I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

This isn’t something you see every day:

a northern short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda. I was out walking the dogs and found it lying by the side of the road on School Lane. No doubt, another victim of death-by-housecat as evidenced by the puncture wound on its side.

Shrews are not uncommon and can be found in most areas of North America, but due to their fossorial (adapted to digging and life underground) lifestyle, are rarely seen. They have an astoundingly high metabolism and it’s been estimated that they need to consume three times their body weight in food daily.

This is only the third shrew I’ve seen in the east in my life. The last one I saw happened to be under my car in a parking lot in Landisville. They have eyes (and ears) that are almost vestigal and it was bouncing around fruitlessly trying to find its way back to soil. I managed to extract it with a broom handle and the animal lived up to its fearsome reputation by hissing and making a bizarre snarling sound as it lifted itself up by its tiny front feet in an attempt to scare me off. Don’t ever pick up a live shrew because you will surely be bitten. They are one of only two toxic mammals on Earth (the other being the platypus). Shrews have venom glands in their mouths that secrete a toxin into their victims when bitten. It’s non-lethal to humans, but I’ve read that it can leave a painful wound for several days.

Pocket mice:

Cholla:

Beavertail cactus:

The west coast is quite different than the east. Instead of the usual retinue of eastern beggars that frequent outdoor coastal dining establishments – pigeons, gulls, boat-tailed grackles, egrets – there’s another, much larger, freeloader:

The California sea lion (Zalophus californianus).  Gene is working the evening shift this week, so we went over to Point Loma for lunch at the only seafood market in town and shortly after we sat down, he noticed this sea lion hanging out not far from out table.  I took my camera to get shots of the rusty blackbirds that mill around the dining area, but ended up scoring a much better shot with this guy. I ran right out to take photos and one of the fishmongers from inside came out with a handful of leftover fish parts and threw them into the water. In an instant the sea lion was at my feet and the fish devoured. I couldn’t even get a shot because his movements were so quick. Apparently he’s a regular here and is fed quite well.

California mouse

The museum’s mammal people, Scott and Dana, as well as bat dude Drew, were instrumental particpants in the expedition. The desert is home to a variety of rodents, but I didn’t get many photos of them since I was busy with my own work. Some of the animals captured were wood rats, kangaroo rats and a variety of mice. They put bait and cameras out for mountains lions, but unfortunately none were seen.

With the proper equipment, there’s a whole ‘nother world to explore at night. Well, and without it. On Wednesday night I was awoken by the distinct sound of raccoons purring. I looked out my tent’s window and saw five babies clinging to the tree about 5 feet from where I was sitting. Adorable. Their mother called to them from a distance and they scrambled away, presumably to have their little arses kicked for getting so close to the humans. We also had a skunk haul ass through camp with Dana and I in hot pursuit trying desperately to snap photos with uncooperative cameras. It wasn’t so dark, however, that we couldn’t see his tail held high, so we didn’t get that close.

The pipe in the lower right corner is the microphone portion of the Anabat device

Anyway, back to the night and equipment…there’s a device called an Anabat which you can see in the photo. It’s an extremely sensitive device that records ultrasonic bat calls during designated intervals. Its memory card is removed the following day and downloaded onto a computer that then shows sonograms of any bat sounds it captured. Each bat has a distinctive sound pattern, so you can determine what species are present by analyzing its respective sonogram.

Another method for surveying bats is mist netting. A fine net is placed in a location that bats frequent and, if you’re lucky, they fly into it instead of up and over as many of them are wont to do. I’ve seen a lot of bats, but never up close like this. They are seriously impressive animals. The museum is in posession of a night vision monocular and I made the grave error of looking through it. I’ve been sort of wanting one for awhile, but that thing made me salivate. It was incredible. Like green daylight. Now I can add that to my lengthy Lust List of Expensive Devices and Gadgetry.

Weighed, measured and released, hopefully without being bitten.

 

Big brown bat. Check out those teeth

wood rat. cute

Gene and I went to the zoo today for the first time. I got a lot of good photos, but I really need to return on a weekday when the crowds aren’t so bad and I can take my time. Here’s a shot of a spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta:

and an unflattering shot of a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis:

Imagine how pissed he’d be if he knew I posted a photo of him saying “duuhhh”.

That’s it for now. I have lots of photos, but will dole them out a few at a time.

I had heard a long time ago that there was an elephant seal rookery somewhere along the coast of California. Fortunately, a short internet search revealed that one of them was about halfway between here and Monterey along the Pacific Coast Highway and happened to be on our route. I wasn’t expecting much (it’s my style to plan for the worst then I’m never disappointed) but I was pleasantly wrong.

We made it through LA without succumbing victims to a highway shootout and not long after leaving that cesspool in the dust, the landscape transformed into those postcard scenes of California that are disseminated all over the world: breathtaking rocky coastlines, azure blue water and the green rolling hills peppered with cows and horses. We took a break for lunch in a touristy village with stores called “shoppes”. Faux quaint. Kind of like the Amish version of any small town in south-east Lancaster PA, the theme being “wine” instead of Amish. All I could think about was what was up the road at the rookery as I ate my avocado sandwich.  Real live elephant seals? Empty sand? Fat tourists? Score on the first and third accounts.

The two-lane winding road suddenly gave way to a snarl of cars coming and exiting a parking lot on the coast side of the road, but we managed to squeeze through the scrum into the lot. We got out of the car and heard barking, wheezing, crying, whining, farting, and blowing noises….and saw this:

Of course, this elicited my stock phrase upon seeing a new animal: HOLY SHIT! and I started snapping photos. The light was not in my favor this time of day, but c’est la vie.  The seal viewing area was designed for optimum viewing by humans and minimal disturbance to the animals. It’s not visible on this photo,but on the left side was a raised fenced walkway that allowed people to look down on the animals. The seals seemed completely oblivious to the hundreds of people watching. The photo shows a rather placid scene, but it was anything but. Babies were wailing to be fed, mothers were bellowing, flippers were throwing sand, western gulls quarreled for the newborns’ placentas, Brewer’s blackbirds scoured in between mountains of blubber looking for scraps of who-knows-what, and the males growled and bellowed and inflated their snouts in intimidating authoritarian displays.

It was thought that these animals were extinct in the 1880′s but a small population remained off the cost of Baja California in Mexico. First protected by Mexico and then the US, the seals rebounded and today there is an estimated population of about 170,000 animals. For ten months of the year, elephant seals are at sea feeding almost constantly and only come to shore twice a year – to molt and either to breed or rest if a young animal. The females are beached for 5 weeks while they give birth and nurse their pups, the males up to 100 days. None of them eat during this time but survive off the massive fat stores that they’ve built up over the months at sea.

The size of the bulls was simply unbelievable. They typically weigh between 3000 and 5000 pounds, sometimes more. Each monolithic male was surrounded by his harem of females with pups. I’m not sure how many ladies he can tend, but it seemed as if there were about 10 females around each male.

It’s always thrilling for me to see a new animal for the first time, but this was especially exciting. It’s not often that a person has the opportunity to see enormous wild animals at such close proximity carrying out natural behaviors. You can actually stand on the viewing platform and watch the cows giving birth! I could have sat there all day, but Gene likes to get from point A to point B in the shortest time possible, so I was regrettably forced to leave. 

This is Leslie’s first time in San Diego so I took her to La Jolla to see the seals. It’s the start of pupping season and there were a lot of animals hauled out on the beach. Unfortunately, the city government recently…

…rejected San Diego’s request to reinstall the rope barrier this winter to protect seals during their pupping season at Children’s Pool beach.

Read the whole story here. That means that the public will have full and legal access to the beach while the seals are giving birth.  They will be open to molestation by the rapacious cads who opposed the barrier. Distubing these animals is a voilation of the Marine Mammal Act which is punishable by law and I don’t understand why the filthy molesters aren’t prosecuted.  I just can’t figure these people out. They’re lucky I’m not king of the USA.

The poor bugger won’t be smiling in a couple of weeks when the females are aborting birthing pups while simultaneously fleeing some idiot swimmer.

We boarded the Hornblower Aventure yesterday under cloudless blue skies, found seats on the upper deck and departed the harbor promptly at 1:30pm. The water was as smooth as a suburban lawn. A dozen or so Heerman’s gulls saw us off and several pigeons landed on the deck as if to wish us a good voyage.  There were a couple of kids on board, none of whom were screaming and seemed relatively well-behaved. In between announcements on the PA system, Jimmy Buffet’s soothing Margaritaville was playing. Wow, this is going to be a great trip, I thought to myself. Our captain, in a voice reminiscent of Ned Flanders, announced on the PA system that the sailing would be fine, yes indeedy - great weather and small ocean swells. Hallelujah! I was as enthusiastic as a Labrador puppy.

It took about 30 minutes to reach the end of the bay where it meets the open sea as indicated by a series of buoys that were draped with sea lions sleeping in the warm afternoon sun, out of reach of the frigid Pacific water. It was a grand afternoon – birds, seals, whales forthcoming. What more could a nature lover ask for? “Did you feel that?” Gene asked me.  I had no idea what he was talking about. I was too busy taking photos and watching for our quarry. “It’s the sea swell.” (cue the Jaws music). He might have said “Did you feel that? There’s a cave troll coming this way to eat us alive.” and I would have felt the same sinking, black feeling of utter doom suck every joule of heat from my body. I wilted.

Captain Ned Flanders doled out tips for “those that might happen to feel a bit queasy” which included staring at the horizon, stay outside in the air, blah, blah, blah. I’d been through this drill more times than I can count and know that there isn’t a whole lot a person can do to stave it off. It was pretty cold out on the open ocean and the blowing wind made it even worse. I was freezing…but not for long. That familiar creeping hot sensation was just the first sign. I took my jacket off figuring maybe if I stayed feeling cold, I’d last a little bit longer. Ha ha. Right. “Attention everyone!” chirped Ned. “One of our guests has just spotted a spray on the left side of the boat at about 11 o’clock.” and everyone, including myself, accordingly ran to the left side of the boat. I saw the whale spout once but that was when the second stage of events leading to fulminant motion sickness struck; hot panic.  I had to return to my seat on the right side of the boat and try and gather myself. But it was inevitable. I was terminal.  All I could do now was try and stifle the french fries and turkey sandwich that was screaming to be loosed.

The commotion on the other side of the boat was too much and I managed to make it back to try and see the whale. Captain Ned said in a hushed voice, “Now, I need to use my golf announcer’s voice here so we don’t scare the whale. I think she has a calf with her, so it’s really important that everyone stay as quiet as possible. Again, I think that is a mother with a calf and these whales can hear very well, so please keep your voices down.” WWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! some little brat wailed just at that instant. He continued to make annoying screeching and wailing sounds and his father did absolutely nothing. I was in no mood entertaining anything that would make me feel any worse, so I went back to my solo seat on the right side of the boat.

As I sat there staring rigidly at the horizon, wallowing in nausea, it occurred to me how lucky I’d be if the whale decided to come over to my side of the ship. And guess what! She did! I saw a spout and then a tail. I wasn’t about to alert the others, but just then Ned announced her location and I was immediately surrounded by people, one of whom insisted on sticking her pendulous gut in my face. In a Herculean effort, I managed to lift my camera and snap a photo. About as good as the platypus photo, but evidence nonetheless.

Gene was fit as a fiddle, drinking beer and having a great time whale watching. I felt bad that I was such a wet blanket, but I fought it tooth and nail and was still overcome. At one point I even said “I’ve got to get the hell off this thing.” Gene got me a barf bag from the ship’s well-stocked barf bag dispensary.  I gave up on the whale watching and concentrating on not needing the barf bag. I was successful and made the 3-hour tour without an mortifying public puking episode.

We only saw two whales the whole trip which, according to Captain Ned and the San Diego Natural History Museum docents on board, was unusual for this time of year. Typically they see 15 to 20 whales at a time among the group of around 26,000 individuals that migrate along the coast of California. The whales spend the summer feeding in the food-rich waters of the arctic, and then swim south along the coast to the bays of Baja California, where they mate and nurse their young. But the last few years have seen normal migration patterns disturbed and the whales are migrating later each year.  Coincidentally, just today I read a New York Times book review of No Way Home, The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrationsby David S. Wilcove. From the review:

Their migrations speak to us in some unfathomably deep way. Birders flock to stopover sites like Cape May, N.J., to watch birds on their journeys to the far north in the spring and back to the tropics in the fall. Eco-tourists head for the Serengeti to train binoculars on herds of wildebeest that stretch to the horizon. American schoolchildren watch monarch butterflies hatch from chrysalises in their classrooms and then see them off on their trip to Mexico.

But in his new book “No Way Home,” David Wilcove, a Princeton biologist, warns that “the phenomenon of migration is disappearing around the world.”

Maybe it’s a fluke that they’re late, who knows, but you just have to wonder. Humans have totally shit on the whole planet so the pessimistic misanthrope in me is inclined to believe that it’s the result of a breakdown somewhere along the line – less food, warmer water, etc. And I don’t think that whale watching tours are helping them either Despite the captain’s best efforts to avoid disturbing the mother whale and her calf, she was clearly doing her best to elude us. Gene and I felt bad about that.

To my great relief the ship arrived back in the bay and as if by magic, the seasickness was gone almost immediately. And what good timing, because it was right before we sailed by a large aggregation of sea lions snoozing on top of the cages from an old fish farm so I was at the ready with my camera.

Unfortunately a nagging, low-grade nausea stayed with me for the rest of the evening, preventing me from getting too festive on the eve of the new year. Gene and I had a nice evening at home and I managed to choke down a couple of glasses of champagne.

Things in our immediate area continue to be safe and the nearest fires have been contained…but they continue to rage in other parts of the county. There’s a haze of smoke everywhere and it’s hot . Really hot. Coronado is usually around 70 degrees with clear, cool air. Today it’s hot, dry and thick.

I worked at the wildlife center today and saw one of the first casualties from the fire, a cottontail rabbit. She’d been hit by a car and was also suffering from burns. All the fur on the underside of her body was singed as well as her whiskers and corneas. I imagine she probably had a lot of smoke inhalation problems too.

One would think that the wildlife hospital would be inundated with animals after a fire, but that’s not the case. Intakes drop sharply. Most of the large animals and birds are able to outrun the fire and escape, but smaller birds, mammals and reptiles are incinerated.

The managers at Project Wildlife said that they are not expecting to have a dramatic surge in injured animals and I imagine that next spring’s baby season will also see a decrease in patients since there will be less food and nesting sites for animals that are reproducing. The migratory birds that come through this area next spring will also have problems. They theorized that in the coming days and weeks we may see emaciated animals suffering from starvation.

These fires are a normal part of the natural ecology in the west, but as usual, humans have totally screwed up nature’s balance. In situations like this, sans humans, the animals would carry on as they have for millions of years and recover eventually. But for compromised populations, a fire like this may be something from which they can never recover.

These possums are safe and sound at the wildlife center. They’re used as educational animals in public speaking engagements.

My mom arrived last Friday and I just returned from seeing her off at the airport. I must admit that I was really impressed with her stamina and adventurous spirit on this trip. She’s from Lancaster PA which is a bastion of tasteless food – the strongest spices used in the local cuisine are salt and pepper so I didn’t have high hopes for her venturing too deeply into Japanese cuisine. I couldn’t have been more wrong. On her second night here she ate the infamous natto…even after she smelled it. And then she moved on into eating sashimi which was also fairly impressive. This was her first trip out of the US. I think that people who’ve never left the US think for some reason that they can’t travel or that it’s really difficult. All this strange and forbidding territory is just out of their realm of reality…so they think until they actually take the plunge and go somewhere. Now that she’s overcome that mental hurdle, I am relatively certain she’ll go somewhere else. Any travel after a journey to Japan will seem like only a hop, skip and a jump away.

We had a great time but were totally burned out by the end of the week. We started the trip off at full-steam with a day of sightseeing in Nikko, a stop at Heike Village (really cool) and then overnight at Bankyou Ryokan in Yunishigawa Onsen about 90 minutes north of Nikko. Yunishikawa Onsen was discovered in 1573 when the Heike Clan used the area as a hideaway when they fled the Genji clan after a battle in which they had been defeated. They settled in the area and you can still experience their influence in local cuisine and customs.  Bankyou Ryokan was really cool and unique even by Japanese standards. It’s a 400 year-old hotel owned and operated by a 25th-generation direct-descendant of the Heike family. We had a spectacular dinner around an irori (a square fire pit in the floor used for warmth and cooking) in our yukatas after a dip in the in-house onsen. The next day we visited a waterfall and a historic park that was comparable to Williamsburg in Virgina, except that it was geared a little more towards kids rather than adults.

We spent the rest of the week touring locally with trips around the Miura penisula and Tokyo. We went to Ueno Park to see the cherry blossoms, then on to Kappabashi, Tokyo’s kitchenware district, and finally to Harajuku to Aki’s for haircuts and a massage.

Mr Hanzawa, a student a friend, came over for dinner Friday night to experience some Lancaster County home cooking and meet my mom. She made pot pie which he thought was fantastic. I figured that would be a dish that would suit the Japanese palate; bland dough with some salt and vinegar. I thought I was terminally burned-out on pot pie, but after not having eaten it for probably 20 years, it tasted pretty darn good.

I’ve got a lot more photos, but we’re getting ready to watch this week’s Lost episode, so I’ll post more later.

Oh, and now I can leave Japan – I saw wild monkeys for the first time. We were driving over a mountain outside of Nikko and there was a group of them in the trees alongside the road.  I told somebody a long time ago that I won’t leave her until I see monkeys. Snow monkeys and platypus all within 9 days -what more could a person ask for?!

We said goodbye to The Sanctuary and the coast on Thursday morning and drove inland on the Palmerston Highway through Wooroonooran National Park with a stop at Crawford’s Lookout. Check out the sign for some interesting information and see evidence that rednecks aren’t just an American phenomena. We walked down the side of a steep mountain through an old-growth rainforest to a grassy area overlooking the Johnstone River. Further down the road we took a detour on the Waterfall Circuit which is a loop off of the main road that passes by 4 or 5 different waterfalls. We stopped at two of them and ran into a couple of Americans visiting from Oregon who were nice enough to take our picture.

The drive from Mission Beach to Tarzali was spectacular. Mile upon mile of rolling emerald hills with cows lying about chewing cud in the mist, with the green carpet broken only by small villages here and there. It was a lovely drive. It almost looked like one of those bucolic scenes from rural Europe or North Carolina…until you see a wallaby or tree kangaroo cross the road and then any illusion of familiarity is shattered.

There’s no disputing that a scene like this is beautiful…

…but then you remember that at one time it all used to be jungle and that we’ve lost 80 percent of old growth forests worldwide and suddenly it’s not so pretty anymore.

We unwittingly saved the best for last, Fur n’ Feathers Rainforest Treehouses. I found F n’ F’s website over a year ago and have been fantasizing about visiting it ever since. But I had built this place up so much in my mind that I figured it would be a disappointment in reality. I was wrong. It exceeded my expectations and was the best part of the whole trip.

Fur n’ Feathers is in a 140 acre private wildlife sanctuary in the Atherton Tablelands. The five treehouses are set on the bank of a small creek and the rest of the property (with the exception of the office/proprietor’s home) is all rainforest that’s never been cleared. We arrived about midday and went into the office to find the effervescent manager, Pam, bottle-feeding a baby wallaby. That was another one of those this-is-gonna-be-a-good-trip moments. Pam finished with the wallaby and took us to our treehouse. When you think “treehouse” maybe some ramshackle plywood dump comes to mind, but this place was anything but. We noticed some birds on the porch but went inside the house with Pam so she could give us a tour of our lodgings. Lastly, she showed us the food for the animals – bananas in the refrig for the possums and honeyeaters, birdseed for the doves and parrots and turtle pellets for the hordes of turtles living in the creek. I didn’t think for a minute that we’d really see all those animals but when we walked back out onto the porch, Pam holding a banana, she was immediately overtaken by honeyeaters scrambling for the banana. The honeyeaters were really nice little birds and were our constant companions the whole time we were there. They know their way around the inside of the treehouse quite well and would come in and inspect the kitchen area any chance they got. There is a wide variety of honeyeaters and this particular species is the Macleay’s honeyeater, found only in a very small region of tropical Queensland.

Pam left and we drove 10 minutes to Malanda to the grocery store. Malanda was about the size of a medium-sized American mall and couldn’t have had a population over several hundred people. We found the grocery store, booze store and butcher and hooked ourselves up with some vittles for the treehouse. We returned, walked up the stairs and were met with this:

Of course, we just freaked out. We scrambled for the camera and Gene ran back outside and took the above photo. Which, in retrospect, is laughable because that possum stayed on our porch almost the entirety of our stay. He is a coppery brushtailed possum and is found throughout most of Australia. I read on the internet that sometimes they set up in peoples’ attics and homes and that removing a possum simply does not work. This is as another possum from nearby will take its place.I can see how this is true because these animals are very gregarious and incredible persistent in their food-seeking behaviors. Even though this animal is nocturnal he was awake most of the day sitting on the table or railing looking into the treehouse waiting to be fed.  I guess the potential to score goodies from the vacationing suckers overpowered his biological clock. There was also a dominant female that would occasionally pay us a visit and on two occasions there were a total of 4 of them there at the same time. Like the honeyeaters, they would enter the house and make a beeline for the kitchen at any opportunity. The male was almost difficult to photograph because every time I would go out on the porch to take pictures he would approach me and climb up on my camera in search of more grub.

The other constant presence around the treehouse were the Australian Brush Turkeys. They preferred birdseed over bananas and fruit. It seemed like everywhere we went there was always a turkey around.

This is a pademelon, a small forest-dwelling wallaby. The last two days we were there these guys came to our treehouse looking for handouts.

We spent most of our time hanging out on the porch with the animals, watching for new birds, hiking around the property and short daily excursions to local natural attractions. One day we drove out of the jungle down onto the savannah and climbed around some rocks.

The last night were were there one of the proprietors, Greg, took us and some other guests out for a drive around the countryside and gave us a short natural history and agriculture lesson regarding the area. Our last stop was a pond in a field to look for platypus. They are very shy animals and are only visible at first and last light. They feed on the bottom of the pond and surface periodically to breathe so they’re hard to see. We got to the pond and stood there for about 5 minutes before I thought I spotted one at the far end. It went under, but the next time it surfaced was almost right in front of us and it indeed was a platypus! I got a crappy photo, but I think this was about as good as it was going to get given the lighting conditions and its manner of foraging:

This is probably sounding (and looking) vaguely like a Loch Ness Monster sighting, but I have Gene as a witness and he saw it too. In fact, we stood there for about 15 minutes and watched one or more platypi going about their business until the light was gone. Clearly, one of my greatest thrills is seeing a new animal for the first time. The charge I got walking up the stairs and seeing that possum staring right at me was unparalleled, so you can imagine what it felt like seeing an animal as famed and bizarre as a platypus. After a lifetime of seeing these creatures on TV through the eyes of David Attenborough it was almost unbelievable that I was seeing them in real life. The whole trip was just fantastic. I am still in a state of disbelief at the abundance of wildlife every place we went – flocks of wild parrots, wallabys and tree kangaroos dodging cars on the road, insects the size of birds. Australia still has a really wild element to it, in both the people and the natural world. I felt that last year when I went to Alice Springs – it’s a tough town to live in given its incredible distance from any other civilized areas and attracts that type of person; independent, tough and with some pioneer spirit. I didn’t expect tropical Queensland to be the same, but it still does have an element of freedom to it that only comes with real wilderness. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of persuasion to get me to move there.

I have a lot more pictures of birds, insects and plants, but they’ll have to wait until later. My mom is arriving at Narita this afternoon, so I need to get cleaned up around here. We’re going to Nikko overnight on Sunday so I’ll post some photos from that trip later.

Halfway between Cairns and Mission Beach is a small town called Babinda through which visitors must pass on the way to a place called The Boulders. It’s exactly as it’s name implies; boulders. But they’re in a creek creating some really nice (and dangerous) whitewater. We stopped there for a short tour before continuing to Mission Beach. When we pulled into the parking lot we were greeted by a guy looking like he’d just left a rural Alabama carney circuit or the set of a Deliverance remake – 18 inch mullet, no shirt, skinny and brown like he’d been smoked, trucker hat, he had the whole look going on. He was loading an empty birdcage into his wreck of a car and asked us if we were Canadian. Bizarre. We still haven’t figured that one out. Maybe he was a wildlife rehabilitator returning some birds to the wild. I hope so.

Anyway, the further we got from Cairns, the more rural the landscape became until we were finally on the dirt road that approached The Sanctuary. It was pretty exciting to see signs like this once we turned off the Bruce Highway. We found the Sanctuary with no problem and called up to the office from the parking lot phone. There are two ways to the facility – one is a narrow footpath meandering uphill through the jungle and the other is a dirt road straight uphill accessible only by a 4-wheel drive vehicle. We loaded our suitcases into the Toyota and drove up the hill to the main building. The view from the top was breathtaking. The veranda of the main building opened out onto an expansive view of the Coral Sea with the jungle in the foreground.  The website says Sanctuary is one of those special places in the world where you realise you are in for a unique experience from the moment you arrive. As you are transported up the steep access track, like a green tunnel, through the rainforest, you might feel you are being carried back in time. To a simpler age where the cares and worries of the modern world are without meaning. And they aren’t kidding. Part of the Sanctuary serves as a yoga retreat and they’ve created one of the most relaxing and unique atmospheres I’ve ever experienced. Everything is tastefully decorated without being overdone, there’s hip music in the dining area and the food was spectacular. We ate all our meals at The Sanctuary and it was the best grub on the whole trip, maybe some of the best food we’ve ever had anywhere.The whole ambiance was amazing.

Paul, the proprietor, gave us a tour of the facilities and then led us to our rainforest hut which was perched on top of the mountain and surrounded by jungle on 3 sides.  We could not have asked for a better view or location. No TV, hair dryer, air conditioning or other “fluff”. Just us, a good book and the sounds of the jungle were all we had for 2 days. We spent a lot of time on the porch just watching the birds and butterflies go by and the rest of the time either on the beach or at the main house having a meal. The walk to the car park was fairly arduous and this is not a place I’d recommend for someone who has problems with major hiking. The walk uphill was a real workout and we were drenched in sweat after every trip up and down but I enjoyed it and it was a good way to exercise.

Note the shower in the above photos. One side of it was glass looking out into the jungle. I watched geckos and butterflies while showering. And, no, I wasn’t worried about people seeing me. The clientele at this place was not the type of person that would snigger and point  – it seemed to be frequented by European backpackers and yoga enthusiasts, not bible-belters or Lancaster County Mennonites. It was a really nice crowd of people and everyone was quiet and respectful of other visitors.

You can see in the above view looking west some denuded trees on the adjacent mountain. This is the aftermath of a tropical cyclone that visited the eastern coast of AU in the early hours of the 20th of March, 2006.  The Sanctuary was in a prime coastal location to experience the full force of the 300km per hour winds of Tropical Cyclone Larry and they sustained some serious damage. They repaired their buildings and the jungle is regrowing its canopy at an astonishingly fast rate. We were told that prior to the cyclone the forest canopy was almost impenetrable to the sun’s rays, but the cyclone just shredded it and left many downed trees in its wake creating a completely different feel to the forest. But that’s life in the tropics and it goes on.

The beach at the foot of our mountain was Brooks Beach. It was beautiful but we didn’t go in the water because this time of year there is a proliferation of box jellyfish which have caused at least 5,567 recorded deaths since 1884. There are areas in which to swim that are enclosed in netting, or you can rent or buy nylon stinger suits, but I didn’t need to swim that badly. There were coconuts on the beach so Gene smashed one open and we ate it right there. I usually don’t like coconut but this was great and it didn’t taste anything like that shredded shit you get in a bag in the grocery store. That’s an experience everyone should have  – smashing a coconut on the beach and eating it raw.

I was dumbfounded by the abundance of butterflies. One of them was the spectacular Ulysses butterfly that has large metallic blue wings. They are impossible to photograph as they fly very quickly and never seem to alight on anything. Every day the prototypical jungle sound of the laughing kookaburra koo-koo-ka-ka-kook echoed throughout the forest. We also saw a large goana (a big lizard), but I didn’t have an appropriate lens on my camera at the time and only got a crappy shot. Perhaps my biggest lifetime photographic miss was the cassowary. Gene and I were in the car on our way to a neighboring town and I made the stupid and regretful decision not to bring my camera because of impending rain. As Murphy’s Law would have it, we saw a cassowary in a field next to the road. It was a seriously impressive bird and the privelege of seeing such an endangered and beautiful animal was not lost on us. I took this photo of a sad and captive cassowary at the Bird World in Kuranda.

After one of our beach excursions, Gene decided to see how fast he could make it up the footpath to our hut and he ran ahead while I meandered up the trail looking at bugs and hoping to run into a foraging cassowary. I was nearing the top and saw Gene at the head of the trail. He said “check this out” but at first I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I saw this and about soiled myself:

It’s a spiny leaf insect, a female, I believe. This creature was about 50 feet from our hut and was freaking enormous – maybe 8 inches long. It’s phytophagus (plant eater) so it sat there for the next 24 hours eating leaves. I know that because I went back 4 times to look at it. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve seen these things in insect collections in museums, but of course never dreamed I’d see one in real life. Incredible. I took a lot more pictures of other insects, but I’ll post those later.

We got lucky with the weather the first couple of days but as the week continued it got cloudier and cloudier and it started raining our last night there. From that point on it rained off and on the whole time, but I guess that’s why it’s called the rainforest. We’d be idiots to complain about it since we scheduled the trip during the rainy season, but the jungle’s beauty is at its peak when it’s soaked and green.

Next destination: Fur n’ Feathers Rainforest Treehouses.

We reluctantly returned to this miserable navy base yesterday after having had probably the best vacation of our lives.  We saw so many things and visited so many places that it will take several posts to cover all of it. Here’s a scanned map of the area that shows all of the places we visited. We saw animals and plants that I never dreamed I’d be seeing with my own eyes. It was truly a thrilling trip and the last night climaxed in what every biology nerd would regard as Australia’s Holy Grail. But you’ll have to wait to find out what that was until the end of this chronology.

Queensland is one of Australia’s five states and lies in the northeast portion of the continent. Australia is largely desert but the northern part of the country has a tropical climate with rainforest vegetation. We spent all of our time on the Central Coast in Cairns, Kuranda and Kewarra and Mission Beaches…

The Central Coast – also called the Cassowary Coast – stretches from Cairns southward to Cardwell, dissected by the Bruce Highway which meanders through mill towns surrounded by cane fields and fruit farms. While most of the coastal lowland has been cleared, there are still plenty of natural places to explore – from isolated tropical beaches to Queensland’s two highest mountains, the mist-shrouded Mt Bartle Frere and Mt Bellenden Ker.

The coastal towns are the wettest in Australia, often receiving more than 4 metres (13 feet) of rain each year. The high rainfall produces special features which attract visitors to the Cassowary Coast – beautiful waterfalls, whitewater rapids and luxuriously green forests. If you are lucky, you may see one of the magnificent birds that have lent the Cassowary Coast its name.

The endangered cassowary is Australia’s largest flightless bird, standing as a high as a human with a colourful red and blue neck.

 …and inland in an area called the Atherton Tablelands. In the tablelands area we stayed near Tarzali and visited several other towns and national parks:

This mountainous plain is nestled between the Bellenden Ker Range and the Great Dividing Range, at an altitude ranging from 600m to 1100m. The air is cool and fresh. The flora is perpetually green and lush. Despite being only 1 – 2 hours drive from the coastal town of Cairns, the Atherton Tablelands offer an escape from the modern hustle of city life. This is Australian countryside at its very best.

The Atherton Tablelands is home to World Heritage listed rainforests, national parks, mountains, rivers, lakes and waterfalls. It is also rated as one of the richest agricultural plains in Australia.

We arrived at the Cairns airport last Monday at around 5am, had breakfast, and waited for the rental car guy to show up. The sun started to rise just about the time Gene was completing the rental agreement and I walked outside the airport and saw this:

Now I’m not one to believe in portentious crap, but that view moved me enough to think this is gonna be a really good trip. Fresh air, open space, lots of greenery – we felt like we were in heaven and despite feeling pretty lousy after the overnight flight, started touring right away. Since check-in at out lodging wasn’t until noon, we had some time to occupy so we drove into Cairns just to check it out. It’s a nice town – very casual and kind of like a tropical party-type place with lots of surf shops and good restaurants. We were visiting during the rainy season so it was a little dead which was fine by us.

Not a whole lot going on at 8am so we decided to head to a town north-west of Cairns called Kuranda. Supposedly they had some tourist things going on there, one of which was a place called Bird World. I hate zoos, but this place came fairly highly recommended on the internet so we figured we’d give it a shot. The drive to Kuranda was nice…for people who don’t get carsick. We stopped at Barron Gorge National Park to do some exploring and then on to Bird World which was decent. The whole thing was too touristy for me because in order to get to Bird World you had to run the gauntlet of tables and shops selling all kinds of Australian kitsch junk – handbags made from dead animal fur, Steve Irwin-esque garments, fake digeridoos, and other junk typically only sold by hucksters. But the birds in the aviary we well cared for and it was a nice time seeing such fantastic animals up close.

These ants were all over the place and they’re called green tree ants. Apparently the Aboriginals used to make a lemonade type drink out of them because I read in some literature that “their bums taste rather sour” and make a good drink. No thanks. I’ll stick to real lemonade and skip the ant ass sour.

The heat was really wearing us down so we decided to head back to the coast and check in at out lodging for the night, Kewarra Beach Resortjust north of Cairns. It was a cool place, but a little overpriced so it was a good thing we were there only one night. We had lunch at the hotel restaurant, but after we recovered from the sticker shock we decided it would be best to eat in town that night. We explored the beach, hotel grounds and the pool then took a much-needed nap. That evening we found a restaurant in Cairns and sat down outside for a fabulous meal. I had barramundi (an Australian fish) that was exquisitely prepared in a tarragon cream sauce. Gene ordered emu with a red wine sauce over mashed potatoes. I tried it and almost barfed – but the potatoes were excellent. He liked it though which was all that mattered. So we’re sitting there enjoying this meal when Gene said “Hey! I think that’s a huge bat that just flew by.” It took me a nanosecond to put two and two together: tropical north Australia…a nearby tree loaded with flowers…huge bats. They had to be flying foxes! I turned around and saw them flying in and out of a flowering tree across the street.  We walked over to the tree when we were finished eating and I noticed a light-colored collar which indicated that they were spectacled flying foxes, one of Australia’s multitude of critically endangered animals. I didn’t have my camera with me at the time so I took this photo from the Organization for Bat Conservation website. I had a dog for many years named Stimpy who looked like a flying fox which is part of the reason I am so fond of them.

We went back to our cabin and picked up our flashlights – or “torches” as they’re called in AU – and went outside for an evening walk. We found an astonishing number of cane toads (an enormous and voracious toad native to Central and South America introduced to Australia in 1935 in attempt to eradicate cane beetles that were devastating the sugar cane crop. Turns out that the beetles preferred feeding high up on the plant where the toads couldn’t reach so the toads ate everything else in their path which included many of Australia’s rare small animals and said animals’ food. What’s more, the amphibians are toxic to whatever animal eats them and are now out of control. We did hear however that things are on the rebound since most birds that feed on them have learned to flip the toad over and eat from the stomach so as to avoid its backside parotid glands that exude the deadly venom. Also, the snakes that prey on the toads have been only the ones with a mouth large enough to swallow a toad. As a result, only small-mouthed snakes are left and are thereby unable to ingest the toads. Who knows though, someone told us this and for all I know it’s only anecdotal evidence) on the grounds as well as a bandicoot which was really cool. It looks like a long-nosed rodent but is actually a marsupial. We returned to our cabin to find a zillion geckos on the porch eating the insects attracted to the light.

The next morning we gave an arm and a leg at a restaurant in town for breakfast and began the beautiful and relaxing drive south on the Bruce Highway winding through sugarcane and banana fields to our next destination: The Sanctuary Retreat at Mission Beach. I was slightly disappointed that the widllife wasn’t better, but little did I know what was in store for the rest of the week. To be continued…

It’s Saturday afternoon and we are preparing for our trip tomorrow. This will be my last post until Monday March 19th so check back for photos then.

If the plane crashes check next week’s episode of LOST and see if we’re on the island!

Here are some photos from my last trip.