So I’m finally getting around to writing about the first trapping trip. We were supposed to be going up again last Tuesday, but all the plans have been shifted and we’re not leaving until tomorrow, and going to a less-exciting location. Bummer. But I’ll explain all that later.
This past trip was to the Mitchell River National Park, and it was a 10-hour drive from Kununurra. Richard and I had made all the food purchases on Friday, packed everything up and made it ready, although we had Saturday off (there was a circus in town and I was feeling like I needed to pack instead of going, but I kind of wish I had gone since it was across the street from the office/my room. Oh well). Ian was at a conference and would be arriving a week later.
Sunday we headed out bright and early, starting along sealed roads but quickly moving onto the infamous Gibb River Road, which is unsealed and full of wild river crossings. I’d heard about this road already since it pops up on every rental car’s rules and regulations statement, usually banning you from driving on it. EVER. Apparently it becomes rather treacherous during the wet season, when the rivers rise and it’s muddy and hard to cross the water, but I thought it was pretty tame at the moment, albeit a bit bumpy.
We were treated to some nice cliff/mountainous views, first at a distance and then right beside us as we passed under them. Sorry I can’t upload photos in my current internet condition, which makes these comments rather meaningless. However, Richard told me that a lot of the scenery was used in the movie, Australia, so if you saw it and remember the cattle mustering sections, I think it was somewhere in there. We discussed that it was a bit of a ridiculous movie, and Richard said he thought it should be called Far Away Downs instead of Australia, which I think would have made a lot more sense, since it didn’t really encompass everything in Australia, as its broad title would suggest.
[cliffs]
At some point we pulled over for morning tea (out of a thermos, Australians are always prepared for morning tea, and I applaud them, it should be mandatory in North America) and walked a short way to a waterfall, even though it was just a tiny pool since it’s the dry season. It was still picturesque, and full of the red sandstone that is iconic in the Kimberley.
We also crossed our first and widest river, the (aahhh I forget the name). It was pretty cool to just ride over it in the ute (short for utility, in this case a 4WD truck) and I got some pics as we crossed, reminding me of the old Oregon Trail game when you had to ford the river. I would definitely rather be in an enclosed truck than a covered wagon! As a side note, this river was the only area we encountered that could have saltwater crocodiles (aka salties) since it flowed closest to the ocean, and was sort of tidal. All the other rivers we saw would only have “freshies” (freshwater crocs), which are small and harmless, rather like the caimans I saw in the Amazon. I have yet to see any sort of crocodile yet, and I’d like to keep it that way, or at least at close range (seeing them at a distance would be cool).
We stopped at the Drysdale River Station for lunch (in Australia “station” usually means a cattle station, like a ranch, and there are a lot of those in this part of the country) and then pressed on for the final hours. When we turned off onto the Mitchell River track, the unsealed road got even bumpier, and we really rocked as we went up and down the red corrugations. We crossed another river, the King Edward, and a few little creek things along the way there.
A few times Richard got out his radio to speak to the drivers of some trucks we wanted to pass. I thought it was really cool that everyone has radios (aka fancy walkie-talkies) that are tuned to the same channel so you can chat back and forth to strangers when you need to solve issues. It did interrupt our music, though, which was set on Richard’s ipod in alphabetical order. It was fun guessing what the title of the song was when you were listening to it, to see how it fit under “W” or “T.” It got pretty random when we reached the numbers, though, since there were lots of songs that started with track numbers that didn’t mean anything. In other auditory news, we heard this weird beeping sound throughout the day that seemed to get worse when we got on bumpier roads. Finally we pulled over and made a thorough investigation, yielding no results. As we jostled down the road again and the inconsistent beeping began anew, we finally realized that it was an even fancier radio that was set up in the top of the cab. There was a handheld mic thing connected to it and it was laid out that every bounce turned it on briefly. Auggghhhh it was annoying, and we figured it out right before we got to the ranger’s station, and our camp area for the next 2 weeks.
We set up our tents and our swags (a magical item that’s a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and partial tent all rolled up into one – literally) and planned to ready dinner when we met up with Chuck, the head ranger, and his wife Jaz, who invited us for dinner with them at their little house. We also met Beau (I’m assuming that’s his name, unless it’s just Bo), their adorable son who apparently is very fond of lady field assistants. Ain’t gonna lie, he was pretty smitten with me from the start, and I have to say he’s probably the most charismatic 2-year-old I’ve ever met. We had some good times.
I was pretty exhausted that night and relished crawling into my swag and enjoying its cushy floor (technically the swag is a sleeping mat with a canvas tent that you can pull on top of you. I put a sleeping bag inside and only needed the tent bit when it got really cold, as the normal tent was good enough for that). Jaz said that it was a “supermoon” that night, because the moon was especially close to the earth, closer than it had been in a few years, and was full, so I enjoyed the supermoonlight as I went to sleep. I think that Marvel is missing out on an opportunity for a new superhero: “Rise of the Supermoon” (trademark Loggins 2013).
Monday I saw my first northern quoll in a trap in the kitchen/office area. Apparently they’d been nosing about John’s house (the other ranger) and causing trouble.
We brought it with us and released it somewhere on the way to our sites, which we set up with traps and flagging tape. Richard marked out a 50x50 m grid, flagging every 5m, while I set up a trap at each flag-mark, chucking in a ball of bait (peanut butter mixed with rolled oats). We have three sizes of traps, for a range of animals from rodents and smaller marsupials to larger possums and monjons (which is like a small wallaby with a tuft on its tail – so cute). The first site was funny since Richard drove along the side-road but then couldn’t find the right entrance to the site, which was about 200m off the road. Of course we lugged the largest traps around for a bit over rocks and such before he found it and we could actually set stuff up. Richard had me try driving the side road back, which was a bit of a disaster since I went so slowly but still managed to nearly crash into a tree on my left-hand side, since I’m not used to there being so much car to my left. We stopped and Richard hacked off the closest branches, but I went even slower after that, so it was even bumpier.
After a break for morning tea (of course) we headed down the road in the opposite direction, this time in the Can-Am Commander (a sturdy off-road buggy thing, I don’t know what the generic name is but it’s like a golf cart crossed with a jeep that can drive on anything – seriously). After crossing the helicopter pad (there’s a “scenic flight” business nearby as well) we broke in the new machine by forging a path through the grassland and then over a narrow but rock-enforced stream. I was a bit nervous every time we did this, since I always thought we were going to end up floating, or stuck through a rock, but the buggy prevailed each time and bounced itself safely across. After this initial adventure we navigated around some trees and rocks and arrived at a ridge, beyond which lay the site (side note: it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, and I think my blog-writing-style is fluctuating a bit – since when do I say things like “beyond which lay the site??” Call it the tropics going to my head). Though setting up the traps involved lots of inconvenient climbing over rocks and slipping on grass-covered hummocks, Site 2 quickly became my favourite site of the week since it held the most animals (most of those lovely quolls I met, as described in my last post, were from this rocky area. No wonder they were so gnarly!).
We returned over the creek to have lunch back at the station (here I just mean the ranger’s station, no cattle anymore, although there are lots of wandering feral cattle in the park, leftover from when there was a cattle station here. They think they’re causing problems with the native mammals so there’s been a lot of culling, but there’s still a lot about). The third site we set up was had been recently burned (if this were a scientific study, we would be keeping track of and controlling which sites get burned at which times, to better monitor the effects on the mammals, but since it’s a government monitoring program we don’t have that sort of control. So we just have to note which sites have been burned and hope something useful comes out of all the data). It was a lot harder to find shade to cover the traps (most of them are small with aluminium siding that cooks in the sun so we have to shade them as much as possible) and the ground and lots of the plants were still pretty blackened, although the fresh grass shooting up was a nice bright green, which made everything kind of pretty, in a black-and-green contrasty sort of way.
Tuesday we were supposed to meet up with some local aborigines and some aboriginal rangers-in-training, but they didn’t show up so we just started with the site across the river. In one of the first traps we got our first quoll, so Richard showed me how to constrain them in a corner (like we did with the squirrels), measure their head from skull to nose, measure their back foot, determine the sex, and then put a microchip in them. This last was tricky, since you have to put it in the quoll’s flap of skin between their shoulder blades, which means that a lot of them is exposed. Unlike the squirrels, manhandling the quoll may not be the best approach to ues, so you have to just hold your hand on the back of their neck, keeping their head (and teeth) in the corner and then pinch the skin with your fingers, quickly inserting the microchip with your other hand (it’s like an injection, but it doesn’t make them flinch or anything, and the chip is really small). Then you quickly scan them with the device to make sure it’s working properly, and the quoll is ready to be let loose (I tried so hard to get a decent photo of the release, but they’re really fast).
So those were the quoll-tactics, but the next animal we caught was a Kimberley rock rat instead of a quoll. Richard had me try getting it into a canvas bag, but it was squirming and screeching a lot as I tried to get it into position inside the bag to measure its head. Suddenly it was still, and I realized that it wasn’t moving. Sadly, this occasionally happens with the rodents who get really stressed out and have heart attacks. I felt a bit bad, to say the least, although Richard reassured me that I hadn’t done anything wrong, although then remembered that he usually uses clear plastic bags with the rodents, so that you can see what’s happening and it’s over quicker. We caught a few more rats and Richard demonstrated how the clear bag was easier, but I was still worried about inadvertently killing the next animal I touched (fortunately, I handled other animals, including rock rats, with no more heart attacks).
When we got back to the station the aboriginal rangers-in-training had finally arrived, so then they followed us to check the next three sites. Unfortunately, since they were supposed to get handling experience, I didn’t get to touch any more animals, even though we caught a few quolls at the first site we’d set up, and a very tiny mouse. One ranger successfully microchipped a quoll that was leaping inside the bag and snarling at her, but this was done with a lot of help and she was very nervous, so I was hoping that I would be okay at handling them, given my squirrel experience, but was a bit nervous myself after watching this especially violent one.
We set up three more sites along this river track, although the rangers did the rainforest site so I didn’t get to see that lovely stretch of vines and volcanic rock until later (though it was pretty, I say this sarcastically since all the vines had little prickles and the volcanic rock was perfectly placed to trip you up).
Wednesday we had our first 6am start, which meant a 5am wake-up (it was still dark out and really hard to mobilize) since we had six sites to do in total. The rangers were late again so we started without them for the river site. I was super excited to see a scaly-tailed possum in one of our traps. At first it looked really calm (it was probably asleep) but then it started freaking out and Richard tried to get it out of the trap and into a bag. As he was tipping it down, it streaked towards the bag, snapping through the cage at his finger along the way. Of course he released his hold slightly and the possum disappeared into the rocks, taking a bit of flesh with it. Needless to say, he was not thrilled at being chomped by a possum, and we didn’t get to take any trapping data, but at least it was cool to see one.
I got to handle my first quoll, which was a small one that was very fidgety (see previous blog post on how this makes life difficult). Though I got the other measurements alright, the sneaker kept trying to back out from under my hand every time I got it in position to be microchipped. Finally Richard said we were running out of time since we still had to check the other sites so he grabbed it and finished the job. He had some trouble with it too, though, so I didn’t feel too bad for failing at microchipping it. I then handled a Kimberley rock rat without killing it (win) and felt better.
At the next site we got a few quolls that had already been chipped, which was fun to check with the scanner and hear the beep, like at the check-out line in a grocery. I also handled and microchipped two quolls in a row, a success, although I had a bit of trouble getting the needle in quickly and Richard said I should never be a nurse (I agree wholeheartedly).
At the third site, which had been burned so we didn’t know if we’d catch much, we got our first red-cheeked dunnart! These little guys are so adorable! They are sort of like a mouse (but a marsupial, which is really obvious when you’re determining the sex) but have more pointy faces with a stripe down the middle and red on each cheek (as predicted by the name). They’re darling.
We met up with a few of the trainers that were supposed to be working with the rangers and learned that the aborigines weren’t working that day since one of their elders had died. Fortunately the trainers agreed to still monitor the traps with us since we needed the help to make sure we didn’t leave any animals out for too long. We’re supposed to close the traps during the day and then reopen them before dark. This is a new rule which is to keep animals out of the traps during the heat of the day, but is kind of frustrating since it wastes so much time in the afternoon when we have to drive back around to all our sites again (which are not close together) and reopen them, even though all the mammals are nocturnal and wouldn’t be active during the day to go into the traps to begin with. Either way, it’s a rule now so we have to do it. We had a bit of time to kill, though, so Richard took me along the track to the Little Merten’s Falls.
The track was very nice and wove alongside the creek and then up into higher savannah areas (with the odd eucalypt scattered about, very classic outback) before reaching a wide rocky area where the stream grew wider and then spilled over a cliff edge. We went down a side track to the bottom of the falls, where there was a wide pool and you could see the falls crashing down. Richard said you could get the best photo from the middle of the pool, so I waded out a bit, but it got so deep that I was afraid I might drop my camera, so I gave it up.
Up we went to yet a different path that led right behind the falls, past some cool aboriginal rock art. There was a kangaroo, some snakes (rainbow serpents, I guess), and some people that looked like they were wearing cowboy hats. These last were called Bradshaw art, and were estimated to be from people who came over from Indonesia after there were already some aboriginals living in Australia. The art is known to have fancy headdresses and thin figures with sashes, skirts, and spears. There were also some hand marks and a woman who was supposed to be an evil spirit. Much better rock art than the little snippet I saw in the Grampians in Victoria, where we traveled a long way down a dirt road in a rental car to find a small rock that only had a few indistinct figures on it. It was still kind of cool at the time, but not worth the risk of damaging the car when we weren’t supposed to be driving it off road (fortunately, we didn’t).
Behind the waterfall was also pretty epic, watching the sheets of water in front. It reminded me of the love song in Robin Hood (the Disney movie) although without the handsome fox outlaw (no offence, Richard). The Merten Creek was the same one that we had to cross to get to our rocky site, and apparently once it flooded so much that Ian had to walk all the way to the waterfall, cross behind it, and then walk all the way back along it to the site, to get to the animals. I was glad it’s not the rainy season now!
Richard preferred to swim at the top of the falls, so we climbed back up and found several Jacuzzi pools, where the water was swirling down in short rapids and you could get a mini massage. It was chilly, but a nice relief from the toasty day (the first week at the Mitchell was quite warm, and almost a little humid – yuck). We also saw a rainbow bee-eater (a gorgeous bird, and probably one of my favourites, even though it’s pretty common) flitting around a small tree.
We had to go back to set up the traps again for the evening, and pulled out the GPS to find the rainforest site, since the other group hadn’t marked it very well. I got a lot of experience trekking up and down hills with clumps of volcanic rock cunningly hidden in long grass (you have to keep walking at least 3km/hour to get the GPS to read properly, so I couldn’t always slow down to navigate more carefully). Eventually we found it, but had to adjust the camera trap so it was more inside the forest. Richard pointed out a giant mound on the forest floor that was formed by an orange-footed scrub fowl, which burrows its eggs in the middle of a built-up decomposing heap to keep them incubated. Pretty cool.
When we got back to the ranger station I was sprung upon by Beau, who was fascinated with the CanAm and pretended to drive it and explore all its buttons. I was instructed at several times to sit down in the passenger seat, put my seatbelt on, help him put his seatbelt on (very safety conscious, of course) and then we would “drive” somewhere, occasionally stopping so that Beau could climb to a new part of the machine and play the peeking-out game (“Hello!”) from different spots. Richard came over at some point and suggested finding the horn, so of course Beau had to figure that out, realizing that if you turned the key slightly you could beep the horn loudly. Hanging out in the CanAm wasn’t quite so much fun after that…
One of the heliworks pilots, Steve, came over in the evening to watch a rugby game on our television (I hadn’t realized we had one, but there it was). It was the second game of a series called State of Origin that puts together a team each from Queensland and New South Wales to compete. As Steve explained, it didn’t matter what real team you played for now, if you were originally from QLD or NSW you had to be on that special team. They get a few practices in and then play the best 2 out of 3. I didn’t really pay attention to the game, but QLD won (as Steve, from Brisbane, was hoping they would). In fact, when they played the final game 3 weeks later (we were back in Kununurra by this point), QLD won the whole thing, for the 8th year in a row!
Okay that was a lot more detailed than I was planning, and I’m running out of time to run over and post it on Ian’s computer, so that’s it for now. We’re heading out tomorrow to go to the Bungle Bungles, and I’m not sure if I’ll have internet there or not. I’ll try to get caught up with the rest of the Mitchell trip by the time I get back (we’ll see).
