In the wet with the platys

Legend tells of a legendary animal, whose anatomical peculiarities were the stuff of legend...

Last weekend, still bouncing from our adventures with little penguins, we headed inland to north-east Victoria, to a tiny little dorp called Tatong. Our objective: Ornithorhynchus anatinus, or Platypus, if you prefer. We were there to assist Elise, a PhD student at UMelb who is looking at genetic markers in platypus sub-populations.

The "town" of Tatong consists of a pub/inn and a post-code for the surrounding farms, but nothing approximating shops or any other signifiers of permanent habitation. The pub was lovely, though, and served as a fine base of operations. We arrived after a 3-hour drive through rolling rural grassland, and spent most of the Friday afternoon setting up nets and scouting for likely platypus haunts. There was a slight conlict of priorities, in that the platys are fond of fairly deep pools where the freshwater invertebrates flourish, wheras the nets work much better on narrower streams (which are also nicer to work in), but we found 5 suitable spots in the end. It was very warm, so we enjoyed having an excuse to spend the day knee-deep in cool water, despite an unfortunate encounter with a leech and the (unrelated) loss of a pair of glasses in one pool. (Said glasses were recovered after much groping about in murky swamp water, somewhat bent but otherwise in good condition after their swim). As we were finishing up the last net the rain started, a persistent drizzle that continued through the rest of the weekend.

Once the nets were in place, there was nothing to do but rest up and wait to see what came in. We checked them first at about 9:30pm, the first location had a family of ducks in the net. We freed them and moved on to the second spot, where we found a platypus! Sitting there in the net! Snuffling the strings with his little bill! Baring his one-inch poisonous spurs! So cute! Really, they are the most adorably improbable beasts. The bill is not as hard as expected, the fur is incredibly soft and they are just wonderful. We took him back to the truck and did a whole lot of measuring and weighing, took a tiny bit of genetic material and gave him a microchip tracker in case he ever got caught again, and then returned him to the river. Amazing.

We then spent the next 20 minutes trying to get the truck back to the road - the rain had turned the trail into a muddy slope, and in a truck with an automatic transmission and 2-wheel drive there is only so much you can do to get out of that kind of situation. We parked on the road after that.

The rest of the night was less dramatic - a few freshwater prawns (called "yabbies" or something), a few wombats on the prowl and a fair bit more rain. We got to bed around 2am and woke at 6:30 to start checking the nets again. The morning brought another platypus and a few holes in the nets: these are caused by water-rats (also known as rakali), which get caught in the net and gnaw their way out, causing substantial damage. They grow up to 35-40cm body length, so they make pretty big holes on their way out. The day was spent resting at the inn with another check in the mid-afternoon and a splendid pub dinner. The pub turned out to be a popular watering-hole, perhaps simply by virtue of being the only place with booze for about 30km in any direction, but I must say that the staff were lovely and the atmosphere very congenial. There was a christening party the first night we were there (and when we left in the morning to check the nets there were a few people passed out in the backs of trucks), and there appeared to be a consistent business from groups of bikers looking for a place to stay overnight.

The following night we got 3 more platys! And another on Sunday morning! Brilliant. (Also: ducks, several trout, loads more yabbies, a spiny crayfish and a few turtles. We found one water-rat in a net, plus a generous helping of holes in various others. We cleaned the trout and left them at the inn - they may have appeared on Sunday's lunch menu). Drove back to Melbourne in great spirits.

That evening we went to a Thanksgiving dinner with Christina's astro group, and then slept deeply and well... until 4:00am, when I had to get up to go to the airport. After battling late trains and shuttle buses, I got to the airport and checked in, at which point I discovered that the online travel agent had messed up and given my a hand-luggage only ticket. Never mind, my bag was small enough for hand-luggage, if a bit awkward, so I ditched a few sharp articles and made my way to the gate as the passengers were starting to board my 7am flight. It was at this point that I realised I no longer had my laptop with me, having left it at security. And, of course, you can't leave your bags at the gate while you run back... Anyway, it all worked out fine, and in the end the flight was delayed by a Korean family trying to pull a baggage scam by checking in bags under someone who wasn't actually flying. I passed out shortly after take-off and woke up just as we were descending towards Hobart.

And what a lovely city Hobart is. There were grey clouds in the sky, but the sun was shining brightly on the harbour, and as we drove over the "diplodocus" bridge the sun was directly behind us, and ahead was a perfectly clear and brilliantly colourful rainbow, magnificently arching over the bridge and disapperaing into the water on either side. Best welcome arch ever. And I was thinking, "Gee, Hobart, I already liked you, you didn't have to go to all this effort to make a good impression!"

I'm looking out of Andrew and Verena's window at a very grey and damp scene as I type this, with about an hour before I head off to the airport and fly back to Melbourne. It's been had an excellent week here, working at CSIRO with Beth, and lovely to spend some time with the Oliviers again. Despite todays rain it's been good weather the rest of the week and I've enjoyed walking to CSIRO and back each day. It's a lovely stroll, a little over 4kms, and passes the river front and the sailing club, as well as several lovely parks. On Wednesday evening the weather was so grand that I decided to walk by an even more picturesque route, and ended up taking 3 hours to get home, hiking more than 10km over the top of Mt. Nelson on the way. So it's been a pretty good week.

Christina's spent the last few days in Canberra, so I'm looking forward to hearing all about her adventures when we both return this evening. And then it's less than 3 weeks til we leave for our great holiday!

Giant Earthworms and Little Penguins

So, we've been planning to have another Saturday afternoon tea, and have come to the realisation that our weekends are ridiculously busy. We have precisely one Saturday in Melbourne before we go off to North America in a month's time. We have, however, been filling our days weekends with delightful adventures.

Two weeks ago we went to Brighton Beach for a belated picnic birthday party for one of Christina's colleagues. It was fiercely hot, so the sea was a great relief, and with liberal application of suncream we managed not to burn. (It's generally been getting a lot hotter here, with days regularly in the mid-30s. It will get much worse around January, so I think our skiing trip over New Year will be perfectly timed.) We followed up the beach with a party at the church, which involved bush dancing, sumo wrestling (with stacks of inner tubes held together with duct tape providing the required girth) and indoor soccer. All good fun, and I picked up some remarkable carpet burns to attest to my enthusiasm in goalkeeping. The following day was Christina's baptism, which was a wonderful occasion. The church had acquired a rainwater tank specially for the occasion, and I must say it looked very refreshing in the 34-degree heat. In amongst all this I was working furiously to edit a paper for submission, so it was a pretty busy weekend.

This past Saturday we drove south of Melbourne to the Bass Coast and Philip Island, in a car very generously lent to us by the Prestons. Two academic interns from Christina's astro centre, Stephan and Anna, joined us for the trip. They are both originally Swiss, although Stephan left when he was about 4. (His parents work for YWAM on the mercy ships, so his childhood involved a lot of travelling around.) We set off early for Gippsland with picnic supplies and high spirits.

Now, some background: a few months ago when we went to Wilson's Promontory at the southern tip of Victoria, we drove part of the way there on the South Gippsland Highway. When I read this name I admit that I felt a certain inexplicable frisson of excitement, because I recognised the name from a passage in Bill Bryson's travels in Australia (entitled either "Down Under" or "In a Sunburned Country", depending whether you got the UK or US version). In the section on Melbourne and Victoria, he mentions visiting the Big Worm to see the legendary Megascolides australis, or Giant Gippsland Earthworms - I know, I know, the excitement is overwhelming, but stay with me for a bit longer. Yes, these are worms. Yes, they look pretty much like regular worms, except for one crucial difference: they average 2-3m long, and can grow up to 4 metres in length and 5cm diameter. True, they don't caper about in the manner of more entertaining wildlife, but still - that's a must-see attraction if only for its peculiarity.

You can imagine the crushing disappointment, then, when we got the the Big Worm and found that we were in fact 8 years too late to see any of these majestic titans of the soil. Shortly after Bryson's visit (the book was published in 2000), the worms were placed on the endangered species list and it was no longer possible to keep them in captivity. Also, thanks to the decade-long drought that Australia is still experiencing, the worms have moved about 7m underground. The Big Worm itself has been painted with aboriginal murals and the whole place has rebranded itself as "Wildlife Wonderland" (it has a couple of dingos and possibly some other hidden delights, but I confess I had rather lost interest by this stage), so we pressed on for Philip Island.

When we got there (over a short bridge from the mainland), we found it charming. Philip Island lies just south of the Mornington Peninsula, so it's exposed to the open ocean (unlike Melbourne's coastline, which is on the shore of the very enclosed Port Philip Bay). Beautiful beaches and satisfyingly craggy outcrops of rock feature prominently along the shore, and the whole island is fairly tourist-centred. We skipped over the chocolate museum and the koala treetop walk, and instead went to Phillip Island Wildlife Park, which promised a decent range of beasties to "ooh" and "ahh" over before our lunch. (No connection there, I promise). The park was splendid - the animals were well looked-after, the enclosures were very generous and visitors received a packet of food pellets on entry, with a helpful suggestion that it would be enjoyed by the wallabies, kangaroos, wombats and flightless birds. We spent the next couple hours strolling around a delightful menagerie: echidnas and kookaburras, blue-tongued lizards and talkative cockatoos, Tassie devils and dingos, fierce cassowaries and sleepy koalas, a kangaroo having a fight with a large and aggressive black swan... In addition to the regular enclosures, there were some more interactive experiences: shortly after we arrived we saw a couple of wallabies hopping about "free-range", and approached one. As we were enjoying the experience of hand-feeding a wallaby, another little head popped out from the pouch with a hungry look, so we got to feed the baby too. Absolutely adorable. Towards the end of our visit we took a stroll through the red kangaroo and emu enclosure, which stretched about 200m square and looked like a very comfortable home for the animals.

Next stop was a beach on the south coast of the island for a picnic lunch and a cool-off in the sea, and then we headed to Nobbies Point at the far western tip of the island. "The Nobbies" (only in Australia could you give something a name like that) are two small outcrops which are connected to the main island at low tide, and the area is host to a seagull breeding colony. I know: again, hold the excitement - but actually it was wonderful. The natural vegetation on the cliffs is a stunningly verdant ground-cover with purple and white and yellow flowers, which gives the whole place a "Shire-by-the-sea" kind of feel, and there are raised wooden boardawlks to keep people from eroding this fragile vegetation. Mixed in with the seagulls is the occasional burrow with a nesting Little Penguin, and it is these penguins (Eudyptula minor if you're taking notes) for which the Philip Island coastline is famous. There is a large commercial exercise devoted to extracting money from tourists for the experience of sitting in an arena and watching the birds return to their burrows at sunset (the road out to the Point is closed to vehicles long before sunset to avoid any accidental encounters between cars and penguins). We decided to go the cheap route, and had a picnic dinner on a deserted beach while the sun went down, and then sat very still as the dusk gathered. Soon the birds came, slowly working their way over the rocks - and this took some effort for the world's smallest penguin species, which only grows to about 20cm. Three of the birds walked within a metre of us - well, first one penguin approached, and then he saw us and ran off to get some buddies before coming back. As the last light faded we made our way back up the road. We walked for about 30 mins back to our car, surrounded all the way by thousands of clumsily delightful birds. With no nearby lights, the sky above us was a spectacular vault of stars, and the whole experience magical. Now, I can't honestly speak with great authority on the Penguin Parade, and it may be that it's worth every cent of the $20-$80 (depending on your seats) that it costs, but I can't help feeling we got a better deal.

This coming weekend promises to be full of more excitement: we're off to rural Victoria to help with platypus research. The last few days have involved more frantic editing of papers while simultaneously trying to prepare for my next CSIRO visit. I'm off to Hobart next week to visit Beth and set up the next few months of thesis work before our big trip in a month's time.