Undara Lava Tubes and Turtles

Summer Session I students had spent their first two weeks in New Zealand, so we only had them at the Centre for two weeks. There was a week’s intermission before we picked up our seven new Summer Session II students from the Cairns airport, with 18 of our Summer Session I students returning from their vacations as well. This brought our second session student total to 25.

On July 16th we took our fresh batch of Americans out to the Undara Lava Tubes, roughly a three hour drive west that took us the greater part of the day due to occasional stops on the way. We headed out in the morning, and hunted for platypuses in the river by the restoration site where we’d stopped for the students’ field exercise. I spotted one, but the cryptic bugger sank into the murky water before I could even turn on my camera. We made a brief stop in Ravenshoe. Every time we stop in one of these Tablelands town outposts, I wonder what everyone does during the day, for fun. You can literally walk up and down the main drag in five minutes…if you think you can’t see the last building on the “far” end of the road. But their Coke Zero was only $1.50 instead of the usual $2.50, so I guess even though it’s rainy most of the time, Ravenshoe isn’t so bad.

On hitting the dry country, one of my favorite landscapes, savannah woodland, engulfed us and became the monorama for kilometers. We stopped briefly at Forty Mile Scrub National Park (where we’d return the next day to do some vegetation sampling), an isolated pocket of dry rainforest subject to extreme rainfall in the wet season, and extreme heat in the dry. Ian (one of my two fellow interns) and I crept off quickly to do some herping, turning over rocks along the path and peering into the dry brush in the scrub. Suddenly, what did Ian find but a northern dwarf-crowned snake! That cool find was succeeded by a stop at what Tim (plant ecology faculty) had found several years back. A graveyard of beetle shells. The earth was literally composed of these rotting beetles, making the earth under your feet feel spongy and springy!

The other avid herpers in the group and I were intent on finding a death adder. Thus, a mandatory activity for us after we pitched our tents at the campground in Undara, unloaded the trailer, and had dinner, was….once it got dark enough, spotlighting. Initially we started out by looking for eyeshine, but we quickly realized that the dry rocky and scrubby country out here required a different tactic. Rock-turning. This successfully yielded a skink, a fat-tailed gecko, and a few Bynoe’s geckos. And as we sat around the campfire, we were delightfully surprised by a rufous bettong that curiously came to investigate.

The dry country, what most people would agree to consider outback, has to be my favorite ecosystem. The red of the rocks and the dirt, the blazing light pale yellow of the tall grass, the wide expanse of eucalypt trees, and the clear night sky littered with trillions of stars. There’s little to no midstory, just trees, and grass, allowing one to see through the maze of tree trunks far across the flat landscape. Dry and somewhat dusty, the open environment invited several students to shun their tents and sleep out under the stars in their sleeping bags. It would have been too cold for me! I arose early the first morning, though, and as I walked around the campground I was greeted by rosy colors glowing behind the black eucalypt treetops reaching their scraggly arms towards the sky. Laughing kookaburras began tittering and their voices rose in a chorus and fell. I bet the one that hung around our campsite had a great part in the ruckus.

We spent the somewhat chilly morning out at Forty Mile Scrub. I continued my death adder hunt with Ian while the students were sampling. We overturned quite a few rocks and poked about in many piles of brush, but all that turned up were “Darth Vader” centipedes (massive, vicious centipedes colored red, blue, and black), and ant colonies. We returned to our brief stopover of the previous day, and Ian recaptured his dwarf-crowned snake. But no death adder.

Our final stop of the day was at the Lava Tubes themselves. Normally visitors are only allowed into the Tubes after paying a $40 fee for a guide, but since Tim had a permit to sample in the area, we got a tour of the Tubes for free!

On the morning of our departure day, I got up to see the sunrise from the nearby bluff. Sadly I couldn’t stay longer in this lovely part of the world.

However, on July 21st, Ellen (the Student Affairs Manager), Leah (fellow intern), and I drove out to the Johnston River to help Tim and Alastair (park biologist and initiator of my snake project) do some turtle sampling. The woman who owns the property says she can just call and the turtles will come to her! She's even seen over 40 turtles come out to nest at once. Luckily we were not the ones going into the water though- I was chilled just thinking about it! In about an hour Tim and Alastair had captured seven Johnston River snapping turtles and two saw-shelled turtles, none of which had been marked on their previous sampling trips. That means that this population of turtles is hopefully quite large!

The fun part came with the processing: taking measurements of the carapace, plastron, and tail; weighing them, and notching their shell in a unique fashion so as to “mark” them in case they were recaptured on subsequent sampling trips. Now the coolest tidbit about the snapping turtles is this: not only can they breath out of their noses, but they can also breath out of their bums!!