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! :)