Off to Trap!

Since I don’t have a way of uploading pictures, I’m just going to post without them, which is a bit of a shame but might mean I actually post more often, so that’ll be good.

I’m leaving on Sunday to spend 2 weeks trapping mammals at the Mitchell Plateau (which the Australians pronounce “PLAT-eau,” just to be confusing and anti-French-speak), which is supposed to be amazingly awesome and cool. I saw some field guides of the kinds of animals that might turn up in the traps, and they’re super cute and have names like “monjon,” “nabarlick,” “quoll (I’d heard of that one before, and apparently they’re feisty and have sharp teeth, so I have to be careful),” and “euro (which is a “large wallaroo”).” We loaded the traps onto the trailer yesterday, although I didn’t learn how to use them yet. Some of them are like the squirrel traps we used in Canada (a mesh cage with a trap lever), but giant-sized and really really heavy. The others are smaller, metal, and fully enclosed, so we won’t know what’s in it until we peek inside (apparently we occasionally catch snakes, so if the weight in the trap sort of slides when you tip it, be extra careful opening the door to make sure that there’s not a venomous serpent about to burst out!).

I still don’t know much else about how the trapping works and where the sites are, but I know we set them up before the evening (most of the critters are nocturnal) and then check traps and process the animals in the [very early] morning. We have several different types of scales to weigh animals from <50g to up to 5kg, and this microchipping tool and scanner, which I found out is so that we know when we have a recaptured animal, like a more permanent and technologically advanced ear-tag. Should be fun, and I’m really excited to see all of them!

In other news I went to karaoke on Wednesday night, which was fairly riotous by the end and lots of people were dancing to the songs. They had a really weird music selection, though, with only a few songs by artists I knew and lots and lots of Aussie artists I’d never heard of. I sang “Twist and Shout” with Tess, one of the German girls I had met the week before, and then did Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” because most of the only songs I knew were in the recent hits section, and it did seem appropriate for the tone of the evening, haha. Next time I may have to sing Lady Gaga or something, there really wasn’t a lot of other artists to choose from.

It rained Thursday evening/night which was very unexpected (the average rainfall for these months is like 5mm, so rain is definitely a surprise) but kind of nice and comforting, since it was still so warm. Hopefully it won’t rain when we’re out camping, though…

The Tropics at Last: First Days in Kununurra

This is an update of what I’m doing now while I finish up some other posts. Unfortunately, the internet is worse here than it was back in Nannup, so I won’t be able to upload any pictures since I’m just borrowing a computer at the moment.

After I finished working at the pub south of Perth (more details to come), I did a trip up and down the west coast so I could snorkel on the Ningaloo Reef and swim with whale sharks (soooooooo amazing, and I also saw octopus and a giant loggerhead turtle!). I then flew up to the north of Western Australia to work on a mammal trapping project for the next few months, which I’ll describe now (snorkel trip post forthcoming).

I arrived in Kununurra, a town of about 6,000 people, in the afternoon on Thursday, met up with Ian, my boss, at the airport (which was actually a bit awkward since I didn’t know what he looked like so I just had to stare around and wait for someone to stare back and recognize me). It was a pleasant 30ish degrees (like 80s, early 90s in Farenheit) and I was happy to not be shivering anymore. We took my stuff back to the office of the Department of Environment and Conservation (aka DEC), which is the government organization sponsoring the work (I thought there was some university affiliation as well, but I was wrong). I have a room provided in the “dongers,” which is a trailer-like set-up near the office, complete with kitchen, showers, and bunkbeds. It’s basic but not at all bad, and having kitchen access is a step up from the pub, so that’s nice. I saw the offices and also met Richard, the older field technician who handles all the logistic work. I went to Ian’s home for dinner, which was very nice, and then immediately collapsed when I returned to the donger because I was still exhausted from my trip on the west coast.

Kununurra is on the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, which puts it nearly in the middle of the country, in the longitudinal sense. Despite this, it still runs on the Perth time zone, rather than the Darwin time zone, which means that everything happens about 2 hours later than it really should. I woke up at 6:30 that first morning, because it was as bright as it would be around 8am anywhere else (and because I had gone to bed at 8:30 the night before). Anyway it’s very strange to be feeling the heat of the day at like 10am, and even weirder when it’s dark by 5pm, which would make sense at a higher latitude, since it is the winter now, but not within the tropics, where the amount of hours in the day stays roughly the same year round (I remember in Peru it was light from around 6am to 6pm, which is still more reasonable than the time here). Alas, Perth makes the rules, and so Kununurra is 2.5 hours earlier than Darwin, even though the cities are geographically very close, which makes it quite funny if you have a flight from Kununurra to Darwin, and arrive a full hour and a half before you left!

Despite that confusion, it’s a very pretty area, with bottle trees (aka boab trees), lots of palms, and giant sandstone mounds that surround the town. It is on the eastern edge of the Kimberley region, which stretches from Kununurra to Broome (I know I’m throwing a lot of Australian geography around, but I feel like I have to explain it a bit to get a feel for the area) and is supposed to be gorgeous with lots of cliffs, gorges, and waterfalls (not to mention cool critters, which is why I’m here). It’s one of the last holdouts for a lot of small, cute, marsupials that are seriously threatened in other parts of the country, though I’m not totally sure why, although the Kimberley area is pretty remote so that’s got to help. In terms of the project, we’ll be trapping for animals in a few different areas, nominally to monitor fire impacts, since there have been some controlled burns in recent years and the DEC is trying to assess the impact on the native fauna. The burns are supposed to help the animals and vegetation maintain high biodiversity, but we’ll see if that’s the case. The monitoring has been going on for about 7 years, although I don’t know if they’ve always been doing it in the same consistent areas and I’m not sure what the results are saying yet. We’ll be doing two sets of two-week field trips up to the Mitchell Plateau, which is in a national park and has a ranger’s station. Then we have 2 weeks rest back in Kununurra before we go on a 1-week trip (via helicopter omg!!) to the Drysdale River Park, and then the last 2 weeks we’ll be camping in a third park (I think it’s called Prince Regent).

I’ll find out a lot more about how it all works by the end of this week, as I help Richard pack up our stuff so we can leave on Sunday. I’m hoping to see a lot of cuteness, although I’ve been warned that some of the critters have sharp teeth, so I may not get to coddle them as much as the ground squirrels, haha (although really I didn’t do a whole lot of squirrel-cuddling anyway). We’ll be using peanut butter to set the traps (PB, we meet again!) and doing micro-chipping, so that will be exciting, and I’m hoping to learn how they keep track of these animals with the chips.

I had a chill weekend settling in after doing an unofficial driving test on Friday – Ian just wanted to make sure I was competent enough to drive the 4-wheeler around town over the weekend if I needed to get groceries or anything. I did alright, except that the windshield-wipers and the turn indicators were switched from what I’m used to, so I kept setting off the wipers when I wanted to make a turn, which was pretty silly since it’s dry as dust out here and there’d be no reason whatsoever to need wipers! I did a lot of shopping on Friday and finally got a haircut, which I really needed since my hair was way too long for the tropical heat.

Friday night Richard invited me to come out to the local bar with his couchsurfing guests (he has a German girl staying with him now, and is also friends with her colleague, another German girl). It was very strange being on the other side of the bar, especially since it was so much bigger than the Nannup Hotel (there was a band and everything!), but it was fun and we danced for a bit.

Saturday I made it to the local market (using the big truck) and got a few nice bananas and paw-paws (aka papayas) for my first real taste of tropical fruits grown locally. I later wandered to the local national park, called Mirima, to check out some lookouts over town and explore the landscape. The one nice thing about the time zone is that walking around at like 2 or 3 is a good time of day, not too hot (of course the flipside is that you’ve only got until 5 before it gets dark), so it was beautiful walking between and on top of the red mounds and ridges to look out at the town. I also did a little “learn-about-plants” walk to read about the aboriginal plant uses, although it would take a few times through before any of the information stuck. I have a lot of nice photos, but I’ll have to wait to post them later.

I went to Ian’s house again that night for dinner, and we were joined by Ben, one of the DEC staff. We enjoyed mango daiquiris, Chinese salad (with the little noodle things), and homemade chocolate pudding (with whipped cream!), which was all delicious. Driving back to my donger, though, I was pulled over by the police! Although I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, I was a bit worried since it was only my second day driving a vehicle in Australia (unsupervised) and I’d hoped it wasn’t that obvious that I was used to driving on the other side of the road. Fortunately they were just doing random breath tests, so it was fine. Slightly nerve-wracking though.

Sunday I went out with Richard and his two German friends to a “Hash House Harriers” walk, which is a group that creates marked trails for each other that the others have to follow, with flagging tape and everything (apparently it’s an international organization but I haven’t done much research yet). We followed the pink flags up and down several ridges and saw some nice views. It was interesting meeting the other “hashers,” who were mostly older, but kind of quirky and excited about the landscape and the hash rules. You had to shout “On on!” when you saw the next flag, and then everyone would echo it, and we stopped for breaks a few times on “hash holds” to check out the views.

When we finished the trail they got out the Holy Esky (containing precious beer) and we had a classic Aussie barbecue (sausages and onions held in a slice of bread, with tomato sauce [ketchup] and/or barbecue sauce on top). They had an initiation rite for the new “hashers,” so we had to kneel on the ground and chug a cup of beer while they sang a funny song. Then the ones who had made the trail, (Richard and one of the German girls, Tess), had to do the same while they sang a different song, and then finally those who had an anniversary to celebrate (it was their 20^th walk or whatever) also had to chug their beer while everyone sang yet another silly song. Everyone also has a code name, which you receive after your 5^th walk (names ranged from “Foggy,” to “Ringo,” to “Man-opause”). Anyway it was all pretty silly and fun and a decent way to spend Sunday afternoon in Kununurra, even if the sun disappeared so early.

So now I’ll be preparing for the field trip all this week, and getting excited about what we’ll find in our traps!

The Great Southwest (Part 1)

My second-to-last Saturday working in Nannup, I was surprised by a knock on my door and opened it to find Shaun, my friend from Nottingham who I had met in my first week in Sydney. He had just moved to Perth, bought a car, and come down for the weekend to see what the southwest was like. I had to work in a few hours, so we didn’t think we could drive around further than Busselton [a nearby town], but Shaun wanted to see the coast and I wanted to walk the Jetty, so that’s where we headed. Right off he asked if I wanted to drive, so I got my first driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road experience. It wasn’t too bad, especially when we were just driving along the highway and I didn’t have to make any turns, but shifting gears with my left hand (the car’s a manual) was a bit tricky. The weather was really nice, and the view of the trees and countryside around was lovely and green as we got out of Nannup (only my second time out of the town in the month I’d been there).

We made it okay, even with my driving, and started our walk up the jetty, which is supposedly 1.8km long and the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere (there are all these headlines in Australia about “the [insert definitive ‘-est’ adjective here] in the Southern Hemisphere,” and sometimes I want to remind people that there’s not as much inhabited land in the Southern Hemisphere anyway so it’s not as impressive a statistic, but I wouldn’t want to offend anyone and I get a bit excited about those taglines in spite of myself…if I could only remember what other “the ______ in the Southern Hemisphere’s” landmarks I’ve seen so far). Here’s the opening view of the jetty and the view looking back with the signpost sculpture.

We saw some schools of fish off the edge of the side, which were fun to watch as they swirled around and changed group size. Shaun was excited to see the coast after spending 3 months in the middle of the outback in Queensland (if you’re from pretty much any country except the USA, you can extend your working holiday visa for another year if you spend 3 months working or volunteering in remote rural areas). I was excited to see a new bird species for my list (or at least to have noticed a new one): some kind of tern. This photo’s a bit blurry, but I like the way the tern (a juvenile) is arching its head and tail, it makes it look happy and excited about life. [Note: I really need to look up birds in my book, this is my second lazy posting where I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I keep forgetting. Hopefully I will remember to go back and fix these “some kind of something” sorts of comments with the proper species].

1.8km is actually a decent distance, but we weren’t going to break down and take the train (you could pay to be driven up and back) and the view at the end was a nice shot of the ocean looking to the west, with the shore distant behind us. Here’s Shaun posing.

And here’s me, with a sailboat coming out of my head. We did get a group shot, but we’re both making weird faces in it so I’ll post the individual ones instead.

I got this splendid tern photo with the sun on its front before we turned around and walked back.

I was worried about making it to Nannup in time for work without driving during the kangaroo-hour when we were in danger of totaling Shaun’s car (along with making life rough for a kangaroo). We cut it a bit close by the time we made it off the jetty, but Shaun’s experienced left-hand driving on the way back got us there in good time.

It was an insanely quiet night at the pub, since everyone in town was at the football club after watching the local team play some other team (Aussie Rules Football, of course). I had planned on checking out the game, and seeing if it was any easier to follow in person than on the “telly,” but Shaun’s arrival coincided with the start of it so I didn’t catch anything, oh well. At any rate none of the locals were in and all of the pipeline workers had gone back to Perth for the weekend, so I spent most of the evening serving Shaun ciders and hoping some more people would turn up. Fortunately some pool-players came in after dinner and kept us open all the way until midnight, which was good for me since I hadn’t been getting too many hours since we’d been closing early when it was so quiet.

Anyway the next day Shaun and I went on a mini-tour of the area directly southwest of Nannup. First we visited the Barrabup Pool, which was only 15km away from town but still far enough for me to never have been there with my limited walking capabilities. The water was a bit murkier than I expected, but it looked like it would be a nice place to go if the weather was nice and you could swim.

They had all these photos from when the Barrabup Mill was operating, back at the turn of the century, with pictures of men with huge saws and trees that they were logging before the main activity shifted to Nannup. We wandered around one of the trails for a bit and I saw some cool plants. One was a type of banksia.

The other was some sort of cool spiral and spiky umbrella leafed plant that looked vaguely familiar, but I’m not sure if it’s like one of the ones we studied in Queensland, or just that everything is sort of blending together now.

It was another glorious sunny day and we were planning on heading to Pemberton first, to see some nice forests containing karri trees, and maybe climb this big tree they had set up in town. We took the wrong road out of town, though, and ended up closer to Augusta instead, so we went to the coast first and left the trees for later. Andrew, one of my friends from Perth, had recommended visiting Hamelin Bay to see some semi-tame stingrays, so we navigated there first.

Though I searched and searched in the water (which was quite warm and really nice to wade through), I didn’t see any stingrays and the waves seemed too strong for them to be hanging around. Maybe you have to get there at the right time of day, or maybe there’s some sort of feeding show. Either way, the bay was still gorgeous and we enjoyed chilling on the beach for a while. Here's an awkward handheld photo.

Even though I had by now been to innumerable beaches in every Aussie state and at every ocean, it still was beautiful and I took too many pictures that all look like all my other Aussie beach pictures. This one of the dilapidated pier was nice, though.

We were running out of time to get all the way to the forest town of Pemberton, since Shaun had to make the 3-hour drive back to Perth in the evening, so I asked a random family if there were any karri forests nearby, since I was determined to see those trees (there’s a famous tree-top walk in the area too, that takes you through a different type of forest, but unfortunately that was too far south and I was not fated to make it there this time around). So instead of Pemberton, we took the “Caves Road” up to Margaret River, a famous surfing and winery area further up the coast. There are limestone caves in the region, but they all charge like $20 to visit and we didn’t have the time for that anyway (besides, I was feeling pretty good about the amazing caves I saw near Sydney…I know I never posted about that but it was really cool). But the point is the road wound through some stands of karri forest, which were amazing!!

We found a little side-lot where we could get out and measure up to the trees from ground-level. They’re really tall, as you can see, and amazingly straight (Shaun kept commenting on this, which makes sense since he’s a carpenter and would think about those things). I was inspired to pose as a tree in front of them, although I wasn’t nearly tall enough to pull it off.

Too many pictures of trees, I know, but I was excited and the sun made them perfect. Here’re the tops of them.

We were still running out of time, but when Shaun said he had never been to a winery, I said we would pull over if we saw one out of Margaret River (granted, I’d only been to a few myself, the first over in Tasmania, which I know I never posted about at all, even though I do have a few things written…wow I’ve been lazy!). We sampled the Brown [something], trying a few whites and a nice red, although my favourite was the muscat, which was last. It was very sweet and tasted like plums. Shaun insisted we pose in front of the vineyards, and I especially like how the dog joined in.

I drove us safely back to Nannup (further improving my left-hand skills) and found out that I needed to help cover the Chase-the-Ace game [I know I haven't written a post about the pub yet, but in a nutshell it was a 2-hour time block that encouraged everyone to buy drinks for a chance to win the pot, which was raised every week until it was won]. It was a completely crazy several hours, even with three of us working, since the stakes were at AU$3000 so all the locals were crowded inside and demanding constant drinks and tickets (fortunately I knew everyone’s preferences by this time, so I wasn’t totally overwhelmed). The only downside was that I had planned on taking the bus to Augusta the next day, which left at 7am, so I stayed up pretty late to pack and was a bit groggy in the morning. No time to post more, so I'll leave that as Part 1 and I will try to write/post more soon!