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!