Our Bunya Mountains tour is a relatively new one, developed because:

1. We visited with 6 guests on a customized tour a couple of years ago and loved the forests and peacefulness there.
2. Our name is Araucaria, and althugh we regularly see giant hoop pines (Araucaria cunninghamii) growing naturally in the forests, we don’t see the even more giant bunya pines (A. bidwillii) in the wild on our usual travels – and they really are something to see!

A few days ago we headed off that way on a 2-day  tour with a lovely from Germany who were especially keen to see the bunya forests, and their son who is living in Australia.

So, off we went out west, up the range to Toowoomba, down again to the flat farming country and finally the climb towards the Bunyas.

While enjoying bunya burgers and bunya pies for lunch (made with meat, bunya nuts and some delicious herbs and spices) at Poppies Restaurant, this red-necked wallaby posed for us in front of an Australia flag and an Aboriginal flag, and a kookaburra joined in, sitting in the tree to the left – nice little collection of Australiana for our visitors!

 

We all agreed the chalet Silky Oaks (which Darren and I had stayed in with guests on our last visit) was quite delightful. Great views, polished timber floors, bathrooms upstairs and downstairs and fully self-contained.

As soon as we had unpacked our things we  walked across the road and into the forest, beneath towering bunyas, although trying not to stay too long under any of them, as this is the time of year they drop their massive cones.

 

 

I had been thrown by a horse two weeks earlier when he was startled by a bunya cone falling at home from a tree that was inside our house many years ago decorated for Christmas and is now much taller than the house.

The cones are BIG! Here are a couple that had fallen near the accommodation, one of them open and showing the nuts that are so important to the Aboriginals. They used to gather from many kilometres away to feast on the nuts for several weeks whenever there was a good crop.

The following morning we chose a walking track that didn’t go under too many of the bunyas! Darren let us off at Westcott parking area and we started off on the track to the Paradise parking area, through a great variety of vegetation.

We started off through a ‘bald,’ a grassy area of which there are several on the mountain

 

We were soon in rainforest, then came out into eucalypt  forest with some tall grass-trees that would have been around since before white settlement in Australia.

We stopped to admire good views across the Darling Downs from the clifftops, then continued on into more forest, with tall strangler figs and plenty of ferns and lianas.

 

 

Lunch that day was at the Bunya Gallery Cafe, including a bunya salad

A wedgetail eagle (Australia’s largest raptor) happened to pass by while we were dining. Other birds we had seen included king parrot, crimson rosella, superb fairy-wren, brown cuckoodove, brush turkey and various others.

‘Magical’ and ‘idyllic’ were two of the oft-repeated words from our guests during our stay, and we’re looking forward to our own next visit.

 

 

We didn’t have a tour booked for this weekend, so I accepted an invitation to attend the Vince O’Reilly Memorial talk – this year by botanist Dr Mike Olsen at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat on Saturday (yesterday) and talks by Dr Margaret Greenway and Barry Fitzpatrick at Eagleby Wetlands for World Wetlands Day.

Then we received a request for  one-person weekend wildlife camp, and this lady was only in Australia for one week (from Hong Kong) and really wanting to see some wildlife. She was happy to accept the uncommon routing for the weekend.

Our first stop was, as usual, Daisy Hill STate Forest and Koala Centre.

While walking I encouraged her to feel the texture of the sandpaper fig leaves, and some very alert ants rushed defensively out of the nest they had made between two of the leaves.

A little further on, amongst the paperbark tea0trees, we saw these large caterpillars, which appear to be one of the hawk moth species.

 

After visiting the koalas in the centre (sadly we didn’t find any wild ones on our walk that day) we headed towards Canungra, making a sudden stop at Tamborine as we saw these impressive black-necked storks striding across the paddock

After a good meal at the Outpost, Canungra we continued up the mountain to O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat, where Denis took our guest walking in the rainforest while I attended Mike’s lecture, which recounted his rainforest experiences from his first-ever camping at the age of twelve, in a gully which was  inundated with rain that night, through teenage adventures, a PhD in botany and taking his own children walking and climbing.  He was lamenting that universities nowadays don’t teach enough basic natural history or encourage their students to get out and experience the forests firsthand.

I then took our guest (who had already been on the treetop walk and botanic garden) to see a satin bowerbird’s bower (and the artist himself showed up as well) and we found red-necked pademelons grazing in the campground.

On to Kooralbyn, and the usual eastern grey kangaroos, whiptail wallabies and red-necked wallabies still grazing despite the development of more and more residential area around them nowadays.  We also drove past the Kooralbyn Resort, which has apparently been recently bought and is to be ‘restored to its former glory’, having languished for several years after the previous owner became bankrupt (owing a massive $60 million)

Maybe it will be looking different soon (and more inviting!).

The platypus didn’t appear at their usual haunts at home, although they had been seen frequently over the past week. After sunset we headed out spotlighting. First stop – the campground toilets. The green treefrogs didn’t disappoint us here: two of them looked down on us from the entry wall, and high in a gum tree nearby sat a barn owl.

On our way to the NSW border we came across a carpet python lying on the road, so after photographing him we gently encouraged him to move into the safety of the long grass nearby

We doubled up the tour with taking some observations of animals along the Lions Road section (on the NSW side of the border) of the proposed CSG pipeline.  We are concerned about the effects on the wildlife if this construction goes ahead, but without ‘before’ recordings we’ll have nothing to compare the ‘after’ situation with, so on behalf of Scenic Rim Wildlife I’m recording what animals are present now.

This night (Saturday 4th February) we saw a sugar glider, a great barred frog and a beautiful bandybandy and heard several other frogs (emerald spotted tree-frog, sedge frog and several others). The bandybandy was crossing the road that leads down to the Border Loop lookout, and this appears to be the route to be taken by the pipeline from the valley, to join Lions Road, which it will then follow.  Many thousands of animals have been falling into the trenches dug for similar pipelines out west, and if this construction (very unpopular amongst residents of the area) goes ahead, we want the company to ensure that they will at least erect temporary wildlife-proof fences until everything is covered over again.

When we started to move the bandybandy off the road he threw himself into the defensive loops they use to startle their predators, which made it very easy to gently slip a small branch underneath him and lift him to the safety of the forest floor.

 

See http://wildlifetourism.org.au/discussions/threats-to-australian-wildlife/coal-seam-gas-and-australian-wildlife/ for further concerns about impacts of CSG extraction on wildlife.

After dinner that night, Darren set up the spotting scope to view the moon’s craters, and took our guest spotlighting on our own property, seeing bandicoots, wallabies, barn owls and a brushtail possum, and our guest settled down for her second-ever night of camping (and first time ever in Australia)

On Sunday morning, after looking through the wildlife ecology centre and the butterfly trail and exploring a scrubby gully on the Araucaria property, we headed to Everyday’s Cafe for lunch and on to Beenleigh to view the fruitbat colony and Eagleby Wetlands for the World Wetlands Day talks, which I attended while Darren led a walk looking at pelicans, black swans and other waterbirds.

[photos coming soon]

Dr Margaret Greenway told us how the Ramsar Convention was formed many years ago in Iran, and how Australia was one of the 18 countries involved (now there are over 100) in the international agreements for conservation of wetland habitat.  Eagleby is part of a larger wetland area connected with southern Moreton Bay.  Barry Fitzpatrick spoke on how the current legislation on development and the emphasis on finding threatened species and then ways of mitigating threats to these is  not sufficient to protect the remaining, unreserved wetlands in this driest of all continents.

Not our usual schedule for a wildlife weekend camp, but our guest agreed it was a very interesting and rewarding one.

 

 

Lamington National Park birding trip

A  male regent bowerbird sitting on our picnic table and a dispute between a rosella and a bird of paradise were two of the memorable events at our first birding trip for 2012  to the O’Reilly’s section of  Lamington National Park.

Red-browed finches, crimson rosellas and king parrots awaited us when we first alighted from the tour vehicle, the finches seeking scraps from the parrot-feeding area.

Our walk through the forest to the treetopsproduced the usual three species of scrubwren (white-browed, yellow-throated and large-billed), brush turkey, eastern yellow robin  and logrunner. We could hear noisy pittas, black-faced monarchs and eastern whipbirds but failed to spot them.  We did also see lewin’s honeyeaters, brown thornbills, pied currawongs and satin bowerbirds.

In the botanic gardens section was either a female or an immature male paradise riflebird (the world’s only subtropical bird of paradise) having some kind of dispute with a crimson rosella in one of the trees.

rifledbird&rosella

The riflebird seemed to have the most formiddable ‘weapon’ but suddenly flew off to another group of trees.

Our picnic was keenly watched by several birds, and we were joined by the beautiful fellow in the picture above, but he finally got  the message that we weren’t feeding him.

A stroll down Wishing tree track to the little swinging bridge above the pretty gully of  treeferns revealed either a Bassian thrush or a russet-tailed thrush (we saw him to briefly to be sure), a red-legged pademelon (they don’t come out of the forest as often as the red-necked) and finally a glimpse of the monarch.

Our birdlist for O’Reilly’s that day included  paradise riflebird, regent bowerbird, satin bowerbird, green catbird, eastern whipbird (heard), logrunner, yellow-throated scrubwren, white-browed scrubwren, largebilled scrubwren, brown thornbill, black-faced monarch, noisy pitta (heard), Lewin’s honeyeater, eastern spinebill, thrush (russet-tailed or Bassian), rufous fantail, red-browed finch, pied currawong, Australian magpie (in the open grassy area), Torresian crow (ditto), crimson rosella, king parrot, wonga pigeon, white-headed pigeon (heard), fan-tailed cuckoo (heard) and (of course) brush turkey.

We called at Eagleby Wetlands on our return trip to Brisbane, where we saw a pair of swans with young cygnets (they may look like ducklings but we agreed they were not ‘ugly’)

Other birds we saw that day at Eagleby included azure kingfisher sitting prominently on an exposed tea-tree branch above the water, greater egret, cattle egret, wood duck, hardhead duck, black duck, grey teal, purple swamphen, dusky moorhen, Eurasian coot, masked lapwing, little black cormorant, darter, rainbow lorikeet, crested pigeon, welcome swallow, noisy miner, magpielark and red-backed fairy-wren.