Wompoo in the quandong

A pair of wompoo pigeons (Ptilonopis magnificus) visit the quandong (Elaeocarpus) late each afternoon. They are big, colourful pigeons that specialise in a fruit diet. Now the quandongs are ripening, the birds are turning up earlier and staying longer. It's probably not a good idea to walk under the tree at that time.

Wompoos have a large gape, which means they can deal with chunky fruit. Quandongs give them no problems. Because of this, they play an important role in dispersing seeds throughout rainforests. (Not all of the fruit-eaters are so beneficial. Many of them crush the seeds when they feed.)

Unfortunately, wompoos aren't fond of rainforest fragments and regrowth, preferring larger expanses. There is evidence that they are declining in dissected landscapes, which may have implications for the quandongs and other fruiting trees (such as Cryptocarya). However, figbirds appear to be increasing in the habitats that the wompoos dislike, so it may not be all bad news for the trees.

Catching the rays

The avifauna is taking advantage of the warm, dry weather to catch some sun. This brush turkey looked embarrassed at being caught in such an uncharacteristic pose, that it immediately scrambled to its feet and resumed mooching for handouts (which were not forthcoming).

Bath time

It hasn't rained for more than a week. That constitutes a drought on the southern Tablelands. Pastures have crisped into straw and the turkeys sound as if they're raking gravel when they scrape through dead leaves.

So a terracotta plant pot saucer full of water is a boon to the wildlife. Is there a more joyful sight than birds taking a bath? Even whipbirds come out of hiding at the chance of a dip. And they're just as frantic in their bathing as they are in everything else.

Possum tragic

In a demonstration of the triumph of hope over experience, this male coppery brushtail peers through the window each night just in case I might have left it open. After a spot of nosing the glass, pawing at the pane and then scrambling up the window frame, he usually gives up. Until the next night.

One day I'll forget to close the window and he'll be laughing.

Timber!

Late on Wednesday afternoon, I heard a gunshot near the front of my property. That was followed, about ten minutes later, by another. Which was followed, in turn, by me thinking 'WTF? I hope they know where their bullets are going'. And before I could finish considering the safety issues associated with firearms in dense forests there was a volley, a fusillade and then a cannonade.

And a tree toppled down across the drive way.

It was an old Queensland maple (Flindersia) that had rotted from the crown. The trunk snapped about three metres above the ground. When it fell, it dragged down vines and pushed over saplings. Chunks of rotten wood flew everywhere. Just like shrapnel. If grenades were the size of 2CVs and made of balsa wood, that is. One big lump held a young elkhorn fern (Platycerium bifurcatum) and an orchid. I retrieved it and relocated it to the garden. (Where Steptoe the pademelon shredded the plants. We'll sort this out later.)

A neighbour came over this morning with a chainsaw, sliced up the tree and rolled the pieces into the forest. The fungi had broken down the upper section and worked their way through the sapwood, but they looked as though they were lagging the borers on the march into the heartwood. I'll check out the logs at regular intervals and record the natural recycling process. Here are the first photos.

Not roo-ing the day

I went out with a head torch and the spotlight last night, determined to track down the source of a loud and relentless scratching noise in the forest. The scratching sounded too fast for scrubfowl, which are frantic in every aspect of their behaviour except scratching. Determined: yes. Frantic: anything but. It also sounded too persistent for bandicoots. They're certainly big diggers but they stop when they hit paydirt. This scratcher seemed to be mining its way to the centre of the earth.

The head torch picked up several pairs of glowing red eyes peering back at me from the trees. The spotlight identified the owners as brushtail possums. I was hoping for a green ringtail, which occur in the area and which I'd spotted briefly not long after I moved in and never again.

In the meantime, the scratcher had withdrawn further into the forest. Given the prevalence of stinging trees along the edge, I thought I'd better not follow it. I've got plenty of time to work out what it is.

On the way back to the house, I switched off the spotlight and relied on the head torch. Another set of red eyes watched me from a tree next to the car port.

The Tree-Kangaroo and Mammal Group have an excellent page about Lumholtz's tree roos.

Lumholtz's tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzii)

A milestone

Some time today, the counter clicked over to 100,000 unique visitors to A Snail's Eye View. Unfortunately, there's no champagne in the house, so I'll have to raise a mug of locally-grown coffee. It's just as good!

So cheers and thank you to everyone who's visited the blog over the past few years. Here's to the next 100,000!

Snake time in the Tablelands

I was sitting at my desk pretending to work getting a lot of work done, when a friend dropped in.

'There's a small python on the road,' she said. 'Thought you might like to see it.'

So I grabbed my camera and went to have a look.

This young carpet snake (Morelia spilota) refused to move off the road, despite encouragement from us. Pythons are probably the most stubborn group of snakes. They can also be a tad bitey when annoyed. And, although they aren't venomous, they do have lots of small, needle-sharp teeth. Discretion. Valour. Intact fingers. You get the idea.

Carpet snakes (diamond pythons) come in a variety of regional colour phases, which have been dubbed with a confusing range of subspecific epithets. (Confusing to me, that is. No doubt herpetologists have got a handle on it.) The Atherton Tablelands 'jungle python' may either be a brightly-coloured version of the widespread coastal form or a separate subspecies, Morelia spilota cheynei. Either way, it's a handsome snake and a delight to see around. I hope it made it to the other side.

Possum Central

Wall-to-wall marsupials here. (Apart from the white-tailed rats, fawn-footed melomys and bats.) I've spotted two more pademelons (a jumpy juvenile and a grey-coated adult male), but am not sure if they'll be around much. In case they do stay, I've already picked out their names: Junior and the Grey Ghost.

Not that I've named every mammal on the property. That would be silly.

The two possums that patrol the garden each evening have no names. They might have their own names, of course, but I haven't given them any. They're coppery brushtails (Trichosurus vulpecula johnstonii), a subspecies endemic to the Atherton Tablelands.

Like their lowland relatives, coppery brushtails are compulsively inquistive. Although the darker one (top pic) is happy to peer at me from a couple of metres away, the lighter one (lower pic) will often sit on the outside sill with his face and paws pressed up against the glass. As I type this, he is trying to scale the window frame. The sound of possum claws against metal is not pleasant. Yet another reason to keep the unscreened windows shut after dark.

A plethora of pademelons

I've named the pademelons. Not out of cutesy sentimentality, but because I want to work out how many individuals are using the garden. To do this, I need to tell them apart. I could have spray-painted them, but I suspect that it not what wildlife biologists mean when they talk about tagging animals. So, I had to look for identifying marks. And once I did that, it was easier to give the paddies descriptive names rather than boring old numbers. (Did that sound convincing?)

So far, I can recognise three individuals.

Big Red is a male with an excess of pigmentation. He looks as though he's been retouched in Photoshop. Whereas the others are shades of grey with a rusty suffusion on the hind legs, Big Red has a charcoal back and orange face and sides. He may have been at the henna. Another characteristic is his lack of grace. You can hear him approaching — for such a small animal, Big Red is very heavy on his feet.



Crinkle Cut is a female with notched ears, presumably from being beaten up by other paddies. Over the past few days, she's spent a lot of time cleaning her pouch. I'm not sure whether she has a joey, is preparing for a joey or is just sick and tired of all the ATM and credit card receipts that accumulate over time.





Steptoe is an old male with torn ears and scars on his back and flank. He turned up yesterday evening and hung around for a few hours, pressing his face right up against the window like a kid at the Myers Christmas display. No mugshot yet.

A day full of WIN

This is how my day went:

• I rang Queensland Transport and got the information I needed with minimal effort*.
• I rang a few other organisations and the same thing happened.
• I saw a beautiful green tree snake.
• I met my next door neighbours.
• I spent the afternoon watching a tree kangaroo in my garden.
• And I got a call to say that I qualify for the satellite broadband subsidy, which covers the equipment and installation.

Oh, frabjous day!

_______

* The first menu on the Q Transport line starts with option 5, then goes to 1, 2, 3 and 4. (There is also a 9.) Which made me wonder, in a Spinal Tap way, why they didn't make 5 into 1.

Tree kangaroos? No, only one of them

Spot the tree kangaroo

As I type this, a Lumholtz's tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzi) is backing laboriously down the trunk of a satinash. Tree roos are fine going up trees, but climbing down again ... not so much. I can't look.

I was watching him earlier when my next door neighbours turned up to say hello. They're wildlife photographers, so the three of us fell into silence with binoculars and cameras trained on my furry, long-tailed visitor as he leapt from the satinash to another tree that had The. Best. Leaves.

Of course, my camera battery was about to run out, so the exposure is dodgy, but here's photographic proof that I have roos loose in the padd ... er ... rainforest. He was in a tree at the edge of the garden, about 10 m from the house.

Snakes alive! again

This photo didn't download from my camera earlier. I liked it so much, I thought I'd post it separately.

Snakes alive!

Okay, just one of them.

The first warm day in a while brought out this green tree snake (Dendrelaphis punctulata). One of our few colubrids, this species is common in forests in northern and eastern Australia. The colour varies from the standard green to blue to black. The black (or very dark green) form often has a brilliant yellow belly and looks as though it's enamelled.

Green tree snakes feed mostly on frogs and lizards, from which they pick up a fascinating range of parasites. They are not venomous, but put on a show when irritated, inflating the throat and hissing and giving you a hell of a surprise if you're not expecting a snake to be in the shrubbery two feet from your face.

This one had plenty of room to make a clean getaway. It moved like lightning when it was no longer happy being the centre of attention, slithering into the forest and up the nearest tree. If the warm weather continues, I expect the scrub pythons will be on the move too. I hope the brush turkeys take note.

Telco update

Because you want to know, I can tell.

No broadband for me!

I called Telstra (yet again) today and finally managed to speak to someone who investigated the situation. The problem is a loading coil on the line. So, no ADSL, no cable and no wireless. Just dial up.

Thanks to Neil at BigPond to whom I spoke today and who bothered to chase it up rather than tell me I should be 'more proactive' as another consultant did or fob me off with a load of tosh. And thanks also to Jase at BigPondTeam who tweeted me after reading my post hoping to come up with a solution. A third round of thanks goes to PaulS at Scribbly, who gave me the lowdown on loading coils.

Bugger! There, I think that covers it.

I and the Bird: Four years young!

Happy fourth birthday, I and the Bird! Enjoy the birthday edition at 10,000 Birds.

Several sarus seen

Yes, I saw sarus. And managed to get a photo of them while I was stuck at road works. True to form, the best view was at a spot where I couldn't stop, but I'm not complaining. (Photo taken with a 400mm lens and cropped. They were quite a distance away.)



They are very similar to endemic brolgas. The most obvious difference is the development of the red coloration, which extends onto the nape and upper neck in sarus but is a only skull cap in brolgas. At this time of year, you can see both species on the Atherton Tablelands. For anyone interested, the general location is shown in the map below.

Odd one out

Purple swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio) enjoys a bath and a spot of preening at Hastie's Swamp.

Telco woes

Dear Diary

Day something (I've lost count) and still no sign of a modem from Telstra. The post office staff are beginning to express concern for my sanity. They've seen it happen before. Far North Queensland has a high density of eccentrics and alcoholics and eccentric alcoholics. Conventional wisdom says that these folk are here because they seek isolation but everyone knows that their problems set in right about the time they start interacting with the telco. The post office staff should get free counseling for having to cope with the mad, staring eyes of customers watching them through the empty post office boxes.

The first twitches began when Telstra rang to tell me I couldn't have ADSL because the lines were too congested. And had I considered cable? Well, yes, I had. I just thought I'd go for ADSL because it was slower and less reliable. But I was delighted that they would run a cable from Cairns along the highway and up over the tallest mountain in Queensland just for me.

Okay, how about wireless broadband? Sure, there wasn't a reliable mobile signal within a kilometre of the house but an external antenna would solve that. Despite my disbelief, expressed in subtle ways, such as 'You've got to be kidding. I could have the Parkes telescope on my roof and still not pick up a squeak', they insisted it would work. So I told them to send over the modem. Which they did. And which, despite hooking it up to the biggest antenna on the Tablelands, did not pick up a squeak. I indulged in a 'told you so' but because you never speak to the same person twice, it was pretty much wasted.

What about satellite? they said. What about it? I said. It is obscenely expensive and doesn't work too well in the rain. Well, yes, apart from that. I live in the Wet Topics, I said. It rains a lot, even in the dry season. And did I mention it's obscenely expensive? Oh, and I have the smallest patch of sky and no horizon. It would have to be pointing straight up, which would pretty much make it a penthouse frog pond in the Wet.

Dial up, then? Yes, dial up. (Which keeps dropping out, as it did just as I was typing this.)

Then I tried applying for ADSL again because I didn't believe them the first time. And, strangely, it's now available. Presumably someone died in the intervening weeks. Or persuaded Telstra to run a cable over the range. Or won the lottery and opted for satellite. Who knows?

One day my modem will come. Of course, whether I get the service I pay for is another matter. Here's what Telstra have to say about the speed of their ADSL2+:

About 50 per cent of members on the 20Mbps plan can access speeds around 10Mbps or more.

I wonder how many can actually access it at 20Mbps? I'm guessing a vanishingly small fraction, otherwise why would they chose such a low rate as their benchmark? It's not something to boast about, Telstra. And if it ends up being slower than the other plan, how do they charge for it?

Tomorrow, the Australia Post staff will get one more look at my mad, staring eyes through the P.O. Box and then I might consider telling Telstra to P.O. once and for all.

Being nosey

I don't have a lawn. If I did have a lawn, it wouldn't last very long. Not only do the pademelons nibble down any vascular plants that poke their leaves above the moss, but the bandicoots like to strip-mine the garden. Bandicoots are both industrious and secretive. I suspect they are exporting the soil to Comalco and investing the proceeds in fine art.

Two species of bandicoot occur in this area: the long-nosed (Perameles nasuta) and the northern brown (Isoodon macrourus). I'm no mammal expert, but I'm pretty sure this is the former.

Bauxite mining is a sideline. Most of their digging activity is a search for invertebrates — beetle larvae, cicada nymphs, worms, burrowing spiders — and fungi. They supplement their diet with small amounts of plant matter. If they can wrest it from the pademelons.

Unfortunately, long-nosed bandicoots aren't good with cars. Despite the low volume of traffic on this road, one of the young bandicoots (possibly this one) got flattened the other night. The roadkill didn't last long — a matter of hours — so some scavenger did very well for itself.

Back again

I'm back. Not that I went anywhere. But plenty of things have been keeping me away for the internet, not least of all the dodgy telco service.

Been raining here, of course. You expect that in a rainforest, even in the dry season. Still not enough to bring out the snails, but certainly enough to stir up the leeches. I found one of the little suckers crawling over the kitchen scales. I have no idea why it was there, but that's one of the bonuses hazards completely neutral features of living in the middle of the Wet Tropics.

Saw some oddities today, as I was driving back and forth between the house and the highway trying to find a mobile signal so I could call the telco to tell them my landline wasn't working.

First, a scrubfowl that had wet leaves stuck to its oversized orange feet. When it ran away, it looked as though it was wearing clown shoes.

Second, a pair of spotted catbirds that refused to get off the road as I approached. Eventually, they took off and I discovered the reason for their reluctance. They were feeding on a squashed frog (or toad). One of the pair managed to peel the dead amphibian off the road and flew off, holding it by the head with the hind legs flailing. They were giving the mad whipbirds a run for their money.

I uncovered the reason for the non-functioning phone line: a techie was at the exchange sorting out ADSL for me ... which would be great, if only I had the modem. Still, it's getting closer.