Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers

This past Saturday a group of friends and I went up to Toowoomba for the annual Carnival of Flowers. It was an extra special event this year as they were celebrating their 60th Anniversary. Plenty of things to buy and rides to go on if you felt like spending the money but also plenty of things for those not looking to spend a fortune. The flower beds were gorgeous, with heaps of different colours and patterns (and even a bed of cabbages as seen in the pic!). It was a great day and the weather was pretty good too, just too bad I neglected to put on sunscreen as my cheeks were a bit pink by the end!

There was a parade down some of the main streets of Toowoomba around lunch time, but we didn't stay for all of it as our stomachs preferred food after all the walking we'd been doing. Like any perfect day, it ended with ice cream before we headed back home :)

Dust Storm over South East Queensland

From my deck you can normally see all the way out to Mt Coot-tha, all the way across suburban Brisbane. Not so today as a dust storm which blew through Sydney has travelled north to us here in Brisbane. This picture was taken from my deck shortly around the time the visibility peaked at its worst and it has stayed about the same since then. Predictions are that it will clear tonight and I'm sure hoping so! Too bad they're not predicting rain any time soon to help clean the air.

Camping at Girraween

A week and a half ago my family and I went down to Girraween National Park which is half an hour outside Stanthorpe, very close to the border between Queensland and New South Wales. There we set up camp for a week, enjoying the extremely fine but very cold weather.

On the first night out there it got as low as -1 degreese Celcius (about 30 degrees farenheit) but thankfully that was the coldest it got. The other nights it was cold (often about three degrees) but we rugged up warm so were ok lol.

The cooler weather certainly made it ideal hiking weather. There are a number of walks available which are of varying difficulties at Girraween. On this trip I completed most of them, except for a hike out to Mt Norman, which would have taken about three hours each way.

My biggest achievement of the week was climbing to the top of a rock formation called The Pyramid. A few years ago we were at Girraween but strong wind prevented me from completing the climb, in fact I'd had to stop approximately 50 metres from the top! It is a challanging climb but I can now say that I've conquored it lol, with photos to prove it! My brother and I climbed The Pyramid on our second last day there while the rest of the family stayed back at camp, tired out from the previous hikes we'd done.

Of note this trip was the variety of wildlife we saw. Even though it was the middle of winter (which means there were very few insects - a very welcome relief lol) I saw/heard a number of birds and macropods. I was even fortunate enough to spot a pair of endangered rock wallabies before they saw me and ran away.

As with any camp ground, we had our fair share of scavengers as well. Magpies and currawongs were happy to steal any food left lying around. What was a big surprise was that the kangaroos would also steal food! This was definitely the first time I'd seen a kangaroo bold enough to come into a camp site when they thought no one was looking and try to steal the bread from the table, and even have the nerve to resist leaving!!

Even at night time food wasn't safe unless packed away where wildlife couldn't get to it, as we had our night maurauding possum friend, who was also conveniently happy to have their photo taken lol.

All in all I had a fantastic week and can't wait till I get to return to that campsite, it's one of my favourite places on earth :)

In order the pictures are: 1. Our campsite 2. The night maurauder 3. My brother near the top of The Pyramid and 4. A large rock formation that we affectionately name 'The Slab' as it is literally a huge (up to 20 metres high) 'slab' of rock.

O'Reilly's

Well, I've been so busy with finishing off a semester of uni that I have been putting off writing a blog about a trip I made a week and a half ago. I'm now on holidays so I've run out of excuses lol :)

The Sunday before last, a friend of mine invited me to join their family on a two night holiday to O'Reilly's resort up in the beautiful Lamington National Park here in Queensland. What an awesome two days it turned out to be!

During the day times we went on bird watching (and feeding) walks, where the little finches etc would come and eat out of our hands! We went on a really long hike (as in we left at 9am and returned at 1:30pm) through the beautiful rainforest to see some waterfalls. We also went on a large flying fox which took us over the tree tops (while in a harness) and on the last day we got to see a reptile show.

The evenings were spent playing board games before some enjoyed the hot spa and others came star gazing.

Over all I had a fantastic two days and would like to sincerely thank my friends for taking me with them to allow me to have such a great two days. Even better, despite those two days being in the middle of my exam block, I still feel that I went ok with my exams lol.

Love Story meets Viva La Vida

My sister found this really awesome youtube video of one of the newer songs played by the LDS pianist Jon Schmidt. I fell in love with it as she did, it is such a nice song. Since hearing it I've also listened to other music by Jon Schmidt, which can be found on his website at www.jonschmidt.com

I'm going to try and post a link to the video that I love, but I've never done this before so bear with me and we'll see if it works!

Bunya Mountains

Last week I went on a three day field trip to the Bunya Mountains for ecology. For anyone who doesn't know, the Bunya Mountains are 3 hours drive north west of Brisbane, Queensland Australia. Seeing as they are quite high in altitude (being mountains and all) and it is mid autumn now it was quite cold, thankfully I was aware it would be and packed warm clothes accordingly :) It was lovely being able to walk around a national park for a few days and I certainly got my exercise in and more!

Accomodation couldn't have been much nicer either, we were in chalets which while the did have to fit about 19 people each, they all had their own bathroom, kitchen, loungeroom and even fireplace! I was fortunate enough to be one of the first in after getting off the bus so was fortunate enough to get one of the three double beds in the chalet to myself :D

The Bunya Pines are a very tall tree which only grows in very limited places now so I guess we were lucky to have one of those places close enough to visit in a field trip. Over the three days we sampled such things as vegetation and canopy cover, soil pH, humidity, tree diametre, invertebrate species of the area and species diversity. I had fun but now of course they expect us to write up a full report which is due in a few weeks lol. Always the way it seems :)

The first night there we went spotlighting to see what nocturnal animals we could find - we saw possums, bats and even a mouse in a tree directly in front of us at almost eye level. One animal you didn't need to search a tree with a spotlight for was the wallabies. these animals were everywhere around the place we were staying, grazing, sleeping or playfully fighting amongst themselves all day.

One of the days on the way back from our study site we passed by the little local shop just at the right time for the bird feeding! It was pretty awesome to have king parrots and crimson rosellas landing all over us and eating out of the seed dishes we could hold. They are both very beautiful birds :)

The second evening I was able to wait outside an old schoolhouse which is home to hundreds of Chocolate Wattled Bats which are small insectivourous bats. A group of us braved the cold to listen to the bats waking up and then watch them come out from inside the house's roof and take off into the night to hunt. I didn't get any pictures of them unfortunately as they were way too fast for my camera - even when they swooped about 30cm (1 foot) above my head!

On the way home we stopped for about an hour at another national park, The Palms National Park, where there were Piccerbean Palms as the dominant tree and absolutely hundreds of flying foxes (fruit bats). We were comparing the 'survival stragtegies' of these palm trees with those of the Bunya Pines and I'll probably have to mention that in my report as well. There was also an enormous Blue Gum tree there - my lecturer had apparently never seen a tree that large of that species before.

So that was my first university field trip, quite a success overall really, wish me luck with writing my report! :)

Swimming Carnival

My university recently held a swiming carnival for those who live on campus in the residences. Although it seemed too cold to swim I went along to support my hall and take photos. There were the usual events such as freestyle and breaststroke first, but then after one of the races they decided it would be fun to have a competition of which hall could get the most people into the pool at once.... I was in jeans... there was no way I was getting into that water!! Thankfully I managed to escape and not be thrown in, although other non swimmers weren't so lucky. The worst I got was a few wet people coming up to give me hugs lol.

Later in the evening they had the belly flopping events (ouch!!) and then the dive bombing competition. Some of the splashes were incredible! Funny thing was the guy who won was really skinny! I have no idea how he managed to get such a big splash, beating much larger, heavier guys lol.

So that was a pretty fun night, a good excuse to get out of uni work for a while :) My hall didn't win but we came a really close second.

Trapping

Two days in the past two weeks I've been out trapping animals for one of my subjects at a farm owned by the university. We go out on the Thursday evening to open up a heap of pitfall traps (basically buckets inserted into holes in the ground - animals fall into them and can't get out) as well as setting up Elliot traps (small, standard traps where an animal enters for the bait and steps on the trigger which shuts the door) and larger cage traps for possums and bandicoots. On the Friday mornings we had to be out at the place we were trapping by 6am to collect what we'd caught, and take measurements on them.

The first week we caught two possums, two bandicoots, a couple of toads and lots of little mice and frogs :) I used to have strong dislike to toads and wasn't overly thrilled by the thought of having to pick them up (with gloves lol) out of the pitfall traps and take measurements of them but amazingly enough I quite enjoyed it lol. I don't know how much the toad enjoyed it but I was enjoying studying it up close. I discovered that they actually have really cool eyes.



Learning how to handle mice was interesting. You place a small calico bag tightly over the trap end before opening it and coaxing the mouse into the bag. Always keep the bag mouth closed unless you have hold of the mouse or all you'll see of it is a small ball of fur disappearing into the grass! Once the mouse is in the bag, encourage it to near the opening and grab the base of the tail where it joins to the body firmly before opening the mouth of the bag. To 'scruff' the mouse, grab the loose skin at the back of the neck firmly to prevent it from twisting around. At all times keep all fingers away from the mouth as it WILL bite if it gets the chance lol. Once the mouse is scruffed, it can be measured, usually by another person as that's easiest.

Week two it had been raining. Although this made things much cooler, it also meant that the wet grass soaked the bottom of my jeans and that we caught only one possum and one bandicoot along with the usual frogs, toads and mice (albeit rather wet, bedraggled mice). Still, it was pretty fun and it's kinda disappointing that we've finished all of our trapping now.

It Seemed Time

Well I've been hearing a lot about blogging from heaps of different people. I've been meaning to set one up for a while so here we are, I finally got around to it!