Rainforest Night-life

The nocturnal tour started at 1:45pm.  Clearly we were going to get more than just the after-dark experience on this excursion.  Our guide, Adrian, picked us up directly at our accommodations and we drove into town to pick up a 5 more people.  We stole the front seats in the van as the other tourists piled in.  There were a few pairs of binoculars scattered around the vehicle. 

Our first destination was a little residential area to get a sense of how wild-life was coping with the ways humans had changed the area.  Wallaby's actually appreciate the extra grazing land... though the locals aren't particularly keen about letting their lawns get eaten.

These spur-winged lapwings are comfortable enough with humans to build their nests in close proximity to people's houses.  The problem is, that these birds get very defensive if you get too close to their kids, so they'll respond by dive bombing you.

Other birds are more innocuous.  The rainbow bee-eater, for instance, just sits there and looks pretty.

As does this king-fisher.

Once we'd toured the neighborhood near Cairns, we started out for the rainforest.  We stopped for afternoon tea at Lake Barinne surrounded by a small patch of preserved forest.  The jam and crumpets were delicious!

 Ming got excited by the flowers around the tea house...

 ...so many pictures were taken.

A duck got into the line of fire...

Before long, it was time for our first short walk around the lake through the rainforest.  The long skinny vines in this picture are called "wait-a-while", because they have sharp, spiney barbs which will catch on your clothing (or another plant, or whatever), pinning you (or it, or whatever) in place.  If you looked closely at the picture of the van, you'll also no that it was the name of the tour company we were using.  Oddly, they were quite early when picking us up.

 Fortunately, there was a path through the forest so we didn't need a machete.

When vines did cross the path, I just bent them out of the way, like this:

Sometimes I had to tie them into knots, so they wouldn't disturb future tourists.

The next spot we stopped is a place I like to call turtle lake.

That's not it's name... that's just where we saw some turtles.  The presence of turtles is probably the least remarkable thing about this lake.  Adrian explained how the lakes around here were formed gigantic volcanic craters millions of years ago.

Finally, we made a mad dash to the platypus pond before dark fell.

We stood along the banks and waited for a platypus to surface.

The platypus, for the uninitiated, are crazy animals.  For starters, with the echidna, the platypus rounds out the grand total of two types of monotremes in existence.  So, here we've got another egg-laying mammal that uses electro-location to stalk its prey.  That should cover the minimum crazy-animal classification prerequisites.

The water-mammal niche they fill has necessitated a few more adaptations including webbed feet and a bill.  They have great vision and great hearing, but use neither underwater, as they have a single eye/earlid, of sorts, which covers both while they are swimming.  Oh yeah, and their venomous.  The venom won't come from a bite, however, but from the next-most obvious place: a spur on their ankle.  All things considered, the platypus probably takes the strangeness cake from the echidna.  You can see most, if not all, of these anatomical anomalies in the following picture.

Ok, so we didn't get as close to the platypus as I would have liked.  The black speck there is definitely a platypus, though, since it's the only thing in this pond (except for a duck), which makes a bow wave like that, indicating horizontal movement along the surface of the water.  Since that's not a duck, it's decidedly a platypus.  Here's a closer look on an anatomically incorrect replica... though size-wise it's not too far off:

Night had fallen and there were no more platypuses (platypus? platypi? platypotamuses?) to be seen.  It was time to move on to the truly nocturnal portion of our tour.   We drove to a walkway that meandered a few hundred meters into the rainforest before popping out a little further down the road.  I was excited to see what lurked in the woods at night on the underside of the earth.  We each got our own flashlight (er, sorry "torch") as well, so this was gonna be great!  My excitement evaporated when we ran into this guy:

I'm not a spider person.  Granted, this Huntsman spider is relatively harmless to humans, but that doesn't mean I was keen on finding out exactly how "relatively."  We moved on.  

Our guide motioned us over to a few vines along the path... or so I thought until I followed them up with my spotlight to a gigantic mass of tree and twists of vine.  This strangler fig has practically demolished the trees that once supported it, and now it bares its own weight.  

We wandered on, each of us lighting up a different tree in hopes of catching a glimpse of the nocturnal mammals that hang around in the branches to munch on leaves without fear of being spotted... well, except by us.  Here's a possum we caught by surprise.

We made it back out to the road and hopped back in the van to drive to another night-walk location to look for more animals in the trees.  It was quite tricky to spot these guys, since then they were often pretty far back in the foliage.  Ming made a good find with another species of possum shown here:

At one point, the group got separated into two by 20 meters or so, and the group ahead of us gave a whispered shout to come quick.  By the time we got there, however, the creature of interest, a tree kangaroo, had disappeared.  So as a substitute, I'll use this picture of one I found drawn on the side of a bus.

As our walk (and night) was winding to a close, we stopped for a night-cap.

Driving back to Cairns was interesting, even if we were getting quite sleepy.  As we drove through some farm country we wooden fences along the road.  It seemed like every fifth or sixth fence post was a little higher than the rest, and when we slowed down to look, this is what we saw.

We must have seen 15 owls as we drove along that stretch of road.  The coolest animal, however -- and this might just be my opinion here -- was one we didn't see until the van pulled into the driveway of our guest-house.  That's where we met this guy:

This was easily the longest snake I'd seen in the wild.  I'd say it was between two to three meters.  The ball pythons my brother and I owned as a kid only grew to 1.2 meters.  The longest black rat snakes we saw outside our house were probably 1.5, and the longest ever recorded (making it the longest in North America according to Wikipedia) was 2.6.  Anyway, this snake was long... not particularly thick, but long.  What's more, it was about half the size that it would eventually get... if it didn't get run over by a vehicle first.  It narrowly missed ours.  Or vice versa, I suppose.

A good end to a good day.