Day 68

This weekend my Biodiversity of Tropical Australia class took a field trip through the Atherton Tablelands to the Undara national park!  We left on Friday afternoon and drove to Yungaburra, which was a little over an hour away.  We stayed at a backpacker lodge called On The Wallaby, which was a really cute little place.

The route from Cairns to Yungaburra.

After eating a fairly mediocre dinner, we packed up the vans and headed out for some possum spotlighting!  They're easy to spot because their eyes glow eerily if any light is present.  We all had headlights, and while my photos didn't turn out so well, I did get a few decent videos.

This is how you find possums.

Bushtail possum!

Photo by Jessica Richmond.

Photo by Jessica Richmond.

Photo by Jessica Richmond.

And here are a few videos of other possums.  The first two videos are of a Herbert River Ringtail possum with a baby!  The voices you hear are mainly mine and my professor's.  The videos are a bit wonky because it's actually quite difficult to focus a camera in the dark.  :)

I have no idea what kind of possums these are.

In the morning a few of us woke up early to go platypus spotting!  Apparently the On The Wallaby lodge has a 98% success rate for self-guided platypus spotting.  We saw two!

Look at the eyeball and nostrils... platypii look even weirder in real life than I had expected.  (In a good way, of course.)

I'm pooped from this weekend, so I'll talk about Undara tomorrow.  Expect lots more photos!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton