Getting Our Feet Wet

Aussie lesson in pronunciation…

“Betadine” – While normal people would pronounce this like “bey-tuh-dayn,” Australians pronounce this word “beh-ta-deen.” 

“Basil” – Americans pronounce this like “bay-zil” while Australians pronounce this like “Bah-zil”

            This week marked the beginning and end of my third and final field trip, and it was definitely an experience to remember! The fun part was of course NOT the getting up at 3:00 am to load on the bus and all the traveling thereafter, but we did get to sleep almost the entirety of the bus ride and then the boat ride after that which was certainly nice.  We had to split up into two groups for the hour and a half ferry across to the island since we had so much darn gear and equipment to take over with us! Fortunately, I was able to get on the first ferry which meant that the two hours we had waiting for the other half of the team were spent hanging out on the beach drinking coffee J.

 

A whole sea urchin exoskeleton

            I really loved how laid back the whole thing was, not even close to how packed and fast paced my other field trips were! We had most of the first day on the island to settle in and just explore. We got a rundown of a few of the reef related processes on the island (this is Coral Reef Geomorphology after all) and some explanations of the impacts the recent and past cyclones have had on the island and reef.

            Day two was when the work really got started and we kicked it off with a couple lectures for catch-up and then it was off to start our surveying! The thing we wanted to look at was the difference between high and low energy reef systems and we did this largely by measuring the reef topography.

            Essentially, we had this tall measuring stake and a laser level devise with which we measured the height variances starting from the very top of the beach, down the ridge, onto the reef flat, and out across to the live reef.  

            We did that on two different areas per beach and over the four days I think we surveyed three or so different beaches.

            There was Pioneer Bay which was right smack dab in front of the research station…

            …the point around the side a little ways from Pioneer Bay…

            …and Iris Point on the other side of the island which we took a boat out to. 

Leaving Orpheus for a full day of surveying

The reef flat of Iris Bay

            We did another little stop over at an area called Horseshoe Bay and the big thing that stuck out there was just how many butterflies there were! Oh my gosh, they were simply everywhere! We took a short bush walk a little inland to get a look at a swamp that is believed to have been put there by some past tsunami and I think when our lecturer said we were using a “trail,” he was using that term very loosely!

            The first day or so of surveying I was the conscientious tennis shoe owner and such with wearing my slightly oversized yet thick soled sandles in favor of keeping my rather nice tennis shoes in good order.  After getting cut a couple times and slipping on a rock and falling flat on my rump into the lovely salty, murkiness of the ocean, I made the big leap and finally decided to wear my tennis shoes on the following day of surveying. Of course, that was the day we spent the entirety of away from the research station and spent half the time wading through the nutrient rich waters of the ocean. I can't say I regret the protection they offered but boy were my feet mighty weird looking by the end! And my shoes didn't smell too stellar either... Thus is life though eh?

Olivia looking oh so enthusiastic while taking our transect in the waters of Iris Bay

            One evening we watched a documentary about reef island nations and their vulnerability to environmental changes like sea level rise. I will tell you now that the absolute BEST way to watch a documentary is with your teacher in the room when he is IN the documentary.  Funniest. Thing. Ever! There were the obligatory side face shots looking serenely off into the distance with deeply thoughtful music playing, the shots that showed him doing the exact thing we were doing during our field trip, and really just everything he did which everyone in the room found utterly hilarious. Including the teacher himself, don’t worry!

Sunset over the waters on the way back to the research station after a full day of surveying.

            Another evening, some classmates taught me how to play the card game "Scum." I seriously think I was smacked upside the head with a giant streak of winners luck.  We played 7 rounds in total I think and all the last 5 I won hands down.  One of the things they did in the game was name the winner the President and the last place finisher the peasant with all the neutrals in the middle. I think my title morphed over time from President to Dictator to King and finally to God. 

            It was another early morning our final day since we had to catch the boat back to the mainland in time for the tides to be right.  I can't say I really complained at the 5:00 am wake-up call since for one, it wasn't nearly as early as 3:00, and for another, we got to see the lovely sunrise again over Orpheus Island.

Sunrise over Orpheus Island

Hinchinbrook Island

Attack of the Native Wildlife

 Aussie term of the day...

"Dodgy" - You will hear this term used quite often here when describing any number of things.  "The way that person acted was rather dodgy.""This chair is rather dodgy, but I'm going to sit in it anyways.""Do you think my milk is a bit dodgy? It's been sitting in my fridge since before break..."

Another lovely Townsville sunset.

            First off, I cannot tell you how tired I was after my week of field trips! They were fantastic and I would totally do them again, but I definitely think my days of incredibly early 5:00 mornings and fairly late nights were starting to catch up to me by the end.  When I got back home at the end I think I spent the next day or so just sleeping and doing nothing particularly productive. Essentially I became a vegetable.  Which brings me to how awesome my roommates are.  It was just Michelle, Dot and I for a couple of days at the lodge on our own since everyone else was still off doing their lecture recess related activities.  Michelle took me along on Friday to Good Friday service at the church she and Shane got to despite my slowness in dragging myself out of bed and really waking up that morning. Then she went to the store later on and got me flowers just because. How sweet is that??

            Monday was my roommate Blessings birthday and to celebrate the occasion and take advantage of our added day off, we headed off to the highly anticipated Billabong Sanctuary.  I seriously LOVED it there, which you would kind of expect from a “tourist,” if you will, studying wildlife as a degree…

            They had numerous talks and demonstrations interspersed throughout the day, the first of which was the cassowary talk and feeding were we actually got to feed one of their male cassowaries.

            There were the wombat and koala talks as well which were both awesome and topped off by the fact that I actually got to hold one of both! I will say about wombats that those are solid creatures.  I understand now what they mean about one of those things totaling your car if you were to hit one while driving…

             The koalas were really cool as well but rather out of it if you will.  I guess that’s kind of what you would expect from an animal of such diet and habits though… Essentially, the food they eat (eucalyptus) is extremely low in nutrients and actually a bit toxic. It’s so limited in nutrients and calories in fact that koalas sleep an average of 20 hours a day and are relatively antisocial creatures.  They don’t have any natural predators either so they quite honestly have not a care in the world.

            Later on they had the dingo talk where I actually got to pet a very friendly and well trained dingo from their resident pack.

            We got to witness their crocodile feeding show for a number of their crocodile pairs as well.  Those are some BIG reptiles right there.

            I really loved how hands on the whole thing was and they really wanted to get the visitors to interact with the wildlife. They had some of the common ‘around town’ birds sitting on perches throughout the park; like the red-tailed black cockatoos. And there were ducks EVERYWHERE. No joke. They were all over the place and loved getting the attention we often gave with the handfuls of birdseed we were given when we got our tickets at the entrance.

Feeding the red-tailed black cockatoo

            There were tons of kangaroos hopping around too and some of them with fair sized joeys sticking out of their pouches, or should I say, practically falling. They were so tame that you could essentially just walk up to them and start petting them. Some of them even let you pet the joeys in their pouches.

            Later on in the day, they had a bird show to showcase some of the more common Aussie birds around.  There were a couple birds they just released and let fly around the audience a bit like the barn owl and the black kite. For the kite, the handler just threw bits of food in the air and the thing would swoop in and catch them mid throw then land and eat it on some tree.  They brought out a rainbow lorikeet and a young curlew as well.  I have seen SO many curlews around town and on campus now that they are really nothing new but it was actually kind of funny with this particular one that was trained to see it follow its handler around and chase after bits of food he tossed out for it.

            I got to see the three deadliest snakes in the world as well and now I know more or less what to avoid if I see it! Of course, two of those three live right around the town I currently live in... As seems to be a recurring theme for me the past several months, I am choosing to avoid a good amount of the wildlife for obvious reasons. If I were at home I would totally pick up most any snake I see because, well, I know nothing is really going to kill me. But then I get here and I realize it's usually a bit safer to just assume anything can kill you.

Coastal Taipan during the snake show

             I did get to hold a non-venomous water python and a very small saltwater crocodile as well during one of the reptile shows.  That was fun J.

            By the end of break I had smacked the opposite end of the spectrum with my body well rested and my mind becoming a little restless even with sitting at home not doing much for a couple days.  The rest of my housemates started coming home, much to my joy, and at one particular point my enthusiasm got the better of me as I solidly smacked my toe into the side of the sofa while greeting a returning housemate.  I’m sure I looked utterly ridiculous as I ‘ran’ one legged up and down the hallway. I did finally sit down and ice the thing after getting handed chocolate and told to do so. I fear my pinky toe has seen some far better days...

            This coming weekend is another long one, Friday being another free day in honor of Anzac day. During this next extended break I will be heading off again on another field trip, this one for my Coral Reef Geomorphology class. We will be heading out to Orpheus Island, the research island belonging to the university, and I am thoroughly looking forward to what we will be learning concerning the reef out there!  I am not however looking forward to getting up at 3:30 tomorrow morning in order to make it to the 4:15 bus ride we will be taking to get on the boat before the tides change... A necessary evil I guess :). 

Cute n' Cuddly and Creepy Crawlies

Felix, my traveling backpack buddy for this weeks activities!

            Boy have the last several days been jam packed but full of so much fun! This past week at uni has been a lecture recess and though I didn’t have any “lectures” per say, I still had “class” in the form of back to back field trips for two of my classes. It all started on Friday with a three hour bus ride beginning at 8:00 am in the pouring rain brought on by the impending cyclone.

            Oh, and that’s another thing. We recently had a category 5 cyclone come down the coast from Cook Town, down through Cairns, and dissipating the tail end of it into Townsville.  I never saw much of it other than a little rain since I was a ways out west but I heard it was quite mild for a cat 5.  Thank goodness!

            After reaching our final destination at Wambiana Cattle Station and settling all our stuff in, we were split up into our respective groups and got right to work setting up all our trapping sites! For the first fieldtrip, Wildlife Ecology and Management, we ran our studies following the methods of an ongoing cattle grazing study that has for the past 17 years been looking at the effects of different grazing pressures in cattle farming. Our contribution was to look at the vertebrate biodiversity side, though the whole study itself looks at a wide range of things like habitat structure, cattle health, effects of differing cattle densities, and the amount of profit throughout fluctuating rainy seasons. Just to name a few.

My crew for the first 4 day field trip.  Awesome group of people right here!

            We set out numerous trap types, each gearing more towards a different type of animal that we wanted to catch.  There were the drift fences with buckets and funnel traps that were good at effectively catching lizards and amphibians. 

Setting up the trapping sites.

Early afternoon trap checks.

            There were the little Elliot traps that aimed at catching little rodents and sometimes lizards of some description (though I don't think we caught anything with them this trip...).

            There were the big cage traps that were set to help catch bigger mammals like possum and battongs. 

            And lastly there were the camera traps which were set to catch things too big to safely catch with a trap (i.e. dingo’s, kangaroos, emus… etc).

 

Richard and Eric demonstrating how to set up camera traps.

            We also did more active type searches, the first of which we did our first night in the form of spotlighting.  Mostly we were looking for geckos and snakes (both of which we found a good amount of) but we also kept an eye out for mammals like possums and such. 

            One thing I will say is that if we had included insects and arachnids in the study, we would have been beyond overwhelmed! When spotlighting, the biggest thing you pay attention to is keeping the light near eye level and looking for the eye shine of the animals.  Geckos will often shine back a whitish yellow from up in trees, mammals like possum will shine back a brighter yellow, and insects such as spiders will glow back bright white. And we saw literally thousands of glowing white dots speckling the landscape.  They were simply everywhere! Fun. Sorry to say this but if you had arachnophobia, this probably wouldn’t have been the activity for you. But it was still pretty cool to see some of them, like the Huntsman Spiders for example!

When I say this spider could have spanned the entirety of my face and beyond, I am not exaggerating.  And this was the small one! Lovely thing to find on a tree next to you at face level in the middle of the night...

             Needless to say, the next time a friend complains to me about having a huge spider in their house I will simply shake my head in apathy.  Boy, they have no idea...

            Every day was a bright and early 5:00am wake up time which was surprisingly easier than it may sound.  Because we had so many traps set up it was really important to check them all before the sun got too high so animals wouldn’t get too stressed or overheat.  Consequently we got to see a good number of sunrises while out in the field!

Sunrise: Day 3

Sunrise: Day 4

Sunrise: Day 5

Sunrise: Day 6 and the last morning

             I cannot tell you how many animals my teams and I keyed out in those 6 days. 30? Maybe? If I’m being conservative here.  I will admit that it got to be really tedious work especially when we had to count the number of scales above the eye, how the scales were positioned on the 4^th toe of the front foot, whether it has a clear eyelid or a scaly one, how many scales were on the underside of the toe… and all this on a lizard no bigger than your pinky finger.  But it was really interesting and it got to the point where I could just look at a lizard or gecko and give you its genus and species.  I did not however enjoy keying out the frogs.  Those things were ridiculously hard!

 

Keying out a small skink

A lovely Burton's Legless Lizard

            We also were able to key out a number of snakes that various groups had caught out during active search but us students weren't generally allowed to handle most of them, for obvious reasons.  

Pale Headed Snake

Brown Tree Snake i.e. the "Night Tiger"

            After keying them out as a group and deciding whether they would kill us or not, we did get the chance to hold a number of the non-venomous ones.

A little Spotted Python

A Keel-back Snake, one of the few things that can safely eat cane toads.

            We also did a couple of other types of active surveys like water bird surveys over at the lagoon. We got to see some cool birds there like White-bellied Sea Eagles, Whistling Kites, and Australian Darters .  We also got to swim in the lagoon if we so chose but the water was a little too… churned up for my taste.

Looking at some cormorants through the spotting scope.

            We did a number of surveys in the evenings looking for kangaroos as well. I seriously had no idea that there were so many kangaroo types around! There's the eastern grey kangaroos, the red kangaroos, wallaroos (also called Euro's), common wallabies, black striped wallabies... and the list goes on. I think someone said there was something around 30ish types in Australia total.

Some Eastern Grey Kangaroos in the road

            There were also the early morning bird surveys which we usually did right after early morning trap checks shortly after the sun started coming up.  A lot of the surveys for those we did by sound since it was often pretty hard to spot a lot of the birds.  Lucky for us, a number of the tutors were really good at pointing out which birds made which song!

            We saw some pretty good red-backed fairy wren activity during those times.  Pretty cool birds really.  We also got to see several bustards at one point when we were driving out for some active survey down by the landing strip. Those things are big! I would say they are a bit smaller than an emu but they can actually fly pretty darn well. I think someone said that they are the largest flying bird in Australia.

            There were also the frog surveys which took place at night as well and were a bit similar to spotlighting except we did it down by the creek bed instead and were focusing more on looking for frogs.  I think that was also the place that we found the largest number of snakes.  Go figure.  One night while frogging, my group found this fair sized tree absolutely covered in these brown and white butterflies!

            I've always wondered what butterflies did when the sun went down and I guess now we know! Well, some of them anyways.
            During the last evening of the Wildlife Ecology and Management field trip (only day 3 of 6 for me!) some of the kids from the ranch and the tutors got out a bunch of boomerangs and taught a number of us how to throw them properly.  I guess the thing to know is that if you do it right, you darn well better watch out because that thing is coming right back! It's also a less than safe sport to be the observer of I found out...  The kids also taught us how to crack a bullwhip. And might I just say that is not as easy as it sounds! At least, cracking it behind you is not.  You kind of have to twirl it over your head and bring it down behind you in just the right way that it doesn't smack the ground instead of the air. I found it easier to crack in front personally.

Gorgeous sunset over the house!

            Other highlights from the Wildlife and Ecology section of the trip included getting to hold an echidna! And a gigantic one at that!

            I honestly had no clue they got that big.  I thought they were almost like hedgehog size not small dog size! I guess it really depends on the particular echidna though.  I think the one we had was about as big as you can find them.
            We also had a campfire on the evening before the Vertebrate Fauna students arrived and we got to have Aussiefied s'mores!

            They don't really have anything like Graham Crackers here which is a terrible tragedy, and their marshmallows are a little weird.  All pink and grainy and a little sweeter than ours.  It was weird to say the least.  Not terrible, but a far cry from the amazingness of a traditional s'more.
            The next morning after the Vertebrate Fauna students arrived and most of the Wildlife Ecology students had left, we all set to work again setting up our new trapping sites.  We used similar trapping methods to the last trip, but we did the trapping in different areas.  This time, we were looking more at vertebrate density on correlation with different habitat types as opposed to cattle grazing density.  There were still cattle in most of the areas I believe, but we instead situated our sites on 4 different habitat types: Bendee, Pandanas, Riparian, and Box (referring to tree or plant types).

My group for the Australian Vertebrate Fauna side of the field trip

The road near the Bendee site.

            Again, we did more of the same in terms of trapping types, active searches, and scheduling things in. We did end up putting in twice the number of traps in each of the new sites and by golly that was a lot of work especially for those of us who had already done it for three days!

            I found this field trip to be a little more laid back if you will in terms of recording the data because we were mostly just trying to see how many animals we could find as opposed to following a specific study trial. We did see a good number of the same animals again, but we also got to see some cool new ones.  Like the young frill-necked lizard and the nobbi dragon!

Getting the little Frilly to frill for us

Pretty relaxed little Nobbi Dragon.

             The first evening of the Vertebrate Fauna field trip I was heading back to our accommodation from the house after dinner and I happened to look up into the sky and catch a glimpse of a lunar eclipse! When I got home after the trip I saw a lot of people at home in the states talking about it but I had had no idea that it was going on until I saw it. It was pretty cool to watch though when I stopped to take a picture, the green tree frog I was holding in one hand at the time began screeching incessantly at me and I had to hurry on my way to put him in a container and set him out for someone to key out the next day. Demanding little bugger! 

             I certainly began feeling all the early days and late nights by the end there.  It was totally worth it though and I wouldn't have changed it for anything!

            Oh, and I also got charged by a turtle when we jumped out of the car to pick it up off the road.  That was fun.  Can you image stopping to look at a turtle when it suddenly turns its head to look strangely at you and then proceeds to run full boar at you and attack your feet? I honestly had no idea those things could move as fast at that thing did and I think I just stood there in confusion as the thing rammed itself into my feet. That was a new one!