Wildlife at the Sydney Zoo

Wednesday, June 24

I was supposed to testify about DNA last week.  But my evidence was postponed to Monday of this week, then to Tuesday; certainly I’ll be in the box today?  Not to be. 

Instead, Eitan and I had another fun day in sunny, friendly Sydney.   We spent three hours at the Wildlife Zoo attraction at Darling Harbour.

Koalas expend their energy metabolizing eucalyptus, and so sleep twenty hours a day.  But this one woke up and looked around.  “Here’s looking at you, kid.” 

The echidna is a monotreme

Who likes its weather nonextreme.

Its eyes are pink and spines are white

Consuming ants all day and night.  

Covered with coarse hair and spine

Oft taken for a porcupine.

Seeing one is quite a thrill –

An egg-laying marsupial.

We see lizards with blotched blue tongues

and lazing dragon bearded ones.

Rex is a sixteen-foot alpha crocodile who attacks everything in sight.  His former dog poaching days earned him the enmity of his rural human neighbors.  Before they could kill him, a field station rescued Rex; but the croc chose to eat his dates, instead of mating with them.  Fortunately for him, today Rex is a pampered refugee at the Wildlife Zoo, rather than a line of luxury handbags and shoes.  

Here is a cuddly wombat, sleeping so marsupially. 

Eitan handles lizards and snakes

and we both get to pet a baby quokka.  (The quokka selfie is the cutest social media trend in Australia right now.) 

We saw a cassowary bird roaming around his enclosure.  This ancient man-killer likes to eat a variety of fruits, which he swallows whole.  Here we see Eitan feeding him cherry tomatoes. 

Australian Museum & ANZAC

Tuesday, June 23

We are staying at the Pullman Hotel, centrally located in the southeast corner of Hyde Park.  Nearby are the Australian Museum of natural history, the ANZAC war memorial, and the Prosecutor Office.  We visited all of those places today, as seen (and labeled) in the view from the Sydney Tower.  

The Australian Museum had a special exhibition of the top “50 Wildlife Photographs of the Year.”  Some stunning work, one by an 8 year old winner.  You can look at and buy prints on-line.  

Natural Harmony © Minghui Yuan (China) 2014

Eitan poses here amid the large drum statues.  He fits right in, looking very percussionesque.

The Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) roamed Australia and New Guinea for tens of millions of years.  This proud marsupial went extinct on the mainland a few thousand years ago, after man introduced the dingo. 

Penguins may be very cute

but Eitan prefers creepy, crawly things. 

Eitan checks out some funky bones in the Hall of Skeletons.

Australia recently commemorated the 100^th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli.  The Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) art deco war memorial was built in the 1930’s to honor the soldiers who served in the Great War.  About 10% of the new nation’s population went off to Europe.  In the slaughter that ensued, most were wounded or died.  The disastrous Gallipoli campaign helped forge the national character of the Australian people. 

A slain ANZAC soldier returns as a Spartan would – on his shield – with his arms extended across his sword. 

Sydney Aquarium

Monday, June 22

The Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbour has a fantastic array of aquatic wildlife.  Here is a platypus, swimming about the tank.

Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) predate the bony fish, amphibians and dinosaurs.  These living fossils include rays and sharks.  The aquarium has a wonderful shark-ray tank, where these fish circle around and above visitors, behind thick glass. 

Here is some footage we took of those beautiful rays

and of the shark, a fearsome apex predator.

New to us Americans was the dugong, a Sirenian mammal that swims the South Sea waters. 

We also saw an octopus scuttling across the glass

and a light show of illuminated moon jellyfish. 

After a delectable pizza at La Rosa on the Strand …

Eitan and I ascended the Sydney Tower (by elevator, not stairs), where the view from the top was panoramic.  The Sydney Harbour Bridge is seen behind Eitan. 

Daintree Zip Lining and Crocodiles

Thursday, 18 June

We wake up to a bright, healthy breakfast in the Cassowary Cafe.

We suit up in zip harnesses.  We tread the hamster wheel to lift other zip liners up to the first treetop station in the Daintree forest canopy. 

We are on a platform, ready for zipping along steel cables strung between tall and sturdy trees. 

The view from the canopy shows a clear beach and ocean on this sunny day. 

Zipping from station to station, we gain more confidence.  The activities become more adventurous.  Eitan films his father zip-lining upside down to the sixth station.  

The last lines zip downhill, accelerating Eitan and Mark to 40 kilometers per hour.  We come to screeching halt as a magnetic "zip stop" suddenly engages. 

The afternoon brings us to a boat cruise on the Daintree River, where we meet all sorts of wildlife.  Here is Scarface, the dominant male crocodile in these parts. 

We watch two beautiful kites take off from the riverbank, and fly off into the trees.

Eitan says goodbye to James, our chatty and knowledgeable tour guide.  The tour bus takes two hours to drive us south along the coast to Cairns, back to civilization.

Nightwalk in the Daintree Rainforest

Wednesday, evening, 17 June

The sun has set, and with ten other intrepid travelers we begin our night trek into the rainforest.  Our quarry is the predator – snake, lizard, spider – the dangerous denizens of the Daintree. 

Our guide Marina waves a glow stick in the absolute darkness.  It is rotting wood, damply decaying with a bioluminescent fungus that fireflies ingest to light their bottom bulbs. 

We walk along with our torches.  Our party sights a 5 foot snake by the side of the path.  The amethystine python is Australia's largest snake, growing to 15 feet.  Their under-jaw organs sense the heat of small birds or mammals; they then cast their coils upon their prey.  Each serpentine squeeze forces the captive animal to exhale further, until finally drained of breath, they suffocate. 

We see a reptile perched quietly on a branch.  This is Boyd’s forest dragon, a colorful lizard that lives only in northeastern Queensland.  The forest dragon lives on ants and other insects. 

There are many Huntsman spiders.  We watch them shed their exoskeleton, lounge on leaves, stalk unwary victims, and devour their prey. 

The strangling fig tree grows atop other rainforest trees.  The Daintree fig was the cinematic inspiration for the Hometree in Avatar.  Aborigines would bury their dead in the tree to speed their ascent to the afterlife.  So when the early European settlers found the buried bones, they thought that the giant fig trees ate people.  Thus they slept by the riverbanks, and were eaten by crocodiles.

Through the forest canopy we see a sky ablaze with the density of ten thousand stars and their unfamiliar constellations.  Throughout the night we hear the chirping of jungle insects and the incessant chattering of rainforest birds.  No human voices, nor telecomm signal; no mobile, text, or Internet.  Good night, Daintree, good night.

The Daintree Rainforest

Wednesday, afternoon, 17 June

We enter the Daintree National Park.  We walk along the Dubuji boardwalk, a raised and well-worn wooden platform that wends its way through the wild. 

From the ground, we see fan palms in the foreground beneath the forest canopy.  These evolutionary innovators are amongst the oldest of angiosperms (flowering plants).  They soak up much of the 15% of sunlight that comes in from above, also blocking light for the competing trees below. 

The ancient cycad plant is older than the dinosaur.  This gymnosperm (tree fern) is well adapted for gathering light beneath the Daintree rainforest canopy. 

We spy small insects on the rainforest leaves, such as a yellow caterpillar

and a well camouflaged stick insect against a green leaf.

Eitan examines a "wait a while" or "lawyer" vine.  Their hooked stems catch on to peoples clothing, and can entangle them for a long time (whence the nicknames).  But the one-way hooks let the vine hitch a ride with a growing tree as it moves upward towards the canopy.

Our guide James tells us that aborigines use the blood tree's sap as a natural antiseptic.  He says the sap covers the outside bark, giving the trunk its red appearance. 

The blue "cassowary plum" lies uneaten on the ground, because it is poisonous to most species.  But the cassowary bird coevolved with this fruit, and so finds it a nice treat.  Without the cassowary, its sole seed disseminator, the blue fruit would go extinct. 

James then bites off the back of a green ant, commenting on how its sour taste comes from highly concentrated ascorbic acid (vitamin C).  The ants wield this acid as a weapon, but locals enjoy drinking boiled green ant colonies for their flavor and nutritional value.  Some of the tourists (not us!) bite on their own green ant. 

After a short nap, and dinner at the Cassowary Cafe (those birds were not on the menu), we prepare for our night walk through the Daintree rainforest.