Biodiversity Field Trip

So this was the weekend of the long awaited biodiversity field trip.

Day1:  We left at 5p on Friday afternoon and drove an hour and a half to Yungaburra where we stayed at a back-pack lodge called “On the Wallaby”.  They made us an amazing BBQ dinner of steak and sausage and mashed potatoes and two types of salad.  It was a huge meal and when Jen and I went back for an extra little scoop of salad we ended up with half of another steak as well.  After dinner we drove out to Mt Hypipamee National Park to go spotlighting for possums.  The possums here are not like ours at home, they look more like lemurs are when you see one there is a high likelihood that you will want to take one home with you.  We wandered along the trail or two hours with a headlamp as our only source of lighting.  We ended up seeing two green ring-tail possums, 4 common brush possums, a Herbert River Possum with a huge pouch full of babies and a coppery brush possum that allowed us to get within a couple feet of it for pictures.  We tumbled into bed at 12:30 and set our alarms for 6a to go hunting for platypuses.

Day2: We wandered out of the lodge down to the creek early in the morning with high hopes.  Jen and I wandered along the creek for quite a while, and although we kept seeing bubbles and trails in the water we had yet to see a platypus.  Finally we decided to give up and just enjoy our walk along the creek, about 2 minutes later, as it usually happens, we saw a line of ripples and ran down to the bank.  A platypus emerged from behind a tree less than a meter from where we were standing! It saw us and quickly dove into the water only to surface a in the middle of the lake and just cruised around while we watched it.  I think we said nothing but “Oh, my God it’s a platypus” for roughly 10 minutes.  The total animal count for our morning hike was 5 platypuses, including a pair together, a wallaby, a pair of laughing kookaburras (which, if you haven’t heard their call before, you need to look up right now) and a couple other birds we have yet to identify.  We then jogged, literally, back to the lodge for a quick breakfast, to buy a t-shirt and leave for the next adventure.

We next made a stop at the curtain fig tree, yes, I have been here before on another trip, you have been paying very close attention.  Our professor gave a talk on wasp-fig mutualism; and trust me, if I explained it to you, you may never eat a fig-Newton again.  The highlight of the trip was that Jen and I spotted and identified the only bird in the area, which just so happened to making a very loud piercing call, as a chowchilla.  We jumped back in the vans to drive to forty-mile scrub (yes, I also think it’s odd that they use metrics but the names of things use miles).  We had lunch and did a transect of the forest and then started turning over rocks in search of reptiles and insects.  We found several large huntsman spiders, heaps of gorgeous butterflies and lots of other bugs.  Again we were on our way in the vans; off to Undara.

Along the way we made another quick stop to look at the forest type and to hunt for reptiles but only managed to find one millipede.  We finally made it to Undara.  We went on another hike, which was mildly more successful with the spotting of a couple skinks, Jen and I found a dragon that we thought was a skink and a few weird bugs.  We watched the sunset and were just relaxing when our professor informed us that part of our assessment was that we would have to form groups and present what we learned that day in a creative manner.  So we walked back down to the camp and made our cup of noodles and began brainstorming.  Eventually we gave up and went to just sit around the fire and wait for this dreaded presentation to begin. We were visited by a bettong, which looks a lot like a kangaroo but is about 18 inches tall when it stands up, in other words, it is ridiculously cute.  Eventually our professors showed up and each group presented, One group had some one read a poem he had written describing the whole day while the rest of the acted it out in the background.  We did a jeopardy show with 2 commercial breaks, one for improved veggie mite and another that was a pretty cool rap about the ecosystems we saw.  And the last groups acted out each ecosystem.  And our mildly inebriated teachers voted our group the winner! We all were in bed at about 10:30, tired and thankful that we were going to be able to have more than 6 hours of sleep.

Day3:  We had a lazy morning and slowly meandered onto a hike to look for mammals and marsupials.  This was way more successful than other hikes.  We saw a dragon, which I got to hold, along with two mobs of gray kangaroos, a pair of pretty-faced wallabies, pale-cheeked rosellas, rainbow lorikeets, pygmy ducks, lots of bugs and various water birds.  After recording our whole day and packing up we piled in the vans for the long drive home.  We made a pit stop for lunch and at a place called the coffee-works, which is an artsy coffee and chocolate store which was pretty nice.  We arrived home a bit before dinner time dirty, smelly, with more bug bites than we started with, but overall: very pleased.