Spring Break!!

On March 31st, in a rather foreboding start to events, just out of the carpark at the Center my van blew a tire. I couldn't believe it.  Luckily, however, that only set us back an hour and a half, and shortly before noon all the students had been dropped off in Cairns to disperse their separate ways. 

Speeding off to freedom, Monika, Audrey, the two new interns (Leah and Ian), Rohan (oncoming socioeconomic faculty), Tim, and I set off on our way to Woonoroonan National Park in the rather chilly rain for an afternoon of freshwater snorkeling.  Unfortunately my borrowed snorkel had an unnoticed hole in the bottom, so I floundered about as well as I could  in the freezing water to look for sawshelled turtles and whatever else was crazy enough to be hanging out in the current.  Tim pulled up one sawshelled turtle before we hopped over to Babinda Boulders, where the water was emerald green, much calmer, and...you guessed it...freezing cold.  But once I'd crossed a current of icy water, I caught up to where everyone was investigating the dad, mom, and baby sawshelled turtle Tim had found on an underwater log!  I also caught sight of a small eel winding its way through the rocks on the bottom.

When my first day of snorkelling had come to a close later in the afternoon (primarily because of the cold and wet), Audrey, Monika, and I took off for Mission Beach.  I had been told that these people love their endangered cassowaries, but I was not completely prepared for the barrage of threatening warning signs every 300m along the road, not to mention the constantly changing speed limit every 500m.  I think the cassowaries themselves would agree that such fluctuations in vehicle speed would prove more hazardous to their estimation of the chances of making it across the road alive...

We got a room at the Mission Beach Resort, where we made excessive use of the pool right outside our room on the lawn.  The day was filled with laziness, whether at the pool, the beach, or around the small town.  We drove to Tully, the rainiest town in Australia, symbolized by a gigantic gumboot with a frog clinging to the rim.  There was nothing particularly noteworthy about it otherwise, and having exhausted our exploration of the area, we planned a trip to Dunk Island for the next day.

The water taxi came for us at 8:30 am, and luckily for us, the day was finally proving to be clear.  We arrived at the island in about 20 minutes, pitched our tent in a mosquito-infested clearing, and set off to hike the circuit around the island.  The view from the top was worth the uphill trek through the rainforest, and the other end of the walk led us to Muggy Muggy Beach, where the beach is entirely composed of coral shards and seashells.  There's also a view of the small island that serves as a nesting site for birds and which is therefore closed to visits several months before April.  The island resort was also at this end of the hike, and we jealously eyed the accommodations and waterfall-pool as we walked by.

After lazily sitting on the jetty, idly swinging our feet over the blue water and watching the fisherman both fish and keep an eye on the huge grouper just down below, we contemplated the possibility of sleeping on the pier.  As we did so, however, a large ominous grey mass of evening clouds swiftly bore down on us and dumped buckets of rainwater on everything- EVERYTHING- making such a thought utterly impossible...although, I'm not sure which i would rather have chosen: sleeping out on the jetty and getting soaked, or trying to sleep while swimming around the lake inside our tent.  We retreated to the small cafe porch on the beach and staved off returning to the inevitable disaster of our tent (which, by the way, had the wrong poles again).  However, I was extremely tired and retreated first.  Getting out my sleeping bag was going to be too much effort (ie, pulling it out, unrolling it, and sleeping on it in an uncomfortably wet environment) for too little reward (hard vs soft beneath you), so I simply took my beach towel and laid it on the floor of the tent.

Needless to say, I probably woke up every hour or so to the pouring rain, cramped muscles, and sore bones.

The rain happily stopped as we groggily awoke to a clearer morning.  Audrey spent some time wringing out her soggy sleeping bag, and we decided with astounding logical clarity that if the tent leaked, it probably wasn't worth anything, so we just left it at the campsite and hopped on the water taxi at 9am back to the mainland.  After spending an uneventful day slowly making our way back to Cairns, we got a hostel for the rest of Easter weekend.  We picked up the students on Easter Sunday after we'd had our fill of petting ducklings, bunnies, guinea pigs, and all manner of small, cute, fuzzy, adorable Easterish farm animals at the mall.

Fun and games, however, cannot last forever.  We returned to the Center and awoke the next morning to the reality of DRs. 

These are the students' "Directed Research Projects", and, under Tim's (faculty) supervision, I took charge of four bright, enthusiastic students who wanted to take part in my analysis of snake diet.  What this meant primarily was that I would be helping to guide them with their own projects on that topic- sticking to timelines, analyzing data, and working on drafts of their papers.  Thus, for the past week and a half, we've spent long days using a Hair ID computer program to identify cleaned and dried mammalian hairs from the stomach and fecal samples of carpet and amethystine pythons collected as roadkill by either Alastair Freeman (Queensland Parks and Wildlife)...or me!  Washing the samples and drying the hair is like going on a clue hunt, or panning for gold.  Out of the mess of cruddy mass come toenails, whiskers, fur, and if you're lucky, even teeth!  Then follows tedious preparation of cross-sections, hair cuticle patterns, and diagnosis of the profile of the hair.  Yet- 
the coolest thing is when the students and I all finally agree:  Yes, this fur and these claws must have belonged to a striped possum!!