30.12.2011

Narawntapu national park - wildlife paradise

When looking at the brochure of the Narawntapu national park, I thought that .. well. Nice but nothing special: Some beaches, some scrublands, some hills - like in every coastal national park. It was actually a book I was reading
which got me interested in the area. The secret life of wombats is mainly like the name tells - about wombats and people being interested in them. Some like one school boy even that much, that he would crawl into wombat burrows which are just spacious enough for a person to crawl into them but not to turn or so anything else but moving forward on his stomach. Exciting to read, but impossible to imagine .. I get claustrophobic when only imagining the whole thing.

Wombats are marsupials which can gain a length up to 1 m and a height of about 40 cm. They live mostly underground in extensive tunnel systems which they dig. Mostly during dusk, dawn and night they come out of their burrows to feed on grass and herbs. Like several other Australian marsupials they have adapted to hot weather and drought in many fascinating ways like for example their life underground in nice temperate tunnel systems. Other adaptions are the ability to utilize food containing very little nutrients in an extremely efficient way. They also have remarkable ways of saving and "recycling" water and hardly need to drink.
Well, but back to the place: Narawntapu national park has a bit lawn which Woodford described as an Australian Serengeti: You can see lots of kangeroos, pademelons, wallabies and wombats grazing there. Their predators are Tasmanian devils which would appear during the night and try to catch some food ...
visitor centre of the national park


Wallabies and roos ..,now the wombats:
Woodford wrote that they look like little bears. In my opinion they look like giant guineapigs. Fascinating animals..
Australias strange animals also were to be met on the beach or actually in the tidal area of the bay, like those soldier crabs which marched up and down the beach in large numbers:

Ray swimming close to the beach (about in the area I was walking in the water up to my knees a few minutes ago ...)
In another corner of the national park there is a lagoon with various water birds such as black swans. And there are the strangest frogs I have ever heard (did not manage to find and see them tough). Here is my  video of frogswamp (voices), youtube

And  .. well. You shouldn't feed wild animals, I know.. But it was Christmas ...
and the pademelon enjoyed the apple piece too much.

as did the possum the piece of bread. It is also amazing to get to see those animals from close distance.
Well, from now on I try to change my bad manners. New Year's promise ;o)

AND - last but not least: I found another pygmy Drosera species growing in the lawn. Yes, LAWN, no bog or something but a LAWN ( I think I get crazy here .. maybe it's best to leave the country ;-).





East Coast

While the west coast of Tasmania is rainy and rainforests the dominant vegetation type, the east coast is much drier. You can find some rainforest here as well in moist and sheltered areas - but far more common are eucalypt forests and sclerophyll forests which are better adapted to drier conditions.
What you also can find along the east coast are beautiful white beaches ... and why not having some beach holiday on Tasmania??

Silver gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae)
 Pelicans
 Some weird jellyfish which has been washed to the beach

Pelargonium australe, a beach Pelargonium! Remembers me a bit of my childhood. We always had those red pelargoniums growing on the balcony.
Really weird is this stuff: Looks like Salicornia, grows on similar places (marshes and sheltered places close to the salty sea). It also has the same strategy against salt stress (too much salt sucks the water out of plant cells) with being succulent (having a lot of water inside to dilute salts). Well, it's the Australian answer to Salicornia, called Sarcocornia! (Sarcocornia quinqueflora).

Well .. and again the beach holiday turned into a botanical, ornithological and whatever-ical excursion ;o)






22.12.2011

Southern Christmas

Christmas time .. Quite strange here in the South in 24-30 degrees Celsius and bright sunshine. People walk around in t-shirts and shorts, some pieces of colorful Christmas decoration are on display, the supermarkets are full of turkeys and ham and Christmas music is playing. You see the whole scenery and can't help the feeling that something just is not right here :-)

Christmas feelings in Waratah, a former mining town
Christmas in Zeehan, also a former mining village in the West. Botanical joke: Tassies have birches as garden plants. I also have seen some Sorbus aucuparia here and there - trees which occur in nature in Europe but not here in the South. Just like we have some exotic species as decoration in our gardens. Which the birches growing there and the mountain in the background, the scenery reminds me strongly on some street view in Sweden/Abisko or so ..

Christmas wombat

Santa Clauses have entered a ship in an Eastern harbour town

Christmas tree in a rainforest lodge with pictures of rainforest in the background

Tassie Christmas shopping

Santa Claus comes to town - and she wears a t-shirt!

edit 27.12.
Strange but nice: Had a barbeque on the beach like nearly everyone here, went swimming and enjoyed the summer sun.

Tassie drugs and honey

When driving through the North of Tasmania you drive through an undulating landscape with meadows, grazing sheep, different crop fields - and fields with some white flowers on it. As a biologist it is of course impossible just to pass fields with unknown flowers - you have to stop and have a closer look.
It turned out that those flowers are poppies - and not just some kind of poppies but THE poppy! As I learn later, Tasmania is the world's largest legal producer of raw opiates. One medical use is for example morphine for pain patients.

Another legal Tasmanian drug is this one:
Leatherwood honey from a rainforest plant endemic to Tassie. It has a quite strong, distinctive taste - quite nice actually!

Rainforest


Tasmania’s west receives most of the rainfalls of the country. The landscape is hilly – mountainous with some of the tips reaching over the treeline. In the valleys grows temperate rainforest, in the higher areas mostly wet sclerophyll scrub (Leptospermum etc.). The higher areas are dominated by buttongrass moorlands – and you can find there also some carnivorous plants :-) like Drosera auriculata, D. binata and Utricularia dichotoma. Really beautiful are those rainforests with their millions of different variations of green, their scents and all those shapes. It can only be a bit challanging to get there .. at least when it has been stormy the night before ..


In the rainforest there are interestingly trees which remind me on mainland Australia like those eucalypt trees. Then, there are also those beautiful tree ferns again (Dicksonia antarctica) which remind me a lot of New Zealand, although they also grow on mainland Australia. Funnily, in those rainforests grows also a lot of Nothofagus trees, here N. cunninghamii. Nothofagus grows with a lot of species in New Zealand were it is called Southern beech. Here it is called myrtle and exists only with two species, that one mentioned above and N. gunnii which forms with some other species like snow gums and pencil pines the treeline in the mountains. Those beeches are pretty special for most Australians, because they are deciduous trees – something which is quite normal for Europeans etc. but does not seem to occur on Australian mainland.

Nothofagus cunninghamii leaves


N. gunnii leaves. This small tree/shrub actually reminds me a lot of the mountain birches which form the treeline in Scandinavia.


 Pademelon

 Rainforest lodge in the former mining village of Corinna. The large forest areas of the west have long been the "wild west" of Tasmania, difficult to access and rich in minerals. There are a lot of adventurous stories of miners finding their way into the wilderness and working under difficult (wet and cold) conditions. Later on mining and logging became more industrial - and there were hard fights between nature conservists and those industries. Nowadays most of the western rainforests are protected and are on the world heritage list.
There are some tourist facilities but not a lot, which is quite nice. You can to things like walking and kayaking in calm and enjoy the nature ..

21.12.2011

Echidna attack


Suddenly some small animal is crossing the road. I manage to stop in time, then park the car on the road side to have a look: It is an Echidna again, one of those fury Tasmanian ones. Also this one is quite shy, rolls itself into a spiky ball when noticing me approaching it. After some time its head emerges again out of the spikes and it looks around, if the danger is over. The clicking sound of my camera spooks it though and it immediately forms a spiky ball again. I wait for it to emerge again and start walking to get another picture. It is not easy to get ok pictures during noon here since the sun is high in the horizon and the contrasts between light areas in the sunlight and dark areas in the shade is quite strong. Emerging – click – forming a ball. Emerging – click – forming a ball. We play this game for a while until the Echidna suddenly changes direction and starts to walk straight towards me. “Now it has become used to the sound of my camera and is not afraid anymore”, I think. But wrong: It comes closer and closer, and then suddenly it lowers its head so that its spikes point right towards my leg. It got pissed off by its paparazzi and is attacking me! I am so astonished that I just manage to jump up to avoid the spikes. I stare at the small animal walking towards the forest. I guess also Echidnas want to have their privacy somewhen.