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Published: November 17th 2011
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Common kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae)
this was taken from my cabin window. I like how it looks like a painting rather than a photo. There were really only two places I was visiting while in Western Australia, Dryandra Woodlands and Cheyne Beach. Both are birdy spots, and Dryandra has the added attraction of numbats. The reason for only going to two places was due to limited time and more importantly because I travel by bus and in WA you can't get anywhere interesting on a bus. They run between the main centres and will stop at towns along the highway routes but anywhere else you're out of luck. Still, I never let little things like that stop me. I had organised my stay at the Lions Village at Dryandra, and the caretakers there, John and Lisa, had kindly agreed to pick me up from the nearest bus stop in Cuballing. They have been the caretakers there for eight years and I was only the second person in that time to need a pick-up. That's how unusual it is for travellers here to be without a car. They also loaned me a bicycle to get around the woodland while I was staying there. I honestly can't say enough good things about Dryandra; it was simply a fantastic place to stay. The cottages there are, despite fooling
Australian ringnecks (Barnardius zonarius)
two subspecies of ringneck meet at Dryandra, the twenty-eight parakeet ([i]B.z. semitorquatus[/i]) with a green belly and the Port Lincoln parakeet ([i]B.z. zonarius[/i]) with a yellow belly. Pure birds of both subspecies can be seen here as well as hybrids. me with their excellent state of preservation, actually the original cottages from the late 1920s/early 1930s when the Lions Village was a real working village of wood-cutters. A lot of history there and I won't go into it all but definitely worth a bit of googling to find out about. My cottage (Magpie) was only $30 per night and was fully-equipped with fridge, freezer, stove, cooking utensils, wood-burner, air-conditioning, shower, everything! Now that's value for money!
Most people visiting Dryandra are birders, followed by wildflower enthusiasts, and then mammal and reptile watchers. I was sort of a bit of everything but the main animal I was after was the numbat, a marsupial equivalent of the anteater which feeds solely on one species of termite which itself feeds solely on one type of eucalyptus tree. Australia is the home of picky eaters. Numbats used to be found across most of the southern half of Australia, there were probably millions of them, but within less than a lifetime they have been reduced to two tiny populations of a few hundred animals. Even at their stronghold of Dryandra the population has recently crashed; I think the statistic I was told was that
Australian ringneck (Barnardius zonarius)
two subspecies of ringneck meet at Dryandra, the twenty-eight parakeet ([i]B.z. semitorquatus[/i]) with a green belly and the Port Lincoln parakeet ([i]B.z. zonarius[/i]) with a yellow belly. Pure birds of both subspecies can be seen here as well as hybrids. the population there is now equivalent to just one every hundred hectares. If you imagine a shy little animal the size of a squirrel that lives on the ground amongst fallen timber and you're cruising around trying to see one on the off-chance that it will be near the road when you're passing by you can probably see the odds. I didn't see any.
Most of the mammals at Dryandra are so rare as to be impossible to see, apart for western grey kangaroos and brush-tailed possums. I had seen my first western grey kangaroo on the road out of Perth. To be strictly accurate it was only half a western grey kangaroo and it was dead, but beggers can't be choosers. At Dryandra real live ones are common around the village at night, as are the possums which here have white tail brushes instead of black like in the rest of the country. Tammars and western brush wallabies are supposed to be common but I didn't see a single one which was very unusual. I went on a trapping run with John which enabled me to see a woylie (brush-tailed rat-kangaroo in layman-speak); again, these used to be
Southern brown bandicoot or quenda (Isoodon obesulus)
this is the baby one being hand-raised by the caretakers at Dryandra Woodlands common -- in fact some fairly recent books note that they can reliably be found right around the Lions Village at night -- but all the populations have now collapsed. John and Lisa were also hand-raising a baby quenda (aka southern brown bandicoot) which was one of the cutest things
ever. There's a small fenced enclosure at Dryandra called Barna Mia where some hand-raised marsupials live so people can see them on night tours. The species in here are woylie, boodie, mala, quenda and bilby. Translations from Lewis Caroll are brush-tailed rat-kangaroo, burrowing rat-kangaroo, rufous hare-wallaby, southern brown bandicoot and, um, bilby. I'd seen bilbies at various zoos and woylies at Perth Zoo and in the live-trap earlier, but for all the others it was first time. They don't count as wild sightings of course but they are fabulous animals and for the first time I could see why rat-kangaroos are called rat-kangaroos -- they actually do look like giant hoppy rats.
So mammal-watching had rather disappointing results, and it was a tad too early for reptiles (I only saw a couple of stumptail skinks and a couple of reticulated velvet geckoes), so it was up to the birds
to come to the rescue. Australian ringneck parrots were all over the village, I saw a few elegant parrots and western rosellas out in the bush, and I finally found a red-capped parrot, so ridiculously colourful that it looks like someone gave a little kid a box-full of paints and told him to go nuts. The scientific name of the species is
spurius so I guess its colours were considered a little suspicious even when first discovered. Amongst many birds of somewhat more subdued colouring there was the rufous treecreeper which for some reason prefers the ground to trees, and the white-crowned babbler which in a nice change from the skulking Asian babblers hops around in the open in groups so you can't possibly miss it. The red-capped robin kept up its end in the colour show, but it was competing with the blue-breasted fairy wren. There are 119 species on the Dryandra bird list, 23 of which are rarely-occuring species; I saw 49 birds while there, so roughly half the total. Good for me I say.
I was at Dryandra Woodlands for four nights which wasn't nearly long enough and I must go back. The main reason is
because I still need to find a numbat. My obsessive nature means the numbat is now my new Flores giant rat and I will not rest until I have found one. Well I might rest a little because it will be a while before I get back there. Hopefully the population will pick up before I try again. As the state mammal of WA it would be a pretty poor show if the government allowed the numbat to become extinct! I also found out whilst there that thorny devils live at Dryandra so a summer visit is definitely in order, and even more excitingly -- turtle frogs!! You probably haven't heard of a turtle frog, few people have, but they are very weird turtle-shaped frogs that live more or less entirely underground and feed on termites. I have no idea how you would go about trying to find one, but it is the frog at the top of my list of frogs I want to see (along with hairy frog and goliath frog).
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Peter Ericsson
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Numbat
I remember sitting in my car watching a Numbat with my kids not. knowing what it was till we asked the caretakers. I have been there twice and truly liked the place.