In the Wild

A touch of the South-west

2011-09-10T19:36:00.001+10:00

Back in Winter I found myself in Perth briefly, and was able to squeeze in a couple of nights frogging and a morning of the fabled 'raking' that the WAliens are so fond of.

First up, out in the Perh hills, was a really impressive frog - Heleioporus barycragus. Not named after a fella called Bary Crag at all, it turns out the name refers to the frog's "deep voice" which isn't actually very deep, but about "falsetto man voice" pitch. Male Heleioporus have impressive spikes on their hands, used apparently for male combat (though they must make amplexus a delicate affair). The photo below shows a male with a scar, presumably healing war wound.

There are a couple more Heleioporus species around the hills, and I was able to pick up a couple more: H. inornatus and eyrei, the Whooping frog and the Moaning frog respectively. These frogs all call from burrows in sand around creeklines.

Whooping frog, Heleioporus inornatus

Moaning frog, Heleioporus eyrei

The marvelously carbuncular Neobatrachus pelobatoidies.

A rather ugly example of the Soft Spiny-tailed gecko, Strophrurus spinigerus

Raking, I'm led to believe, is a favourite winter pastime of Western Australian herpos. The procedure involves strolling around sandy areas with a garden rake, occasionally stopping and furiously agitating the top layer of sand and hoping to turn up some of the sand snakes and lizards that live in that habitat. For an East-coaster, it's all a bit bizarre. However, it did reveal this marvelous little creature below - Jan's Banded snake, Simoselaps bertholdi, which I spent some quality time photographing. Fantastic!

A taste of the Pilbara

2011-05-05T16:23:00.002+10:00

I've just returned from the Pilbara - assisting a fauna survey job. It was my first time in this part of the country - so I found myself seeing plenty of new animals while at the same time recognising the connections that this landscape has with other parts of Australia.

Delma nasuta, Legless Lizard

We were located not far from the Hammersley Ranges, our survey sites butting up against Karajini National Park in some instances. Generally we were focussing on variations of mulga, spinifex and grassland habitats, with a few rocky outcrop areas thrown in.

Pilbara Ningaui, Ningaui timealeyi

It was boom time out there following a good wet season. We didn't catch a single animal in poor health or condition. Insects were in abundance. Driving around would invariably flush masses of Little Button Quail from the grass, and we even had some fall in traps (including chicks!). The Stripe-faced dunnart (Sminthopsis macroura, below) has a tail about 10mm long at its base - this is the dunnart equivalent of a double chin in terms of fat storage.

Stripe-faced dunnart (Sminthopsis macroura)

Reptile-wise we turned up a fairly good haul of lizards and snakes, including some blind snakes, various elapids, dragons and small goannas, a handful of geckos and legless lizards.

This Diplodactylus pulcher had just shed its skin and was showing its colours off nicely.

A young Varanus bushi - a small tree-dwelling goanna recently split off from gilleni/caudolineatus

Painted Pyrgomorph, Greyacris sp.

Exploring the rocky areas toward the end of the survey we managed to turn up quite a few more reptile species, including my favourite animal of the trip, the Spiny-tailed skink (Egernia depressa, below). This slow-moving, prehistoric-looking creature lives in rock crevices in small family groups.

The crevice dwelling Ctenotus rubicundus

Another rock dweller, Egernia formosa

Bandy-bandy snake, Vermicella snelli

Spiny-tailed skink, Egernia depressa

Dwarf bearded dragon, Pogona minor

Western netted dragon (Ctenophorus reticularis), above and below, surveying its domain.

Another highlight turned up on the final day as we were packing up - a Mulga dragon, Caimanops amphiboluroides, appeared right behind the ute we were loading. It was intent on digging - not a proper burrow at all but a shallow scrape. After some time it abandoned this one but began another! It was totally unafraid of us, and dug, ate ants, and even had its tail stepped on without seeming to mind. This species, the only one of its genus, is another one restricted to the North-West.

Mulga dragon, Caimanops amphiboluroides, above and below.

Still lots of Pilbara critters out there that I'm keen to see, and it looks like I'll be heading back over there at some point too.

One from the road

2011-03-30T22:56:00.001+10:00

Thorny Devil, Moloch horridus, natural habitat

Sydney... Cockroach

2011-03-29T20:43:00.000+10:00

Back in Sydney. Next move...?

Check out this cockroach, Polyzosteria limbata, from Brisbane Water National Park just north of the Hawkesbury, spotted on a recent bushwalk.

Compare the patterning with an individual from Waterfall, south of Sydney (links to my old blog, from way back in 2006!).

Prickles!

2010-12-27T21:39:00.000+10:00

A nocturnal climb up to the top of the Heavitree Range near Alice Springs was a very rewarding little expedition. On the gecko front, I first encountered Diplodactylus conspicillatus, Heteronotia binoei, Oedura marmorata and Strophrurus ciliaris. I spotted a couple of very pretty Centralian treefrogs (Litoria gilleni) right up top, then the animal I'd been hoping for showed too.

It's a central ranges endemic species - one of the prickly knob-tailed gecko species: Nephrurus amyae or the Centralian knob-tailed gecko. It's claim to fame is it's the 'most massive' (meaning heaviest rather than lengthiest) Aussie gecko.

And a cute little one just as an added bonus.

Floating frogs (or Frogging the Alice)

2010-12-07T19:08:00.000+10:00

So much rain, good thunderstorms, warm weather... only more free time could make conditions better for frogging around Alice Springs. I have managed to get out once recently and was amply rewarded. As well as the relatively 'boring' Spencer's Burrowing Frog (Platyplectrum spenceri) and the Desert Treefrog (Litoria rubella), a couple of other interesting species were calling away from flooded roadsides just out of Alice Springs.

Neobatrachus centralis, Trilling frog

Cyclorana maini, Main's waterholding frog

Neobatrachus centralis, Trilling frog

Sminthopsis sp., Dunnart

Narrow-banded sandswimmer, Eremiascincus fasciolatus

Herping the Alice

2010-10-22T12:22:00.001+10:00

I've been working as a tour guide out of Alice Springs - taking backpackers out to Uluru, Kata Tjuta and King's Canyon. The country is looking so beautifully green at the moment - due to the amazing amount of rain that's fallen this year. Alice Springs has had about 620 mm so far - compare this with the annual average of 250 mm or the 65 mm that had fallen by this time last year. Lots of plants are flowering or producing masses of seed. Birds are singing from all the trees. The waterholes are all looking fantastic and are home to plump tadpoles.

The arrival of the warm weather has seen me heading out from Alice on a couple of little night road-cruising trips. It's been quite productive so far!

A few geckos are out and about - masses of fat-tailed geckos (Diplodactylus conspicillatus, below), and the odd spiny-tailed gecko (Strophrurus ciliaris).

I also came across an old favourite, the smooth knob-tailed gecko (Nephrurus laevis)

The only elapids I've been seeing are a few Curl snakes (Suta suta).

This legless lizard, the Western Hooded Scaly-foot (Pygopus nigriceps) was a nice surprise.

But by far, the highlight was this impressive 150 cm Centralian carpet python, Morelia bredli, found crossing the road next to a tree-lined watercourse.

A few frogs have been active and calling on wet nights too - so far only Desert Treefrogs (Litoria rubella), Spencer's Burrowing frog (Platyplectrum spenceri), and a couple of Trilling frogs (Neobatrachus centralis, below).

Some interesting herps have been showing up on the tours I run - I'm going to start taking my camera along more often so I can get photos of them to share.

Walking the Larapinta - I

2010-07-06T22:58:00.000+10:00

It's late afternoon and I sit by Birthday waterhole with my binoculars at the ready. I've been keeping an eye on the resident birds - there are three Australian hobbies hanging around. Surely the budgerigars are nervous nesting in adjacent trees. Every now and then there is a chattering from the hobbies and if I'm quick I'll spot one chasing something - the favourite quarry seems to be bronzewings though the latter are certainly swift enough to give the hobbies a breathtaking run and I didn't spot any being taken.

Only a couple of trees down the creekline is a pair of Brown goshawks nesting too. And a squeaking that I originally attributed to branches sliding over one another in the breeze turned out to be a pair of Major Mitchell Cockatoos feeding quietly in the same tree. A wallaroo casually hops over the rocky ridge behind the waterhole.

The River red-gums (Eucalyptus camalduensis) dominate this sandy riverbed like so many others. Immense and valuable trees, contorted and buffeted by flooding river flows, they form plenty of hollows.

After dark I go walking, first around the waterhole where a solitary Spencer's burrowing frog (Platyplectrum spenceri) sits at the chilly water's edge. Then up the ridge. The eyes of flat-rock spiders shine out from impossibly thin cracks in the quartzite. One slightly larger crack houses a handsome marbled velvet gecko (Oedura marmorata) tucked well away. The rocks are littered with rock wallaby scats though none made an appearance.

Descending again, I follow the gravelly riverbed upstream. It's a cold evening and these nocturnal walks haven't been yielding much but they're a good way to warm up before bed and there's sometimes something of note. On a separate rocky outcrop I come across the beautiful Centralian treefrog (Litoria gilleni), only the second one I've seen and a real stunner to top off the all-round great day.

Dawn had found me drinking tea and watching the sunrise atop Brinkley's Bluff, a towering peak of the Chewings Range in the West McDonnell Ranges. It was day seven of an eighteen day walk. The Larapinta trail. Starting at Alice Springs, the trail stretches 223 km through the West MacDonnell ranges to finish at the peak of Mt Sonder near Redbank Gorge. The trail passes or penetrates the numerous gaps, gorges and chasms cut through the Chewings and Heavitree tranges; it climbs to peaks and bluffs with panoramic views; it encounters riverbeds of the oldest rivers in the world. It crosses the exposed strata of ancient mountains past, it crosses the plains left by aeons of deposition.

...and from the outward trip

2010-06-25T12:42:00.001+10:00

I drove to Alice Springs in late May with a friend. The trip wasn't the greatest due to some pretty foul weather but we still had a good time and saw some interesting things.

The Flinders Ranges were beautiful. There have been really good rains in this part of Australia - one local told us that there hasn't been anything like it since 1989. As a result, the ranges were really green and there was lots of evidence of large river flows and flooding.

I got a chance to see and photograph Yellow-footed rock wallabies here which was a real thrill.

Ctenophorus sp.

Also came across the Streamside froglet (Crina riparia), an endemic to the Flinders.

Crinia riparia, Streamside froglet

Drove the Oodnadatta track and checked out Lake Eyre. Water is flowing into the lake from various sources - the Cooper hadn't reached the lake yet and the north lake was dry, though the south lake was filling. Really interesting, no Lake Eyre dragons though!

Lake Eyre North

Lake Eyre South

Quick pics from the homeward trip

2010-05-16T09:33:00.001+10:00

I travelled back fairly directly - via Wondonga, the Riverina, then through Griffith, visiting Cocoparra NP then driving home. I was hoping to see some geckos and was rewarded quite handsomely in the latter park.

From near the Murray:

Sugar Glider, Petaurus breviceps

Cup-moth caterpillar, Doratifera sp.

Brown Treecreeper

From Cocoparra National Park:

Egernia striolata, Tree skink.

Thick-tailed Gecko, Underwoodisaurus millii

Marbled gecko, Christinus marmoratus

Southern Spiny-tailed gecko, Strophrurus intermedius

Tassie wrap-up

2010-05-16T09:15:00.000+10:00

Bennet's Wallaby

After spending almost three months in Tasmania, I headed back to Sydney for a job and to plan my next move. Tasmania was great. There's a whole lot to see and do for a relatively small place. There are some pretty interesting animals and it's great to see all the mammals - that tend to be very bold compared with their mainland relatives. It was interesting to see the contrast in the environment from west to east - the west has high rainfall and is characterised by Nothofagus (Myrtle/Antarctic beech) forests and buttongrass areas whereas to the east the rainfall drops considerably and a dry sclerophyll forest more typical of Eastern Australia predominates.

Southern blue-tongue, Tiliqua nigrolutea

What didn't I like about Tassie? To be honest I missed herps. While frogs can be locally common in some areas, they're largely thin on the ground compared with other areas I've visited. And there is a dearth of cool little reptiles - no geckos, legless lizards, goannas. One dragon. Three snake species, which are pretty nice, but they're all elapids, so no pythons or colubrids. There are a few skinks. Road-cruising on warm nights through the parts of Australia that I've seen always holds at least the promise of some interesting reptiles, but in tassie the herper is reduced to taking an interest in the large furry things that hop or amble on the roads.

Still, I reckon I'll be back before too long to do some more exploring and walking, and maybe find some of the more elusive animals that I missed this time around.

Peninsulas etc.

2010-04-15T15:04:00.002+10:00

Arve River

My first stop after leaving Hobart was the Hartz Mountains - as many froggers will know, this is the area where one of the most recently described Australian frogs was discovered. It's a very nice spot in its own right too, of course, however the weather when I visited was pretty ghastly. I walked up to the peak but was only ever able to see about 30m in any direction, while the biting wind almost froze the rain as it lashed any exposed skin.

Bryobatrachus nimbus, the frog in question (or, as the generic status is sometimes in doubt, Crinia nimba) is a pretty cryptic little frog from the south-west of Tasmania which avoided discovery until 1994. Unique amongst its close relatives, the species lays its eggs on land amongst vegetation and the tadpoles do not feed at all. While atop the Ironbound range on the South coast track, I heard some of the little blighters but wasn't able to find any.

Whilst walking in the Hartz I came across a patch of boggy moorland that looked about right so stopped and imitated the call. Pretty soon a couple of the frogs replied and I was able to triangulate and spot two of the little guys without much trouble.

Bryobatrachus nimbus (Crinia nimba)

I did a nice bit of walking on the Tasman Peninsula - an overnight walk from Fortescue bay down to the tip of Cape Pillar, then around to Cape Hauy via Mt Fortescue and back to the Bay. The sea cliffs on this walk were terrifyingly awesome. From one stop I looked out to sea with my binoculars and watched dolphins play. While eating lunch on the Blade I could see seals just across the channel on Tasman Island - swimming and diving, sunbaking on the rocks, fighting, slipping in and out of the water... idyllic!

Tasman island from the Blade

I then visited the Freycinet peninsula and did some day-walking there - the Mt Amos scramble and a loop encompassing Wineglass bay and Hazard beach.

At Friendly beaches, I was treated to a spectacular sunset over the beautiful lichen-covered boulders and clear waters.

Bruny, Bushy and Beyond

2010-04-06T15:56:00.001+10:00

After the walk, where better to relax than Bruny Island? I spent a couple of nights over there but didn't take any photos, so you'll have to just take my word for it. The best part of Bruny was the eastern quolls. The North Island is crawling with them and they were very very nice to see. Also spotted a long-nosed potoroo which was a new one for me. Penguins, Shearwaters, water rats... it's a good place for a spotlight. Also some very nice walking though it's rather tame comparatively.

I found work on a hop farm out at Bushy Park in the Derwent Valley which is were I've been for the past three weeks. My plan is now to see a few bits and pieces while heading back north and over to the mainland again. From there I'll go west!

South-west walk

2010-04-06T15:42:00.001+10:00

Bathurst Harbour and Mt Rugby

At the start of March I was joined by a couple of friends and we did an 11-day, 155 km walk together through the South-West wilderness, departing from Scott's Peak Dam (Lake Pedder) and walking to Cockle Creek via Melaleuca. It was a great experience - beautiful country and a very satisfying achievement. The weather was pretty good to us and though we had a bit of rain here and there it didn't inconvenience us greatly.

The first section of the walk, the Port Davey track, is skipped by many walkers who instead fly in to Melaleuca and walk from there (the South Coast Track). We did the 70 km in four days so there was a fair amount of walking. It was pretty muddy despite the dry summer and I went in above my knees a couple of times. In the first couple of days the track skirts around the base of the Western Arthurs then follows the Crossing river. On the final day, Bathurst Harbour grows in the distance into the sizeable body of water that it is, then the 'Bathurst Narrows' are crossed by rowboat. Finally it's onwards to Melaleuca where the walkers' huts were offered welcome luxury.

I would heartily recommend this track - there are some really nice scenes and the final day was simply beautiful.

Astacopsis tricornis

In the evening at Melaleuca, despite the 26 km day that had just passed, we went out frogging and were stupefied when we came across the beautiful Tasmanian Treefrog, Litoria burrowsae. What a cracker!

Birdwatching in the morning we saw quite a few of the rare orange-bellied parrots that birdos fly in to see (not always successfully). We also got good looks at a few Ground Parrots here and there.

The South Coast Track was nicely varied - beach walking, a few hill climbs, a river crossing, bays, points, inlets and the notorious Ironbound range crossing. The seven days of walking was taking it fairly easy. Our plans to visit Louisa bay had to be scratched as bad weather was predicted and we wanted to get across the Ironbounds when we could.

Atop the Ironbounds

All up, a very satisfying adventure. The South-West is indeed a special part of the world. I'm keen to do some more long walks!

Prion Beach

The Tarkine

2010-02-17T11:53:00.000+10:00

Edge of the World, Arthur River

From the North-western Corner I first explored some of the forest around the Arthur River then travelled south down the 'Western Explorer' which borders the Arthur Pieman conservation area.

I came across my first endemic frog, the Tasmanian froglet, Crinia tasmaniensis. Rather drab like all Crinia species, it is set apart by its startling red underparts.

Not long afterwards I found another interesting little frog, the Southern smooth froglet, Geocrinia laevis. Quite a pretty little thing.

Geocrinia laevis, Southern Smooth Froglet

The Western explorer is a pleasant journey for the countryside it travels through - buttongrass hills merging into mixed forest and rainforest around the creeks and river valleys. Near the Savage River I did another good walk which took me up a mountain to survey the landscape.

I made another great little find on this walk. Throughout this country there are numerous little holes in the ground - about a couple of centimetres diameter. Sometimes turreted, sometimes not. I found one of the culprits under a log.

A beautiful little crayfish, entirely terrestrial, clad in a stylish purple and orange!

At Corinna I took the barge across the Pieman river (which, incidentally is a ridiculous name for a river) and headed south to Zeehan. I had a bit of an adventure when I took a 4WD track out to Montezuma falls. Twelve kilometres into the tedious 14km track I came unstuck - while climbing a hill after a creek crossing I lost traction and slid off the lower side of the track. I was neatly stuck. I tried self-recovering for some time but had to give up when the little hand winch that I had was making ominous noises. I had phone reception so got through to the police radio room who sent a guy out to me. With his winch and help, we continued the winching job that I'd started and managed to heave the car up and back on to the road. No damage done but a painful exercise nonetheless. At least the falls and the swing bridge were nice!

Montezuma falls

So, I bet you all wish you were here, am I right?

The North

2010-02-17T11:32:00.001+10:00

Cradle Mountain behind Dove Lake

After Narawntapu I visited the Cradle valley for a day - beautiful indeed though rather touristy. I did a fantastic walk - from Dove Lake around in a big loop to the Cradle summit via Hanson's Peak and returning via a section of the overland track and Marion's Lookout. Superb scenery! I saw my first tassie snakes too - a couple of small White lipped snakes (Drysdalia coronoides).

I made camp at the beautiful little Mole Creek where I spotted platypus at dusk. Lots of brushtail possums around including some extremely black ones which I've never seen before.

Hellyer Gorge

I visited a few nice spots over the next few days as I headed westwards towards the northern edge of the Tarkine - Hellyer Gorge, Dip falls. I've been doing as much walking as I can and enjoying the mixed forest and rainforest of this region. The Leatherwoods are in bloom and their petals adorn the forest floor.

Leatherwood petals

Bizzarre yellow flatworm

Tasmania!

2010-02-17T11:07:00.001+10:00

About a month later than planned, I'm finally in Tassie! After a pleasant though fairly uneventful trip down the coast, I came across on the Spirit of Tasmania I and have spent the last week and a half exploring the island's north-west. It's been fabulous. I love being back on the road and I've seen some interesting animals and beautiful scenes.

I began by heading just east of Devonport to Narawntapu national park - coastally located with some pleasant walking through sandy banksia forest and melaleuca swamp surrounding a freshwater lagoon. The best part of this park is the sheer mass of mammals! Pademelons are by far the most common, ridiculously abundant, foraging alongside wombats. I saw a few Bennet's Wallabies and Eastern Grey Kangaroos too. Walking along one of the tracks I was glad to spot several hair-filled scats so I was keenly on the lookout for predators.

That night - only my second in Tassie, I saw not one but two Tassie devils! The first was on a road that I was slowly driving at dark with the hope of seeing something interesting. It looked up at me, showing off its white bib, before dashing into the scrub. I was amazed and incredulous. Was it that easy to see wild devils here? As I drove into camp I saw another devil actually loping around next to a caravan! I sat quietly near my tent and the devil paid me a visit. A pademelon that was grazing in the clearing saw it and stamped its feet. The devil turned to the pademelon and chased it briefly but without much enthusiasm. It sniffed around my camp then galloped off down the road. Amazing creatures! I've since seen one more devil in my headlights - pretty impressive!

I also did a bit of frogging in this park - came across Litoria ewingii, the Brown Treefrog, Limnodynastes dumerilii (Pobblebonk) and Limnodynastes tasmaniensis (Spotted grass frog).

Litoria ewingii, Brown Treefrog

In the wild again!

2010-02-05T11:19:00.000+10:00

I'm back on the road as of a week ago. I've made it as far as Wilson's Prom where it is currently cold and rainy (never a good combination). I'm hopping on the ferry over to Tasmania on Sunday. I haven't been taking many photos so far so in the mean time you can enjoy some animal shots from the channel country, Simpson Desert and Western NSW from some recent trips, here.

Coast frogging

2010-01-16T09:01:00.002+10:00

A weekend up on the mid-north coast around the Myall Lakes area was, as always, a fantastic frogging trip. Since I've photographed most of the frogs up there on previous trips I don't have any photos of them to share.

Interestingly, the dirt roads were littered with tiny Southern dwarf crowned snakes, Cacophis krefftii. Though I've spent a great many hours driving these same roads, I'd never come across a single one before. Perhaps it's a temporal thing - previous trips have generally been either earlier or later in the season.

On the way back, a trip to the Watagans was very successful. All three Mixophes species turned up, as well as things like Blue mountains treefrogs (Litoria citropa) and Red-backed toadlets (Pseudophryne coriacea) On the road out we were lucky enough to encounter this Common scaly-foot, Pygopus lepidopodus (above).

Interim trip - Barrington

2010-01-15T22:02:00.000+10:00

With the promise of rain and warm weather, I headed up to the Barrington / Gloucester tops area back in November with a couple of mates. If you recall at the start of my trip I spent a night or two in Chichester but then had a hankering for a swim in the and headed to the coast. So there are lots of places there that I didn't get to explore.

The frog that we were hoping for was the species Litoria daviesae, recently split from the New England treefrog, Litoria subglandulosa. They were actually quite easy to find and present in good numbers, calling away merrily from around small high altitude streams. Very beautiful frogs. Highly variable in colouration - individuals could be almost entirely bright green or brown, though all had the mango-yellow flash colours on their hind legs.

As I say, beautiful. Other highlights of the trip included several greater gliders, a koala and the Stuttering frog, Mixophyes balbus.

Bandy-bandy, Vermicella annulata

I've got a few more quick ones to share from the last couple of months so stay tuned.

Home!

2009-10-21T09:54:00.001+10:00

I'm in Sydney! But don't worry, my journey is far from over. My vague plan at this stage is to cross the Bass straight some time after Christmas, and spend summer down in the land of six fingers. After that I might head over to WA. So no updates are anticipated for the moment, but remember to come back in a couple of months!

Diamantina - take two

2009-10-21T09:51:00.000+10:00

Immediately after the Simpson trip I drove out to the Diamantina to meet up with a DERM research trip studying the ecological effects of cattle removal in the park. The park is home to wild populations of bilbies, Kowaris and Kultarrs. Kowaris are small quoll-like dasyurid marsupials - much like Mulgaras though inhabiting flat, ironstone and gypsum country rather than sandhills. Kultarrs are bizarre little things which look like a cross between a dunnart and a hopping mouse. They share the hopper's long, tufted tail and gracile back legs, but facial features reveal their true dasyurid nature.

Spencer's Monitor, Varanus spenceri

In addition to the excitement of trapping these wonderful small mammals, I was thrilled to pay a visit to Astrebla Downs NP. A bizzare flat, lightly grassed landscape, this park has long been used for bilby research. The best part was that, following good summer rains, long-haired rats (<I>Rattus villosissimus</I>) had erupted in the park. Rats were everywhere. By day, squeaking sounds came from every scrap of cover. At night, masses of rats scurried and bounded for their burrows when lit up by torchlight. Almost every square metre of earth was home to a rat burrow. The mass of rodents is a great boon for predators in the area - birds, snakes and mammals alike.

Long-haired rat, Rattus villosissimus

By day, a variety of raptors hung around, hopeful for a rat stupid enough to venture outside its burrow - black kites, brown falcons, black falcons, brown goshawks, spotted harriers. In the late afternoon the night shift started turning up - letter-winged kites.

These are very interesting raptors. They seem to be specialist predators of these rats - they only really turn up where the rats are erupting, and simultaneously breed like crazy themselves. Also, unusually for a kite, they're largely nocturnal.

This photo shows two adults (far right) and some juveniles - presumably their progeny. Astrebla's few trees almost couldn't handle the weight of breeding letter-wings.

And of course... the bilby

The Red Playground

2009-10-21T09:08:00.001+10:00

I spent most of September in the Simpson desert on my third trip with the 'ratcatchers' - that is, the Dickman lab. I've already posted bits and pieces about these trips on my photoblog, so I'll just share a few photos (as always, more in the gallery).

Central netted dragon, Ctenophorus nuchalis, Welford National Park.

Pebble-mimic dragon, Tympanocryptis intima

Smooth knob-tailed gecko baby, Nephrurus levis

Smooth knob-tailed gecko, Nephrurus levis

Spotted snake, Suta punctata

Desert skink, Egernia inornata

Rusty desert monitor, Varanus eremius

Canegrass dragon, Diporiphora winneckei

Bird-eating spider

That's the burrow entrance of the Slit spider, Fissarina ethabuka. The burrow is a sort of trap utilising a sand slipface.

And that's the little spider herself.

Water-holding Frog, Litoria (Cyclorana) platycephala.

The frog was a real bonus find - it turned up in a pool that we had dug to have a bathe in.

As always, this trip was a really good experience!

Interesting inverts - Burrowing bees

2009-08-31T12:04:00.001+10:00

Walking near the Bulloo river yesterday I stumbled across a curious little patch of soil alive with activity. I first noticed the buzzing noise of flying insects, then spotted the numerous little burrow entrances, and finally caught sight of the animals causing all this excitement.

They were bees - Burrowing bees. Something similar to Dawson's Burrowing Bee (Amegilla dawsoni), related to the well-known Blue-banded and Teddy-bear bees of suburban gardens.

There were about a hundred burrows, each one featuring a raised turret at the entrance. Occasionally a bee would emerge from one of the holes and fly off, not wasting any time in doing so. It soon became apparent why - the circling, patrolling bees must have been hopeful males, and any female slow enough to be caught would be tackled to the ground by a male who would then do his best to grapple her into submission and have his way with her.

This constant attentions of the guys also must have made it hard for the females to find their own burrow - as they'd sometimes dart down a burrow only to be chased out backwards by the indignantly buzzing resident.

Some females were involved in a bit of construction / maintenance and this gave me a chance to photograph the beautiful golden behind of one.

Interesting inverts - Slater invasion!

2009-08-31T12:01:00.001+10:00

I was woken in the night while camped beside the Ward river by raindrops on my face. I had to hurriedly get up and erect my tarp, and then couldn't get back to sleep. I soon heard a strange rushing noise - sort of like raindrops on still water (made sense as I was by the river, but the rain wasn't falling on the tarp anymore). Wind in the trees? No, it was coming from ground level. I grabbed my torch and was about to step out of the tent to investigate when I discovered what the sound was.

Slaters. Thousands upon thousands of them. Right outside my tent. They were massing along the ground in great streams. That's what the sound was - millions of little feet walking along the clay soil.

Stepping out of the tent gingerly I investigated further.

As well as the migrating hordes there were massed bunches here and there where they'd found something on the ground that I'd poured out when cooking:

I couldn't work out where they'd come from or whether they had any particular destination in mind. Why were they in such high density right here?

Interesting inverts - Weevil

2009-08-31T11:34:00.003+10:00

I found this bizzare weevil under a piece of timber.

I just can't fathom the strange appendages emerging from its rear. They appeared immovable and fused at their posterior ends. I've never seen anything like it. Ideas?

[Edit - this is a weevil of the genus Phalidura (ID courtesy of Mark Thompson). Only males have the strange appendages.

Flower Show

2009-08-31T11:29:00.000+10:00

While staying on the farm near Roma I headed out to Gurulmundi near Miles to check out the heath wildflowers. It was a pretty nice show - enjoy.

The news

2009-08-31T11:21:00.001+10:00

Bearded Dragon

Apologies, dear readers, for keeping you all in the dark as to my whereabouts and... whatabouts. But all will be revealed henceforth.

In short: following the Boulia camel races I had about a month in which I was somewhat at a loose end, because I had arranged to meet up with the 'Ratcatchers' / Dickman Simpson desert lab for their September trip. It was cold and dry and it was getting pretty hard to find any interesting critters, so I decided to look for some sort of work in western QLD during this time.

I ended up near Roma, working on the property of some relatives of mine - Jock and Mina Douglas - who farm Australian Desert Limes (Eremocitrus glauca). This is a fantastic little native citrus - intensely flavoured and suitable for a wide variety of culinary uses - jam, marmalade, chutney, cordial or whole in syrup or glacèd. The family has been farming and wild-harvesting the fruit since around 1997. For more information on the limes and the Douglas family operation, see www.australiandesertlimes.com.au

So for the past month I've been doing a variety of farm jobs - from driving a tractor, slashing, to fixing a windmill. I was also involved in the grafting of 3000 young trees - we collected wood or scions from wild trees with favourable characteristics and grafted them on to hardy citrus rootstock. It was a really interesting and educational experience, not least of all because of Jock's exhaustive knowledge of the country and stories from his varied life as a cattleman, landcare and land management enthusiast and now a horticulturalist!

Desert Lime flowers

The lime picking season is in November; the trees were just starting to bud when I arrived and had just started flowering when I left. After a couple of years of drought where the trees hadn't done so well, the good summer rains this year look like resulting in a big harvest.

While grafting we found an interesting snake - a new one to me, the Pale Headed snake - Hoplocephalus bitorquatus. Closely related to the Broad-headed snake and Stephen's Banded snake (H. bungaroides and stephensi respectively). Quite pretty.

Since leaving the farm I've hit the road again. Heading out to Windorah via Welford National Park, then the Birdsville races before venturing out in to the sand dunes of Ethabuka for about a month.

The dusty Diamantina

2009-07-21T11:59:00.001+10:00

Greetings from Boulia! I've been here a few days attending the camel races - a good fun weekend! I'm camped down by the Burke river in the trees and am treated to big mobs of budgies in all the hollows... getting up to all sorts of mischief.

Before that I spent a couple of days down in the Diamantina national park. The great thing about this park is the varied environments that occur in a relatively small area - there are red sand dunes, sculpted mesas, featureless claypans, grassy floodplains, cracking clay river channels as well as permanent waterholes. I camped by one of the waterholes on the main course of the Diamantina - Hunter's Gorge - which is a long, deep channel which enters a sort of gorge of sandstone. Note that even a vague furrow on the surface of the country qualifies as a 'gorge' out here.

I went for a dip in here - the water was coooooold!

There are a few other waterholes around in the park and many of the channels had water in them. A pleasant drive - the Waracoota circuit - takes in many of the area's charms.

Tracks in the sand on a dune - hopping mouse, ?dasyurid?, invertebrate

Dune crest flowers including my favourite green Crotalaria

Looking out over the green green Diamantina channels

Sculpted mesa country

Claypan

On the Burke

2009-07-18T09:29:00.002+10:00

A whooshing noise overhead - a flock of pelicans soars just above the treetops in two great Vs. Flapping slowly, gliding effortlessly, following the riverbed.

Mt Isa

2009-07-14T15:33:00.001+10:00

I spent a week with a group of scientists from CSIRO Townsville doing a fauna survey on some of the mining land in the hilly desert country around Mt Isa. Had a pretty interesting time - it was quite cold so there wasn't too much on the move, but we managed to find enough to keep us occupied in the way of reptiles, birds and the occasional rodent and bat.

Spiny-Tailed Monitor in the morning sun (Varanus acanthurus)

One morning when my services weren't required, I took a chair and my camera down to a small, almost dry waterhole in the creekbed near our camp. The spot was a popular one with the birds.

Painted Finches

Diamond doves and a couple of Zebra Finches

White-necked Heron

Occasionally, the diamond doves, budgies and other birds would take flight and a sparrowhawk or goshawk would soar speedily through, trying its luck. After one such occasion I heard a rustle in the grass and watched the spot until the animal emerged.

It turned out to be an awesome snake, the King Brown or Mulga snake (Pseudechis australis). The snake wasn't worried at all about my presence - just cruising slowly around, having a hunt and occasionally stopping to soak up the sun. This species apparently produces record amounts of venom when milked. Herpers often talk about the powerful presence that this species just exudes and I'd have to agree. It appeared totally relaxed and in control. I followed the snake for several minutes until it disappeared - presumably down a hole or under a rock. When I first saw it I thought it must have been at least 6 ft long, but when I actually measured it up in my mind, I reckoned it couldn't have been much over 4 ft. An impressive snake nonetheless, and an unfogettable experience.

There were purple-necked rock wallabies up in some of the rocky hills, and I spent an afternoon staking them. Eventually got this photo which I was rather happy with, given the difficult conditions.

Gulf to the Desert

2009-07-14T15:04:00.001+10:00

Phew! It's been a packed three weeks since my last post. From Normanton I headed out west to Burketown then Doomagee, where I turned my car southwards and made for Adele's Grove. I spent a week there with the paleontologist mob, doing a little fossil-digging out at the sites, but mainly having a look around the various ranges and escarpments for rock wallabies with Arthur White. There are probably three rock wallaby species in the greater area - the common one is the purple-necked, but the black-footed occurs not too far away, and another, mysterious species, something like a short-eared has been sighted though never formally identified.

Rock Wallaby Country

As well as plenty of climbing over rocks and spinifex in search of these elusive beasts (with occasional sightings), we did a couple of other memorable things - like snorkelling in a beautiful creek, brimming with rainbowfish, hardyhead, archer fish, glass fish, mouth almighties, spangled perch, eel-tailed catfish, two turtle species, and most exciting of all, freshwater crocodiles. Truly a magical experience, like swimming in a fishtank. Oh, for an underwater camera...

Speaking of swimming - we also had a fantastic swim at Indarri Falls - the stars here were the file snakes, nestled in crevices in wait for their aquatic prey. I saw one big female in the classic pose of the pythons - tail curled around a branch, body bunched into tight S shapes as the snake faced down the branch. This was all about two metres underwater of course. When we were sick of seeing the fish, turtles and snakes (!) here, we swam down the beautiful Lawn Hill Gorge.

Other highlights:

Boating on the Gregory - Arthur with the turtle he described first as a fossil, then again in the flesh: Elseya lavarackorum.

Striking yet stupid - the Spinifex Pigeon

John Scanlon with the little-known Pygmy Mulga Snake, Pseudechis weigeli/Pseudechis 'pailsus'

Young Wedge-tailed Eagle posing

Rock-Ringtail possum

Purple-necked Rock Wallaby disappearing down a rock face

It's beautiful country. I could have spent more time there, exploring, but I was due in Mount Isa to catch up with some CSIRO scientists conducting a fauna survey around the town.

Frogging the Gulf

2009-07-14T14:36:00.001+10:00

Notaden melanoscaphus

Litoria dahlii, Dahl's aquatic frog

Cyclorana australis, Giant Water-holding frog

Reptiles

2009-06-24T13:33:00.001+10:00

A few reptiles from my nocturnal wanderings:

Children's Python

Bynoe's Gecko, Heteronotia bynoei

Freshie

Northern Spiny-tailed Gecko, Strophurus ciliaris

Northern Spiny-tailed Gecko, Strophurus ciliaris

Porcupine Gorge

2009-06-24T13:14:00.001+10:00

Grevillea, White Mountains National Park

I spent a couple of nights at Porcupine Gorge north of Hughenden. It's a spectacular place - the 'mini grand canyon'. Porcupine Creek has caved a gorge about 120 m deep through first the basalt cap then the underlying sedimentary layers.

From the campground, a track descends to the gorge floor, and I spent quite a bit of time down there exploring. On the second night I took my sleeping bag down and spent the night sleeping on the sand while attempting a star-trail exposure. The stars were brilliant and I also saw the most amazing shooting-star I've ever seen.

The photo didn't turn out too well though I did get some other nice shots of the Pyramid that towers over the gorge.

In the Evening

At Dawn

I couldn't resist climbing up the side for the view from the top:

Spotlighting at night yielded no novelties though I did find that curious beast, the prickly knob-tailed gecko, Nephrurus asper. Water rats were also amazingly common.

Heading west

2009-06-24T12:55:00.001+10:00

From the tablelands I drove down to Charters Towers - choosing the Overlanders Way over the Savannah Way, so as to take in the dinosaur fossil sites of Hughenden and Richmond and check out some of the national parks in the area.

I'd suddenly hit Winter - up on the Cape and in Cairns, the weather had been quite temperate - but now I was having to wear my jacket at in the evening, don my thermals and flanno then burrow under the sleeping bag at night then pull my beanie on when morning came. Still, the cold has its good points - I get to eat hot porridge for breakfast and I don't break into a sweat from drinking a hot mug of tea. The dry air of the inland is another thing that has taken a little getting used to - but at least my clothes dry out. Living outdoors is undoubtedly easier in the semi-arid zone. Few annoying insects, gear can be left around without getting wet, mould doesn't grow on everything.

I say few annoying insects. One night, there were locusts annoying me in large numbers. Thinking laterally, I heated up some oil in a pan and collected about a dozen of the critters. After cutting the spikey legs off, I fried them up to crispness and seasoned them with some salt and pepper. They were actually quite good. Very crunchy, like prawns with the shells on. They go pink when cooked too! Not an unpleasant taste. I'll take some photos next time.

The Muttaburrasaurus, assorted fossil and mineral exhibits at Hughenden were spectacular, and I found out about a spot just out of town where I picked up a bunch of Belemnites from the surface (Belemnites are a type of cephalopod like ammonites and nautilus).

At Richmond, the marine dinosaur exhibit (Kronosaurus Corner) is really very good. Amazing to see the size of some of these beasts - the 11 m long Kronosaurus, with 30 cm long teeth must have been a terrifying beast in its day.

I headed out to Richmond common to do some fossil-hunting. I must have moved about a ton of rock, though I had only a little luck - there was plenty of stuff though most of it was mish-mashed shells and fish bones. I did find some sort of jaw that I'm yet to identify, it could be interesting.

Since Richmond I've driven through Julia Creek to Cloncurry, where I turned northwards, reaching Normanton today.

Dunny frog with a difference

2009-06-17T13:07:00.001+10:00

Walked in to one of the public loos in Ravenshoe early in the morning and saw a frog sitting on the paper towel dispenser. No biggy right? There are always frogs in loos.

The interesting thing was the species of frog - it was the beautiful green-eyed frog, Litoria serrata. Something of a different habitat to the rainforest streams it tends to inhabit.

Ah, the Wet Tropics...

Playing Possum

2009-06-17T13:06:00.001+10:00

Driving through the tablelands on my way south/west, I happened to pass a national park sign that rang a bell in my head - Mt Hypipamee. Last time I was up on the tablelands I didn't get there, but the reason I was suddenly excited was that it's supposed to be the place for spotlighting. It was afternoon already so I pulled in and decided to wait for dark and try my luck.

Most people know this park by it's unofficial title - The Crater. Easier to pronounce than the real name. While I waited I wandered out to take a look at the famous formation.

I was, needless to say, rather impressed. The sheer drop down to the water is about 60 m, and apparently the water tunnel goes down about 80 m before making a turn and continuing. The structure is a diatreme - formed by an explosive eruption of gas.

When darkness fell I donned my torch and went out for a look around. There was certainly lots of eyeshine though most things were high up in the canopy and my light wasn't sufficient to give me a good look - and I didn't really know what I was seeing anyway. I tried taking some photos but they turned out rather rubbish.

Luckily, my night was saved by some kindred spirits who pulled up in to the parking lot. A bunch of wildlife enthusiasts like myself out for a spot. I tagged along and was not only able to see a bunch of animals thanks to their spotlights, but they knew what everything was! Luckily I was able to show them a splendid leaf-tailed gecko (Phyllurus platurus) camoflagued on a lichen-covered trunk that I'd spotted earlier, so I didn't look like a complete klutz.

The next day I drove to Mareeba to avail myself of a sweet little spotlight, drove back to Mt Hypipamee then fiddled with my camera to work out the best methods (my flash is still playing up after its swim in Little Crystal Creek). I was ready for the night to come...

The first possum I spotted was the green ringtail.

Lemuroid ringtails were common too.

It took a bit of looking around but I eventually found a Herbert River ringtail in a nice position to photograph.

Three ringtail possum species and not one common ringtail! The only other possum I spotted was the common brushtail. Alas, no tree kangaroos or striped possums, but I guess one can only be so lucky. I heard the screech of a Sooty owl on a few occasions, perhaps that scared them off!

Six Months in

2009-06-14T09:11:00.002+10:00

Whilst up at the tip, I celebrated six months since leaving Sydney! How time flies.

So how about some general statements about how my travels are going so far?

Pretty much exactly as I'd envisaged, really. I'm having a wonderful time.

I've seen loads of fantastic animals. Swum in beautiful creeks. Walked through varied forests and hopped on rocks of many origins. Met and connected with interesting, lovely people. Shopped in hundreds of towns. Spent rather a lot of money on diesel. Stood in awe of a multitude of views. Learned, experienced, witnessed, explored.

Not all those who wander are lost.

Time to head West! I'm going to take the Savannah Way over on my way to Riversleigh!

The tip!

2009-06-14T09:01:00.001+10:00

Along the way to the tip, anyone we met travelling in the opposite direction told me "Punsand Bay. Stay at Punsand Bay". So I headed for Punsand. It turned out to be a really nice place to spend a few days and see some of the local attractions. Of course, a visit to the 'tip' was mandatory.

View from the tip

One funny thing about the tip is it's a stone's throw distance from two big islands to the north - Eborak and York islands.

Text reads: "You are standing at the northernmost point of the Australian continent". In case you hadn't realised and just happened to stumble onto the place.

One peculiar epiphytic plant growing in wet sclerophyll forest which I saw from Iron Range north is this one - the Ant Plant. I've seen it previously in Papua New Guinea. The bulbous base is a honeycombed structure, providing a home for ants which presumably protect the plant from insect predators or some such. I've also heard that there's a type of butterfly which lays its eggs on this plant, and the caterpillars are tended by the ants.

The track!

2009-06-14T08:09:00.001+10:00

I'm back in Cairns after about a month's journey up to the tip and back. I've already posted about Iron Range and I'd probably still rate that as the highlight of the journey.

Spent a couple of days in Weipa - resupplying etc. Sunsets over the gulf sea... bauxite... mining haul trucks...

Another interesting experience was doing the old telegraph track. This is one of Australia's best known 4WD tracks, and has a reputation as being pretty difficult. Originally I wasn't going to attempt it, but everywhere I went, 4WD enthusiasts encouraged me to give it a shot. I 'had to do it'. I met up with one fella in a Nissan Patrol which he'd converted into a tractor-like vehicle and decided that doing the track with him was a pretty safe bet. It turned out to be a really fun couple of days. There are several interesting creek crossings, some of which feature some rather large holes that one must endeavour to avoid.

The Belafonte performed magnificently, taking me through deep water, around big washouts and ruts, up and down slippery slopes... the only places where she faltered were two muddy bog-holes, the tyres just spinning ineffectually. Luckily the Patractor pulled her out effortlessly. Hey, at least it gave me a chance to use that snatch strap that's been sitting in the car gathering dust! I heard of one other bloke who had to get pulled out 18 times on the track!

Part of the track passes through Heathlands - an interesting area dominated by, you guessed it, heath. The creeks here looked really fantastic. Heath grows on really infertile sand, and as a result, the runoff into the creeks is basically the purest, cleanest water you can imagine. About half-way up the track are the falls - Fruit-bat, Elliot and Twin Falls. These are simply spectacular. After travelling up the Great Dividing Range as I have, a waterfall has to be pretty special to rate anything more than a nod... but these falls were real standouts.

Fruit-bat Falls

Climbing pitcher plants and sundews grow beside many of the creeks in the area - carnivory is an adaptation to low soil nitrogen.

Climbing Pitcher Plant

After the falls I headed back on to the bypass road to reach the tip.

Jewel in the Iron Range Crown

2009-05-19T22:58:00.001+10:00

There's a well-known element of Iron Range that I haven't yet mentioned and I'm not talking about the birds. Those herpetologically inclined will have noticed its absence. I'm alluding to what is surely one of the most beautiful snakes in Australia, if not the most. May I present the Green Python, Morelia viridis.

I spent a lot of time searching for these snakes and was duly rewarded. I'm sure the mini-wet I had helped, as I'm told they aren't nearly as active or visible in the dry season. I don't want to write too much about how I had success finding several individuals because as I understand it there's a significant problem with the poaching of these animals for the illegal pet market. What I will do is put an unreasonably large number of photos here because... really they are spectacular, incredible animals and I couldn't get tired of photographing them or even just going out and finding them to gaze at.

They have a distinctive way of resting in coils on branches and books will tell you they eat largely birds and are largely arboreal however I found most individuals either on the ground or just above it, in poses that suggested they were after terrestrial prey, perhaps the numerous rats that scurried around on the leaf litter. Interestingly, although I found individuals that were predictably in the same place on a few subsequent nights, I couldn't find them in the day time. I suspect that they either hide in dense undergrowth or go high up trees to 'hang out' in the day time.

It's an incredible green colour. Just stupidly bright green. At night they're visible from a long way away simply because they're the brightest things around. The ordinary rainforest greens dull into greys in comparison with this snake.

One remarkable aspect of the Green Python's biology is that for the first three years of its life, the young snake is not green with a white stripe, but yellow with pale, maroon-edged blotches. After seeing a few adults, I was really keen to see one of these juveniles, but when night followed night with no success, I became resigned to the fact that I could only be so lucky. I contemplated the fact that my standards were now stupidly high as I drove back towards my bed, after midnight. I saw a snake on the road ahead of me and thought I must be dreaming. There was the most beautiful, utterly perfect snake making its way across the mud.

Like the adult, the colour is just ridiculously bright. I took a lot of photos of this snake. When I awoke the next morning I went out to where I'd seen it and managed to locate it again, resting in that distinctive pose in the undergrowth. I proceeded to take a lot more photos. Over the next couple of days it only moved a couple of metres.

Wow.

When I told people I would be heading to Iron Range I joked that I was going there to see a green python and a cuscus. Little did I know how fortunate I'd be and that I would actually see these things and many more. The park has a lot to offer the naturalist and to be honest I personally would be happy spending more time there.

Frogging Iron Range

2009-05-19T22:57:00.001+10:00

I was, as I say, very lucky in Iron Range. The skies opened up, unseasonally, and dumped a good amount of rain while I was in the park, creating a mini-wet season just for me. Normally, considering that the park is closed for the duration of the wet season, it would be pretty hard to be there when frogs are active. And also luckily, I managed to get across the Pascoe River before the big rains that might make that crossing impassible.

Whilst wandering around by a creek I heard a noise that sounded a lot like one of the whistling microhylid frogs. After only a couple of minutes' searching, I found it and confirmed that it was indeed the Cape York Nursery Frog, Austrochaperina gracilipes. Nice little guy and I was to frequently hear its call piercing the night air throughout my stay.

I happened to also find the Bridled frog, Litoria nigrofrenata, whilst cruising the roads. This guy actually occurs through many of the areas I've already traversed in the wet tropics but strangely I've never managed to locate one until now.

Whilst a common and widespread frog, the Dainty Green Treefrog, Litoria gracilenta, seems to show quite a bit of variation over its range. I was surprised by the (to my eyes at least) very distinct looking 'version' of this frog that I came across numerous times in Iron Range.

However, my final frog discovery was to be the most exciting. When I was stopped by the side of the road for some reason I happened to hear a low croaking growl coming from a nearby temporary stream that had filled with water after a particularly hard downpour. A short search revealed it to be the northern species of Green Eyed Frog, Litoria eucnemis. If you've been reading for some time you'll remember the southern species Litoria serrata from down in the rainforests between Cape Tribulation and Townsville. Though the two species look practically identical, the call is distinct and a fair gap separates the populations.

It was great to see some really nice frogs after a bit of a 'dry' spell!

Iron Range - Arrival

2009-05-19T16:21:00.001+10:00

Iron Range. Chances are, if you're interested in any sort of animal in Australia, be it birds, frogs, reptiles, mammals, butterflies... you've heard of Iron Range. It's a sort of Mecca for Australian naturalists. It's home to the weird and the wonderful: in particular relatively recent immigrants to Australia from North of the continent, things that are restricted to just a tiny area (Iron and McIlwraith ranges, generally) of the continent - and there are an impressive number of these things.

Though it's a relatively small park, it contains the largest expanse of lowland rainforest in Australia. What was more surprising to me as I entered the park from the west was the heath - yep, genuine heath - not what I was expecting. If it wasn't for the strange sight of termite mounds emerging from the stunted vegetation, I could almost have been somewhere around Sydney.

Soon after leaving the heath I was in the aforementioned tall rainforest. Bizzarre. I was to spend six nights in this rainforest and have the luck to spot and get to know a heap of amazing animals.

After a short drive through the rainforest I spotted the first of these 'Iron Range Species' that I've mentioned - the Canopy Monitor, Varanus keithhornei. Impressively slender with a long, prehensile tail, this monitor species spends much of its time in the tops of trees and I was granted a display of its agility as it climbed from the treetrunk where I spotted it, up a liana and into the thin branches of the canopy.

Spotlighting that night I saw two individuals of the Spotted Cuscus - one of two cuscus species in the park. Check out the amazing tail!

I also caught a bit of eyeshine from a tree in a section of wet-sclerophyll forest which turned out to be yet another endemic - the Giant Tree Gecko (Pseudothecadactylus australis), a remarkable large gecko with adhesive pads on its tail.

Of course Iron Range is also home to many species with wide distributions and I saw a couple of common things too like Common Treesnakes (Dendrelaphis punctulatus) and Brown Treesnakes (Boiga irregularis) and a couple of beautiful Amethyst Pythons (Morelia amethistina):

I was feeling darn lucky but the best was yet to come...

Lakefield fishing adventures

2009-05-19T15:54:00.001+10:00

Hi folks!

I'm in Weipa at the mo, and as the last two weeks have been packed with excitement, I thought I'd try to write a bit about it all for my faithful readers.

A quick summary before I begin in detail - after heading to Cooktown I did a bit of exploring through Lakefield NP - travelling out through the Battle Camp road before turning north, just east of Laura. The top half of Lakefield was still closed when I went through there, so I had to go back down to the main road to continue northward. The next excitement was Iron Range, where I spent more than a week doing a lot of spotlighting and seeing some awesome stuff. But more on that later.

Lakefield was a bit of a strange park, to me. It's like a big fishing adventure park. If you see a car that doesn't have a boat on its roofracks, it's probably towing one. Practically every waterhole or deep river has at least one campsite along its banks, and I'm told the park is almost booked out all through the dry season. It's Queensland's second biggest national park, and it has one walk in it. A 4 km walk. And though I tried to find this track, it didn't appear to exist (understandably really, as the park had only just opened and it probably hadn't been cleared since the wet season).

I enjoyed my time there though. The billabongs and rivers are idyllic and I saw a bit of wildlife.

In brief, a few photos:

Spotted Python, Antaresia maculosa

Yellow-spotted Monitor, Varanus panoptes - these guys were very common and evidently had little problem with the abundant cane toads

Very nice campsite at the junction of the Laura and Normanby Rivers in Lakefield

Ammonite? Nautilus?

Hand-caught Cherubin

Dinner - a delicious delicious Cherubin

Merten's Water Monitor, Varanus mertensii

The Reef

2009-05-04T11:06:00.001+10:00

I spent a day out on the reef on a snorkelling cruise. We visited a couple of spots out at Opal Reef, about 1.5 hours out from Port Douglas.

It was, in a word, awesome. I had a fantastic time. I'm not going to try to describe it, my words would simply pale in comparison to the reality.

If you haven't seen the reef, you must. Do it. I actually wasn't expecting a lot, but truly, it was unforgettable.

Cape York time!

Caves to Coast

2009-05-04T11:01:00.001+10:00

After Undara I took a shortcut on a bumpy track north from Mt Garnet through to just east of Chillagoe. Like Undara, the Chillagoe-Mungana region is famous for its caves too, though they're of a completely different type - limestone.

I spent a couple of pleasant hours exploring the public caves (Pompeii and Bauhinia) which featured a couple of tight sqeezes and were surprisingly quite interesting, though of course it's always heartbreaking to see cave vandalism in any form.

I had things to do and while the area featured some magnificent limestone structures, I didn't really see a lot to recommend the region, so after a bit of spotting around the caves and rocks at nightfall, I jumped back in the car and pointed it in the direction of Cairns.

Random fact: Echidnas invariably make a lot of noise, rustling through the leaf litter and undergrowth, making one very excited with the possibilites. Then it turns out to be just an echidna.

Swimming the Lava tubes

2009-05-04T10:49:00.000+10:00

From Townsville I drove north then crossed the ranges west of Ingham on the Mt Fox - Lava Plains road. Quite an interesting drive, surprisingly dry country and savannah. I made camp at a nice little spot beside the Burdekin River - at this point it was only a fraction of the size of the mighty river it would become. I threw my yabby trap in the water and had enough for a good feed before long. There were areas of what looked like recent lava flows beside the river, and trees here and there had broken up the surface like pavement.

The night was a very cold one and with the combination of the dew-fall on the outside and the condensation inside the tent, I had a surprising amount of drying-off to do in the morning.

My next stop was not far off - Undara. Famous of course for its lava tubes. I'll provide a brief explanation for those not in the know. Quite recently - between about 8 million and 200,000 years ago - the area around Undara underwent quite a lot of volcanic activity as the crust stretched thin. One of the final volcanoes at this time was the Undara volcano, which oozed great quantities of lava. This lava would have followed a river bed and cooled and solidified around the edges and on top, while lava in the centre, insulated, could continue to flow. Eventually as the flow ran out (over 20 years or so), the molten lava would have just flowed out and away, leaving a tunnel. This tunnel is now the 'lava tube' system. Here and there, the tube roof has collapsed, allowing access to a number of separate tunnels.

Undara Lodge and the Savannah guides run tours which are the only way to visit the tubes, which are in a National park without public access. So I took a tour.

The diversity in habitat in the area means there is a good variety of species. The valley where the tube runs is a haven for dry rainforest in a sea of savannah. Rock wallabies enjoy the cool interior of tubes. Tree-snakes and pythons are regularly seen around the entrances when bat maternity colonies form.

One lucky thing about the timing of my visit was that the caves were flooded. This has only happened three times since the seventies. We actually got to swim in the waist-high water down through the black tunnels - a very cool experience.

I saw quite a bit of wildlife while at Undara - there are lots of macropods in the park, and I saw grey kangaroos, euros and antillopine wallaroos, the Mareeba rock wallaby, whiptailed wallabies and bettongs. I spotted a golden tree-snake on the tour too. I did a bit of frogging down at the flooded swamp and some spot-lighting on the rocky bluff, near the Lodge, but didn't turn up anything too exciting, just a pretty young brown treesnake that I regret not photographing.

Golden Treesnake, Dendrelaphis punctulatus

The Elusive Platypus

2009-04-30T15:57:00.001+10:00

As I mentioned in my last post, after leaving the farm I headed down south to Paluma where I volunteered on a JCU project studying platypuses. The researcher, Stephen Kolomyjec, is investigating platypus population genetics - how the platypuses in different areas are related to one another and the extent to which gene flow occurs between areas and that kind of thing.

So I spent a fairly relaxed week staying in Paluma and heading out to Hidden Valley every afternoon or morning to attempt to trap some platypuses. The valley is on the western side of the Paluma range and, because of the rain-shadow effect, is quite dry and covered in open sclerophyll forest. In the afternoons, at certain spots on the Running River, we would put gill and fyke nets in place then sit back and wait, checking the nets regularly. It got quite cold at night (once it got down to 10 degrees C) and I was really feeling it, being acclimatised to a much warmer clime!

Unfortunately my first hand experience didn't amount to much - we only caught a single female in our six nights of trapping! It was great to see and hold that one though. The fur and beak are really quite incredible.

Suspicious of mammals...

I did learn a lot about platypuses through chatting with Stephen, so I'll relate a couple of random facts that I found interesting.

- There's a gap in the distribution of platypuses between Mackay and Townsville

- FNQ platypuses are puny compared to their southern relatives - those from Tassie are about three times as heavy!

- The ear-hole is located right behind the eye

- Apparently you really don't want to get spurred by the males

- Body temperature is a cool 32 degrees C, so in the North overheating can be a real problem.

Though the platypuses seemed a bit thin on the ground, the area did seem rich in mammals. Squirrel gliders visiting tree wounds. Bettongs and bandicoots bounding around the undergrowth. Dingos howling in the distance. Some sort of dunnart-like thing. I even saw my second ever feathertailed glider zipping up a tree! And of course the ever-present brushtailed possum.

Reptile wise, it was a bit cold and the only thing of interest was this gecko which I've not identified yet due to laziness:

Pretty though! Frog-wise too it was a bit quiet, just a few common species around.

All in all it was a pleasant if rather uneventful week! After Paluma I headed back to Townsville for a night to meet a friend, then it was back on the road again.

Aaah, the camping life

2009-04-18T13:01:00.001+10:00

I was quite sad to leave my temporary home of Lakeland and hit the road again. On the one hand I see so much of unexplored Australia stretching out ahead of me but of course I'd really become close to a lot of people during the weeks I'd worked on the farm. I really started missing them as I drove the long highway.

I had a bit of an adventure soon after leaving - a car had lost control on the highway, skidded and spun and ended up in the ditch beside the road with three mangled tyres. The driver and four passengers were clearly drunk and obviously idiots, but they were 30 km from anywhere at 10:00 pm so I felt I had to give them assistance. First they wanted a jack. Obviously this wouldn't help them much. They then wanted a tow. I said that that would stuff the rims badly. The driver said he didn't care. So I towed their car (which made a horrible noise) on its rims for about 25 km to the nearest roadhouse (closed of course). As luck would have it I saw three snakes on the road as I was towing, but wasn't able to stop to have a look at them. The driver said that if I could give him a jump-start he'd be able to drive slowly on the dirt road from there to the aboriginal community. Another car pulled up, with some mates of theirs, and they all suddenly lost interest in their car and just began having a big old chat. I clipped on the jumper leads, started their car and drove off with barely a 'thank-you' - I was ready for bed and not in the mood to put up with their idiocy any longer. Still, what could I do?

Last night I camped at Davies Creek near Mareeba again and was reminded of the reasons I love the travelling and camping life. I reached the campsite in the late afternoon and had time for a swim in the cold water (rainbowfish, perch, turtles, shrimp) before setting up camp. I ate my dinner and enjoyed a mug of wine on the rock bed next to the creek as it got dark. Bandicoots began bouncing across the clearings and fossicking around the grass hummocks for a feed. I was lucky when another mammal streaked across a clearing to a patch of trees and rocks right next to me where I got a good look at it - a beautiful northern quoll! It regarded me from the shelter of a rock before shooting off across another clear patch to a different area of cover.

I went for a walk up the creek and encountered numerous waterfall frogs (Litoria nannotis) clinging to the cascades. Uperoleia mimula called occasionally from wet areas up the hill. It was a beautiful night and I felt keen to go on experiencing these sorts of things as I contine travelling.

Before I left lakeland I got an email about some volunteer work with platypuses down in the Hidden Valley area near Paluma next week so I've been getting that organised. Should be fun!

Life in the Bananas

2009-04-16T13:59:00.001+10:00

Wow - it's been two months since my last update! I apologise for this, though in my defense I will say that there hasn't been too much going on with me that would be of interest to my readership in general. I'll give a brief summary in any case.

Bob's Lookout near Mount Carbine

As I mentioned, I've been working on a banana farm at Lakeland (about three hours from Cairns or one from Cooktown). This town, where I live, is just a nice little place with a shop, a pub and a caravan park, and is inhabited largely by the foreign backpacker workforce of the farm.

The banana farm is pretty huge - employing about 100 people and with an output of something like 30-40 pallets of cavendish bananas every day (mainly shipped to Perth). My job - the job I did for every hour of the two months I've worked here - has been de-suckering. Bananas throw up lots of 'suckers' (small shoots) around their main shoots, and a plantation left untended would quickly become an impenetrable jungle. The job of the de-suckering team (consisting of about nine people) is to work along each row, armed with narrow spades, and chop out the suckers, leaving one or two in suitable positions at each plant to replace the current stalk following fruiting. It's a fairly tough job, physically, and it takes a bit of experience to get fast and efficient without missing suckers.

All in all I've got fond memories of my stay here - the work itself can be tedious but I have actually really enjoyed the lifestyle. The people here have really made it interesting - so many languages being spoken, different kinds of cooking, stories of diverse lives 'back home'. Most weekends I've driven a bunch of people to Cooktown for shopping and a bit of a swim somewhere on the way back, and we've done bits and pieces of exploring, fishing, swimming, building things, sharing food and opinions. Some people think that this town is boring though I have found my weekends to have been almost exhaustingly full.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked by the local primary school to come in and talk to the kids about frogs and I happily obliged, talking about what makes Australian frogs special, introducing them to some FNQ frogs and telling them a bit about Cane Toads. I was impressed that the kids - about a dozen of various ages - already knew quite a lot about frogs. They all had their own stories which they seemed more interested in than those I was trying to get across, but overall I think it went very well.

There have been some interesting animals in the paddocks too - good numbers of snakes including carpet and spotted pythons as well as some venomous snakes - I had a good look at a brown snake (though I'm not sure if it was a Western or Eastern Brown) that did a great aggressive display with a full-on puffed up throat and rearing s-shaped pose before it climbed a banana tree with surprising agility. I also saw what looked like a black whip snake one day. The most common frog in the fields is of course the cane toad - young toads especially love hanging around rotting bananas and feasting on the insects. Apart from those I've seen stony creek frogs, Ornate burrowing frogs, Green Treefrogs and Red treefrogs.

A few weeks ago when I was driving back from Cairns, I was lucky enough to spot a snake sliding off the road just before sunset. I pulled over and was very glad to see it was a black-headed python. This one must have had a bad day as it was really quite aggressive compared with the others I've found up around Darwin.

I'm hitting the road again this afternoon - I think I might actually head back up to Black Mountain for a night before going back through Cairns and then out to Chillagoe and perhaps Undara. The Cape York parks are set to open up in early May and I'm really looking forward to that leg of my journey.

Wish me luck!

Waiting for the Dry

2009-02-20T11:21:00.001+10:00

Driving back to Cairns from Cooktown, I called in on a banana farm at Lakeland (~80km west of Cooktown) to enquire about work. I'd heard about this farm from a few people, including workers from there that were out on the weekend swimming and fishing. They employ a big mob of people including lots of backpackers. The long and the short of it is that I'll be heading out there again this weekend to start work! As I said previously, I'll wait until the roads and parks open up north of here then head off - in the meantime I'll make a bit of money and probably do a little travelling on the weekends. So expect to see only the odd post here during this time.

I'll be living in Lakeland, where there is a... ermm... rather limited range of recreational activities. So I've spent some time here in Cairns scouring the second-hand bookstores and Vinnies for reading material. Incidentally, I'm thoroughly enjoying the reading I'm doing - I put time aside to read almost every day. Currently I'm working through four books: The Future Eaters (Tim Flannery), Emma (Jane Austen), Beasts in my Belfry (Gerald Durrell) and selected stories by Henry Lawson. I'm finding Future Eaters to be an immensely interesting and important read. It raises and ties together so many concepts to think about that I actually find quite relevant to the varied ecosystems that I've been spending time in. I keep asking myself why I hadn't already read this book!

Well, I suppose I had better cut to the chase and talk about some animals!

The most interesting thing I've seen recently is the barred frog from the Carbine tablelands - Mixophyes carbinensis. An interesting frog, smaller than M. coggeri and schevilli, and to my eye, coloured quite distinctly too. I found this species in a beautiful little upland stream in the rainforest - the water was filled with the impressively large tadpoles (which are almost black in the daytime and fade to a grey by night). They swam languidly or rested on the clean gravel.

I picked up the eyeshine of a couple of the adults which were sitting on the leaf-litter and was very glad to see them. With this sighting I've now encountered on this trip the entire range of Mixophyes species in Australia - that is M. balbus, fasciolatus, fleayii, iteratus, coggeri, shevilli and carbinensis. They're all beautiful, special frogs.

Curiously, only about 5 km away, heading down the mountain, I came across one of the mottled barred frogs, Mixophyes coggeri. It would be interesting to know whether there's altitudinal separation of these species or whether they actually co-occur (certainly not altogether unreasonable - indeed three Mixophyes species coexist at a single site in the Watagans)

Some of the other things I've encountered include four death adders in one night (Acanthophis praelongusi), elvers (young eels) and shrimp climbing up a waterfall, a couple of beautiful coiled Amethyst pythons sitting beside tracks and the ridiculous spectacle of amplexing Stony Creek Frogs (Litoria wilcoxii/jungguy). It never gets old. See the gallery!

Death Adder

The only other encounter of note was that with a branch sticking out of the bush that I failed to see one night as I navigated around a big washout. I was given the pleasure of changing a tyre with a torn sidewall at night and shelling out for a replacement. It'll be good to get some money in my pockets again from working at Lakeland!

Cooktown Surrounds

2009-02-16T12:05:00.001+10:00

The word from Cooktown is that the roads north of here are a bit dodgy, probably *just* passable at the moment, but most of the national parks are actually closed for the rest of the wet anyway. So, seeing as I still really want to see the rest of the tip, I'll probably try to find some work and settle for a couple of months before heading north once again.

I've explored a little around Cooktown and been to some interesting places. I drove out to Trevathan falls and camped the night there; this rates as one of the nicest waterfalls I've visited. I also added to my Quoll count here, seeing my third; this time it was the Northern Quoll, Dasyurus hallucatus. I saw two more individuals out at Black Mountain so they're obviously doing pretty well here!

I also spent an afternoon and a night out at Archer Point which was quite nice. I camped out on a headland, the landscape occasionally lit up by lightning, whilst a welcome breeze blew through my tent.

Down in one of the bays, hordes of soldier crabs moved over the sandflats, and I spent a little time photographing them. They were quite shy, and if followed, the mass of crabs would run away and individuals would corkscrew down into the sand until the entire regiment had disappeared.

I've also wandered around town a little, climbed Grassy Hill, visited the botanic gardens, drove out to Quarantine bay, swum at Annan Gorge... I'm yet to climb 'Mount' Cook though it's on the list of things to do.

Night on Black Mountain

2009-02-16T11:24:00.002+10:00

South of Cooktown is a tiny national park called Black Mountain National Park. There are actually two peaks to the 'mountain' of black boulders, with the highway passing between them. The boulders are granite - the remains of a big batholith that has been fractured, weathered and eroded over time - and encrusted with a lichen layer that gives them their black surfaces.

Black Mountain - Volley Country!

Incredibly, in this tiny area, scurrying over the boulders and sheltering within their cracks, are three vertebrates that occur nowhere else - a gecko, a skink and most interesting of the three, a frog.

The Black Mountain Frog, Cophixalus saxatillis is surely one of the most extraordinary animals in the wet tropics. It's a giant amongst the microhylids, with females reaching almost 5 cm long. And as you can see, the colour of these females is just beyond belief. The males are smaller, and less strikingly coloured (the ones I saw all were quite yellow, though I've seen other photos where they are simply mottled brown). [Edit - I suspect that these were just young females rather than males - they're just too yellow]

These frogs live on the edges of the boulder-fields, where there's a bit of vegetation, and I was startled by just how many of the delightful females I saw, festooning the rocks in certain areas. The males were less common for some reason. They are evidently quite good at climbing despite their rather pudgy appearance - I saw a few females climbing on tree branches alongside rocks.

Climbing Mt Sorrow

2009-02-14T12:37:00.002+10:00

Whilst at Cape Tribulation, I had to wait for low tide to cross the Bloomfield, so I headed up the Mount Sorrow Ridge trail. Though it's only a 3.5 km walk up to the top, it's a climb of about 680 m and it's another spot where the information signs are basically trying to dissuade you from trying to do the walk at all.

It was a fun walk. I sweated buckets and was soon completely saturated. I reached the top, which is unfortunately a lookout with no shelter from the sun, and it was an unusually clear day, so there wasn't much opportunity to cool down. There was, however, respite from the leeches which had been climbing up my boots in huge numbers for the duration of the climb. Every few steps I had had to stop and flick them off. There were also many, many spider-webs that I continually walked through, and these I also had to remove lest I become encased in a silken sarcaphogas.

On the way down, I ran into another walker about a kilometre from the top. He was exhausted, the sweat pouring off his forehead. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that he was German. He wanted to know how far it was to go and I told him he had the worst of the climb ahead of him, so he seemed keen to take a break and have a chat. His name, I found out, was Robin.. It transpired that he was a fellow biologist so we talked about some of the things we'd spotted.

"Did you see the goanna on the way up?" I asked. He had.

"Have you seen a Boyd's yet?" He hadn't. I'd seen one the night before, sleeping down near the start of the track.

It was his turn - "Did you see the peppermint stick insects?"

I hadn't seen them. They live on, and eat, Pandanus and I just hadn't been on the look-out for them.

Our conversation drifted to other topics and my eyes strayed off to the side of the track. Just ten metres away, on a buttress root, was perched a Boyd's dragon! I was very pleased to point it out to Robin, and left him to photograph it as I continue down the ridge.

Only a few hundred metres down I came across a pandanus plant, evidently heavily chewed. It didn't take long to find a couple of the Peppermint stick insects that Robin had mentioned. These beautiful insects have a milky defensive secretion which they squirt from nozzles behind their head. It smells, as you may have guessed, like peppermint.

I continued down to the base of the ridge, very satisfied with my pleasingly symmetrical little encounter.

North from Cairns (cont...)

2009-02-14T12:26:00.001+10:00

I forgot to mention the frogging! Around Cape Trib I did a bit of walking around at night and managed to find another species new to me. There were heaps of White-lipped Treefrogs calling from the swampy creeks, as well as the odd Mottled Barred Frog (Mixophyes coggeri), Green-eyed Frog (Litoria serrata) and Stoney Creek Frog (Litoria wilcoxi).

I heard a strange sound which, from a distance I thought was perhaps a flying fox complaining somewhere. When I realised it was coming from a creek, I ventured in and found a wood frog, Rana daemeli. This species is the only one in the Ranid family (which includes the European edible frogs) in Australia - another recent migrant from the North.

Apart from the frogs, the other thing of note was another nice Amethyst Python sliding off the boardwalk into the rainforest.

North from Cairns

2009-02-14T12:09:00.001+10:00

After Cairns I headed up through Mossman, with a quick trip to Mossman gorge, then up through the Daintree to Cape Tribulation.

This natural beauty of this area is a bit ridiculous, really. The creeks are just perfect. The water is clear as glass, with a clean granite gravel substratum; birds-nest ferns, mosses and palms line the banks.

Similarly the beaches are spectacular. At the high-water mark a diverse range of interesting seeds, pods and bits of driftwood are deposited and I spent quite some time just poking through the strange assortment.

I went on a few little board-walks through the mangroves and there were some strange things there. Mangroves with buttress roots. Mangroves with huge, cannonball-like seed pods. Others with boat-shaped, keeled pods. Mangrove roots that emerge from the mud, do a U-turn then plunge back into the muck. And if one stops and watches, the huge number of crabs silently passing detritus from claw to mouth becomes apparent.

After staying the night at Cape Tribulation, I continued up the Bloomfield track to Cooktown. This road, 4WD only, has several creek crossings as well as a crossing of the Bloomfield river which should only be attempted at low tide when there's not much water flowing. It was an interesting drive and I was lucky that the road was open and the conditions good - the deepest creek crossing would have been about 60 cm; much more than that and I'd be getting pretty nervous.

At the end of the day I pulled into the Home Rule Rainforest Lodge to camp, a nice place on the edge of Cedar Bay National Park.

Bad Boyd's

2009-02-09T14:48:00.001+10:00

Boyd's Rainforest Dragons (Hypsilurus boydi) are great. They're just spectacular animals. Quite bizarre and beautiful. I guess they're one of those things that herpers and other nature-nuts such as myself just *have* to see when they're in the Far North.

I'd been only partly satisfied by seeing them at night - and I did this quite frequently. They're just asleep, stretched out and boring, so I'd been keen to see one in the daylight. On a number of occasions, I'd see one or two at night, then go back and have a look in the morning, but never find one. I did see one in the daytime a week or so ago, then went to grab my camera and when I came back the thing had scooted off and couldn't be found.

Just a couple of nights ago I spotted a two at Lake Euramoo, then of course couldn't see a single one the following day.

But it was destined to be a good day for dragons. At Mobo Creek I was doing the short walk when I reached the creek which was flowing over the track a little too enthusiastically for me to continue. As I turned around I spotted a dragon perched on a tree just a couple of metres away so I whipped out the camera and got some shots just as a mosquito landed on its head.

Just a couple of hours later I saw another, this time when I was wondering around at Lake Barrine. Both of these guys were totally fine with me taking photos of them.

To me these dragons are a bit like the green-eyed frogs (Litoria serrata) I suppose. Beauty in a subtle, rather than flashy form. And I can't get bored of seeing them or taking photos. Hope you enjoy them too!

Atherton Tablelands

2009-02-09T14:32:00.001+10:00

Just got back from a bit of a trip out west of Cairns on the Atherton Tablelands. I looped out through Kuranda, stayed at Davies Creek, visited Emerald Falls before heading down to another campsite at Lake Tinaroo, then to the lakes Barrine and Eacham, Curtain Fig then headed down the Gillies Highway to camp in the Goldborough Valley.

Davies Creek is a nice area - it's all sparse Eucalypt country and I found myself reminded of Litchfield NP in the Territory. Similarl at Emerald Creek Falls. I thought to myself that it looked like good frilly country so was keeping an eye out even though I wasn't sure they were there and sure enough I spotted one on the road.

These guys (Frilled Dragons) have a very typical, predictable behaviour and the one I came across acted absolutely to-the-book. You can drive right up to them and they show no concern. But the moment you step out of the car they see you as a threat and race off the road. This one hit the grass on the roadside at speed and I thought it was gone for good but I also had my suspicions about a small eucalypt trunk. Sure enough, it had climbed up around the back of the trunk where I couldn't see it, and after a bit of hide-and-seek I got a fairly poor photo of it.

Camping at Lake Tinaroo I did a bit of night-driving to see what I could find. I was pleased to finally find another of the Barred frogs up here, this time Mixophyes schevilli. Distinct from the coggeri that I've been seeing in that the head/back stripe is solid, while mottled in the latter species. Now I only have carbinensis to go and I will have 'collected' them all!

The rest of my tablelands trip was fairly uneventful - the lakes, though beautiful, are very touristy. I wanted to swim around Lake Eacham but I'm not supposed to because of my fresh tattoo. Curtain Fig is pretty cool, so is Cathedral Fig. Did a bit of spotlighting but failed to see a tree-kangaroo, or anything really except for a brush-tailed possum (got me excited for a minute) and the ever-present bandicoots. I hear The Crater is the place to go for spotlighting.

Cairns

2009-02-09T14:31:00.001+10:00

I mentioned that I was supposed to be heading out to Undara on a vertebrate trapping trip. Well, there's been some pretty serious flooding and road closures etcetera so I was waiting to see if that would happen while getting a couple of things done in Cairns.

Some interesting things I did:

- Got a tattoo. My first one, it's a treefrog climbing up my forearm. I spent a day or so working on the design. You'll see me not-so-subtly showing it off in some self-shot photos from now on!

- Watched the mudskippers and fiddler crabs from the Esplanade. There were also some things with feathers there.

Mudskipper. These things are HUGE!

Fiddler Crabs

- Got my air-con fixed.

- Stayed in a YHA.

I've just learned that the Undara trip is postponed for a few weeks so I'll be heading up further north from here.

Those troublesome microhylids

2009-02-09T14:00:00.001+10:00

Microhylids. I have a sort of love/hate relationship going with them at the moment. While they are quite cute, they are also terribly small, hard to find (when they're calling), and hard to identify without knowing the call. I've had some luck finding a few of the little buggers by rolling rocks and logs, so I'll have a go at some IDs.

This one was on Mt Windsor, under a rock. Very nicely coloured! I'm going for Austrochaperina pluvialus, the Rain Whistling Frog.

In the Mt Lewis area. I suspect it was a young one. Luckily the blonde cap, elbows and ankles gives it away as Cophixalus aenigma, the Tapping Nusery-Frog.

Also at Mt Lewis, probably C. aenigma again.

And finally another Austrochaperina... I'm thinking it's either fryi or robusta. Hard to say which, they're very similar species.

Bits and bobs

2009-02-04T14:54:00.001+10:00

- I have a backlog of microhylids to identify. Most of them were found under rocks and logs so it's hard without hearing the calls.

- Went for a lovely walk yesterday in Barron Gorge National Park. 17 km all up, taking in lots of rainforest which transitioned with wet and even dry schlerophyll forest in a very cool way. A few interesting creek crossings and a great lookout from 'Glacier Rock' which quickly clouded over before I could get a photo. The giant Kauri pines growing beside the track were impressive!

Kauri Pine

- Leaf-tailed Gecko, Saltuarius cornutus. Nice!

- My Greek mate Nic Dymistes

- This is why they call it the Green Eyed Frog (Litoria myola). I'm just a total sucker for these frogs.

Cool critters

2009-02-04T14:34:00.001+10:00

Just a couple of quick notes on some animals.

I spent the morning's pit-toilet excursion reading my Menkhorst on Quolls. As 'H' pointed out, the one I saw was not a northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus), but rather the spotted-tailed or tiger quoll (Dasyurus maculatus). The species has a disjunct distribution - the southern subspecies (maculatus) only comes up to around southern Queensland, while the endangered northern subspecies (gracilis) occurs only in the wet tropics. D. maculata gracilis is smaller and more lightly built than maculata - in line with my experience as the one I saw down at New England was much chunkier than the one up here.

Speaking of mammals, I also have seen a couple of ~~guinea pigs~~ bizzare little macropods, the Musky Rat-Kangaroos. So far haven't had a good look or the chance to get a photo.

I've spent a couple of days near Kuranda at Speewah campsite. The green-eyed frogs near Kuranda are interesting; they're actually in a hybrid zone between two lineages of Litoria serrata, making them a distinct species, Litoria myola. There's not too much difference between the two species. But seeing as I think I was in the right area, and the call sounded more excited than the serrata I've heard, I present you with what I'm going to call Litoria myola!

Litoria myola

The wet tropics, in the wet season

2009-02-04T14:19:00.001+10:00

I've been north of Mackay for a couple of weeks now and I thought I'd better record some of my impressions of the wet tropics before I become too used to everything to notice any more.

1. Things that can hurt/bite/sting/scratch/annoy you

This is a HUGE topic up here, I could write a whole post on it. A whole book even! A (no doubt incomplete) list:

- Lawyer vine - also known as "Wait a while", this rather malicious climbing palm has long tendrils that hang down from its spikey stems. The tendrils are covered with recurved hooks, for some reason. As you walk through the rainforest these tendrils can be quite hard to see. If you do see one in your path it's often at the last moment and you do a matrix-bullet-dodge sort of maneuver. Often you get hooked without realising, and about two steps later you feel the hooks digging into your flesh, or your clothes, bag or hat. You freeze as if you've just walked into a booby-trapped tripwire, then slowly and carefully walk backward those same two steps until you can unhook yourself. Oh, and the leaves are also covered in hooks. Nasty plants.

- Mosquitoes - Worst down on the lowlands, sometimes there are none at all in the rainforest, which is nice

- March flies - very common, very annoying in the daylight hours. Surprisingly hard to kill.

- Sand flies - haven't encountered these too much except down around Airlie Beach.

- Leeches - these are some of the worst things here in my opinion. I get them a lot from walking and wandering around in the rainforest. Though when they start piercing you can generally feel a prick-like pain, they tend to go for spots where you're already cut, or a leech has got you before, and I tend not to feel these ones so end up with a couple of bloody spots. Though the bite itself isn't that bad, I get lots of swelling the day after and it's damn itchy for days.

- Ants - Got a lot of bites once when tiny red ants invaded my tent (either in search of dry shelter or to clean up the dead march flies).

- Spiders - Spiders are so rarely a menace, but yesterday I felt a little sting and felt under my shirt to find a tiny spider that had obviously taken a dislike to me.

- Ticks - I've only had a couple of larval ticks but these guys leave an irritating itchy lump too.

- Scrub Itch - Generally under the belt. Itchy.

- Stinging Tree - Haven't been stung yet but these buggers are like Triffids, always lurking in the bushes next to the walking track or road, waiting for you to stray from the centre of the path... I hear that bad stings last a long time, getting irritated every time you get cold water on the sting site.

- Bullrout - this is a freshwater stonefish. Not sure how common these are up here in the Far North, but I saw a few down near Mackay. When I was 12 or so I stepped on one. Incredibly painful!

I generally have a gallery of a few of these things somewhere on my body. There's also a plant that can burn you, apparently.

2. The Rainforest

I know, I know. It's a cliche. I almost feel bad for saying it. But... really, the rainforest is fantastic. Apart, of course, from all the things that I've just mentioned above. It's the green. The palms and epiphytes. The insects. The mammals. The birds. The noises. The creeks. The frogs!

3. Rain, and being wet.

This is another 'fact of life' in the wet tropics. You will get wet. Frequently. You will often stay wet. If you wear a rain-jacket to keep the rain off, you'll sweat so much in it that you're pretty well wet anyway. If you're inactive in the pouring rain, especially at altitude, you can get pretty cold so a raincoat is good for keeping the warmth in. If you're walking, you'll likely be pretty wet from sweat and brushing past wet foliage, no matter what you wear. Your shoes and socks will be soaked through most of the time. Everything goes mouldy or at least starts to smell a bit. Or a lot.

4. Rain, and roads

It rains. Roads flood. Roads get closed. Towns get cut off. It's the tropics mate!

5. The *not* Rainforest

I haven't spent too much time on, say, the coast, or the lowlands. Is it all just cane fields? I know that when I'm on the highways down on the coastal strip, I generally just gaze at the cloud-enveloped ranges to the west. One thing I have yet to do is watch some mudskippers, these guys are great fun.

6. The frogs

Have I mentioned the frogs at all? It's fantastic. They're just so revved up!

7. The influences

It's interesting how there are things in nature up here that are very Australian - things with obvious analogues elsewhere in the country. Like the orange-thighed treefrog, Litoria xanthomera, obviously closely related to the red-eyed treefrog, Litoria chloris. But on top of these things are the influences from the north - Papua New Guinean and Indonesian influences. These are the things that are very weird and interesting, like the microhylid frogs, things like the green-eyed frogs (Litoria serrata), tree-kangaroos, cassowaries and the like. I'm sure it's the same with the plants though don't know enough about that.

By no means a definitive list, I'm sure I'll add more as I go!

Poor photos of cool critters

2009-01-27T12:21:00.001+10:00

Just been hanging around the Tully/Innisfail tablelands region for a few days. I've been very lucky with some of my recent sightings. Of course, some of the things I've been seeing are very hard things to get good photos of, but in the spirit of documentary, here are a couple of photos as 'proof' that I saw them:

Striped Possum

Northern Quoll

And also some cool critters that I got less bad photos of:

Chamaeleon Gecko (Carphodactylus laevis)

Weird gecko with hilariously carrot-shaped tail.

Cassowary with two chicks

And I didn't run them over! Hurrah!

Giant (possum-sized, scary) white-tailed rat

Boyd's Rainforest Dragon (Hypsilurus boydii)

Been hoping to see one of these guys... very handsome. Still want to get one in the day though!

Amethyst Python (~3m long)

Scared a couple of German ("Cherman") tourists with this one!

I'd love to write more but I'm off for a week of driving around the rainforests with JCU kids!

Non-frog

2009-01-22T16:53:00.001+10:00

Apart from the frogs I've seen, a few quick notes on other things animal, mineral or vegetable:

- Went up Mt Bellinden-Kerr. I was very lucky to get to do this, helping with some research on carabid beetles at different altitudes. There's a broadcast station near the summit, so we got to go up the 1600m by cablecar, then headed back down to 1000 m and walked to the top again before doing 1400 and 1600 m sampling the following day. No-one except broadcast engineers and the odd scientist gets to go up this mountain, one of the highest in Queensland. It was simply amazing, all of it. The cablecar ride was much fun. The forest on top was very strange, a sort of alpine rainforest. Big old gnarled Leptospermums. Dr Seuss-like Dracophyllum plants. It was cold. Cloud-covered most of the time, except when we woke in the morning to killer views over the valley to the west. Bright orange snails cruised the permanently wet tree-trunks.

(I know someone who'll like this one)

- Saw my first wild Onychophoran (Peripatus)!

- Other cool invertebrates - strange snails and Katydids,

- Amethyst python, Morelia kinghorni. Didn't get a great pic though...

- Lots of swimming in rainforest creeks. Beautiful. Lots of fun with the volume of water heading down...

- Have fallen in a couple of creeks. I can't really expect not to, I suppose, considering the stuff I do.

- Having fun in the rain! Bit tricky keeping things dry though, most of my stuff has a few little mould-spots here and there.

Of course I've left heaps of things out, but now I must mount my faithful steed and spur her on into the setting sun...

Photos of some of the things I've mentioned, and some other things I haven't, are in the gallery as always, be sure to check it out. In the meantime here's a shot of the rainforest canopy from above

Green!

Frogger's paradise continued

2009-01-22T16:31:00.001+10:00

I did a bit of frogging on the lowland areas close to Big Crystal. Things felt more familar down here, much like the floodplain areas around Fogg Dam that I got to know so well. Things like the Rocket Frog, Litoria nasuta and the Marbled frog, Limnodynastes convexiusculus. There was even something that reminded me of some sort of cross between Litoria dahlii and Cyclorana australis - that is, the striped burrowing frog, Cyclorana alboguttata.

But it was when I headed back into the rainforest, this time west of Innisfail in Wooroonooran national park that I would be again surprised by the frogs.

The Australian Lace-lid. Nyctimistes dayii. I'm sure I don't need to say much about why these little frogs excite me. The huge black eyes. The veined iris (hard to get a photo of...). The fact that they're a treefrog that isn't a Litoria. I'm blown away.

I can't get enough of them.

The other cool thing was the Mist Frog, Litoria rheocola. A cute little stream frog.

Frogger's paradise

2009-01-22T16:19:00.001+10:00

Wow... I'm so amazed at all the frogs I've seen up here. I've been doing quite a bit of frogging and I'm starting to get a bit of a handle on what's out there - previously, the wet tropics frogs were just a big jumble in my mind, now it's just the microhylids that are a big jumble!

Before I start I'll quickly plug a book I just obtained a copy of - "Rainforest Frogs of the Wet Tropics" by Conrad Hoskin and Jean-Marc Hero. It's a fantastic book with a key, and a full page of text, plus a page of photos to each of the 33 frog species. One of the points that it's impossible to ignore, reading this book, is just how so many species have undergone dramatic declines or in some cases completely disappeared (particularly the high-altitude creek frogs).

I'll start with my first day's frogging - just north of Townsville at Paluma. Regarded as some as the start of the wet tropics rainforest. The township is up at about 1000m altitude, and the road from the highway winds its way up the range crossing numerous creeks and cascades as the vegetation changes from sclerophyllous at the base, with Eucalypts, Banksias and Casuarinas, to proper rainforest at the top. Half-way up the road is Little Crystal Creek which was swollen by the recent downpour into a raging torrent. I stopped on my way up for a quick squiz in daylight and found several Waterfall frogs (Litoria nannotis) in a side-stream. These guys are bizzarre - living on the rocks in creeks where they're splashed by waterfalls. They're easily disturbed and will jump into the rushing water only to emerge on a rock only a short distance downstream (they must be pretty capable swimmers to avoid being swept away).

I rocked up to Paluma and ate dinner whilst waiting for dark. The sounds of a couple of microhylid species started up in the rainforest and it was these I went after first. A bird-like whistling from the leaf litter was the Robust frog, Austrochaperina robusta.

It took me a while to find the origin of a creaking beep-like call, because its maker, the Ornate Nursey frog (Cophixalus ornatus) was calling from 50-100 cm off the ground, often in the forks of small tree-trunks.

I headed down the mountain and stopped at one of the first promising little streams. I had only climbed up a short distance when I heard a throaty "WHUT!". I thought to myself that it sounded like a Mixophyes fasciolatus on steroids. When I found the frog that was calling, it turned out that this was more or less what it was. Mixophes coggeri is like a bigger, more boldly, beautifully patterned version of the former species which occurs further south.

My good luck still hadn't run out as I soon spotted what is to me one of the most beautiful frogs in Australia, the Green-eyed frog (Litoria serrata, previously genimaculata)

Back on the edges of the road, the Orange-thighed treefrogs (Litoria xanthomera) had just started calling, including one with a curiously unpigmented left eye!

A little further down the mountain was the Stony Creek Frog, which up here is either Litoria jungguy or Litoria wilcoxii - the two species are impossible to distinguish in the field.

I had just seen seven frog species I'd never encountered before, several of which were substantially unlike anything I'd ever seen... as I said - paradise. The excitement was to continue yet...

Leeches: 2, Eyeball: 0 [caution: graphic]

2009-01-18T15:15:00.001+10:00

When I set out on this journey, I was in search of new experiences, adventure, discovery... Even though it admittedly fits these criteria, 'leeches on the eyeball' is not what I was thinking of.

The prelude to this story occurred a few weeks ago when I was chatting to someone about experiencing the wet tropics rainforest. I can't remember who told me about it, but they told the story of how leeches could climb onto one's face and crawl up under the eyelid, from where they suck blood out of the eyeball. I remember thinking that this was surely an urban myth and inwardly laughed with disdain at the idea.

So on Friday I spent most of the day in the rainforest up at Paluma helping with some JCU ecology projects. It was very wet, pouring down most of the time. I became aware of something in my right eye, as if I'd got something in it or perhaps brushed it on a twig or something. I gave it a bit of a rub but couldn't feel anything, it wasn't particularly noticable or painful.

About half an hour later I could still feel something. I casually asked my companion about the leech-eyeball story, as if I was just vaguely curious about the phenomenon. He was able to confirm that it did indeed happen, but that it was pretty rare - his supervisor had had one, but he himself had never had the experience. "Hrmm, ah, I think that maybe I have one". He had a look and lo and behold, there was a leech. On my eyeball. A leech on my eyeball. Under the eyelid. It was visible if I swivelled my eye to one side. It was only a small one and I managed to dislodge it - it was almost completely engorged and it might have been making its way off anyway at that stage.

So I thought this was pretty amusing. Another half-an-hour to an hour later I felt something again! Suddenly a big (big!) leech crawled out of my eye and dropped off, also completely engorged with nutritious eye-fluids. It felt nice and relieving when it was gone, as you'd expect I guess. This leech's exit was followed by a slight bit of bleeding into the eye, but apart from that there it felt fine. I thought that was the end of that.

Unfortunately, I tend to get a bit of a reaction to some leech bites. I had one on my leg when I was down in the Watagans that swelled up like half an orange. So I awoke on Saturday morning and could hardly open my eye. The eyeball itself was swollen, as well as all the eyelid region. My sight was fine if I strained to raise the eyelid and it was completely pain free. I took a couple of paracetamol for the swelling (didn't help at all) and just put up with it.

When I woke up this morning (Sunday) it was even more swollen, much harder to open eye. Still painless and my sight is still fine! You can see in the photo below how the white of the eyeball itself is red and swollen (who knew that was even possible!). So, I drove myself (carefully, considering the whole one-eyed depth perception issue) to Towsville hospital where I now sit awaiting medical attention. I suspect I'll just have to sit it out, but there's not much else I can do without the use of my favourite eye.

On the plus side, I've been given a great conversation starter... I can see when people notice it and they're sort of afraid to say anything, but I take any opportunity to boast about it. Most are really grossed out. Some probably think it's an excuse I came up with and that I'm really the victim of domestic violence. I caught a little kid staring at me in the hospital waiting room so I opened my eye up as much as I could manage and gave him the full treatment - he hid behind his mum.

And now, in conclusion, the photo you've all been waiting for... taken yesterday:

Leach-bitten eyeball. Ooooh yeaaaah!

Update: just got seen by the doctors. They thought it was pretty cool. I've been given some antibiotic drops and told to take some antihistamines for the swelling. They say the bleeding ('subconjunctival haemorrage') should take quite a while to clear, but the swelling should go down in a few days.

By the way, I've had some very exciting frogging recently, I'll write some updates on that another time... For now, it's to the road again!

The Ville

2009-01-15T10:21:00.000+10:00

I've had to kill a bit of time in Townsville waiting for the weather to die down. A summary:

- Visited the Aquarium. Quite nice! Some very interesting creatures, like the stonefish, olive seasnake and the nautilus, and really pretty reef displays. Would have been great to see more freshwater stuff.

Scorpionfish

- Ran up Castle Hill. This is a big granite outcrop in the centre of town. It was pouring down and incredibly windy up on the top. Standing on the lookouts, grasping the steel barriers was such an invigorating, exhilirating experience, with the wind racing up the cliffs and whipping the rain onto my skin and into my eyes. I tilted my head back and let out a roar into the chaos. It was fantastic.

Most importantly, I've organised a bit of volunteer work with some of the good people of JCU. So, next week I'll be heading up Mt Bellinden-Kerr for a night or two to help with some invertebrate and leaf-litter samples (whilst searching for endemic microhylids...). Then I'll be doing similar things going up to Atherton - Kingfisher - Windsor - Mt Lewis - Mossman. After that I'm heading out to Undarra Volcanic National Park to do a bit of vertebrate trapping and surveying. Should be great fun!

Monsoon rain, wind, floods and all that

2009-01-15T09:57:00.001+10:00

Yes, I am still alive - I've survived the... fairly extreme weather conditions up here. For those that don't follow the meteorological conditions of the tropical north, the gist as I understand it was that Cyclone Charlotte came across from the gulf and flooded Cairns, it was coupled with king tides that did further damage... down here in Townsville we were affected by a big monsoonal trough that gave us gale-force winds and a fair amount of rain for a few days. Limited flooding but there have been plenty of road closures and impassible river and creek crossings.

Coral Beach, Conway National Park

But first, to backtrack a little... I had a nice though fairly uneventful trip from Mackay. My first night I spent at Conway NP which is in the Whitsundays region. That afternoon I went for a little walk down to Coral Beach and had a quick dip. Visibility was pretty poor though I saw a few nice fish and a couple of rays. There are no drive-in camping areas in the park so after dinner (kangaroo steaks, yum!) I shouldered my pack, donned my headtorch and walked the 2 km in to Swamp Bay campsite. Despite the name, it was very much worth the walk - it was awesome when I reached the campsite, dropped my gear on the coral-lined beach and looked out on the bay - lit up by the full moon peeking through gaps in the cloud.

Moonlit at Swamp Bay, Conway NP. 20 second exposure.

The following day I headed for Dingo Beach in search of some fringing reef I'd been told about (you know who you are!). It was a pleasant spot though the visibility was shockingly bad and even if there was some reef (I think further out than I went, as it was high tide) I wouldn't have been able to see it. I was tempted to go back to Airlie beach and get on a snorkelling trip out to the reef but I was worried that the water would be similarly turbid everywhere.

My next campsite was at Alligator Creek which is near Mount Elliott in Bowling Green NP, 30km south of Townsville. I was hoping to find some of the rainforest stream and microhylid frogs here but didn't have much luck finding any rainforest when I went for a walk in the evening. I did manage to slip off a rock and fall into the creek in a very uncoordinated way. I was fine, and even my camera gear survived a little bit of water.

I awoke in my tent to wind and rain. I had planned to do a long (17km) walk and then stay another night but the weather didn't make me too keen for this. Instead, I went swimming! A group of three Aussies on holiday turned up and we all had a great time in the creek in the pouring rain. It was a nice way to escape the mozzies. The creek had lots of good-sized fish: Eel-tailed catfish, different types of perch and grunters and some I couldn't recognise, as well as the smaller rainbowfish and gudgeons.

After sharing a couple of mugs of tea with my new friends I was informed that the creek just at the park entrance was coming quite strongly over the road and I decided that I should probably get out of there and seek some better shelter for the weather which was supposed to be pretty nasty for a few days. Luckily, a cousin in Townsville had generously offered me a bed if I needed it so I gratefully took him up on his offer.

Recent happenings

2009-01-09T09:53:00.001+10:00

After Blackdown I spent the night at Cape Palmerston national park a short distance south of Mackay. It was a funny story as I arrived quite late and drove for absolutely ages down a horrible track in search of a campsite. The sandy track kept going through big bog-holes, with nowhere to turn around and no campsite in sight. I thought I was going to get stuck at one stage, and my car got covered in stinky black mud. I eventually did turn around by driving into the bush between two trees, and when I got back to where I'd turned off, I found it was right next to a pleasant campsite just behind the beach! I ate dinner, set my tent and jumped into bed, listening to the surf just a hundred metres away and the wind buffetting the tent as I drifted off to sleep.

Since then I've spent my time with relatives - at a beautiful spot nestled up against the Clarke Ranges and Eungella national park near Calen, and a couple of days in Mackay. A few notes:

- Spent some time searching for the 'tinker animal' which I suspect is Taudactylus liemii, or Liem's Day Frog. The noise we hear is a musical 'tink tink tink' which is repeated only every five minutes or so in the daytime, making it very hard to locate. No luck finding the actual animal. They seem to be very sparse.

- Lots of swimming and snorkelling in the creek; beautiful water, rounded granite boulders, rainbowfish, blue-eyes, shrimp, turtles, gudgeons, catfish. I've seen a few Bullrout (freshwater stonefish) but managed to avoid stepping on any so far this trip.

- Big mobs of other frogs - Green Treefrogs in ridiculous numbers, Dainties, Red-eyes, rubella all going nuts in the dam. L. wilcoxii and Mixophyes fasciolatus in the creek.

- Spent a day out at the public side of Eungella; quite nice, beautiful rainforest, good walking. Didn't see any platypus but we weren't there at the right time for them.

- Eating lots of tropical fruit. Bananas in huge numbers of various varieties (it's a banana farm), lots of jackfruit (one of my favourites), mangoes, sapodillas (delicious), jabotacabas, papaya...

- Partying with hippies.

I'm going to head off again soon, continuing northwards. Seems like there's quite a lot of rain falling up here at the moment, could get a bit interesting...

And so it continues!

Blackdown Tablelands

2009-01-09T07:23:00.001+10:00

I thought I'd be able to get to Blackdown tablelands by Saturday night but ended up driving along seemingly endless, occasionally poorly maintained track for most of the day and decided it would be easier to just camp at the Baralaba campground to cut the drive short and head up in the morning.

Blackdown Tablelands from the road below

The tableland is quite impressive from the plains below, and looking up at it I was asking myself "How is a road going to get up there?" but as it turned out it was pretty tame. After driving to the Munall campground, I just felt like taking it easy for a while. What followed was what might sound like a bit of a boring day - snacking, reading, drinking various teas and coffees, having a snooze - but it was a nice place and I enjoy just fiddling around at camp sometimes and relaxing.

Leaftailed Gecko, Saltuarius salebrosus

The star of the evening was yet again a gecko species, this time another Leaftail, Saltuarius salebrosus. I spotted a few of these on a walk down one of the creekbeds. My wish for coolness was granted with quite a chilly, windy night. Strange weather! I hit the mattress pretty early with the alarm set for a ridiculous hour - I planned to walk out to one of the lookouts to greet the sunrise. My plan was foiled by cloud cover though I did the walk later in the morning. It was quite peculiar how the environment reminded me of Sydney sandstone bush - the sandstone creekbed, the fleshy Angophora costata trunks - it was only by looking more closely at some of the other plants that the differences became obvious.

Rainbow Waters

Another walk - this time to Rainbow waters - was very rewarding; it was a beautiful spot for a swim. I then drove around the 4WD loop which was also pretty interesting. One little animal of interest was a beautiful diurnal cockroach - a Platyzosteria species.

Platyzosteria sp.

Expeditioning

2009-01-08T16:52:00.000+10:00

Friday saw me head out to Expedition National Park. This park is fairly remote, 90km along a dusty road from the small town of Taroom. Not far along the route I stopped at Lake Murphy - a waterbody which forms in wet periods when the nearby Robinson Creek breaks its banks, creating a haven for waterbirds. There was plenty of water, and big mobs of black swans as well as ibis, stilts, cormorants and no doubt many others. The lake was christened by Leichardt when he camped beside it on his expedition north.

Lake Murphy

It was very hot; dry heat. The vegetation I passed as I drove was quite peculiar; savanah-like, with abundant Livistonia palms and Ironbarks. Starkvale campsite, where I stayed, was very pleasant. There had obviously been a big blow in the area not long ago - fresh fallen branches littered the ground. It was too hot for much walking so I headed out to take a look at the 'cattle dip' which is a permanent waterhole in a section of Robinson gorge. This gorge winds through the park, carved out of the sandstone by Robinson Creek. Whilst above, on the plateau, dry eucalypt forest dominates, the relatively moist gorge shelters palms, figs and other rainforest scrub species.

Cattle Dip lookout, Robinson Gorge

Despite its muddy waters, the cattle dip looked inviting, but finding a way down looked a bit too risky, considering the remoteness of the park.

That night frogging around the campsite I saw another new species for me, the New Holland water-holding frog, Cyclorana novaehollandii as well as plenty of Green Treefrogs (Litoria caerulea) and Ornate Burrowing Frogs, Opisthodon ornatus. A couple of geckos were around, including a 'Zigzag' Velvet gecko, Oedura rhombifer. Cool name.

New holland Frog, Cyclorana novaehollandii

Before leaving the park, I set off early on the walk to Robinson Gorge Lookout. A big tree had blown down at the lookout and several more had toppled down into the gorge. There were great views of the 100m sandstone walls.

From the lookout there's a more-or-less unmarked trail down to the gorge floor. No water was flowing, but the occasional muddy pool combined with the shade and trees made for a very pleasant, cool environment and I spent an hour or two just exploring down there and soaking up the ambience. At one point, while I sat, beautiful Carlia skinks with orange flanks and blue heads came out and foraged on the rocks and ground around me.

A couple of disappointing notes - firstly the cattle tracks through the gorge, secondly the numbers of cane toad tadpoles in the pools and little toadlets hopping around everywhere.

As the sun climbed, even in the gorge the temperature began to rise and I was chugging down my water. It was time to head back to the car, have a bite of lunch and hit the road, perhaps to somewhere cooler.

(Isla Gorge photo)

2009-01-08T11:52:00.001+10:00

Just uploaded another photo from Isla Gorge.

Sunset at Isla Gorge

The Bunyas to Isla Gorge

2009-01-08T11:09:00.001+10:00

The Belafonte's next stop was to be the Bunya mountains. On the way though, I missed a turnoff and while driving along the wrong road I saw a turnoff marked with "Muntaba Railway Tunnel" so I followed the signs and ended up at a little picnic area with some camp ruins, a loop walk and a little information panel. Apparently the tunnel was bored 287m through the top of the Great Dividing Range, a process taking 13 months around 1911.

I walked down to the tunnel to find it had gates at both ends (closed in winter) to protect the Bentwing Bats that roost there. Apparently the colony in winter has up to 8000 bats which mostly move away in summer, though there were large numbers (probably up to a thousand) there when I visited. I walked down the guano-lined tunnel very quietly but my presence was enough to disturb the bats, which flew off the ceiling and began milling around above me.

Bentwing Bats, Muntapa Railway Tunnel

The drive up in to the Bunya Mountains was very pleasant, passing through some majestic rainforest. In the Bunyas there are two large pine species - the Bunya, which tends to grow on the ridge crests while the Hoop pine grows on the slopes. The first walk I did was west of the crest and I was surprised to find that it went through mainly dry rainforest and vine scrub (with no pines!) rather than the moist rainforest that I had driven through. I camped at Burton's Well next to a hippy-type couple with whom I shared some tea and a baked banana with chocolate.

Natural Bald, Bunyas and Hoop pines

I rose and packed up early so I could do a nice-looking loop walk in the rainforest. I was rewarded for my early start as I hadn't gone far through the forest when I saw something hopping off the track. I approached silently and cautiosly and managed to have a good look at a Noisy Pitta, a nice looking and interesting bird which hops along the forest floor. I also saw piles of broken snail shells beside rocks - these are left by the Pittas which smash the shells and devour the contents. A bit further on I saw another of these birds as it flew off.

I ran into a ranger as I completed the walk and told him about the Pittas - he was quite surprised that I'd seen a couple as he'd been there for 12 years or so but had never spotted any! I guess that as a ranger he's normally making a fair bit of noise and the Pittas seemed pretty shy.

Rock Orchid, Bunya Mountains

The next leg of my journey was north then west to Isla Gorge via Chinchilla and Miles. When I reached Miles I saw a great display of petrified wood at the information centre, so I pulled over beside the road a little bit out of town to do an emu walk and managed to find a few pieces.

The grandiose Isla Gorge cuts a broad, complex maze through the plateau of the sandstone belt. I arrived at sunset - just in time to venture out along the spit that extends into the gorge, giving amazing views of the sun disappearing on one side of the gorge, and the cliffs of the other side lit up in pink and orange. The thunderstorms in the area added some drama to the scene. These storms came close throughout the evening, making for a windy dinner, though the lightning and rain never came too close. After darkness had fallen I walked back out along the spit with my headtorch and was rewarded by spotting a couple of the bizzare-looking Prickly Knob-tailed Geckoes, Nephrurus asper on the chalky, soft white sandstone.

Prickly Knob-tailed Gecko

Gecko night

2009-01-05T17:58:00.001+10:00

From Toowoomba I drove the short distance north to the campsite at Crow's Nest National Park. As dusk approached I set off on the walk to Crow's Nest Falls and plunge pool. This area has been hard hit by a few dry years though there had been a bit of rain that was enough to put a little flow in the creek and falls.

I arrived at the swimming hole below granite cliffs just as darkness fell, and after scoping it out for platypus, slipped into the black water for a dip. Around me I could hear rock wallabies thumping on the rocks, chasing each other and making little noises of aggression.

Thick-tailed Gecko, Underwoodisaurus milii

After my swim I donned my headtorch and began walking back to camp. It wasn't long before I heard a rustle in the leaf-litter - I checked it out and found a charming little Thick-tailed Gecko, Underwoodisaurus milii. A few steps further on, another rustle - this time Gehyra dubia. Then the 'Ocellated' gecko, Oedura monilis. Then another Oedura, this time Lesueur's Velvet Gecko, O. lesueuri (I think). I was quite dumbfounded at this high diversity of geckos in such a small area - I guess the combination of granite outcrops and dry forest was just perfect for them.

Ornate Burrowing Frog, Opisthodon ornatus

I spotted a couple of frogs too - the Northern Banjo frog, Limnodynastes terraereginae and a very sandy Ornate Burrowing Frog, Opisthodon ornatus. I also came across a large, impressive frog that surprised me despite my familiarity with it - the cane toad (Bufo marinus)! A few were calling from pools in the creek. From here on, Cane toads were abundant virtually everywhere I visited. It's always a bit disappointing to see them in so many varied environments and in such huge numbers, but it's also in a way a testament to their astonishing properties of survival and spread.

Just a quick hello

2008-12-23T11:03:00.001+10:00

I'm in Mackay - I don't have time to do any proper blogging at the moment but I just thought I'd check in and send my assurances that updates are coming (perhaps not till after Christmas though).

A quick log of my movements:

From the Border Ranges:
- Crows Nest
- Bunya Mountains
- Isla Gorge
- Expedition National Park
- (Baralaba)
- Blackdown Tableland
- Cape Palmerston National Park

Baking at the Border

2008-12-16T14:48:00.001+10:00

I spent the best part of the day at Sheepstation Creek in the Border Ranges, a very nice campground, perfect for relaxing after the previous days' exertions.

The highlight of the afternoon was cooking! I had a craving for some nice fresh bread so I got kneading. I made a foccacia and a big calzone and cooked them both in the camp oven.

I was very proud of my efforts and promptly went over to the neighbouring campers (a Brittish couple) to tell them about my achievements. As I chatted to them, a koala wandered across the campsite! The Brits were appreciative, but they just sort of thought that this kind of thing happens all the time in Australia!

The evening's search for frogs turned very snakey, with a Small-eyed snake and a Golden Crowned making an appearance. At Forest Tops, a fair sized carpet python had swallowed something like a big possum, bandicoot or pademelon and lay comatose in the grass, digesting peacefully. Also on the reptile front, I spotted four Leaftailed Geckos (Saltuarius swainii) on trees around Brindle Creek.

The following afternoon after a bit of driving I arrived at Goomburra in the Main Range National Park. The big highlight here was the Fleay's Barred Frog (Mixophes fleayi) in the creek beside the campsite. I saw 20+ of these endangered frogs, the males calling beside the creek (which was also full of tadpoles of the species). This sighting was another first for me!

Red-necked Pademelons were in huge numbers around the campsite, so if you ever want to see them, go there! I heard the screech of a Sooty Owl several times in the night, perhaps it will knock off a few.

After a very cold night I rose early and drove to Toowoomba, where I now sit. Time to look at the map and work out where to go next!

As always, make sure you check out the photo gallery for more pics

The ballad of Mt Barney

2008-12-16T14:24:00.002+10:00

I'd heard of Mount Barney a few times before. I somehow associated it with wild bushwalks. Driving to Yellow Pinch Reserve, with the mountain thrusting up into view before me, I began to get a strong feeling as I peered through the trees at it. I began to really want to climb it.

I was disappointed then when the information booth told me that it was a long, hard, unmarked walk and that walkers wishing to climb the summit must be super fit, experienced bushwalkers who would turn up at 7:00 in the morning and take 10 hours to climb it, after notifying friends and family where they were going, and carrying topographic maps, compasses around their necks, prepared for whatever freaks of weather nature would throw at them.

I reluctantly set off on one of the shorter walks that would take me south of the mountain. The track was along a fire trail and frankly, fairly uninteresting. After about 5 km or so the 'south ridge' trail started which went up to a campground near the summit. The sign said '6-8 hours return'. I surveyed my position.

- I really wanted to do the full walk to the summit
- I had a first aid kit, food, water and wet weather gear
- I had no detailed map
- I had a GPS and had marked the position of the car
- I was fit and healthy and had been doing quite a bit of walking lately
- The weather looked like it might rain/storm

And last but not least, it was already 1 o'clock in the afternoon, giving me only 6 hours of daylight (QLD time, remember).

I decided to nip up there and back.

Let it be known, for the record, that one empirically cannot 'nip up' to the top of Mount Barney and back. It was a pretty hard walk, considering that I was doing it very fast. It's a big climb and I did have to take a couple of short breaks. I gave it a pretty good shot though.

I made it to the top in about 2.5 hours. For the last section there is no track and it's basically a scramble up the rocks to the summit (this is the east peak). The view over the mountains and ranges in the area is fantastic, and the West Peak is very impressive too. The campsite in the saddle between the peaks looked like a very nice place to spend the night, with a gurgling stream nearby.

Tired atop Mt Barney

Heading down the mountain was very satisfying. A light, cooling rain fell. I had plenty of time and the going was much easier this way! Each step down felt good because I'd worked for the height on the way up. I got back to the start of the trail in 4.5 hours (hah!) and strolled back to Yellow Pinch where, exhausted, I treated myself to a shower and relaxed for the rest of the evening.

Chaelundi, Washpool and surrounds

2008-12-16T14:19:00.001+10:00

Wow, it's been a week since my last blogging so I feel like I've got so much to tell! I'll have to keep this fairly brief though.

Hand-cut tunnel on old Glen Innes - Grafton Road

A quick synopsis of my travels after New England :

- Drove through Guy Fawkes River NP to camp at Chaelundi.
- Continued up the old Grafton-Glen Innes Road, camped at Mann River rest area.
- Hung around Washpool/Gibraltar Range for a couple of days (camped at Coombadhja Ck in Washpool)
- Visited and camped at Basket Swamp NP.
- Went through Stanthorpe and Warwick and camped at Koreelah Ck.
- Spent some time at Mount Barney.
- Camped at Sheepstation Creek in the Border ranges.
- Drove through Rathdowney, past Lake Moogerah, visited Spicer's Gap and the Governor's chair before settling down for the night at Goomberah, Main Range.

Some highlights from the first part of this trip.

Just as I thought my luck in seeing cool animals had to come to an end, I saw yet another L. subglandulosa at Chaelundi, as well as a sugar glider, and best of all, a tiny, adorable, agile, hyperactive feathertail glider! I was able to watch it for some time as it fiddled around in a tea-tree right near the creek. The next day I tramped out to Lucifer's Thumb (Chaelundi bluff) where I spotted a Rock wallaby basking in the morning sun on the rocks below the cliff. Also in the macropod world, there were big mobs of wallabies on the old winding road to Glen Innes - wallabies that looked very strange to me, pale, grey with strange markings on their backs and long tails. A quick look in the book identified them as Whiptailed Wallabies. Frogging at Mann River only revealed common species though a pretty brown treesnake (Boiga irregularis) was a treat.

Whiptailed Wallaby

The snakes were also out on the Washpool walk - I saw a big black snake which made me jump as it shot off into the bush from a sunny patch on the track in front of me. Another snake I didn't get a good look at, though I suspect it was a rough-scale.

Falls at Washpool

I've had some great refreshing swims in the creeks along the way - the water has been much warmer than it was up at New England. I swam in the river at Dalmorton, twice (evening and morning) at Mann River, and again at Basket Swamp Falls. Koreelah Creek near Warwick looked a bit too chilly for me though.

Assorted notes...

2008-12-08T12:50:00.001+10:00

Just a few general notes...

- Car

Going great guns, absolutely no problems at all. I love her! I haven't had to get the winch out yet...

- Camping

The National Park campgrounds are awesome around here. Secluded, lots of wildlife, great facilities. I even had a shower at New England! It was... invigorating. Oh, and the other exciting thing was that I caught a glimpse of my first quoll! It was at night just before bed, I'd seen scats around and the park sign said they sometimes visited. I got a fairly good look but it was all too short as the quoll sauntered back into the forest and of course I had no chance of a photo.

Most nights I just sleep in the swag, sometimes under shelters if I think there's a chance of rain. The nights are sometimes pretty cold! Last night I rigged the tarp up on the side of the car to make a shelter for the swag - worked pretty well and was nice and quick to set up.

- Cooking

I had a chicken last night! I roasted it in the camp oven on the fire. It came out beautifully, except I accidentally did it upside-down (breast side downwards). I had a couple of onions which I baked in the coals (wrapped in foil) too - delicious. Otherwise, cooking is good. I'm eating well Mum.

- Self shots

A quick look at my photo gallery will show that my narcissistic passion for self-photography is getting sillier and sillier. I'm getting very good at counting down from 12 seconds. Who knows what will be next?

- Meeting people

I'm talking to lots of other travellers. My standard is to invite people over to my table for a cup of tea. The europeans seem excited to meet a real Aussie, rather than other travellers, so I put on a big ocker accent and swear a lot for their benefit.

So, in general I'm having a fantastic time. It's getting a bit ridiculous how lucky I've been to see so many amazing animals.

Might spend another night around here somewhere then head up to Washpool.

New England

2008-12-08T11:52:00.001+10:00

Just across the Waterfall Way lies New England National Park. It's pretty big. I pulled into Thungutti campground in the morning and did a day walk from there, heading over to Point Lookout then down off the plateau on the Lyrebird walk past Eagle Nest lookout Weeping rock. It was a really nice walk and a great way to see several different aspects of this part of the park.

There was some interesting information at Point Lookout - about how this whole area was created by the 'Ebor Volcano', the centre of which is somewhere in the middle of the park called The Crescent. It's really clear if you look at the river drainage patterns which radiate from this point.

Whilst doing the latter half of the walk, which was down below the edge of the escarpment, I heard numerous Sphagnum frogs (Philoria sphagnicolis) which sound kind of like a grumbling stomach or a golf-ball rolling into a hole. I was even lucky enough to find a nest with a foamy mass of eggs and attendant female!

Sphagnum frog, Philoria sphagnicolis

These frogs typically call from within the splash zone of a small waterfall or where water is trickling and dripping down the rocks.

I spent most of the next day at Dangars Falls south of Armidale, which is in the northern part of Oxley Wild Rivers National park. I thought I'd seen most of the types of landform around here but the gorge here was another thing all together. That's one of the most striking things about this part of the world - the diversity. So many types of landforms and biological communities within a pretty small area. I hadn't heard a lot about this area but now I couldn't recommend it more to anyone thinking of visiting!

It was a chilly night but I headed out for a walk anyway. In the pools along the creekbed were Dwarf Treefrogs (Litoria fallax) as well as more typical creek frogs, the Broad-palmed rocket frogs (Litoria latopalmata) and Stony Creek Frogs (Litoria wilcoxi). I also spotted a couple of Rock Wallabies here - it's apparently a pretty strong refuge for them and there's even a section of cliff that's got a dog-fence around it to protect them.

Another interesting note - I heard Fletcher's frogs (Limnodynastes fletcherii) and Beeping froglets (Crinia parinsignifera) calling from somewhere beyond a fence. These are what I would consider 'western' species so I'm obviously sort of on the edge of the distribution of these guys.

Don't forget to check out the photo gallery!

Cathedral Rock

2008-12-08T11:23:00.001+10:00

After a brief stop at Ebor Falls (which are actually really impressive, with great columnar rock formations) I stopped in at Cathedral Rock. It was really astonishing to see the change in the landscape from Dorrigo (which is all rainforest) over only about 60km. Cathedral rock NP, by contrast, is really quite alpine, with heathy swamps and snow gums.

I was amazed by the beauty and novelty of this landscape. I don't think I'd even heard of this park before!

There's a great walk that goes around the rock (which is actually one of the highest points on the New England tableland; it even gets snow up there!) and a scramble to the top. I loved this part and ended up spending a great bit of time up on top, rock-hopping, climbing and scrambling around the big granite boulders.

Back at the campground I met a couple from Thun, Switzerland, and ended up chatting and hanging around with them quite a bit over the next couple of days.

As night fell I headed back along the track to check out the local stream that had looked pretty promising. I didn't hear anything calling but spotted some eyeshine which turned out to be a New England treefrog (Litoria subglandulosa) - another threatened species and a very beautiful one at that!

New England treefrog, Litoria subglandulosa

I was stoked as here was a very pretty species I'd never seen before. Then a little further on I heard a staccato call and found a very photogenic Stuttering frog (Mixophes balbus)!

Dorrigo

2008-12-08T11:04:00.001+10:00

After the hustle and bustle of Port Macquarie (featuring many P-plate drivers) I gently pushed the Belafonte up the eastern edge of the New England tablelands to Dorrigo through Bellingen. It's a beautiful drive, and the climb up to the plateau is very cool, winding upwards, crossing narrow bridges over cascades.

I got in fairly late so I cooked a meal at Never Never picnic area (managing to fend off the brush turkey that was intent on finding something of mine to eat) then set out for a bit of a drive as I'd seen some nice creeks on the way in. Walking down the creeks I was pleased to spot the beautiful and rare Stuttering frog (Mixophyes balbus) in good numbers, the males sitting above the creek edges, calling occasionally.

Stuttering Frog, Mixophes balbus

The following day after rolling up the swag, I spent half the day exploring the tracks around Never Never. There are a couple of circuits that wind through the rainforest, often bordering the creeks there. Dorrigo has a huge rainfall (2000mm) so there's plenty of water and numerous waterfalls. On the path I took I went down to the base of Cedar falls and Casuarina falls. Both were spectacular. I spotted lots of tadpoles in the creeks - some were small hylid tadpoles, probably L. barringtonensis, but there were also some large dark tadpoles - these were M. balbus. I even saw a cute little metamorph of this species.

It started raining just as I got back to the picnic area, and it continued for the rest of the day as I relaxed in the impressive log shelter drinking lots of tea and hot chocolate. The rain encouraged a few Pouched frogs (Assa darlingtoni) to start calling around the site. These frogs are amazing. After the male and female produce fertilised eggs in the leaf litter, the male waits around for the eggs to hatch. He has two little pouches on his sides, and when the eggs hatch the tadpoles wriggle into these. Here they undergo their complete development, and eventually hop out as froglets. The most amazing thing is that the adult Assa is less than two centimetres long itself!

Pouched Frog, Assa darlingtoni

I slept another night at Dorrigo before heading westwards again, climbing higher up the plateau.

Bago Bluff to Port Macquarie

2008-12-03T12:00:00.001+10:00

Looking down from Bridal Veil Falls, Comboyne Plateau

Just a quick update for today, nothing terribly exciting to report

- Headed up through Bago Bluff NP (south of Wachope) and had a lazy afternoon at Swan's Crossing, swimming and exploring.

- A willie-wagtail would not stop attacking my side-mirrors, even when
I turned them in to face the windows he would squeeze in there to
attack his reflection! I couldn't get rid of him.

- Saw my first male Regent Bowerbird! Absolutely stunning

- Lots of green catbirds calling around camp and I got a good look at some of these too.

- In a worrying piece of news, I just bought a bird book and a mammal book. Oh dear.

- Fireflies! The idea of a beetle producing light is just mind boggling to me. Seeing these guys flashing around the campsite at dusk was just magical.

- Frog-wise I saw another couple of Giant barred frogs (Mixophyes iteratus), another Red-eyed treefrog (Litoria chloris), plenty of phyllochroa/barringtonensis, wilcoxii and the odd Lechriodus.

- The alarm call of bandicoots sounds like a squeaky toy

In the morning I decided I was too close to the Comboyne Plateau to not go and see that, so I headed west and climbed up into that wet and misty land. Quite nice.

I then drove to Port Macquarie where I've spent the last couple of days, enjoying the surf, taking advantage of the library to do some computing, and doing a bit of shopping.

Next - off to New England!

Track me...

2008-12-03T11:11:00.001+10:00

Hey everyone, my brother whipped up a little gizmo that will upload a point from my GPS when I connect to the internet. Not much to see so far but I'll hopefully keep updating it from now on. Check it out

Chichester to the coast

2008-12-02T15:32:00.001+10:00

The rest of my time in the Watagans was fairly rewarding - though all the extra rain made the roads pretty interesting! Highlights:
- Red-backed toadlets (Pseudophryne coriacea) calling off the side of the road
- seeing Great Barred Frogs (Mixophyes fasciolatus) also turn up at Boarding house dam
- waking up to a male Lyrebird scratching its way boldly around camp
- lots more Sandpaper Frogs (Lechriodus fletcheri)
- a beautiful Brown Treesnake (Boiga irregularis)

I next drove up through Maitland and Dungog (through occasional pouring rain which washed the mud off my car nicely!) to Chichester state forest where I made my next camp at Frying Pan Creek.

Southern Forest Dragon (Hypsilurus spinipes)

Driving through the forest I saw lots of Eastern Water Dragons basking on the road, but at one spot I was lucky enough to spot something different - a Southern Forest Dragon (Hypsilurus spinipes) warming itself! I've only ever seen one of these lovely creatures before so I was stoked. I love the mossy-green looking spiny scales. Unfortunately, metres from where it sat, another of these dragons had been roadkilled. The following night I was to see another live forest dragon (sleeping at night) and another roadkill - both the corpses were evidently full of eggs when they were run over - probably warming their eggs by sitting on the roads. A real shame to see these poor things.

As night fell over the campsite, the frogs began calling - Leaf green treefrogs (Litoria phyllochroa) in the creek, but also more excitingly, the low groaning of Red-eyed Treefrogs (Litoria chloris) from vine thickets around the camp. I saw a big mob of them chorusing from a puddle beside the road.

A walk along the road turned up a rough-scaled snake (Tropidechis carinatus), no doubt searching for some frogs to eat. There were plenty of Stony Creek Frogs (Litoria wilcoxi) and Sandpaper frogs (Lechriodus fletcherii) on the road, I'd be surprised if it didn't find something.

The following day, I had planned to work my way north through Chichester into Barrington Tops National park, but the day was so beautiful and I felt like a swim so I headed out of the forest towards Gloucester and drove to Blackhead (north of Forster). Had a refreshing snorkel - lots of fish including a big ray with some sort of attendant fish attached.

Nightfall found me a fair way to the south - I actually drove down to Wallingat for a look around there, then ended up staying the night at the Grandis. Interestingly, I saw another Rough-scaled snake (Tropidechis carinatus)! A couple of Great Barred frogs were calling as well and I spotted one of these too, as well as a Golden Crowned Snake (Cacophis squamulosus).

I'll have to save the last couple of days for another time as I want to do some things before the shops close...

Check out the photos!

Day one - Sydney to the Watagans

2008-11-28T11:42:00.001+10:00

Mixophyes iteratus, Giant Barred Frog. Check out the rest of the gallery here

I'm writing this in the comfort of a picnic shelter at Boarding House Dam - it's raining steadily so I thought I'd enjoy a hot mug of tea and do a report on my exciting first day.

I took the scenic route up to the watagans (which are west of Newcastle), entering Wyong state forest on the central coast and following the road up through Jilliby state conservation area, Watagan state forest then into Watagan national park.

Almost immediately after entering the forest I had my first encounter with something special - when I noticed big flakes of eucalypt bark falling onto the road I was alerted to a big lace monitor (Varanus varius) climbing up the trunk.

A little further on I saw an echidna crossing the road and stopped to watch as it worked along the road cutting, levering off pieces of earth with its bill and probing with its tongue. Whenever it found ants and had a feed, it would close its eyes - no doubt to protect them from the attacking ants - but it looked like an expression of bliss. Interestingly, there were two or three leeches on a specific spot on its back. I saw it try to scratch them off at one stage but it seemed like they were in exactly the right spot so that it couldn't reach them.

Other sightings of interest as I drove included a brush turkey, satin bowerbirds (males and females), another goanna and another echidna.

I was planning to camp near Gap creek, but at the turnoff was a sign saying the road was closed! I'd like to get down there tonight to check it out but I might have to do a bit of walking! I ended up returning to boarding house dam as it was a place I wanted to do some frogging at too. As I cooked while it grew dark, I started hearing tentative noises from the leaf litter near the creek, just metres from where I sat. I was in luck! There were sprinkles of rain though the threatening thunderstorm didn't actually hit here.

The frogging turned out to be very successful. I saw the species I was most hoping for - the Giant Barred Frog (Mixophyes iteratus) - as well as a nice selection of other things too. The Mixophyes were here in good numbers - I saw about a dozen - very visible despite their good camoflague because of the strong eyeshine their big eyes give off. The other frogs I saw were the Blue Mountains Treefrog (Litoria citropa), the Leaf Green Treefrog (Litoria phyllochroa), and another bonus: the Sandpaper Frog, Lechriodus fletcheri (I nearly didn't look at it, thinking it was just another mixo).

The only other sighting was a leaf-tailed gecko, Phyllurus platurus.

It rained for much of the night and all morning, it looks really set in at the moment.

A big group of Duke of Ed kids just emerged - completely sodden - from the forest! Two of the kids came over to me... then got confused and walked back to their friends. I think they had mistaken me for their support crew as after a few minutes a hilux and minibus pulled up and took them away!

Introduction

2008-11-28T11:38:00.001+10:00

G'day!

Welcome to my new blog. I'm going to guess that most of you know me already though there's a chance that others will stumble upon this blog from my photoblog or random googling. So hello one and all, I'm David.

Yesterday I began my trip. I could talk about what I aim to do and see whilst on my travels, but really this thing is a sort of big experiment. But, in broad terms, I'm trying to explore and experience Australia.

At this stage my plan is to head north from Sydney, taking in many of the national parks along eastern Australia, and end up in the far north. I anticipate that this stage will take me about 2-4 months, and after that I'll consider keeping on going. I'm hoping to see lots of animals, different environments, meet other travellers, have adventures and generally enjoy the outdoor life.

I'm driving my new car, a 1991 Toyotoa 4runner (2.8l turbo diesel). It's filled with a big load of camping, photographic and electronic gear and I'm trusting it'll get me where ever I want to go.

Time to start the report on day one!