More on the Mitchell

To continue where the Mitchell Plateau story left off…Thursday we left early again and checked the closer sites while the other group did the farther sites (ours were more interesting anyway). We only caught quolls in ours, which was good as it gave me a chance to improve my quoll-handling skills, especially the microchipping. We caught a few that had been microchipped already, so that made it easier, but we also caught a couple that had been microchipped last year, so that made for some nice continuity. Apparently the males don’t live very long (I think they burn out after reproduction, like a few other small marsupials) but occasionally you get one living an extra year. The females live a year or so longer than the males, and I think the quolls we recaptured were all females anyway. I got a few cute pics of the quolls leaving, although I’d like to get one with me in it too, at some point.

We finished up around morning tea time (10-11) and then chilled out for a bit before we had to open the traps again. It was pretty hot out and the tent was a sauna, but I managed to take a nap just outside the tent entrance, which must have looked kind of funny if anyone had noticed. I saw a big katydid wandering by the tent, a typical giant tropical insect that I hadn’t really seen since Peru. I wanted to look for interesting birds but it was just too hot.

In the afternoon I got my first real solo 4WD driving experience – traveling to the further-away sites to reopen traps. The track is really bumpy in sections and crosses a creek that’s really shallow but has a steep hill up at the end with a seriously rutted section. I was a bit worried about how I would do on the rough bits, but went slowly at first and then more confidently on the rough sections, trying not to let the wheel wobble too much (and keeping my thumbs outside the wheel, which is apparently important when you’re driving in the really rugged bush so you don’t accidentally jerk and break a finger – yikes). I met up with Richard to fix the camera at the rainforest site, and we rode in the CanAm up the hill, which was some serious bush-driving where we kept hitting giant volcanic rocks hidden under the grass and some very steep sections. I think I prefer walking.

I saw a dingo trotting casually along when I drove back to camp and took a video, but the light was bad. We met some researchers back at the station who were studying fish and processing all these specimens on the table, which kind of stank up the place. They were nice, though, and wanted to come out with us at some point to see some animals. We shared some of our ice cream with them since they were hard at work with their fish samples and still hadn’t had dinner (that’s the sort of field work that I’m not crazy about – I like to have regular meals!). I also saw a cute praying mantis in the office (I never remember if it’s “preying” or “praying,” since they look like they’re doing both)

Friday was exciting because we got to see a golden-backed tree rat. It wasn’t in one of our traps, but a helicopter pilot brought it out to us when we rode past the Heliworks Centre since he had trapped it at his tent (apparently they were making a lot of noise and climbing around everywhere). It was kind of pretty, for a large rat, with a golden colour and a bulbous face. We caught a few more quolls at my favourite rocky site and some more rock rats – one looked a bit worse for wear and was missing half its tail and ear. I think it was a juvenile too, so it had been getting into a lot of trouble for one so young, haha. I got a good release video of one of the rats (I think it was the less-injured one). We caught a quoll in a big cage and had to do lots of bag transferring between the cage and our smaller bags, which was tricky with two people and I think would be quite hard with only one, so hopefully that doesn’t happen again (usually the cages are too big for the quolls and rats to think about wandering inside).

We took Greg, one of the aboriginals working at the ranger station, with us to the next site and caught another quoll and I learned about another rat species, the field rat (aka Rattus tunneyi). We also caught my favourite little dunnarts at the burned site and had another chill afternoon where I dozed in front of my tent. I wandered out later to look for birds and ended up chatting with a couple at the tourist campsite who were asking about my binoculars and what I’d seen. They were very nice and enthusiastic about the mammal trapping work, and pointed out a white cuckoo shrike, but otherwise not many birds were about at 2pm. Right before dusk I wandered out again and saw a few wallabies bounding away (I love the sound they make as they hop, and they can move so fast), which was cute.

Beau (the two-year-old) brought us some cake that his mom had made after we got back from resetting traps, and then Richard made fish and chips for dinner, so that was a nice combination of tasty food, although we didn’t have much extra to give to the hungry fish people (they had their own food, I just always felt bad that they were still working at like 8pm, when I was starting to get ready for bed).

Saturday we took the fish people out with us to hopefully show them some animals. The other workers had left so I had to go to the Yalgi creek track (the bumpy road without very many animals). Fortunately we caught one quoll, so my fish person was happy (I feel bad I don’t remember any of their names, but they were PhD students studying fish populations in the Kimberley and had so far identified several new species, which was cool). The quoll was a recapture, so I didn’t have to do anything to it, although of course it was very calm and would have been really easy to handle. Some of our traps had been turned over in one site, and we suspected dingoes as the culprits. We caught lots of the tunneyi rats at the other sites, although I had to bring a few back to Richard to be sure about the identification (the rats and mice are way easier to handle than the quolls, as long as they don’t die of heart attacks, but way harder to identify, so they still take a long time to process). When I checked the rainforest site I saw a cool ground bird strutting around, which I learned was the orange-footed scrub fowl that makes the giant mounds to bury its eggs (I think I mentioned that already). We never got one in the camera traps, though.

I had to drive back to release the rats back to their site after I’d showed them to Richard, but then got to chill out at lunch again. We watched a few of the camera trap videos and were excited to see some quolls, possums, and monjons in the shots. I got my first glimpse of the tuft on the end of a monjon’s tail, and their cute little faces (they’re like a very small wallaby with a long fluffy tail). Beau was playing with kitchen utensils, using them to dig holes outside, which was cute but a bit annoying since then we had to wash them. Oh well.

I made thai chicken curry for dinner using a cool green curry paste thing that worked quite well although was a little spicy. At night as I was walking between the kitchen and my tent, Richard warned me that there was a brown snake about so to keep my headlight on. I didn’t know what it would look like, but I moved really slowly and saw the long snake casually moseying through the grass. It was about a metre long and I took some photos and then continued to the kitchen. I confirmed that it was in fact a very poisonous snake (most of them are) and vowed to always have my headlight on at night, no matter what!

At some point in that first week I saw a kangaroo with a joey so she looked pretty heavily laden as she jumped, and another bigger kangaroo at the entrance to one of our sites. I also saw a small white hopping critter around my tent at night, but couldn’t get a good look to figure out what it was. Probably some sort of mouse or maybe even a dunnart!

Sunday we closed up all the sites, catching a few more rats on the Yalgi track, although we got a bit confused about whether they were more tunneyi rats or maybe another species, a grassland melomys (pronounced MEL-o-meez), that look really similar. Alas, the struggles of catching rodents! I washed and cleaned out the traps (quolls are especially messy when trapped) while Richard went to collect Ian from the airstrip (they fly helicopters in and out of there on a regular basis, but it’s not an official airport as such). We headed off to the Mitchell Falls just after lunch, but I’ll save that for later. I’ll also put up the first short post about the Bungle Bungles, which was the location for our second trip (I just got back from it on Sunday).