Weekend in the Bush

I finally got a weekend away from the city and it turned out to be much more fun than I anticipated. It was for a field trip for my Australian Wildlife Biology class, so there were lots of mandatory activities I had to take part in, but they were all quite fun and interesting. We studied such things as the plants in the area and the soil at various elevations, which directly contributed to why certain plants grew in those areas. As far as animals go, we caught small mammals, like rats, bats (photo at left) and a small marsupial called a brown antechinus. Bird watching was on the agenda for one morning and my group spotted about 30 different species. We also went out one night frogging at a pond and saw some really tiny frogs hanging onto reeds, which you can also see here on the left. Another pretty neat activity we did was sending out owl calls in the hopes that we would get some to call back to us, but we didn’t have any luck with that. We also called out to some bats, flying foxes and the best one, a koala. Now, I’m pretty sure that no one reading this has ever heard a koala grunting, but let me tell you, it is not anything like what you might expect. It sounds pretty freaky, especially when you’re standing outside in complete darkness. I think we were all shocked at how energetic and scary-sounding the koala was.

Anyway, the whole reason for the staff at Smith’s Lake for doing all this animal observing was for survey purposes. Some of the animals we were looking for are endangered, so it gives them a chance to monitor the numbers of each species and report it to the state wildlife department. As for the students, well we learned heaps about many different plants and animals and got to observe them in their natural habitat. The koala grunting was probably the most interesting bit of info I acquired this weekend simply because I always thought the were so docile and if they made any noise it would be pretty quiet, but I sure was wrong.

The weather up at Smith’s Lake was pretty good, too, at least during the day. Smith’s Lake is located north of Sydney by about 4 hours driving, so it was naturally a bit warmer. However, at night it got quite cold and since the rooms we slept in had screens at the corners open to the elements, we noticed the cold nights quite a bit more than we do in our houses in Sydney.

In addition to the biology that I learned over the weekend, I also learned a bit about stars and the solar system. Now, this was not part of the class work, but my good friend Dominik is taking an astronomy class and the sky is so ridiculously clear at night where we were, so we actually spent quite a bit of time out underneath the stars just gazing. If I truly believed in wishing on falling stars, I would imagine I’d be pretty lucky over the next few years, because I probably saw about 50 of them. We could just see so many stars and the Milky Way galaxy was very bright, too. Amazingly, Dom actually got some really good photos of it all, but the standard rule holds true; that the pictures don’t do it justice. They’re still amazingly good though. In the picture at the bottom, you can see the sun setting over Smith’s Lake and the moon and maybe if you look close enough you can even see the planet Venus at the top of the photo. Pretty cool stuff.

Now, all of this stuff was cool, I really feel like I learned a lot about natural biology in general and I feel I have a much deeper appreciation for the natural environment, but the best part, by far, was just spending time (and constantly repeating funny lines from The Office) with my good friends, Dom and Harry, as well as making lots of new friends. We had three awesome days and two great evenings of just chatting away about nonsense around the fire and out under the stars by the lake. It’s a shame that this trip had to come so late in the school year because now we only have three more weeks of class to spend with each other, but it was still a great time and it has even inspired our next adventure, a road trip into the Outback!

Special thanks to Dom for the use of all of the photos in this post!