We didn’t have a tour booked for this weekend, so I accepted an invitation to attend the Vince O’Reilly Memorial talk – this year by botanist Dr Mike Olsen at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat on Saturday (yesterday) and talks by Dr Margaret Greenway and Barry Fitzpatrick at Eagleby Wetlands for World Wetlands Day.
Then we received a request for one-person weekend wildlife camp, and this lady was only in Australia for one week (from Hong Kong) and really wanting to see some wildlife. She was happy to accept the uncommon routing for the weekend.
Our first stop was, as usual, Daisy Hill STate Forest and Koala Centre.
While walking I encouraged her to feel the texture of the sandpaper fig leaves, and some very alert ants rushed defensively out of the nest they had made between two of the leaves.
Ants on the alert at Daisy Hill
A little further on, amongst the paperbark tea0trees, we saw these large caterpillars, which appear to be one of the hawk moth species.
Caterpillars at Daisy Hill
After visiting the koalas in the centre (sadly we didn’t find any wild ones on our walk that day) we headed towards Canungra, making a sudden stop at Tamborine as we saw these impressive black-necked storks striding across the paddock
Black-necked storks in paddock between Tamborine and Canungra, Queensland
After a good meal at the Outpost, Canungra we continued up the mountain to O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat, where Denis took our guest walking in the rainforest while I attended Mike’s lecture, which recounted his rainforest experiences from his first-ever camping at the age of twelve, in a gully which was inundated with rain that night, through teenage adventures, a PhD in botany and taking his own children walking and climbing. He was lamenting that universities nowadays don’t teach enough basic natural history or encourage their students to get out and experience the forests firsthand.
Dr Mike Olsen (left) and Peter O'Reilley, before Mike's talk for the Vince O'Reilley Memorial Lecture
I then took our guest (who had already been on the treetop walk and botanic garden) to see a satin bowerbird’s bower (and the artist himself showed up as well) and we found red-necked pademelons grazing in the campground.
On to Kooralbyn, and the usual eastern grey kangaroos, whiptail wallabies and red-necked wallabies still grazing despite the development of more and more residential area around them nowadays. We also drove past the Kooralbyn Resort, which has apparently been recently bought and is to be ‘restored to its former glory’, having languished for several years after the previous owner became bankrupt (owing a massive $60 million)
Kooralbyn Resort February 2012
Maybe it will be looking different soon (and more inviting!).
The platypus didn’t appear at their usual haunts at home, although they had been seen frequently over the past week. After sunset we headed out spotlighting. First stop – the campground toilets. The green treefrogs didn’t disappoint us here: two of them looked down on us from the entry wall, and high in a gum tree nearby sat a barn owl.
On our way to the NSW border we came across a carpet python lying on the road, so after photographing him we gently encouraged him to move into the safety of the long grass nearby
Carpet python on Lions Road
We doubled up the tour with taking some observations of animals along the Lions Road section (on the NSW side of the border) of the proposed CSG pipeline. We are concerned about the effects on the wildlife if this construction goes ahead, but without ‘before’ recordings we’ll have nothing to compare the ‘after’ situation with, so on behalf of Scenic Rim Wildlife I’m recording what animals are present now.
This night (Saturday 4th February) we saw a sugar glider, a great barred frog and a beautiful bandybandy and heard several other frogs (emerald spotted tree-frog, sedge frog and several others). The bandybandy was crossing the road that leads down to the Border Loop lookout, and this appears to be the route to be taken by the pipeline from the valley, to join Lions Road, which it will then follow. Many thousands of animals have been falling into the trenches dug for similar pipelines out west, and if this construction (very unpopular amongst residents of the area) goes ahead, we want the company to ensure that they will at least erect temporary wildlife-proof fences until everything is covered over again.
When we started to move the bandybandy off the road he threw himself into the defensive loops they use to startle their predators, which made it very easy to gently slip a small branch underneath him and lift him to the safety of the forest floor.
Bandybandy crossing the CSG pipeline route at the Border Loop, off Lions Road
Bandybandy throwing himself defensively into coils
See http://wildlifetourism.org.au/discussions/threats-to-australian-wildlife/coal-seam-gas-and-australian-wildlife/ for further concerns about impacts of CSG extraction on wildlife.
After dinner that night, Darren set up the spotting scope to view the moon’s craters, and took our guest spotlighting on our own property, seeing bandicoots, wallabies, barn owls and a brushtail possum, and our guest settled down for her second-ever night of camping (and first time ever in Australia)
On Sunday morning, after looking through the wildlife ecology centre and the butterfly trail and exploring a scrubby gully on the Araucaria property, we headed to Everyday’s Cafe for lunch and on to Beenleigh to view the fruitbat colony and Eagleby Wetlands for the World Wetlands Day talks, which I attended while Darren led a walk looking at pelicans, black swans and other waterbirds.
[photos coming soon]
Dr Margaret Greenway told us how the Ramsar Convention was formed many years ago in Iran, and how Australia was one of the 18 countries involved (now there are over 100) in the international agreements for conservation of wetland habitat. Eagleby is part of a larger wetland area connected with southern Moreton Bay. Barry Fitzpatrick spoke on how the current legislation on development and the emphasis on finding threatened species and then ways of mitigating threats to these is not sufficient to protect the remaining, unreserved wetlands in this driest of all continents.
Not our usual schedule for a wildlife weekend camp, but our guest agreed it was a very interesting and rewarding one.