Fantastical Fieldtrip of Flora and Fauna!

A platypus in Yungaburra

This weekend my Biodiversity of Tropical Australia class went on a field trip to Yungaburra and Undara. We left Friday night and drove to Yungaburra where we stayed the night at a cute hostel called On The Wallaby. We spotlighted for possums. All of the American students were quite shocked to find that Australian Possums are quite cute and not anywhere near as creepy as American Opossums. Unfortunately it was incredibly difficult to get a good picture of them in the dark. The next morning I woke up bright and early to go look for Platypii (or is it Platipodes? ;) ). Despite going the wrong way to get to the "good" place to see them we saw two! They swam right under the bridge that we were standing on and were so kind as to come to the surface right beneath me so that I could take a picture. I was surprised how small they were, I had envisioned them being maybe twice as big as they actually are for some reason.

The Curtain Fig

Next we went to the Curtain Fig Tree, a very famous strangler fig. We went there to observe a vegetation type of North Queensland called Mabi Forest. The Mabi is the preferred habitat for tree kangaroos but unfortunately we didn't see any. I learned that figs are fertilized inside the fruit by small wasps that go inside the fruit to mate and lay their eggs. mmm....insects, now we know what makes figs so crunchy :P. Our next stop was a park called Forty-Mile Scrub where we observed deciduous vine thicket. After that we continued on to our final destination, Undara.

A Dragon!

A herd of Kangaroos

Undara is in Tropical Savannah, a vegetation type characterized by bush fires, low rainfall, grass and few eucalyptus trees. While there we clambered about on rocks and looked for interesting animals. We saw a few skinks. When it got dark we looked at the stars and found a bunch of spiders, their eyes glow at night. We also saw a bettong, a cute little marsupial that's related to wallabies and kangaroos. We indulged the professor by "showing what we'd learned" through such means as skits, raps, and interpretative dance before going to bed. In the morning we walked around in the bush some more and found a ton of kangaroos and a dragon! I was very pleased because I love reptiles and really wanted to see a dragon. The one we found was a two-lined dragon (Diporiphora bilineata) and I got to hold it. He or she (I'm not sure which) was quite mellow and let us take several pictures.

On the way back we stopped for food and coffee. I had my first latte since I've been here and it was delicious. I also had a sandwich with bacon (Aussie bacon is much different than American bacon, it's really more like ham) and egg which also had a big slice of beet in it. I was pretty excited about that. I've noticed that Australians seem to like beets more than Americans do, they put them on burgers in place of pickles pretty often. I love beets so I can't complain.

All in all it was a quite busy weekend and now I really need to work on homework, but it was well worth the trip!