More marsupials ... and other beasts

The Red Centre had much to recommend it, but mammals were not among its strongpoints. In fact, the only one that I saw was a dead spinifex hopping mouse on the path at the eastern end of Uluru. It looked very similar to the other desert rodents that have evolved independently - including the jerboa of North Africa - in having short forelimbs, powrful hopping hindlimbs, and a long tail with a tuft of hairs at the end. One reason for the dearth of mammal sightings was that most of the smaller mammals in Australia (and elsewhere) are nocturnal, and seeing them requires wandering around at night - preferably with a powerful spotlight.

The antidote to this lack of furry tails and wiffly noses was on hand in Cairns. My flight got in after dark in the evening, so I'd decided when booking various trips in advance from the Netherlands not to try and book a full day trip for my first day. I'd found the perfect alternative in a wildlife trip that left Cairns mid-afternoon, and went up onto the Atherton Tableland (only an hour's drive away) for a bit of wildlife watching in the afternoon followed by spotlighting after dark for nocturnal mammals.

Rickie the guide picked me up from the hotel in a minibus. Looking rather sheepish he said, well you'll either think this is good news or bad news, but you're the ony one on the trip. The Australian dollar is relatively high, which makes a holiday to Australia expensive, and those who do make it are economising on day trips once here. As far as I was concerned it was definitely good news as Rickie was knowledgeable and more than happy to share his expertise. Later, as the only passenger, I didn't have to fight over the second spotlight.

We stopped off in the suburbs of Cairns to watch a group of about 20 agile kangaroos happily munching in a small field enclosed by houses, then on and past Gordonvale where the first cane toads were fatefully released, and wound up through the forest - dry forest at first, but then a sudden transition to rainforest - before emerging out onto the Atherton tableland. The tableland is volcanic in origin, and much has been cleared for agriculture. Small patches of rainforest remain around a couple of volcanic crater lakes. We stopped off at Lake Barrine, headed along the footpath around the lake, and within a couple of hundred meters had spotted a musky rat-kangaroo, about 25 cm in length, plus a tail about half of that. Unusually for a small marsupial thye're diurnal, and they don't hop but bound like a rabbit or walk quadrupedally.

We headed on again to a private property - once, I guess a small farm, but now hostling wildlife tourism. There were grassy areas with high tree hedgerows, and a small stream and pools. We fed the Johnstone River snapping turtles and black bream that were waiting for their regular meal, but the light was too poor for photos. We did find a tree frog to pose for us, though:

Dinner was provided by our hosts, and conversation interrupted for 15-20 minutes by chorusing cicadas. This particular species 'sings' in synchrony, and very loudly, but thankfully for a relatively short period each day. The noise is like a circular saw being used to cut metal and loud enough to drown out speech. A few were attracted by the light onto the terrace where we were eating, and showed off their jewel like colouration:

Before dinner a green-tailed possum put in an appearance for the first time that our hosts had seen her carrying her young. I didn't have my camera ready, but made up for it after dinner when we made another circuit of the hedgerows on foot and found a coppery brush-tailed possum:

Then we headed off in the van to look for more mammals on some dirtroads throught the dry sclerophyll forest, but before we even got off the asphalt we spotted an owl on a fence post. This is either a barn owl, or just possibly a grass owl:

Once we got on the dirt roads, it started raining hard, but it didn't sem to put off the mammals. Rickie and I both had powerful handheld spotlights to search the area alongside the road as we drove along, and in less than an hour we saw Mareeba rock wallaby, eastern grey kangaroo, northern - and possibly also southern - brown bandicoot, norhern bettong ...

... and common brush-tailed possum (below). This last beast was particularly interesting as it and the coppery brush-tailed possum are sub-species of the same species, the former in the sclerophyll forest, and the latter in areas originally containing wet forest. The distributions of many mammal species and sub-species in the mountain range are finely divided, probably as a result of populations being isolated on separate peaks, and particularly between the ranges to the south and north of the Daintree River, about 100 kilometers north of Cairns.