Day 69

After breakfast and platypus spotting on Saturday morning, we took off to see a fig tree called the Curtain Fig.  It's a pretty cool tree.  If I were a feral child, I would live in that tree.

Photo from EarlyForest.com.

The life cycle of the fig tree is kind of odd.  First a bird eats a fig fruit and poops out the seeds high up in the canopy.  The seeds sprout in the canopy, on top of other trees, and grow their roots downward until they hit the ground.  The fig grows over the host tree until eventually the host tree dies and rots away, leaving just the fig tree.  In the case of the curtain fig, the fig tree grew so large that the host tree collapsed under its weight, falling into another tree, which the fig also took over.  If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the collapsed tree part on the left, and the upright second tree on the right.  (Those trees have actually rotted away, and what you see is all fig.) 

Photo from claassans.com.

Check out this Wedge-Tailed Eagle (Aquila audax) and the huge hole in his wing!

These guys are about 3ft long and have a wingspan of over 8ft!  Huuuge!  (That's 1m and 2.5m respectively.)

After the Curtain Fig we all hopped back in the vans and drove to Forty Mile Scrub National Park.  Apparently a lot of things are named by 'miles' because the British folks who originally landed here used to use miles, and also because "Forty Mile Scrub" sounds better than "Sixty-four Kilometer Scrub."

We ate lunch and then actually did some sciencey things there, like doing a transect and measuring trees and such.  Boring stuff.  But fortunately my Australian teachers are all big believers in the "poke stuff" method of science, so the rest of our time was occupied by turning over rocks and logs to look for cool bugs.

These ants had army-green bodies with a black and white bum!

A lovely spider I found under a log!  I've never seen this kind before, and I have no idea what it is.

Another spider!

I rolled over a rock and this huge Huntsman spider almost crawled onto my hand!  He was lightning-fast.

Our teacher-driver-dude Steve picked up the rock with the Huntsman on it, so we could all get photos.

Spiders really are beautiful if you can get past the creepiness!

After Forty Mile Scrub we piled back into the vans and headed to Undara.  We stopped just outside the park and did more sciency stuff followed by more looking under rocks.

This is how we got from Cairns to Undara.  It takes about four hours if you drive fast.

This is what you see when driving through non-coastal Queensland.  Not a bad view!

This hole is large enough to fit two softballs down it... and it was made by ants.  The ants here are freaky!

This is the molted exoskeleton of a cicada!  It's not alive because the actual bug shed this  'skin' a while ago.
Still looks pretty scary though!

It's a centipede!  These guys are venomous, but they won't kill you.  Check out those fangs!  (Photo by Jessica Richmond.)

An assassin bug!

Walking Stick bug. (Photo by Jessica Richmond.)

Finally we drove the last bit into Undara.  We passed a ton of cattle farms, which are a lot different than American cattle farms.  The cows are free-ranging on massive plots of land, as opposed to the American farms that stuff hundreds of cattle into tiny caged areas.  This land also happens to be full of wallabies and kangaroos.  I saw plenty of wallabies, but the only kangaroos I saw were roadkill.

This is a Pretty Faced Wallaby (also known as a Whiptail Wallaby or as Macropus parryi).  They're small and cute!

Pretty Faced Wallabies are generally non-violent and cough to show submission.  How cute is that?

Undara is a national park for lava tubes.  A volcano called Kalkani spewed out lava for somewhere between 10-100 years--nobody actually knows how long, because hey, nobody was around back then.  Over 23 billion cubic metres of  lava flowed out over 55 square kilometres.  That's enough to fill the Sydney Harbour three times.  (It's a lot of lava.)  The main lava tube, from which most of the others branched off, was once over 100km long!  Today a lot of sections have collapsed, so we can get inside!

"Undara" means "a long way" in some random Aboriginal language, which refers to the lava flowing a long way.  The native people of Undara didn't have a name for the area and didn't much care what they named it, so some random guy with a book of Aboriginal words from various areas just picked it arbitrarily.  Good story, right?

We took a little hike after settling in, which ended at a rock bluff.  The bluff had a terrific lookout:

Click to make me bigger!

After dinner we all had to do 'presentation' of everything we learned during the day.  One group did a rap with interpretive dance, one did a silly play, and my group did a game show skit.  The' hosts' were our teachers (one of whom was extremely drunk during the performances), and the contestants were two two stupid Australians and two Americans, a Texan and a valley girl.  We like to make fun of Australia, so the Americans got all the answers right while I (a stupid Australian) talked about 'cracking tinnies' and randomly yelled "Crikey!"  We also had an infomercial about vegemite and a rap about orographic rainfall.  We won, of course.  :)

While waiting around for our inebriated teachers, a few fearless bettongs wandered up to our campfire looking for food!  The endangered Northern Bettong is only found in three areas of Queensland, all within 80 miles of each other.  They're adorable and will come right up to you if you put out your hand out.  They bite though, so I didn't pet one.

He's got a carrot!

It's like a cross between a rabbit and a wallaby.  It's got a really long prehensile tail!

Check out the claws on this thing.  They apparently use them to dig up tubers.

They're nocturnal, so they need those super-reflective eyes.  Still a bit scary to see though.

I'll finish up with Undara tomorrow--between mine and Jessica's cameras, I have over 900 photos to go through, so it's taking longer than usual!  Until then, here's a video of the bettong.

Cheers,
Ashton