Don't try this with an echidna

From the BBC's Asia-Pacific news:

A man who attacked a teenage boy with a hedgehog has been fined by a New Zealand court.

William Singalargh, 27, had asked his victim if he wanted to "wear a hedgehog helmet" before hurling the animal at the 15-year-old on 9 February.

...

A more serious charge of assault with a weapon — the hedgehog — was dropped. It carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though police said it was dead when collected as evidence.

What a prick.

Cooking snails ...

... with Gordon Ramsay. I probably don't have to mention that this is NSFW unless you have the sound turned right down. Or work within earshot of my office, in which case you won't even notice.

The species involved is the garden snail (Cantareus aspersus), which is a smaller cousin of the Roman or edible snail (Helix pomatia). Don't try this at home if you or your neighbours use snail bait in their gardens.

Tagging snails ...

... the fancy way. Inner City Snail is a slow-moving street art project by Slinkachu. Check out some of his other work at Little People, where he left little hand-painted people to fend for themselves in the streets of London.

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HT to Janice Voltzow via Molluscalist.

Man disturbed by wee snake

A man is caught short on the road to Laura in Far North Queensland. He hops out of his car and has a pee* in the scrub. It doesn't go the way he expects.

Must ... resist ... puns

* Well, probably not a pee, if we're going to be absolutely accurate.
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HT to Molecular JJ

I and the Bird #76

Uncle Merl is throwing a birding party at Wanderin' Weeta's place and we're all invited.

Questions at Hay

The Grauniad offered authors at the Hay Festival the opportunity to ask one another tricky questions in front of reporters. Easy copy? Tick. Entertaining? I read it all the way through.

There's something in there for everyone. The Bishop of New Hampshire asked President Carter about the potential impact of Barack Obama's election on the world's perception of the U.S. Will Self posed a bizarre question about the aurochs to Deborah, the last surviving Mitford sister. (It demonstrated that one of the pair knew more about extinct wild cattle than the other. Perhaps that wasn't the purpose of the question.) But the prize goes to this response from Christopher Hitchens.

Julia Neuberger, rabbi and Lib Dem peer asks Christopher Hitchens, journalist, critic and author

Q Why are you so angry about religion? Don't you think your very fervour — and certainty — make you just like the religious extremists you profess to despise. And where's the room for doubt in your analysis?

A Oh Christ, not this one again. Anthony Grayling puts it definitively out of its misery in Against All Gods, reprinted as his contribution to The Portable Atheist (ed. C Hitchens) entitled Can an Atheist be a Fundamentalist?

If I may, I will borrow his conclusion: "Any view of the world which does not premise the existence of something supernatural is a philosophy, or a theory or, at worst, an ideology. If it is either of the first two, at its best it proportions what it accepts to the evidence for accepting it, knows what would refute it, and stands ready to revise itself in the light of new evidence. This is the essence of science. It comes as no surprise that no wars have been fought, pogroms carried out or burnings conducted at the stake over rival theories in biology or astrophysics."

Clear? It's not a matter of "room" for doubt. The whole analytical method of humanist materialism is based on scepticism. We take nothing on faith. Imagine what a fortune could be made by a palaeontologist who unearthed human bones and dinosaur bones in the same layer of sediment. I will bet my house that this discovery will not be made, but my bet is not entirely, or at all, an article of belief. It is, rather, a conviction based on the study of evidence.

As to the manner in which I express myself, it rather depends on the antagonist. I'm normally renowned for my patience and good humour, but I admit to being easily bored and, when I come up against, say, a self-righteous rabbi, can be tempted to succumb to sarcasm. I think that may be where your confusion arises. Oh, and I do not "profess" to despise religious extremists. I really do despise them.

Orange-footed renovators

The mounds are to be met with here and there in dense thickets, and are great puzzles to strangers, who cannot understand who can possibly have heaped together cartloads of rubbish in such out-of-the-way places; and when they inquire of the natives they are but little wiser, for it almost always appears to them the wildest romance that it is all done by birds.

Alfred Russel Wallace, 1869
'Bali and Lombok' in The Malay Archipelago

Bushy Creek runs along the boundary of Kingfisher Park. A rustic bench overlooks the water. You can sit here for hours watching the birds as they drop by to forage and bathe. I shared a lot of time at the creek with spectacled and pied monarchs, rufous fantails, little shrike-thrushes and even an azure kingfisher. (Duncan at Ben Cruachan Blog has a photo of one of these dazzling creatures, which I'm convinced are the product of an alchemist who can turn gemstones into birds.)

Orange-footed scrubfowl have built a nest in the rainforest along the creek. Nest is perhaps an understatement. It's an edifice, a massive mound of leaves and soil raked up from the forest floor. So big is this structure that scrubfowl make brush turkeys look like slackers.

• Scrubfowl mound: up to 5 m high and 12 m in diameter
• Brush turkey mound: up to 2 m high and 5 m in diameter

See? No wonder turkeys have made a pastime out of mooching. They've got all that spare time to fill.

Evidence of a turkey filling its spare time with mooching

Scrubfowl construct their mounds in closed forest. Occasionally, abandoned mounds are found in woodland or savanna, indicating that vegetation type has changed at some time. Inferring a change from the nests is one thing, pinpointing the time is quite another. Radiocarbon dating gives unreliable results because scrubfowl constantly bring in, chuck out and rework the material in their mounds. They are the ultimate renovators.

(For a video of scrubfowl in action, click here. 2.6 MB)

Bright orange feet are a requirement of OH&S regulations

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ETA: Those figures for the maximum dimensions of a scrubfowl mound came from Pizzey's Birds of Australia, which is pretty good on these sorts of things. But I've just been searching for more information on the subject. I haven't been searching very hard, of course. If anything requires more effort than a few keystrokes, you can forget about it. The less-than-authoritative internet gives figures from 4.5 to 7 m in height. This reminds me of the changing dimensions of the giant squid.

Undara signs

Someone at Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service / Environmental Protection Agency has had a lot of fun with these interpretive signs at Kalkani volcano, Undara.

Well, that is the question

Ah, now it's settled ...

... or maybe not

Birds of the Bush

Common (if sometimes shy) birds from the camp site at Undara.

Pale-headed rosella

Red-winged parrots

Rainbow lorikeet

Pied currawong

Squatter pigeon

Everyone's favourite — laughing kookaburra (in a pensive mood)

Undara: Pioneer Track

Although there might be a coach load of day trippers in the car park, it doesn't take long to escape the horde. Most visitors pile into minibuses to go on tours of the lava tubes. The Savanna Guides show them the sights and give a good commentary on the natural and social history of the area. Only a small number of visitors explore the walking tracks.

That suits me fine. Most of the time I'd rather be where other people aren't.

And they aren't on the tracks.

No people

The Pioneer Track follows the path of the old telegraph line, which ran along the coast from Brisbane to Cardwell, then west across the ramparts of the Seaview Range and the inland plains to Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was completed in 1872. In the same year, another line was finished. That one ran from Adelaide to Port Darwin.


When the submarine telegraph link was finally established between Java and Australia, the cable came ashore at Port Darwin. Queensland missed it by that much quite a big distance really.

Line workers used ironbark (Eucalyptus crebra) as a source of wood for everything except the poles themselves. Consequently, many of the older trees along the track are forked, having grown back with two trunks from the cut surface.


The telegraph poles were made from cypress pine (Callitris intratropica), a native conifer that is highly termite-resistant.

In a termite-filled landscape, this pole has survived for almost 130 years

More termites than you can poke a stick at. Not that you'd get your stick back. They're termites, after all.

This replica pioneer hut is at the end of the walk. It's in better condition than my place.




I'm considering replacing my weatherboards with slabs of ironbark lashed together with green hide. I might avoid the crushed termite mound floor, especially if I have to moisten it with cattle blood.

Mond you, if I did, I'd certainly be where other people aren't.

Undara: View from the Bluff

Let's not mince words. Undara National Park is amazing. (Okay, I did mince words. I minced an off-colour adjective right out of that sentence. Feel free to put it back in.)

To be honest, it doesn't look all that amazing as you drive in. You turn south off the Gulf road just before Mount Surprise and head through a cattle station for a few kilometres. Brahman steers watch from the tall grass, unperturbed by the traffic. (Such that it is.) Cow shit dots the bitumen. That must confuse the dung beetles.

Even when you get to the camp site, with its railway carriages and corrugated iron and inoffensive Olden Times feel, there's no indication of what awaits beyond the trees. You have to get your car-numbed arse up to the Bluff to check out the landscape.

Path to the Bluff

Kurrajong (Brachychiton)

Daytime moon

From the Bluff

View to the east

What makes Undara amazing is its volcanic legacy.

Eastern Australia has a history of eruptions and flows and general igneous mayhem over the past few million years. Most of south western Victoria lies on basalts that oozed and flooded from volcanoes like Mount Napier and Tower Hill. Tourism on the Atherton Tablelands features the volcanic lakes Eacham and Barrine and the sinister-looking, water-filled diatreme of Mount Hypipamee, which is known, slightly unimaginatively, as The Crater. And there's a country's worth of pointy basalt configurations in between.

But none of them is as spectacular as Undara. Not in my book, anyway. As always, your mileage may vary. Undara has volcanoes. That whole area — the McBride Volcanic Province — is stuffed to the gunwales with more than 160 of them. But, yanno, that's not the big thing. What make this place worthy of State protection are the lava tubes.

The flow from Undara volcano, which erupted about 190,000 years ago, extends over 1550 km2. Part of the flow followed a watercourse, as lava, being liquid, is wont to do. But the surface cooled at a faster rate than the interior, forming a tube through which the lava continued to run. It finally stopped 160 km from the crater.

Setting the scene

Collapses in the roof reveal the tube's track. They provide sheltered conditions that allow vine thicket species to grow, so they are marked on the surface as a Morse code of emerald on a sheet of pale green.

Undara volcano and the lava tube

Another part of the flow appears above ground as The Wall, a 20 m tall, 35 km long ridge of basalt formed along another watercourse.

The Wall near Mount Surprise

Visitors to Undara National Park can only view the lava tubes on guided tours. Having seen them before, I decided that I'd concentrate on some other features. I'll put up posts about those over the next couple of days.

But I did want to see the microbats. During the Wet, Barker's Cave acts as a major nursery for several species. It's also a larder for Children's pythons (Antaresia childreni) and night tigers or brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis), which hang from the cave walls and trees in the cave mouth and snatch bats from the air. Because I visited in the Dry, bat numbers were down but it was still a thrill to have them wheel and zoom around me. Also, one solitary, probably hypothermic night tiger made an appearance. I pointed the camera and clicked. Under those circumstances, you're happy for an image of any quality .

To the bat cave!

From the bat cave!

Death in the walls

Mount Carbine cemetery

Pied butcherbird sings at Mount Carbine cemetery

When there are no handy trees, termites make do

Road trains

The only thing to remember is that road trains are like supertankers — they take a long time to reach cruising speed, a long time to stop and they don't give way to anyone.

So it's kind of exciting to encounter one of these 50 m (160') monsters on a one-lane road.

You can't drop your nearside wheels on to the gravel, as you can with other traffic. You have to get right off the nail file of bitumen and stop. Or become a hood ornament. The choice is yours.

Big but not as big as the ore trucks

Forty Mile Scrub

Just north of the turn off to Mount Surprise, Georgetown and the Gulf of Carpentaria, is a gravel parking spot large enough to accommodate half a dozen road trains, a sweep of lawn with picnic tables and a track through a dry rainforest.

In all the years of travelling to Undara and the Atherton Tablelands, I’d never visited Forty Mile Scrub. Actually, I'd never been on that part of the Kennedy Developmental Road. From Townsville, I'd driven up to Undara and then pushed on to Chillagoe along a 4WD track that left the Gulf road east of Mount Surprise and joined the Burke road at Almaden. From the Tablelands, I always veered east onto the Palmerston Highway. So that stretch of road between Ravenshoe and the turn off was Terra Incognita.

Dry rainforest — more accurately, semi-evergreen vine thicket (SEVT) — is a type of closed forest that grows in areas subject to markedly seasonal rainfall. At Forty Mile Scrub, almost all of the annual precipitation comes down during the Wet, between December and April. For the rest of the year, there's bugger all. Plants cope with the prolonged Dry by dropping their leaves if necessary. Hence the term 'semi-evergreen'. As for vine thicket — lianas snake between the trees and the canopy is low.

A short walk in the vine thicket

Explaining it all

Kurrajong (Brachychiton australis) emergents tower over the low canopy

SEVT often grows in the same areas as eucalypt woodland. Here's the problem — one of those vegetation types is fire-sensitive, the other is fire-dependent. Because of its susceptibility, SEVT persists only in spots protected from fire, such as rocky gullies and basalt flows. Unfortunately, many of these spots are not protected from cattle and/or weeds, so the vine thickets get bashed around by other foes, some not so easy to control.

I and the Bird #75

Amila at Gallicissa has put together a splendid I and the Bird. As well as assembling a selection of entertaining birdiness business, he's offering readers the chance to win beautiful books. I can't believe you're still here. Get over there now!

Mount Molloy

Far North Queensland was built on tin and copper, gold and wolfram.

James Venture Mulligan, an Irish immigrant, discovered the most important ore deposits in the Far North. In 1873, following directions given by explorer William Hann, he confirmed the presence of gold on the Palmer River.

It was Mulligan's party that proved the Palmer payable, a river of gold, thus causing the mighty rush which within a few short months saw a fleet of ships within the mouth of a far northern river that had barely seen a ship since Captain Cook beached his stricken Endeavour there. Little did Captain James Cook dream … that this wild, outlandish spot would one day be called Cooktown, the broad river mouth packed with vessels of all descriptions, from the new cities of the south and even from China, brought there by the most romantic gold rush in Australia's history.

Ion Idriess, Back o' Cairns

Mulligan discovered alluvial tin in the Wild River (1875), which led to the founding of Herberton, more gold in the Hodgkinson fields (1876) and silver in what became known as Silver Valley (1880).

Thirty years after his first big discovery, he gave away the nomadic life of a prospector. He married and became a pub landlord in Mount Molloy, a town founded on copper ore. It was probably a relief for him to live in a town that wasn't connected with one of his finds.

There seems to be confusion over the identity of Mulligan's pub. Mount Molloy locals say it was the Pioneer Hotel, which no longer stands. The Queensland Environmental Protection Agency's book on heritage trails of the North identifies it as the National Hotel, which is still open for business on the main street. So here are some photos of what may be — but is probably not — the right pub.

The National Hotel, built in 1903

By this time, John Moffat — another big name in the Far North's mining history — had taken over the Mount Molloy Copper Mining Company. After establishing a tramway to transport ore to Chillagoe, he found that the smelters there were unsuitable. He then built smelters on site at Mount Molloy and also opened a saw mill.

Remains of the sawmill boiler

Things went well for a few years. The town prospered under a series of copper booms and construction of the railway south to Biboohra promised greater things to come. (Not for James Mulligan, unfortunately, who was killed while trying to stop a brawl between railway workers at his hotel.)

Memorial for James Venture Mulligan in Mount Molloy Cemetery

But the copper ore was running out and the smelters were finally shut down in 1909. After that, Mount Molloy persisted as a timber and railway town with a dwindling population. Closure of the sawmill in 1963 and the railway in 1964 almost finished it off. Now Mount Molloy is thriving again as an agricultural centre and tourist destination.

Spectacled monarch

Kingfisher Park near Julatten in Far North Queensland boasts a bird list as long as your arm. Being the world's second worst bird watcher, I only ticked off a thumb's worth but I was happy with that. The spectacled monarch (Monarcha trivirgatus), an active and attractive flycatcher, is one of the more frequently encountered species on the list.

Did I say it was active? I spent the best part of an hour trying to snap this fellow as he darted and danced through the foliage above my head. I got him in the end. Sort of.






The next day, one of the little charmers perched on the back of a chair as I had my breakfast on the patio. Who says birds don't have a sense of humour?