A touristy day

 One theme for this trip has certainly been weather. Our flight from Hobart to Melbourne (a 75 minute flight) was delayed by 6.5 hours largely due to fog at Melbourne. Skipping the details of a long day, we arrived on Auckland about 1 am this morning. Our flight to NY does not depart till 7:45 pm… so we decided to be touristy today and go to the Hobbiton Movie Set. 

Hobbit on is near the town of Matamata, on a 1250 acre sheep farm. Peter Jackson saw the farm from a helicopter as he was scouting for locations and loved the rolling hills and giant specimen trees near a large pond. So he landed the helicopter, went and had some beers and watched rugby with the farmer, and a deal was struck to use some of  the land for the Hobbiton set. The original Lord of the Rings set was built in a temporary manner and was completely dismantled when filming was done. When the set was rebuilt for the Hobbit movies, however, it had become clear that there was demand for a visit-able set, so a business partnership was struck with the family and the new set was built with more durable materials and methods, to last 50 years.

It is a VERY popular destination, about a two-hour drive from Auckland. Tour groups of about 20 people depart every 10 minutes for an hour-long guided walking tour of the village, ending at the Green Dragon for a complimentary ale, stout or cider. We had some trepidation about the experience, but it was both lovely and interesting. 

The buildings and gardens are beautiful, and the tour guides have many interesting stories about the making of the movies. For example, different of the hobbit houses have different size doors (60%, 90%, 100% of average man size) to allow the doors to look small if Gandalf is standing by one, but “normal” if a hobbit actor is standing by one. The differently sized houses are never on camera at the same time or the illusion would be lost. Other props come in different sizes for the same reason. There was a stunt double for Frodo who was genuinely 4 feet tall, and one for Gandalf who was 7’ 1”, so that images filmed from behind could cover up that the main actors are about the same height. 

The details of filming were fascinating and funny. One problem was that the smaller pond attracted amorous and noisy frogs that disrupted filming. After trying to catch and deport the frogs, the solution was for an actor to sit by the pond as a fisher-hobbit. He had a bag of pebbles, and if a frog started singing he’d throw a pebble into the pond to restore silence for filming. 

Pictured: Bag End, the frog pond

Last day in Tasmania

 Before breakfast, we again searched for platypus in the Derwent River.

We had two sightings, but not as good as the previous day. After breakfast, we started towards Hobart. We spent several hours at the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary en route. The sanctuary is dedicated to the rehabilitation of injured native Tasmanian animals, and the visitor fees fund the Wildlife Rescue Service. The rescue service is an amazing enterprise. Throughout Tasmania, if you see an injured animal (often from car encounters), the expected protocol is to stop, check on the animal, move it to the side of the road, and check whether Joey is  present, and if so, whether it is okay even if the mother is not. Then you call the rescue service, and they arrange for pickup and treatment, or if needed euthanasia. They have 22,000 trained volunteers who help with this (which in a country of about 500,000 people is impressive). They also have a network of veterinarians, and a full time medical clinic of their own. They answer 15,000 calls per year, and the vast majority of the animals brought in for treatment are successfully released back into the wild. The animals in the sanctuary are either too injured to survive in the wild (for example a blind echidna, or an echidna that lost a leg from a dog attack, or an albino pademelon) or are undergoing treatment ( for example an orphaned wombat not old enough to release yet). The third category are pets that have been rescued or bequeathed to them, who are too habituated to humans to be released. One such pet is a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Fred, who at 108 has outlived two owners, and who received a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting on the occasion of his 100th birthday. 

We finished the day in Hobart, the second oldest city in Australia (1806). We are staying in a Victorian city mansion built in 1878 and managed by the great-grandson of the builder. We took a walk to the Botanic Gardens, which like our lodging is on a hill called “the Queen’s Domain” in the middle of Hobart.  We walked through scrubby meadows teaming with Eastern Rosellas, brightly colored parrots that have moved in from the mainland. We also heard and then found a flock of Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoos munching on pine cones. One bird decided that the foliage was interfering with his supper, so he cut clumps off pine needles with his beak and dropped them, as well as rejected bits of pine cone, onto the street below. He made quite the noisy mess.  On our way back to our lodgings we saw two Southern Brown Bandicoots.

Pictured: Madge the baby wombat, blind echidna, albino pademelon, yellow-tailed black-cuckoo

Mt Field and more platypus

  We got up early this morning to try again to see platypus in the Derwent River. In the first half hour we saw two separate animals surface briefly, but well upstream from our location. We were about ready to abandon the search when a platypus surfaced quite close to us. It swam on a direct line upstream, so that we could scramble along the bank and see four subsequent surfacing, close enough to see the duckbill breaking the water followed by the head and back, and then an otter-like dive (head goes down and butt comes up) underwater again. 

After breakfast the whole group went to a well known platypus spotting location, but to no avail. We continued on to Mt Field National Park, where we hiked to two waterfalls. The water in the streams here are so clear that you can watch the trout swimming, no doubt to the delight of fly fishermen and fishing eagles. After lunch we returned to this morning’s location, and this time nearly everyone got to see a platypus repeatedly surfacing.

We’ve mentioned the prevalence of sheep farming before, but here in Tasmania sheep really are everywhere. Yesterday we stopped on the main road while about 400 sheep were herded (by men on 4x4’s not sheepdogs) from one side of the road to the other. Today we saw sheep inside the hop farms (presumably use for weeding?) and a pair of sheep on the front porch of a dilapidated house.

Pictured: Platypus (morning and afternoon), Horseshoe Falls, Brown Trout 

Paddling with platypus

 We had an early start this morning to meet the first tour of the morning at King Solomon’s Caves. You enter through a modest wooden porch and a metal door in the side of a hill, to discover a wonderland of limestone pillars, curtains and waves that extend about 300 meters into the hillside. The caves are only 5-20 meters below ground, so that in some places there are tree roots hanging from the ceiling that have been coated with calcite by the dripping water as it percolates through the limestone above. The calcite also leaves tiny crystalline fragments that sparkle in the light of a flashlight. Tasmania is one of the least seismic areas on earth, so that the stalactites have been uninterrupted by shaking in their 15 million years. So while the features only grow 2 cm in 100 years, some are very extensive. The whole experience felt much more intimate than visits to larger and more famous caverns in the US.

Much of the rest of the day was spent driving through the central plateau to our next lodging on the Derwent River. The Derwent River valley is important as the hatchery of trout fingerlings (from eggs brought from England), which in turn initiated trout populations in South Africa and South America. The valley is also important for growing truffles (Tasmania exports their truffles to Europe during the Northern Hemisphere winter), hazelnuts and hops. There are also vegetable farms, although most are to harvest the seeds rather than the edible vegetables themselves. Our accommodation is a “glamping tent” similar to those in Africa, with a large veranda overlooking the river. We’ve been advised to zip the flaps shut at night to keep possums and devils from wandering into our tent.

The Derwent River is also home to many platypus. Late in the afternoon we boarded kayaks for a 2 hour paddle downstream in search of these elusive monotremes. Platypus hunt for underwater invertebrates, mostly worms, by electromagnetic sensing with their bills. They do need to come to the surface to breathe, and this is the opportunity to see one. We were lucky that a platypus swam on the surface as we were preparing for to board our kayaks. The trip itself was lovely, with a warm sun and a light breeze, but we only saw one additional platypus, well below the leader’s average.  The warm sun was great for us, but caused the platypus to hide in shadows of the trees lining the riverbank.

We saw 6 pademelon on our way back from dinner and, on a night stroll, a Ring-tailed Possum (a new marsupial for us), a few mote pademelons, a 3 rabbits.

Pictured:  cave view, ring-tailed possum, our “tent” 

Cradle Mountain National Park

 We spent the morning in Cradle Mountain National Park, which is also a UNESCO protected area. Tasmania has over 40% of its land protected as national parks (most of it in Western Tasmania) and 30% UNESCO designated.  Cradle Mountain includes huge expanses of alpine bogs and meadows, as well as deciduous forests and temperate rain forests. We walked through all of those on a cool and misty morning. Yes, our Australia weather found us again.  At one point in the hike is a place for an iconic photo — Lake Dove and its old boat house in the foreground and Cradle Mountain in the background.  For us, the foreground was no problem.  The background was another thing…the mountain was completely hidden in the low clouds.

This afternoon we walked on a 1.5 km trail that started by our cabin and ended by the main lodge.  The sun broke through the mist at a perfect time, just as we reached an overlook and we actually got a good view of Cradle Mountain.  This area is primary (temperate) rain forest. Although we had walked in another such forest two days ago, this one felt older. The myrtle beech trees grow in a gnarled manner, become covered  in mosses and have a shallow root system— this results in a lot of massive fallen but not decomposing trunks. The effect is both magical and a little creepy. 

After dinner we visited a local sanctuary dedicated to raising « insurance populations » of carnivorous marsupials, mostly Quolls and Tasmanian Devils. Quolls are small (2-6 kg) and nimble, able to catch prey three times their size.  Both Eastern and Spotted-tail Quolls are endangered and dropping in population in the wild, largely thanks to our old friends the feral cats. Tasmanian Devils are much better known, larger, and were thriving before the appearance of the contagious cancer that has killed about 85% of the wild Devil population.  So the center, and others like it, conduct intentional breeding programs (in the case of Devils, entirely cancer-free) to ensure the survival of these species.

The sanctuary consists of large open air pens, where the animals can behave and interact fairly normally. We heard a lot of the famous Devil vocalisations and watched them chase each other and roar. The Quoll enclosures have steel mesh on the top so they don’t climb out. We watched the different species be fed, which in the Devil case was pretty noisy and contentious. 

Pictured: primary forest, views of  Cradle Mountain in the mist and in the sun, Eastern Quoll, Tasmanian Devil

To Tasmania

 During the night we heard the deep grunting sound of a male koala.  In the morning we found him high up in the gum above our room.  Aussies call eucalyptus trees gum trees or gum for short— for all 600 species of them. We spent the morning and early afternoon in transit to the Geelong airport for the short flight to Launceston Tasmania.  Having spent a day up in the hills above the « surfing coast » it was interesting to drive further inland, where the countryside is flat and very agricultural (hay, cattle and sheep). We had a short side trip after lunch to see another huge encampment of Grey-headed Flying Foxes (about 6000 this time) at the Geelong Botanical Gardens. The weather was overcast but not unpleasant.  On arrival in Tasmania (80 degrees and bright sunshine!!) we drove about two hours west, first through agricultural areas and then steeply upwards into Cradle Mountain National Park. The mountains are beautiful, and somehow feel familiar although all the tree species are different than at home. 

 Until about 10,000 years ago there was a land bridge from the south coast of Australia to Tasmania, so many species are found in both locations, although there has been some divergence (for example in the details of the wallabies we saw both yesterday and today). The land bridge was grassland, so there are no koalas on Tasmania despite there being eucalyptus trees here. And some species, for example Tasmanian Devils, exist on Tasmania but went extinct on the mainland (or the Big Island as Tassies call it).  It is believed that the Dingoes were the primary cause of the Tasmanian Devils and Tasmanian Tigers going extinct on the big island.  The Dingoes never made it to Tasmania because the land bridge disappeared before the Dingoes were brought to the big island.

During our drive we stopped to watch an echidna cross the road. The echidnas here have fewer spines and more fur than the ones on Kangaroo Island, perhaps because up here in the mountains they need to stay warm while on KI they need to cool off using the spines.  Both times we have seen echidnas, it has been on or near the road. This is a good illustration of why, at every location of this trip, drivers are encouraged not to drive at night. The risk of hitting kangaroos, wallabies, possums, echidnas and smaller marsupials is just too high. 

Our lodge looks rustic on the exterior but is very comfortable inside. The lodge is at about 3000 feet, so it is considerably cooler here than down on the plains. On a walk before dinner we saw two wombats and a wallaby. Wombats are about the size of a bulldog and resemble fluffy bear cubs with short legs. After dinner, as darkness fell, we saw 7 pademelons and a brush-tailed possum. These possums are quite different than North American opossums in diet and appearance.

Pictured: short-nosed echidna, wombat, and Tasmanian Pademelon

Into the forests

 The day dawned with more wind-driven rain. When we reached our first stop, a water fall nestled in a temperate rain forest, a strange thing happened— the sun came out! It was a short walk to the falls, about 400 m. It was a very tranquil spot with a warm sun filtering through the forest.  On our way back to the parking lot, two eastern kangaroos were on the trail.  They stood there for quite some time trying to decide what to do.  They could not simply leave the trail because the slope to either side was too steep.  In the end they retreated back down the path to a spot with a shallower incline.  Our second stop was at another falls, in a second-growth forest recovering from a history of logging. It was nice but not a serene as the first, nor were there any roos.  After lunch we went to an old growth rain forest.  The natural beauty, particularly the scale of the ancient eucalyptus and tree ferns, was humbling. 

The final stop was at a small (2 km diameter) sanctuary with a perimeter predator fence. The area inside the fence was entirely open, some wooded and some grassy. We were able to enter after the sanctuary had officially closed, so it was a private tour at a time when the animals were beginning to emerge for the evening. We saw emus, koalas, kangaroos, two kinds of swamp wallaby, a pademelon, a bandicoot and a potoroo. Both bandicoots and potoroo are small fungivores. Their digging in the soil loosens the soil, enabling better growth for plants. Naturalists believe that the decline in the number of species of this kind, added to the compaction of the soil by hoofed animals like cows and sheep, may contribute to the severity of wildfires in Australia.  

The highlight of the day came towards the end of our sanctuary walk: a second potoroo, this one with a young (1-2 month) Joey that climbed in and out of the pouch incessantly. Even the local sanctuary staff had never seen a potoroo joey before. 

We had dinner at the restaurant of our lodge again tonight.  The restaurant is outstanding.  There are many Greek inspired items on the menu.  Since we ate there for two night we got to sample a few of the fabulous entrees (appetizers) and mains.  There were still a couple items on the menu we wanted to try, but we are leaving in the morning.

Pictured: Southern Brown Bandicoot, Potoroo with Joey, Roos on the trail, Swamp Wallaby

The Great Ocean Road

Today we flew from Kangaroo Island to Warrnambul on the mainland to start our drive on the Great Ocean Road. Our first stop was Tower Hill, a park inside the caldera of a volcano that last erupted about 30,000 years ago. Aboriginal artifacts have been discovered beneath the ash layer, a testament to the longevity of human occupation at this location. In the nineteenth century the area was stripped of native vegetation. Species from England were introduced to create a familiar-feeling park. Then in the 1960s an effort began to restore the land to its original condition, using an oil painting of the area from 1855 as a guide. Our aboriginal guide showed us many edible plants in the landscape and told both happy and sad stories from the history of his family. The pattern of treatment of indigenous people by later settlers sounded all too familiar.  We also saw seven Koalas, including three pairs of mothers-and-joeys of different ages. The joeys were much more active, perhaps because of the cool rainy weather. It was a surprise to see so many, as our Kangaroo Island guides had predicted that we wouldn’t see any koalas on the mainland. 

Our afternoon was spent appreciating the beautiful sandstone cliffs along the “shipwreck coast”. The narrow Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania shortened the voyage for ships coming from England, but 170 ships did not navigate it safely, and sunk along this section of the coast. Some of the more famous landmarks along the coast look a lot like a sandstone version of the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland.  

The next section of the Road ducked inland through dry forest and then temperate rain forest, the so called “green coast”, which we will explore tomorrow. Finally we rejoined the coast at Apollo Bay, the center of the "surfing coast".  Our lodge sits high above the coastal plain and the views are outstanding.  After a fabulous dinner (the best so far on this trip), we spotted a Swamp Wallaby (which are very dark in color) on the grass near our room.

We brought the rain and wind with us from Kangaroo Island, but it didn’t interfere too much with our activities. All the same, we are all looking forward to wearing fewer layers in the days to come!

Pictured: Koala Joey (2 months old) swinging in the breeze, our room at Apollo Bay, cliffs at the Twelve Apostles

Southwest Kangaroo Island

 Most of today was very windy, chilly, and occasionally rainy as we made our way to the southwest corner of Kangaroo Island. The locals referred to it as winter weather. Kangaroo Island is so far south that the next landmass to the west is South America: that gives a lot of time and space for wind to accumulate. Our hosts for dinner, the leaders of the local tour company, made a fire at their home to help us warm up. They commented that we should remember that we needed a fire on February 2nd, as it should be high summer!

We learned a great deal about the devastating bushfire of December 2019-January 2020, a consequence of drought, hot dry weather, gale force winds and highly flammable timber plantations.  The fire lasted for six weeks and burned about two-thirds of the island, including 90 homes, 60,000 sheep, and huge numbers of wildlife. The impact of the fires, followed immediately by the pandemic, on the 5,000 inhabitants has been enormous. It helped us to understand why rain in the summer is such a blessing to them, as it is the hot dry summer weather that creates bushfire risk. The island also has a lot of laterite, an iron rich mineral that attracts lightning strikes. The landscape is recovering more quickly than people expected. Small animals also survived better than expected; the disaster prompted an increase in conservation and research funding so that more is known now about some species than ever before.  We saw koalas and kangaroos in the new scrub, but bird life will be slow to recover.

We also heard yet again about the scourge of feral cats. These creatures have grown to be bigger than bobcats, and eat anything that moves (wildlife as well as domesticated animals such as lambs). In the western part of the island volunteers are using camera traps to identify the location of cats to be captured and removed — sadly last nights camera also took a photo of a feral cat with an endangered bandicoot in its mouth.

At the far southwest tip of the island we stopped at a lighthouse and walked down almost to sea level. The wind (40 mph without the gusts) created 30 foot high waves, which crashed all around the sunbathing fur seals and sea lions. Despite the rough waves,  some of them played out in the surf.  We could have watched them for hours. We also stopped to see the Remarkable Rocks, a granite outcropping that has been carved into fantastic shapes by millennia of wind and salt water. 

At dinner, we saw a Scarlet Robin, a bird we were hoping to see, and a brush-tailed possum and her joey (living in the children's treehouse). On our way back from dinner, we finally saw an echidna. Initially we saw it crossing the road. By the time we unloaded from the van it was safely hiding under a shrub off the road. The local echidnas can be blond, red-headed or dark, while those on Tasmania are all dark. Tonight’s echidna was a blond. 

Pictured: Long-nosed Fur Seal in the surf, Scarlet Robin, Brush-tailed Possum, Koala 

Learning about local species

 Having gotten no rain in wet New Zealand, it rained all morning here in the dry season of south Australia. The rain brought the kangaroos out from the shade and out into the open, which was fun. We spent a good part of this morning learning from Peggy Rismiller, who has been studying echidnas and tiger snakes on the Dudley Peninsula, the easternmost part of Kangaroo Island. This may seem like an odd combination, and really it is. Peggy laughed as she said that as tiger snakes bear live young and echidnas lay eggs, maybe they belong together. 

When she came to the island on a two-year research grant 35 years ago, there was a lot that was not known about the two species.  Her work has centered in Pelican Bay, which with its shallow water and reed beds serves as the “nursery” for baby fish that later populate the water off south Australia as adults. At some point early in the 20th century, some sheep farmers decided to put sheep onto the large islet in the bay. The sheep did not do well, but house mice were introduced to the island as a consequence. House mice out competed the native bush mice, and as house mice dig burrows rather than living on the surface, the local tiger snakes had to change their hunting methods. It is an example of rapid differentiation, as the tiger snakes on the islet now have much smaller heads, suitable for reaching into mouse burrows, than the same snake species on the main island. We haven’t seen a tiger snake yet, but we will keep looking (from a distance as they are very poisonous).

When Peggy started her echidna work, all that was known was that they lay eggs and breed in the winter. She developed the techniques to study their courtship, mating, egg laying, egg carrying (they do not incubate the eggs in a burrow), hatching, and nurturing the tiny puggles for eight months until they are weaned. She even had to develop the techniques to “unroll” an echidna to study it.  Echidnas have many interesting aspects beyond their reproductive habits. For example their spines are really hairs, deeply rooted and capable of being moved independently because the spine roots go into a layer of muscle below the skin. This is unlike a porcupine’s quills which are not deep rooted. We haven’t seen an echidna yet either, but we are hopeful.

Peggy is also one of the leaders in an effort to eliminate feral cats from the peninsula with a combination of technology and fences. Feral cats not only kill thousands of native birds each year, but carry diseases that threaten the sheep on local farms. If the peninsula project is a success, it could serve as a model for other selected areas, as all of Australia, New Zealand and the pacific islands suffer from feral cats. 

Later in the day we observed Glossy Black-Cockatoos, a rare local parrot, on a short nature walk. We also saw a second type of Black-Cockatoo (the Yellow-tailed) as we drove to our picnic lunch on Brown’s Beach, and enjoyed the scenery at the Cape Willoughby lighthouse. We finished the day with a wine tasting at a local organic winery. 

Pictured: Glossy Black-Cockatoo, Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo, Peggy with Flat Freda (the echidna model she takes to schools), Western Grey Kangaroos