was very funny. He was so excited to show us the possums, but seemed very conflicted about having his light on, as he didn't want to bother them. He'd flash the light on and then say, "No, too much light!" and then flick it off again. But they were really adorable little creatures. I'll try to find a photo of them for you. It was much to dark to photograph them without a serious flash. One glided right over our heads and landed on the tree above us, and another did a little series of acrobatics on a tree about a hundred feet away. The gliders eat the sugary sap out of holes made by birds during the day. They also make the funniest noises. They almost sound like plastic tarps flapping about rapidly in the wind.

Thursday morning we took a brief outing to Wongabel State Forest, which is one of the only remaining areas with type 5b rainforest (which I will not explain, for fear of boring you all to tears). But it was a lovely spot, and we had a nice short walk and finished up the last of the presentations. Then we stopped in at On the Wallaby on the way back to The Lodge, to say hello to the lovely owner and get a few postcards and t-shirts.

We spent the afternoon doing data collection for our project and fending off leeches, which seemed to like the nefarious mud around our stream. It was relatively uneventful, and we made an early night of it after we grilled about eighty-thousand kebabs (only a slight exaggeration––Merrell provides for us quite well).

Today, Friday, we spent the whole day doing data collection. We went out around nine-thirty. While Shannon and I were standing in the stream (we collected the pool data), I looked down and saw a bloody enormous fish about a foot away from my leg. When I looked again, I realized that it was actually a platypus! I could have reached out and touched him. He was going pretty fast, though, and made it downstream before Becca and Megan got a look at him. As it turns out, Shannon and I saw quite a bit of wildlife (including a boatload of invertebrates). In addition to the platypus, we saw quite a good-sized turtle, maybe two feet long, and something mysteriously reptilian. We're not sure if it was a large aquatic goanna or a small freshwater croc, but it shot out of the stream at about thirty miles an hour and dashed up the bank. It went too fast to get much of a look, though.

In the afternoon we sorted out our data and started putting it together for a little presentation (old-school, with big sheets of paper and markers) that we'll give before we leave The Lodge. After dinner, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my Tim-Tam and drinking my tea when Drew, whose group is doing a project spotlighting for possums, came to our door and offered to trade me an echidna sighting for the rest of the Tim-Tams. I obliged, and followed him out into the rain. Drew and Keven saw the little guy (quite a young echidna, judging by the fully intact spines and small size) perambulating across the lawn near the gate, a few hundred metres from the Main House. He (she?) was curled into a ball when I got there, but I sat on the ground with my light out until he came out. Echidnas are generally nocturnal in tropical areas (they become more crepuscular and even completely diurnal in more temperate climates, but they don't like being hot), so it was actually very unusual to see an echidna in the light as we did on Wednesday. He uncurled after about fifteen minutes, and I got a good look at his little face. I was only about two feet away from him. He got a little scared by the light, though, and curled up again. Some more people came out to look at him, and eventually he got up and waddled off into the bush. What a lovely little creature. Now I'm sitting at the kitchen table in the Dairy, but I'm about to go to sleep. We're going hiking all day tomorrow.

Today, Saturday, we went off on a hike to a spot called The Bluff which was, well, a bluff. We all got compasses and map coordinates, and we were supposed to determine where we were going, where we were starting, and how we were getting there. So, we pulled up to a field of lantanas, which are a nasty invasive scrub bush, and off we went. No paths. We found it eventually, without too much drama, and then we had lunch looking out over the bluff. The route was mostly open eucalyptus forest, dominated by the lemon-scented eucalyptus, a lovely tree. It actually smells like lemons, and you get little wafts of pleasant citrusy air as you walk through the forest.

This evening we had a little party for John, as it's his last time coming with an SIT group. Apparently he's seventy-five, although I would never have put him above sixty-five. He kept up hiking better than some of the students on the trip. We put together a sponge cake for him, and Merrell bought him a bottle of Drambuie, which he loves. I think he appreciated it.

~a