Hello Everyone!
Sorry for not posting in a while. Had a busy week traveling. Mackay was the first place that I went on break. I went to visit two of my friends and stayed at one of their places for the whole time. I went with 2 of my american friends. We left on Saturday morning and got there in the afternoon. That night we went out into town and went to some clubs. It was a really fun time to go out in a place other than Townsville! We also went to a lot of natinal parks. Instead of going to Yongala, like i thought my friend said, we went to Eungella. My friend had to laugh when I told her that I was going to bring my snokel for swimming -- when we were going to be in the rainforest! :) One of the parks that we went to did have the ocean, which was amazing! I loved the views of it on our hike! We ended up getting a lot of pictures of Kookaburras, kangaroos/wallabys, and some crabs. We were able to find sand dollars on the beach! We all found one and brought them home with us.
Yesterday I got back from Undara National Park where I was on a field trip with one of my classes to do animal surveying! It was an amazing trip! We spent 3 days there camping in the outback. Our class was broke up into smaller groups and we all did the same activities but at different times during our trip. I was in the red group --- later, we named ourselves ' team awesome'. On our first night there, Thursday, we went batting where we went by a lava tube cave and set up a few traps to catch bats. We ended up just hanging out in the bush while the bats flew out and some of them got caught.
On Friday we went trapping for mammals, reptiles and amphibians. My friend leandra and I mostly did the elliot traps, which are small, solid metal cages that animals go into. There were also some buckets and nets that reptiles and amphibians would fall into 0r walk into and we had cages for larger mammals. Later that day we did some IDing of animals made lunch, did some habitat descriptions by collecting data at an area of the park and did a macropod, bat tour and frogging in the evening. We drove around during our macropod survery - which was pretty much involved looking at various types of kangaroos and wallabies. We did see a wild boar though! That was awesome. The tour guide took us to a bat cave where we watched bats emerge from the cage. We found a bird called a frog mouth in the road as we were driving back to camp. The tour guide go out and picked it up and brought it on the bus to show us! The bird was hurt though, so it was easy for him to pick up. On frogging we got to go through a swampy area to catch frogs. I caught a big frog, cant remember what kind it was though!
On Saturday we did a bird census were we went with a birder and got to know the calls of many birds and what they look like. I think that the easiest one to hear is the laughing Kookaburra! We also did a reptile census where we tried to find lizards and snakes. Sunday we went mist netting to catch birds. After a while a small group went to check on bat traps from the previous night. I went with the group and it was awesome because in one of the traps we had about 207 bats!!! They were making noise and crawling around each other... it was an interesting sight to see!
Well, I am going to head out. Take much care everyone!
1. One of the parks we went to where the forest meets the ocean!
2. Kookaburras looking at one another --- they were hanging out while we were eating lunch one day!
3. small waterfall!
4. being the tourists that we are... we had to get a picture by the roo sign!
5. A rock where we had our lunch that day. It was very nice!
No comments:
Post a Comment