I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

Last week we received a dwarf cassowary from the zoo that had died. A bird like that is just too large to stuff and keep as a whole specimen, so Phil decided that we prepare the skeleton only.

There are three species of cassowaries which are large, flightless birds native to New Guinea and Australia. The dwarf cassowary is the smallest of the three and lives in the mountains of New Guinea. The largest, the Southern or double-wattled cassowary, is native to northern Australia, New Guinea and some smaller islands in the vicinity. Gene and I had the experience of a lifetime when we saw a live wild cassowary in Queensland last year. It was absolutely thrilling. These birds are over 6ft tall and weigh up to 180 pounds. We were advised to not walk through the forests without a stick and were briefed on how to behave if we should run across one of these birds. They’re infamous for their ability to eviscerate humans with one kick. In the photo on the left you can clearly see the modified inner talon that’s used for defense. Looks just like a sword and I wouldn’t want to get one of those in the gut. Even on the dwarf cassowary, the power in the legs is staggering. It’s upper legbones were almost the diameter of my forearm bones. That’s some serious kicking power in a bird that’s only 3.5 feet tall. Imagine what one of the big ones could do to your guts!

These birds are important to forest health because they’re frugivores (fruit eaters) and are integral in seed dispersal. Unfortunately, like virtually every other animal on the planet, they are endangered because humans just can’t control their greed and population levels.

I began volunteering in the Entomology Department at the museum which increases my time in the museum to three days a week. The bug department has about 1,000,000 specimens, largely lepidopterans (butterflies and moths), none of which are cataloged. “Not cataloged” means that they are not in any kind of database, anywhere, with identifiers for easy location. I began the monumental task of getting these things organized last week, starting with the type specimens. Each insect will be assigned a museum identifier number and its accompanying information (collector, date, species name, location, etc) will be entered into a computerized database. The best part about this whole project is access to one of the marvels of modern photography, the Canon 65mm MP-E macro lens. A bitch to wield, but take a look at the results:

and that’s not even as good as it gets. This lens can do 5 times life-size, that photo is only 1 or 2. If you’re not camera-geek enough to understand what that means, trust me when I say it’s enough to give me goosebumps.  I would love to have this lens, but I can’t justify the purchase of it just yet without having a wide-angle lens first, something that has a much greater utility and that would nicely round out my basic lens set-up. Its use is very specialized and limited to tiny subjects. It’s extremely difficult to use in the field and its purchase also necessitates the additional purchase of a good tripod and ring flash attachment, bringing the total investment for this lens to roughly $2800. The insect pictured above is probably 1/4 of an inch long.  But the detail! Wow! Take a look at these:

All of the insects pictured here were collected in the early part of the last century, maybe around 1910 to 1930. They remain in remarkably good condition when properly maintained.

Some miscellaneous things from the AU trip that I thought were interesting and fun…for those of us interested in parasites, that is. The rest of you might be pretty grossed out.

Queensland’s rainforest isn’t all cuddly possums and endearing and mischievous honeyeaters alighting on your hand, despite what I made out in my previous Australia trip posts. I didn’t mention that the possums continually pooped and peed all over our porch. The particular possum who set up camp on our porch was a male and had typical male urine – pungent and  in copious volume. He had no qualms about eliminating anywhere he happened to be sitting: above the door, on our outdoor table and even on the barbie (the BBQ grill) after it had cooled. We typically woke up to multiple piles of possum poo pellets all over the porch. Occasionally the turkeys would crap on the porch too. That was a real mess.  We didn’t mind though and it certainly didn’t detract from their appeal. After all, everyone’s got to dump.

When we stopped at Crawford’s Lookout on our way to Tarzali, we were met with this disturbing sign at the beginning of the trail.  Appropriately unnerved, we continued our hike without encountering this evil plant and forgot all about it. The stinging tree once again entered our consciousness once we got to Fur n’ Feathers and this time in a big way – the plant was everywhere, including the trails around our treehouse. Pam warned us that this thing was ferocious and to be very careful…which only intrigued me all the more. I couldn’t wait to get on the internet and find out more. I even entertained the idea of touching it just to see what would happen. Really, how bad could it be? Surely this was an exaggeration. Nothing could be worse than poison ivy, right?

Au contraire, you curious and doubting idiot, a voice in my head answered when I got home and consulted the internet. It really is that bad! Turns out, poison ivy is baby food. This thing is a killer, literally. The name of the species is Dendrocnide moroides, or locally gympie gympie, a derivation of an Aboriginal word. The sting is delivered through tiny silicon hairs that cover the leaves and the fruit of the plant. When a human comes into contact with the plant, the hairs penetrate the skin, and then break off. They’re so tiny that often the skin will close over the hairs making removal impossible.

The silicon hairs cause pain because of a neurotoxin produced by the plant which is exacerbated by touch or heating or cooling of the skin. Unfortunately this toxin is very stable and can remain active in a person’s skin for months or even years making every subsequent shower a painful experience. Experiments have been done with hairs that were collected nearly a century ago and they can still cause pain.  But you can suffer even if you don’t touch the plant. The plants continuously shed their stinging hairs so that staying close to the stinging trees for more than an hour can cause a reaction – intensely painful and continuous bouts of sneezing. You can even get nose bleeds from these silicon hairs floating in the air.

The reaction depends on what species of animal gets stung, and how many hairs get stuck in the skin. Humans feel something between mild irritation and intense pain and death. The pain comes immediately after touching the plant, and it gradually increases to a peak after about 20-30 minutes. The Dutch Botanist H. J. Winkler made the only official recording of Death By Stinging Tree, for a human. It was in New Guinea, back in the early 1920s. There have been other anecdotal stories from soldiers in WW II suffering intense pain, and of an officer shooting himself because of the unrelenting pain – but these are anecdotal stories.

Stinging trees are harmless to many native Australian species, but hideously painful to introduced species such as humans, horses and dogs.  Like capsicum (red pepper) the pain is real and intense, but the body does not suffer any damage. (Information paraphrased from here.) I find it incredible that a plant has this power to cripple simply by brushing up against it.

When I say that I left a part of me in Australia, I do not mean in the poetic sense. I carried a pretty heavy parasite load while in the jungle. I was ravaged by mosquitoes. The rainforest is reputed to have few mosquitoes, and not even all that many in the rainy season. But apparently every single one of them in the Atherton Tablelands sought me out and bit me. Gene didn’t get any bites. I also was host to many leeches, four of which had attached and begun exsanguinating me. Both of us found a good number of them on our pants, shoes and socks. There are around 100 species of leeches in Australia, but several of them have adapted to life in the forest rather than water. In wet weather they lie in wait on foliage or on the forest floor for a passing mammal. I was overcome with revulsion and an almost irrepressible reaction to immediately detach and kill them, but once I was able to stifle it long enough for Gene to take a photo. I later realized that I hadn’t shaved my legs in some time, so I won’t be posting the offending image here. You’ll have to make do with this:

I know they’re gross as hell and there is something so innately repugnant about them…but they are interesting animals. They keep their host’s blood flowing by use of an anticoagulant that is quite remarkable. I bled for 30 minutes after pulling them off. Pretty neat.

One evening we were sitting around and I felt a familiar sensation right underneath the elastic in my underwear at the top of my leg. I was horrorstruck; Oh god, no. Please, not chiggers!  I went to the bathroom and found a lone mite embedded in my skin. Which was somewhat of a relief since when I lived in North Carolina I suffered from severe infestations most of the summer months – I could handle one of them, not hundreds. I remembered seeing some insecticide under the sink and used a small dab of it to kill and remove the little bastard. Disaster averted. Such are the dangers that await the jungle traveller and I loved every minute of it.

I was a little disappointed that we didn’t see any snakes. Australia is home to three of the most venemous snakes in the world: the inland taipan, the king brown, and the coastal taipan. Two of those three are found in Queensland. It was still exciting just knowing that they were potentially right outside our door.

Here are some other photos. From left to right, emerald dove, green catbird, turkey feet, turtle, female Victoria Riflebird growing in some scalp feathers after what appears to be a serious molt episode, and a masked lapwing:

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.

I am almost done grieving for North Carolina and am coming around to swallowing the fact that San Diego might not really be hell on earth. I did some research on the internet and found some fantastic organizations. The Sierra Club has an active photography club, the Audubon Society seems to be very professional and organized and there’s a place called Project Wildlife that is a wild animal rehabilitation facility. They take in over 10,000 animals a year and I am hoping to get involved with them.  That’s just one of serveral wild animal opportunities in the area as well as a number of cat and dog shelters. I don’t think I’ll be bored.

We just reserved accomodations for out trip to Queensland, Australia next month. I am so excited. We’re flying into Cairns and then driving south about 2.5 hours to a place called the Sanctuary Retreat on Mission Beach that borders a National heritage rainforest. We’ll stay there for a few nights and then head inland and up into the mountains to a spectacular jungle lodge called Fur n’ Feathers Rainforest Treehouses. This place has platypus on the property!  There are also cassowaries (giant blue-headed, flightless birds related to emus and ostriches that are reknown for disembowling a human with one slice to the gut from their sharp talons. Apparently this doesn’t happen very often and they are reputed to be quite docile. At least I hope so. On second thought, death by cassowary wouldn’t be a bad way to go for a bird enthusiast), giant praying mantids, the world’s biggest moth (the Atlas moth) wallabies, rifle birds and much more. We chose these places because they both take environmental stewardship very seriously and have taken measures to ensure that their activities impact the jungle as little as possible.

Queensland is in the northeast part of the continent and is predominantly topical jungle. Last year I passed through there on my way to Alice Springs which is in the geographic center, or the middle of the outback.  I was only there overnight and it was in the rainy season so I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see anything. It’s entirely different than the outback and I am really anxious to experience it.  When describing Australia, one naturally uses a lot of superlatives, but the one that stands out in my mind is most poisonous XXXX. Fill in the blank with any animal or plant species you like because chances are Australia’s got a poisonous version of it. Blue-ringed octopus, great white sharks, funnel web spiders, stonefish, crocodiles, box jellyfish, coneshells and taipans, here we come.

I went to the park on base armed with french fries to draw in birds. They’re the same species I posted last time, just better shots. Also some photos from Australia last year.