Armidale

Hello again everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Easter and had the opportunity to take some time off to be with family and friends. I have spent the last three weeks in Armidale, New South Wales, working in Fritz Geisers' lab at the University of New England. Unfortunately, there was no field work for me to help with, and very little other work, so it's been a bit of a disapointment. However, there are always good points to everything, and this experience is no different. I have had another personal revelation (I guess travel is a time for self-discovery!)...I do not want to go back to grad school and do a Ph.D.! I have come to realize that I no longer particularly enjoy the academic environment, although I suppose that could change with the right project. For the foreseeable future, however, I am content to work and actually make money so that I can take trips like this one! The past month has also confirmed my workaholic tendencies, and that I am most happy when busy and feeling that I am contributing in a significant way.

Fall colours in Armidale

Armidale is a small university town that is one of the few places in Australia with four seasons and spectacular autumnal foliage reminiscent of home. The town is small enough that I regularly bumped into three or four people I knew when I went "downtown". I stayed with Fritz for the first week and then moved into a house, located a 15 minute walk from the Zoology building, with a grad student named Claire and her other housemate Michelle. Claire has a wonderfully good-natured dog named Rose, who tended to follow me around the house in the hopes that I would take her for another walk. It was nice to have a walking companion, especially one who loves walking as much as I do and doesn't talk too much!

Rose - she looks a bit evil with the eyeshine, but she's really the friendliest dog in the world

Because there was very little work for me to do, Fritz suggested that I conduct my own little lab experiment, using some striped-face dunnarts he had left over from previous work. I divided the animals into two classes: heavy and light, and then monitored their responses to varying degrees of food deprivation. The idea was to determine whether the smaller individuals went into torpor more readily and for longer than the more well-endowed (i.e., fat!) animals. To do this, I had to take their temperatures and measure their tail widths (they store fat in their tails) every two days, and weigh them daily. I had some ethical qualms about subjecting animals to stress (not to mention the stress I experienced trying to handle them!) and depriving them of food, just so that I could have one to two hours of work to do every day. Unfortunately, the data produced from the experiment could not be turned into stand-alone paper, although can perhaps be combined with other data collected on other species.

One of my terrified victims, er subjects, a striped-face dunnart I called Piggy

For two nights, I was able to accompany some visiting researchers from Western Australia on their search for greater gliders at Newholme, the University field station near town. Greater gliders are extremely difficult to catch due to their tendency to hang out at the top of trees, and merely glide into a neighbouring tree when feeling threatened. We tried various methods of getting them down, including banging their tree and/or branch with a fallen branch, shaking the tree, throwing things at them, etc. We were nearly successful the first night, and got to see a greater glider gliding a few feet above our heads before scurrying up another tree out of our reach. We managed to catch a glider on the second night. These critters are really quite small and light, but have a huge excess of skin and fur for gliding. They really are very cute!

Greater glider in a bag

Someone from the zoology department, Gerhard Kortner, kindly offered to take me out to a few national parks on Easter Sunday, since I had not seen anything of the area yet. We first did a really nice hike in New England National Park. Although this park is only about 50 km from Dorrigo, the forest is completely different, dominated by Antarctic beeches. It was very foggy the day we visited, which minimized the views, but also made for some really nice photos. We also visited Cathedral Rocks National Park. For those of you who have been here, I chickened out at the point where you have to pull yourself up the rocks with chains anchored to them - I couldn't quite overcome my fear of falling! Nevertheless, it was a nice hike with great views that were somewhat obscured by fog and then pouring rain.

New England National Park

Cathedral Rocks National Park

I am excited to say that my next destination is Tasmania. After ten days of touring around and visiting some parks independently, I will be volunteering for a grad student from the U Tas on her project in northwestern Tasmania. We will be trapping Tasmanian spotted quolls and Tassie devils, and I should get to see some pretty cool stuff! The weather promises to be cold and wet, and there has already been some snow, but I've got my toque and gloves all ready! Next month's blog should be a bit more exciting, I can't wait to tell you all about it.

Take care everyone, don't work too hard, and keep in touch! It can get lonely over here on the other side of the world!

As always, please check out my photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/elk2378/Armidale?feat=directlink