More tiny things and my diary

A baby gecko hatching. This egg was less than 1cm diameter.

ABC article about the Australian Geographic Scientific Project

Here are some more tiny things from El Questro. Amazing!

A baby gecko hatchling. This one was about 3.5 cm long.

 

A monitor with a spiny tail (see below)

  

The monitor from the previous post.

Wednesday 24 April

After a night spent keeping up liquids and sleeping like a log between times I woke at about 6am with the birds. Chaos and confusion while the family left in time to get Helen to work by 8am. Anna and I were left to clear away before leaving for the airport.

The plane trip over to Kununurra was good and then we were collected from the airport by Chris. Into camp by lunch time and a wonderful reunion with the regulars as well as meeting the new volunteers. I am sharing a tent with Di from Karatha again who was also a volunteer last year and shared a tent with me.

After lunch I had a dip in the swimming hole to cool off then sorted a bit in the heat.

The activity in the cooler time was a walk along the toad fence and set the pit and funnel traps that had been closed up since the previous vollies week. We rescued a few burrowing frogs and one tiny Crinea sp. There were a few skinks too. The moon rose over the scarp as we were walking – a beautiful sight.

Back to camp for a posh dinner at the Steakhouse dressed in our field gear. A very large meal!

After a brief sit around the camp fire I collapsed into my bed.

Thursday 25 April – Anzac Day

Up with the kookaburras for the dawn service. This is always amazing with mounted horse riders, readings, a 21 whip salute and rum and coffee to follow – all in the dawn light. I declined the rum. Back down to the camp site for breakfast, sorting, packing lunches and dispersal of the various teams to sites all over El Questro.

My task today is to join the Toad Cognition team with Martin Whiting from Macquarie Uni. This involved recording results of the movement of cane toads through a maze. We needed to redesign and rebuild the maze because the toads kept escaping.

By lunch time the day was extremely hot and I got quite dizzy, even though I had been drinking continually. The solution was a long soak in the river chatting with Ian and Gail over poster possibilities for the area.

Then it was back to the slow work of watching toads fail their learning tests.

Dinner at the Steakhouse again then a talk by Sean for vollies and the public about the reasons for the work being done in the various science projects.

Friday 26 April

After breakfast and a few changes in roster I went butterfly sampling with Matt Williams from Perth DEC I the morning and caught lots. It was also fantastic to see a small flock of budgies fly into a nearby tree. We were treated to a swim at Zebedee Springs where we wallowed in a pool watching an Azure Kingfisher and lots of different damsel flies and dragon flies.

Back to lunch at camp and more changes of roster. Simon gave me a lab assistant job writing labels for his tissue samples stored in tiny vials. Then I hung out a combined load of washing for a few of us. Time to charge up a few batteries and enjoy a cuppa.

After dinner. While many went out croc spotting, frog hunting or toad busting a small group of us sat around chatting until I went to bed with heavy eyes at about 9:30pm.

Saturday 27 April

Before I came on the trip this year I had offered to the scientific team that I was happy to do data entry to ensure a quicker turn around for the publications that result from the project we are doing. Today the data started to come to me.

Up at kookaburra hour again and had a slow start as I was on toad cognition again with Martin and they are not ready to work with until about 8:30am. During the day this was mixed with data entry for Martin, Sean, Ryan, Colin, Maik and others. At last my work has started with data sheets coming from everywhere.

Tonight was a barbeque at the bar and a party for Simon's birthday. After the dinner Marion and I completed all the data sheets I'd been given and it was great to have someone to read out the lists.

Sunday 28 April

After many changes of plan for my activities today I left relatively early for roster on the Emma fence traps with Ryan Back to camp for a drink then off again to Moonshine Gorge for a turtle capture activity with Sean. The pool was magnificent with Nymphoides covering the surface of the shallow sections. I bagged and carried the turtles caught then was scribe for the measurements and observations. My shoes eventually disintegrated so I had to throw them out. Lunch was a picnic at Zebedee Springs for most groups. It was booked for us to use exclusively so we all ate our cold hamburgers and wallowed in the many thermal pools.

Back to camp for a shower and an afternoon of data entry, label writing and charging of camera and laptop before the camp kitchen requires all the power.

Whilst sitting around the fire after dinner Hugh called for vollies to change memory cards in the motion detection cameras over monitor nests at the rubbish tip. This involved a walk in the pitch dark in unknown territory visited by dingos, snakes and huge goannas scavenging around the tip.

On return to camp Marissa called for help to make bait balls for the mammal traps in the morning so I helped with that as well. All this after dinner activity meant a later night than usual at about 10:30 pm.

Monday 29 April (Surrey's Birthday)

At breakfast we were entertained with Rebecca's Cup Game annotated by me as follows:

1. clap 2. clap 3. tap tap 4. tap

1. clap 2. up 3. down 4.

1. clap 2. grab cup with right hand on left side 3. pop – with hand on open end of cup 4. tap base of cup

1. grab base with left hand 2. hit table 3. pass cup to next person on right 4.

Breakfast is always in straggly shifts to ensure people with early starts get out on time (or at least within half an hour of “on time”) and those who were out collecting till the early hours of the morning can sleep in and still get breakfast. Lunch and dinner are more regulated in camp with those in the field at lunch time packing it at breakfast time to take with them.

At morning tea time Bec, Ben and I celebrated Surrey's birthday with a piece of Simon's birthday cake left overs and a long chat.

After that I started my long data entry job for Simon. I completed 2 of 5 sheets by lunch time and as it was so hot I decided to take time out to wet down in the river. The data entry job continued in the afternoon but this time Marion helped me with one of the sheets so progress was a little faster.

Tuesday 30 April

Today I chose to do butterflying and to walk to the half-way pool up El Questro Gorge. The path up was in and out of a shallow river bed that was very rocky and uneven. Matt, our butterfly leader is great to work with. While he seems to just plod along looking for butterflies he actually catches ten times as many as we do and marks and records them all while we swip our nets haphazardly through the air.

We enjoyed our stop at the pool, meeting up with Kim's group, then headed on back out to the cars and back to camp.

Our week ended with a mass exodus to Saddleback lookout to view the sunset and enjoy pre-dinner drinks together.

Dinner was a barbeque up at the bar which was great food again. This was followed by a few talks about science results so far. Then it was back to camp where most sat around the camp fire but Di and I collapsed into our beds.

Wednesday 1 May

I was up early this morning despite the fact that I could have slept in. Our first job was to back and dismantle the stretchers. While in camp Gail caught butterfly number 500 for Matt to mark. We had a small frog that was on one of the tents. Some campers brought us some hatching gecko eggs they had inadvertently disturbed. We were all very excited when the second one hatched as we watched and of course photographed. Such a tiny animal. The eggs were less than 1 cm diameter! So our final morning was far from devoid of biological happenings.

Three car loads of people and luggage went into Kununurra. We enjoyed a very lively lunch at the Wild Mango Cafe before being delivered to various hotels and to the airport for Di, Col, Maik and myself.

Back to Darwin for the next leg of my journey.

If you'd like to see more photos of my time in the Kimberley email me and I'll give you access to my Dropbox gallery.