I’m in the Gulf of Carpentaria at the moment. The wet season has just started and there are critters all over the place. The flies, heat, flies, humidity, flies, mosquitoes and flies are a small price to pay.
I recently spent two weeks up at Alpha, between Emerald and Longreach. It was very hot and dry, and there wasn’t as much critter action as I’d hoped. But I still managed to find and photograph a few new things.
Collared sparrowhawk (Accipiter cirrocephalus)
This collared sparrowhawk (Accipiter cirrocephalus) was hanging around a dam. He seemed completely unperturbed by us, as long as we remained in the car. He flew off as soon as I stuck my head out of the window to get a better angle.
I was out at Lake Broadwater recently. A group of 11 apostlebirds (Struthidea cinerea) came to investigate me while I was eating. I set up my camera and flashes on the ground and stood a short distance away with my remote trigger. When the birds came over to investigate my camera and food crumbs, I blinded the bejiggery out of them with my camera gear. They soon got used to the flashes and the strange clicking noises, and I was able to take some pictures from an interesting perspective.
Apostlebirds (Struthidea cinerea)
The winners of the 2009 ANZANG nature photography competition have been announced. I had two images short-listed this year, but unfortunately neither of them won their category. Congrats to the winners and to all the other short-listed entries! Hopefully the travelling exhibition will make it up to Queensland this year.
Numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus) – short-listed in Threatened Species category
Northern spiny-tailed gecko (Strophurus ciliaris aberrans) – short-listed in Animal Portrait category.
I’ve just returned from two weeks of poking around near Dalby. Here are some pics. Reptiles/amphibians I saw but didn’t photograph are:
-Diplodactylus vittatus
-Pseudechis guttatus
-Carlia foliorum
-Limnodynastes tasmaniensis
Red-bellied black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus) found on a dirt road
I don’t normally post pics of captive animals, but here are some owned by a friend of mine who lives in Longreach.
Mulga snake (Pseudechis australis). St George locale.
I’ve just returned from a trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Mount Isa. I think the highlights were the olive pythons (we found two) and Cryptoblepharus zoticus (Cryptoblepharus is my favourite skink genus), plus the bats.
Species marked with an asterisk (*) are ones which I hadn’t before seen in the wild.
Common tree snake (Dendrelaphis punctulatus)
Driving back from work last month, a colleague and I decided to drop into Eungella National Park, a few hours west of Mackay on the central Queensland coast. Eungella is a mountainous rainforest environment with a number of endemic species. We were after two in particular, a skink (Eulamprus luteilateralis – “the lute”) and a honeyeater. We had some hot info on where to find both of them, so after wending our way up the winding woad we headed straight for our target location (stopping only to look at a couple of dead snakes on the road).
We got out of the car and immediately saw a bunch of small skinks running around the place. Closer inspection revealed them to be Lampropholis adonis. While not one of our targets, this was still a new species for me. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get any decent photos and didn’t want to waste too much time on this BS (=brown skink).
Lampropholis adonis
The musings of Stewart Macdonald, an Australian wildlife ecologist.