Today's weather has taken a bit of a turn, for the good.  Over the last day or two it has been pretty cold and miserable (nothing compared to Melbourne!).  But by the end of the afternoon the rain had cleared and sun managed to peek through the clouds.

Day 6

Mission:

       Improbable!

Your mission (whether you choose to accept it!): To use telemetry to find the exact location of Lewin’s Honeyeater for every minute of the day in a patch of tropical rainforest.

Your chance of success: Improbable

Your briefing : Lewin’s Honeyeater is a small bird, 10cm in size, and blends in extremely well in its natural environment, the rainforest. You must find one specific example of the bird (given the id no. #105210) and track its every move, from 11am until 6pm.

Your attempts: to locate the bird may seem to be fruitless (excuse the pun!) but you must persevere.

Your skills: in radiotelemetry are the key to your success.

Your step by step instructions:

·        Set up a bird-catching net in the forest to capture the intended bird species.

·        Attach a radio-collar to the bird and release the bird

·        Set up an observer on the perimeter of the forest, one person on each of the sides of the forest

·        Give them the radio-tracking equipment to be able to find the location of the bird.

·        Ensure that each person ‘radios in’ their compass bearing on where the bird is

·        Using triangulation and some fancy computer software, enter each of the coordinates to make a fix on the bird

·        Fall asleep for 10 minutes whilst resting on a chair, with the dazzling sun glistening through trees.  Then wake up, panicked that you may have slept for a couple of hours! (this is true!!)

·        Repeat these steps every 5 minutes for 7 hours of the day

Your results:  A great success!  The Lewin’s Honeyeater was successfully tracked for 7 consecutive hours of the day. 

The results of the radio tracking for several birds looks just like the image shown below.  It shows where the bird (yellow lines) has been for every minute of the 7 hours.  Each colour represents a different bird.

After a well needed sleep in (8am) I got up to do some domestic chores (washing clothes and me!) and then met at the lab, as we do each morning, to pack the cars and drive off into the wilderness.

It was a very dewy morning, but lucky for us it was a late start (10am). 

Today I worked with Chiang (China) and Catherine (USA) and Graham (the fella who has a beautiful house amongst the trees, you'll hear more later).

 This was my view for about 6 hours of today!

This is called a Focal Tree Watch.  It involves sitting (actually, lounging) on a 'banana' lounge and looking up at a particular tree (a fig tree in this case) and recording all of the birds that visit the tree and describe what they do whilst visiting. 


... and this is why the birds come to visit:

We got to see some very cute Silvereyes and Lewin's Honeyeater.  We made some new friends today - the mosquitos!  There were plenty of them, enough for everyone in Melbourne!

After all of that, Graham a CSIRO fellow (an old codger who knows everything about the Queensland bush - no offence Graham) and I trampled through the rainforest in search of seeds. 

These are the large nets set up to collect falling fruit, seeds and defecations (poo!).  Our job was to take them out of the nets and count them.  One of the highlights was almost stepping on a Red-Bellied Black snake, an extremely deadly snake, but lucky for me it saw me first, got scared and made a quick getaway.

As I promised I'll tell you about Grahams block of land.  We went to Graham's house 2 nights ago for a look at his amazing place in the forest.  We saw some amazing sights:

   

We also saw a Lemuroid Possum (not too common, it is the blob in the bottom of the photo on the left).  It is hanging upside down by its prehensile tail.


The other cute and cuddly creature we came across in Graham's 'backyard' was the brushtail possum (right).  They are the described as being the same species as the 'Brushy's' we have in Vic, but Graham and I have a sneaking suspicion that they are least a different variety, if not a separate species to Victorian.

TODAY'S QUESTION: How could you determine if Queensland's Brushtail Possum and Victoria's Brushtail Possum were the same species or different species?
(Hint: what is the definition of a species?)

Yes, you were lucky yesterday - there was no question!

Another 5am start!

I spent all day radiotracking a bird with a group of Earthwatch volunteers and CSIRO scientists.



I wandered around for about 7 hours tracking a Barred Cuckoo Shrike. 



Unfortunately, it was too far away from my station
for about 2 hours, so I had to fill in time. I came across some unusual things...

   
   
 
    

This is a very cool Boyd's Forest Dragon, I found near Lake Eacham.

DAY 3 - Bird Tracking & Tree Watching

G’day! Well, we had our first ‘real’ work day today.  Although we finished at around 1:30pm this afternoon, we certainly did not slack off!  We were up at 5am (yes students & Lauren, such a time does exist!) and had had brekky, packed our bags, the 4-wheel drives and were on the road by 6am. 

We spent the wee hours of the morning looking for a bird (it had a radio collar on for us to track it), but it was nowhere in sight.  Eventually we found it, a few kilometres from where it was last seen.  The bird (Yellow-Eyed Barred Cuckoo Shrike) is a mid-sized bird that feeds on fruit, including the fruit of the fig tree.

Which leads me to what we did from 11am till we finished.  We performed a “tree watch”.  Which means we sit next to a tree and watch it for anywhere up to 8 hours.  Today we watched a fig tree (Ficus destruens, Dusty Fig) for 2.5 hours to record all of the birds that visited the tree and note what they were doing (feeding, perching, defecating, preening and many, many others!).

  As you may realise, there were

  a few probs with my pics, but
  they are getting sorted.

  Meanwhile, enjoy the Gallery

  on my McKinnon website

      (Thanks Mr Kelly!).

DAY 2

Today was an incredible introduction to Queensland's tropical rainforests! In the morning we were given a talk by the ecology 'guru', Andrew Dennis, who has an incredible knowledge of the area's plants and animals.

He gave 2 talks; an overview of the Queensland area and then details of our project, separated by a much needed coffee!  It was incredibly informative and interesting.  Year 11 students - if you think I squeeze a lot into one lesson, you should try one of Andrew's talks!

 
In the afternoon we went out into the field (the rainforest) to learn more about the environment and to get some experience with what we'll actually be doing over the next 2 weeks.

DAILY QUESTION: What are important components in a tropical rainforest ecosystem?
(in your pairs, post your answers by clicking on today's 'comments' below)

We learnt how to use radio telemetry, so that we can track where birds travel.

 <--  Do I look like I know what I'm doing? 

 
We wandered through the forest and came across some amazing sights, even in the short few hours that we were there.



It has been a big couple of days, but I'm keen to get started with some research.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring!

 

DAY 1

What a huge couple of days it's been! On Friday night I flew from Melbourne to Cairns, arriving just before 1am early on Saturday morning.  As soon as we got off the plane we could feel the heat and humidity of the tropical north (although not as bad as it is in the wet season).  I'm travelling with Cathy a fun, environmental, tree-huggin’ hippy! (according to her). 

If you want to check out her description of me then see her website from the Teachlive website.  She teaches at Princes Hill SC in Nth Carlton.  After meeting up with the other Earthwatch volunteers (10 of us) at Saturday lunchtime, we took the Skyrail up to Kuranda (1 hour trip). 

This is me and Cathy on a tour in the rainforest.

From the Skyrail we had an incredibly spectacular view of the rainforest from above the canopy.

 We had lunch at a great spot in Kuranda and then drove to a colony of Spectacled Flying Foxes near Mareeba. There were thousands of them!  Although the bats were making deafeningly loud screeches and were flying from tree to tree, they were apparently “resting” before their nightly feed (fruit, flowers and nectar).

We were soon introduced to our living quarters where we’ll be based for the next 2 weeks, located next door to the CSIRO Tropics Research Centre.  I share a room with Qigang (from Hubei, China) and John (from Buckinghamshire, U.K.).  There is an amazing diversity amongst the volunteers and workers!