Sunday, and a reprieve from the end of a tough week. So what do we do? Sit around and eat all day!

I’m stuffed. This morning I slept in, then wandered up to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Then came the pancakes, egg frittata, and sticky rolls (the Aussies call them “scrolls”). After that, regular food was dispensed with entirely and I spent the rest of the day pigging out on chocolate, trifle, and other desserts. For dinner, another bowl of cereal. The farthest I walked today was a short amble from my bed to the kitchen and back – hardly a strain!

But it was well-deserved, since Jen and I ran a dusty half marathon yesterday afternoon (for the heck of it). And, speaking of Jen, she’s out of here tomorrow, on a plane back to the U.S. after five months working on a Crimson Finch project. Roughly half of Mornington’s staff will be turning over in May, so we’re getting ready for a new crowd around here. So, to kick things off, according to specific request from her mother, I hereby post all my best Jen photos – retribution for a soon-to-be-lacking communal dinner cook. Take that!

Gouldians formerly ranged across northern Australia but populations were decimated by trapping (for the pet trade) and habitat loss. Today they’re found in just a few scattered areas, and may number fewer than 2,000 wild birds. At Mornington, though, they’re fairly common, and I see these guys just about every day. Researchers here have studied Gouldians intensively over the last decade since they’re a good indicator of tropical savannah habitat quality.

Interestingly, there are three color morphs. About 80% have fully black heads, but 20% have red heads (like the one in the photo, which I took this morning). If you’ve done your math, that leaves zero percent for the last morph, the near-mythical golden-headed Gouldian, which is so rare that it basically exists only in captivity. The genes are out there, though, so, even though a golden-headed one has never been seen at Mornington, it could happen…

We got up at 3:30 on Thursday morning and Michelle drove us more than an hour from Mornington Station, dropping us at dawn along a rough track near an escarpment called the Cliffton Range — pretty much the middle of nowhere. From that spot, Sara and I picked up the Throssel River and followed it south for 13 kilometers of dense, off-trail hiking, stopping every 100 meters to play a 2-minute tape recording of fairy-wren songs (and observing birds which responded to the tape).

The Throssel is particularly known for being infested with crocodiles, of which we saw a good assortment. A year and a half ago, a student looking for Purple-crowned Fairy-Wrens stepped into the water here to find a large croc latched around her knee. The croc wouldn’t let go, and the muddy river banks were too steep to climb out with the animal attached to her leg; luckily, someone else was there to pull her out, croc and all. They had to gouge its eyes out before it relented and flopped back into the muddy water. The student had to be evacuated by helicopter to Derby (a couple hours away), and subsequently underwent surgery back in the U.S. to reconstruct her kneecap. They say such attacks are extremely rare, but, six months later, a staff member at Mornington was bit in the calf while swimming and still has the scars to prove it. Two croc bites in two years at a place with an average population of 12 people – it’s something, that’s all I’m saying.

Anyway we went all-out, hiking and surveying, dawn to dark on Thursday, 12 hours straight with just a short lunch break. We went right through the heat of the day, over 100 degrees F, carrying 11 liters (25 pounds) of water in each of our packs, wearing long pants, and just generally gutting it out through thick grass, hot river rocks, and spiky pandanus stands. When it got dark we rolled out sleeping mats and flopped down to sleep at 6:30 p.m. under the stars, but mosquitoes descended with darkness, and I was up for 4 more hours alternately swatting mosquitoes and hiding from them under my sauna-like sleeping bag before it was cool enough to sleep. A kilometer or two in the distance, five prescribed fires burned like molten lava, lighting up the night underneath a half moon.

Friday morning Sara and I finished our survey, walked out to a road, and radioed for a pickup. It was sure nice to return to the land of air conditioning and smoothies – but not for long; this afternoon we’re headed for another night of camping. This time, though, it’s just for fun; four of us are climbing nearby Mt. Leake with plans to sleep under the stars tonight on the highest point in this region. We’ll see how it goes!

Crimson Finches and Double-barred Finches build some of the most obvious nests, which I stumble across almost daily; they’re both enclosed with side entrances (like fairy-wrens) and usually eye level in a pandanus or paperbark. Dove nests are at the opposite end of the spectrum, so flimsy that the eggs seem to hang suspended by a thread. Kingfishers nest in tree cavities, honeyeaters build suspended sock nests, Magpie-Larks construct solid mud structures, and Buff-sided Robins seek out a flimsy fork at the tip of a mangrove branch. Sara found a Pheasant Coucal nest on the ground amid tall grass, probably the most interesting nest so far. As for the fairy-wrens, they’re probably done until August at least, so our work now mostly involves weekly censusing and resighting efforts. Winter is coming!

But an occasional soul-searching session doesn’t go amiss. The lows accentuate the highs, and it was good to have a very slow day today, rest, and recharge a bit, even in a drained mood. New plans are afoot later this week – literally – with two different overnight camping trips on top of regular field work. So there’s plenty to keep us busy!

This morning I collected the three remote, motion-activated cameras we set up at a dead wallaby carcass two days ago, and hit paydirt! We caught a wild Dingo in the act of scavenging some of the rotting meat. This is a snippet from the low-res video.

Dingoes are Australia’s version of coyotes. They’ve only been here about 10,000 years and are basically just wild, brownish-colored dogs; they’re one of the top predators at Mornington Station (along with crocs). I heard some Dingoes howling near camp the other night, and have seen tracks everywhere, and Sara has seen two in the last week, but I have yet to properly set eyes on one. Soon enough! Meanwhile, it’s fun to watch our camera-trap video. You can see the two other remote cameras on the right side of the frame (neither one caught much of interest, so it’s good we set up three).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdE5cH7ssc0

If things go well, we’ll get a shot of a dingo or something. If not, we’ll have spent time next to a rotting carcass for nothing. The stench is now wafting all over camp on the breeze. Hope it works!

Melty Tim Tams and warm ice water and sandy forks. Pigeon, Wallaby. Heat. Slippery rocks, stickery grass. Mud. More mud. More rocks. Great company. Awesome!

Julie drove us out to Sir John Gorge in predawn darkness and paused there just long enough to see us drag the canoe down the rocky bank – a task that would become all-too-familiar throughout the rest of the day – before hightailing it back to station for breakfast. Michelle and I, with radios, provisions, and drybags (er, trash bags; don’t ask), hopped in the canoe and set off downriver.

Nine hours later, we hauled out at a prearranged point downriver, called for a pickup by radio, and gratefully extracted sore butts and backs to shore. In the interim, we stopped every hundred meters or so to play a 2-minute recording of Purple-crowned Fairy-Wren song in hopes of finding birds along the riparian strip. As it turned out, we found just three birds: a lone female, unbanded, and a banded pair that Michelle already knew about.

Most entertaining, though, were various sets of rapids. Unfortunately, the ongoing drought has resulted in lower-than-usual water levels, so we often got stuck on rocks and had to drag the canoe through whitewater. I think we did that eight separate times. A few rapids shot us like an amusement ride, and I could see why, on the last two surveys of this river, the canoe flipped at some point. No such catastrophes today; just a nice day on the river!

Sara and I were learning the intricacies of home brewed beer from a master. “The cheapest beer at Woolworth’s [where we order groceries] is $1.30 per stubby,” he calculated. (A “stubby,” to us Americans, is a regular old bottle.) “But home brew works out to about $0.20 per stubby and tastes about the same as the cheap stuff anyway.”

So, we mixed the yeast, sugar, and some treacle-like magic “draught” mixture into a 23-liter tank, and set it aside to bubble away for the next week. Meanwhile, another batch from last week was ready for bottling, and the three of us spent 45 minutes disinfecting old bottles, siphoning in the new brew, adding carbonation sugar tablets, and sealing on new caps. Another two weeks, and it’ll be ready to drink – though the beer will probably taste better after a month.

Home brew is a major part of Mornington culture. The staff has been at it for years and people here have it down to an art. “You can’t mess it up,” says Swanie, but, almost in the same breath, “a lot of things can go wrong.” So, we’ll just have to see how this latest batch turns out!

Still, it’s an easy name to remember. I see these spiders hanging out all over the place, often suspended above Annie Creek, and I’ve wondered many times how they manage to connect the first strand of webbing across five feet of open water – do they jump, climb around, or piggyback on unicorns? Their webs are nothing to mess with, either; two Crimson Finches have been found caught in spider webs here this season (the spiders, apparently, balked at finding a bird in their net, so nobody benefited). Not something you want to walk into!

I have a case of heat rash on my ankles and calves, bad enough that I only slept one hour last night (too itchy to sleep). It’s kinda like poison oak – bumpy, scabby, and just generally gnarly. If it gets any more photogenic I’ll post a photo here – after all, misery loves company! For now, I’m spending 30 minutes at a stretch with my feet immersed in a bucket of ice water, twice a day. It’s actually quite pleasant, even if the rash continues, to feel a touch of frostbite once in a while.

Cuckoos in Australia are like cowbirds in North America: they lay eggs in other birds’ nests, hoping to pawn off parental responsibility on other species. Cuckoo chicks hatch quickly and push out all other eggs in the nest. Sometimes, the outcome is a bit ludicrous; I recently observed a tiny Bar-breasted Honeyeater feeding a Brush Cuckoo fledgling more than three times its size. You’ve got to wonder what they parents are thinking at that point – are they proud to raise a giant?

Fairy-Wrens aren’t often parasitized by cuckoos, probably because their nests are enclosed. Last season, one female Horsfield’s Bronze-Cuckoo laid single eggs in four different wren nests along Annie Creek (DNA confirmed that the eggs all originated from one female). The nestling we found this week could have been a Horsfield’s, or maybe a Brush Cuckoo; after taking a blood sample, we’ll eventually be able to figure it out in the lab.

In this case, the cuckoo didn’t make it. At 10 days old, it was eaten in the nest by a goana at 11am on March 30. How do we know? A motion-sensored camera trap positioned on the nest actually caught a 15-second video of the lizard sneaking up to the nest. The video lines up with my field observations: happy Fairy-Wren parents feeding the cuckoo chick at 6am on March 30, and an empty nest the next morning. Life is rough in the wild.