Another field trip!

Tis the season to be busy!  We're coming up on mid-semester so everything seems to be catching up and stockpiling.  This weekend was yet another weekend field trip.  Third weekend away from Townsville....geez.

This field trip was not quite as exciting as a weekend on Orpheus Island.  For starters, it didn't involve a boat ride.  :(  Secondly, I didn't have my professor chef telling it up every meal....I had to go out and by my own lunch.  Lame.  haha

Naw, it wasn't that bad.  It was for my foundations of natural resource management subject, so we went around and had a look at all the different management practices occurring in the Mission Beach area.  This subject is a video lecture, occurring on both the Townsville and Cairns campuses, so both campuses met up for one big NRM party.  We met up at the Mamu Canopy walk and had a walk around there, admiring the region.  Ironically this walk was literally within miles of where I had been camping the weekend before.  We took the same beautiful highway up, but this time with sunshine!  (Crazy, huh??!)  I also found out that all the hills in this region were all formed from volcanic eruptions.  Pretty sweet.  Anyway, we walked around and had a look at the rain forest heritage area, from the canopy's perspective.  It was cool, don't get me wrong, but it was nothing compared to the hike from last weekend! Not to mention there were heaps of insanely large spiders!

After that we headed to a banana farm to talk about fertilizer control and erosion prevention.  That was followed by a trip to a sugar cane farm, where the farmers told us all about the benefits from putting GPS systems on tractors.  All new information to me!  We stopped by two more sites on the way  home, successful and unsuccessful rain forest re-vegetation sites, and then it was off to Mission Beach for our accommodation.

We stayed just outside of the main area, so it was quite a small area.  We had a pricey buffet dinner (because nothing else was open) and hit the bottle-o for an after dinner cocktail to wind down with.  I tried a can of premixed pineapple soda and vodka and it was muyyyy delicious!  For this field trip we had to keep a field notebook and write down all of our notes and thoughts from the different stops.  It was due upon our return to uni so we took our cocktail back the the room, had a drink, re-wrote our notes and hit the hay.  After 2 weekends of being in the rain a day in the blazing sun really took a tole on me!

We were off to a cassowary habitat first thing the next morning!  In Mission Beach they're currently facing big issues with cassowary mortality, mainly due to cars.  We talked about land management in regards to this issue, specifically related to new housing development.  We also took a hike into the bush where they live just to get an idea of their habitat.  It was a beautiful walk....swarmed with mozzies though!  We saw some cassowary droppings, but no cassowaries.  :(

After that we were off to a fan palm forest, the largest remaining fan palm forest in Australia to be exact.  There was no real purpose to this stop....just a cool walk for us to do.  It was really cool!  It was shady because the leaves were so big, but still bright since the leaves were somewhat translucent.  It was like being in an umbrella forest, if you can step into the brain of Jamie and imagine that.  hahaha

That pretty much ended the trip.  We loaded on the bus and headed to Tully (the wettest city in AU) for some lunch, a group photo, and of course some admiring of the giant Tully gumboot!