Australian Adventure

We spent the holidays in the land of bouncing kangaroos, screaming cockatoos, crimson parrots and eucalyptus trees (600+ species of eucs)! Our son Todd and his wife Kelsey were wonderful tour guides, treating us like royalty. Todd’s in grad school studying dispersal of fungi by vertebrates. We met various friends and mentors and checked out various national parks in temperate areas of New South Wales (called the New England high country)—even some rainforests.

Folks in Australia drive on the left side of the road, and many are hesitant about driving after dark because of the risk of a kangaroo bouncing through your windshield. Many cars have rugged metal bumpers called “roo guards.” Towns have very few stop signs—at crossroads they generally have a triangular yield sign that says “give way,” meaning you don’t have the right of way but you don’t have to come to a full stop. (I think about all the traffic tickets I wouldn’t have had to pay.)

It does seem strange to have Christmas around the summer solstice. Todd was pointing out a June bug to one of his friends and they replied, “That’s not a June bug; that’s a Christmas beetle!” They speak English, but there are a lot of terms that are different. Elevators are called “lifts”. Chickens are called “chooks.” In the city, ibises are called “bin-chooks” because they’re often seen rummaging around in trash bins. (Maybe they would be a good totem animal for dumpster divers!) Hiking is called “bush- walking.” Trails are “tracks.” Crawfish are called “yabbies.” Pickup trucks are called “utes.” Pastures are “paddocks.” Our favorite expression so far: Someone was talking about a rare animal; she said, “They are rarer than rocking horse shit.”

My favorite critter so far has been the foot long, half pound+ lizard called the blue tongue skink. It’s thick- bodied and rather sluggish and defends itself by opening its large mouth and sticking out its blue tongue and waving it at you.

I’m dreaming of a surreal Christmas…
We became aware of another interesting critter when Yanna noticed a big, oozing bloodstain on her pants leg. She had just had a visitation by a terrestrial leech. When a leech bites, it injects an anti-coagulant so the tiny wound keeps bleeding. The leeches are almost 2 inches long when stretched out. In one forest we explored, if you stopped for a little while you could see the leeches humping along toward you like a horde of thin, slimy inchworms. One of our friends saw one on my arm. She just rolled it up and flicked it away, “like a ball of snot,” she said. Any way you look at it, leeches really suck!

I’m dreaming of a surreal Christmas…

The carpet python is the most dramatic snake we’ve seen. There were several of them hanging around one of the places we visited for a New Year’s gathering. One of them was 7 feet long, and it created quite a scene when it was discovered hanging out in the outhouse. It’s non-venomous and was delightfully easy to handle. Australia has a lot of snakes and many of them are venomous. We’ve seen a red- bellied black snake and a tiger snake—both venomous. We didn’t mess with them!

We’ve seen a couple of bowers made by bowerbirds. When mating season approaches, the male bird builds a “bower” (a runway/platform with two sides made of vertical grasses and thin twigs). Then he collects various objects to decorate his bower. When he gets his decorations in order and attracts the attention of the female, he does a little dance and shows off his treasures.

In the case of the satin bowerbird, he really prefers blue objects—one of the bowers we saw had blue flowers, blue parrot feathers, bottle caps, and lots of blue plastic clothespins. Todd had been watching this particular bower for several years. When he first saw it in 2010, the bower was just beginning to be constructed and all that was there was a blue sheep ear tag and a few blue-colored blewit mushrooms. That was when he realized that even birds collecting ornamentation for their bowers can in fact affect the distribution of mushrooms. He wrote a scientific paper about this and it got published in the journal, Australasian Zoologist. ( Look for it at your favorite news stand 🙂