My day

Dear everyone,

I had a good day today. Today I had three hours of lectures. The first was a socioeconomics lecture about agriculture and tourism in the Tablelands. The second was about plate techtonics and Australia's geological history. The third was a socioeconomics lecture about agriculture and tourism in the Tablelands. See a pattern? I do. I see a waste of two out of three hours. As you can probably tell, I don't think socioeconomics is all that interesting, but I guess it's important. I'd rather let other people worry about it though.

After a delicious lunch, we hopped into the SFS vans and went to Curtain Fig, which is a gigantic strangler fig (everyone says it's about 500 years old, but I think it's older). I got some pretty good pictures which will be posted later. For anyone who doesn't know, a strangler fig is a little tree that starts growing on the branch of another tree when a bird poops out a seed onto it. It's cute and cuddly, and lives for a little while that way on the tree limb, minding its own business and not really causing many problems. After a while, its roots begin to grow longer and longer until they reach the ground. At this point, the strangler fig starts growing much much faster and its limbs and roots begin to swarm the tree on which it lives. Eventually, the original tree is completely covered and eventually dies. Because the fig doesn't withdraw any nutrients from its host tree, it can't technically be called anything but a structural parasite. In any event, after around 500 years of these shenanigans, these things can get pretty impressive. Curtain fig actually overtook a tree which then fell over onto another tree, which the fig also eventually overtook. The result is a large, triangular structure with roots hanging down in the middle, forming a curtain. It's really beautiful. I also managed to get a pretty nice picture of a bird who evidently lives inside the fig.

The other day one of my friends found a three inch carnivorous water beetle on our lawn. It's a pretty fearsome looking thing.. I got a picture or two, which I will post later. I walk on that lawn barefoot all the time; I hope I don't get pinched by one of those things. We let it go into a small pool where there were hundreds of cane toad tadpoles. I've been watching them grow, and I'm hopefully going to be able to catch and photograph some toadlets.

How could I forget! Later in the day (today), we went to another area where there were flying foxes hanging from the trees. I took MANY pictures, so you'll eventually see at least one. These things are really big! Their wingspan is about a meter! While walking on the path, someone spotted a Rainbow Skink, which I also photographed (it's a small, iridescant lizard... the iridescance was impossible to capture though... it has to be seen directly). Then I had some ice cream. Yay.

GRR I have to go and write a cane toad paper now. And maybe I'll eat a bagel. Ok bye!