WATERHOLES 2 : FRUIT BATS & CROCODILES

WATERHOLES 2: FRUIT BATS & CROCODILES   

Saltwater Crocodiles.

We’ve stayed at several bush camps up in the Gulf Country which claimed to be where the  much-loved  film Crocodile Dundee was shot, and each time the stories got taller and the crocodile longer.

However, the Saltwater Crocodile doesn’t get its evil reputation for nothing. They are formidable, cunning, patient and intelligent. Every year the North can tell of a sprinkling of narrow-escapes, and of limbs and occasionally lives lost by the unsuspecting, unwary or complacent.

'Saltie' on the watch. Taken from a boat in the Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory.

  

Nor are they restricted to salt water. They occur all round the coast of N. Australia from Broome in the NW to well down the Queensland coast, and not only in salt water but in estuaries and thence up rivers, into billabongs waterholes and swamps inland.

 

Freshwater (Johnson’s) Crocodile

This smaller species, growing to about 6 feet and less than half the size of a ‘saltie’ are  common in the freshwaters all around the north of Australia. Again, they are the top predator of smaller birds and animals but are said not to attack people. They are wary and shy.

 

'Freshie'

Approaching Napier Range and Winjana Gorge.

 Winjana Gorge from the log: “We pulled into the official campsite among the scattered gums in the middle of the day. A long Black-headed Python wriggled across the track ahead of us. 

 

Black-headed Python.

 

A long -drop dunny.

 

The site was deserted, the ablutions closed, only one long-drop dunny was useable and the usual wood supply by the fire-pit was reduced to a handful of bark scraps. Up-side, no honesty box and no Ranger to collect a fee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After setting up camp in the thin shade of a wispy tree we walked down into the gorge through a cleft among a great tumble of huge boulders. This is where the Lennard River has cut a gorge through the limestone of the Napier Range. A gathering of bugs were aestivating on the leaf of a creeper and just beyond, a Blue Argus butterfly basked in the sun as we came out to the wide, flat bottom of the gorge, heaped with low domed sandbanks and a sizeable waterhole.

Bugs sheltering from the summer heat.

 

 

Blue Argus butterfly.

The Lennard River is reduced to a series of waterholes in the gorge in the summer.

 

On the other side was a thicket of Melaleucas with a crowded throng of Flying Foxes  -- Little Reds  -- They were draped along the arching branches in an irritable mass, stretching their wings, shuffling, squabbling and now and then taking off. It was as if they were too hot and crowded. You could smell their stench from 50 yards away.

 

Flying Foxes roosting.

 

 

 

Little Red Flying Fox.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now and then one swooped down to the water below to dip its chest and then flew back up to the colony or ‘camp’ to get a grip with its toes and turn head down to groom and sip droplets of moisture from its fur.

 

Fruit Bat flying down to dip in the water below the roost.

 

 Six or seven ‘freshies’ were lurking in the still green water, waiting for a bat to plunge close enough to grab. We watched many such plunges and lunges, but didn’t see a catch.

 

Like a log floating in the water, a 'Freshie' lurking, hoping for a catch.

Further along, a Darter was standing on the far shore, wings outstretched to dry like a Cormorant on the rocks at home. It was being stealthily stalked by a small freshie in the water behind it, but the water was too shallow and the freshie broke surface and alarmed the darter before it was in reach.

Driving in, we crossed the Lennard river before it went into the gorge and we stopped on the bridge to look down into the water below. It was a deep pool, lit by shafts of sun and looked clear, like very weak tea without milk.. Several young  freshies, no more than a foot long, were hanging, tail down, suspended  motionless in the water.

The adults we saw down in the gorge sunning themselves on the sandbanks were no more than about six feet long. They were very wary and quickly got up on their cranked legs and slid into the water and disappeared. Now and then a snout and top of the back appeared, like a bit of floating log.

Picking up armfuls of dead branches we went back to camp. It had been like an oven in the gorge. We made a smoky fire. The bush flies were bad . We didn’t want much to eat but we drank till we were bloated.”

Later, from log: “Sitting out in the last of the light under an opalescent sky. The flies, especially bad up here, have gone to bed. And then the Little Reds started. They must have been the ones from the camp in the gorge.  For about twenty minutes they flitted silently in a stream overhead, fanning out across the savannah beyond in the gathering darkness.  I wonder how far  they had to go to find sufficient flower nectar or pollen to feed that great number?"

 

Flying away from roost at twilight

Tunnel Creek.

2 days later “Pulled out from Winjana. Still no Ranger. Stopped to have a look at Tunnel Creek. A river has tunnelled through the ancient reef limestone of the Napier Range.

 

 

Savannah and Napier Range, an ancient reef of coralline limestone,once under the sea.

Taking torches and candles  --  belt & braces  --   we followed the stream into the entrance at the base of the precipitous rock face. We picked our way between big boulders and shallow puddles  till we came to a sort of amphitheatre where  long ago there had been a roof fall. Open to the sky high above, some light filtered down and we could see a large murky pool stretching right across with steepish muddy banks. We waded in. It got to thigh deep but to my relief, no more. Freshies must have been on the banks and we heard them splashing into the water but couldn’t see them. T. & K said I was hanging onto them VERY tight! But, living up to their reputation, the freshies didn’t grab us! Further on, we emerged into the bright white light into a grove of trees at the far end.

Pool below ancient roof-fall in the middle of Tunnel Creek.

Emerging from far end of Tunnel Creek.

We poked around a bit but I was in a rush to go back; I wasn’t relishing the return journey so wanted to get it over and done.”

 

Whew! We've done it!

Douglas Hot Springs.

 From log….It’s good sometimes to revisit a place you liked, to get more out of it.  Though it doesn’t always pay to try and repeat a success. We chanced it this time as we wanted to show it to Kim, following our visit in ’92. It is a jumble of marshy pools, open water and billabongs among  the savannah and pandanus. The water steamed, bubbled and the hotter pools looked scummy and smelt sulphurous. 

 

Steaming hot pool at Gregory Hot Springs.

 

 

Rahjah or White- headed Shelduck, otherwise called Burdekin.

 On our previous visit we had watched a couple of  drake Rahjah Shelduck fighting furiously till they fell into the water still interlocked and wings beating. They went on fighting and squawking till they disentangled and flew up and away. We expected them to be par-boiled with damaged feathers and lost toe-nails but they seemed OK!

Abundant dragonflies, some of them exquisite.

 

 

Some of the pools were hot and scummy; some clean, fresh and tempting. I'm under my hat on the right!

 On this visit with Kim she seemed suitably impressed. After tea she and Tony went lamping along the waterhole behind our camp. They quickly came back to fetch me, with talk of ‘shining green eyes’ lit up in the torch beams.

The next day, still suffering from the heat Kim and I took to the water.

From our log: “ Bliss! We just lay and wallowed. It was like tepid bathwater. Perfect! Only our heads and hats showed. We were so still and quiet the birds came down from the bushes and several freshies appeared like floating pieces of wood, just beyond where the waterhole curved away from us. We didn’t want to get out, though when the freshies sank as quietly as they’d appeared, we did wonder whether they were swimming towards or away from us!”

 

Kim never stopped drawing.

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FOCUSING -IN

 

FOCUSING –IN .

A lifetime of itchy feet, indulged in the past fifty years by frequent travel, now has to be radically modified. Not that I don’t appreciate the endlessly varied landscapes of this country, nor even our immediate home patch; after all, I cut my teeth in the English countryside. But I have always, after settling back home for a few months, have again had the overwhelming urge either to revisit favourite places  or to investigate new ones. In the past, this was always followed up with plans, preparations, and departures.

Now, the urge has to be translated into sessions of gardening or a short officially-allowed walk. The focus is close-up, the attention on familiar things sharpened. Just wait a minute! Pause, look carefully, listen, think!  There is always something new to be noticed, or the already-known to be appreciated more fully with sharpened senses.

 

 

My earliest flower memory is of primroses and particularly of their sweet demure fragrance. This must be from family holidays in South Devon at Easter, seeing and picking primroses from the banks. These holidays stopped in 1939 so I can’t have been much more than three. We didn’t have primroses in our part of Hertfordshire, my home county. The delicate scent of these flowers takes me right back through my life every time I smell them now. Flawless in their simple form, humble tone rather than the more strident value of so many other yellow flowers, they were my first lesson in botany! Mum would point out the pin-eyed and thrum-eyed forms. Later I learnt that the ‘thrums are the stamens up in the top of the flower tube, ready for the pollen to be picked up by a foraging bee and transferred to the  stigma, the ‘pin eye’ on another plant, thus ensuring cross-pollination.

 

Thrum-eyed, with stamens showing.

 

Pin-eyed, with stigma showing.

 

Onions! Another smell, evocative of spring. Ramsons grow rampantly in many woods and damp places especially in the west country. To walk among them is to send the smell of mild onion into the air. The round heads of white flowers and the shiny oval leaves can be eaten in salads. They propagate madly from tiny slim bulbous offsets and once in the garden are almost impossible to get rid of. Eating them just doesn’t keep up!

 

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) or sometimes known as Wild Garlic.

 

In spring, and a sound now, the clear sweet falling cadence of a Willow Warbler, newly returned from its winter in Africa. These little greenish warblers are best differentiated from the similar Chiffchaff by their very distinctive songs. I don’t think they are as common as they used to be but we can always hear a few on the scrubby slopes of Kit Hill nearby.

Willow Warbler

 

Running water, tumbling, rushing, trickling, bubbling, gushing, roaring, crashing... so many ways of combining the sound and the ever-mesmerizing sight of moving water, from soothing to exhilarating. 

 

River Fowey, rushing down off the moor at Golitha Falls.

 Look at the delicate tracery of veins on insects’ wings. Some species can only be identified but the pattern of the veins.

A Mayfly (Green-winged Olive)

 

An Ichneumon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painted Lady Butterfly

 

 Touch is one of the most sensuous of our senses. Stroke a silky Pussy Willow catkin in the early spring. Their silvery silk shines against a blue sky. It’s only the male catkins that look like this, and only before the golden fuzz of stamens emerge from the silk. The female catkins are a knobbly greenish mass of stigmas before producing a myriad silk-born seeds which float past in a breeze like a thin mist.

 

Silky male catkins of a 'Pussy Willow'

 

 Or stroke the velvety wing feather of an owl or buzzard. The feathers have a soft furry surface designed to muffle the sound of their wing beats as they pounce on their unwary prey. 

 A delight on a dewy  morning in late summer, to find before anyone else, a harvest of new button mushrooms. The small ones still conceal the baby pink gills under the domed white cap. I like to eat them raw, savouring the delicate flavour with the almost crisp plump feeling as you bite into them.

 

Field Mushrooms

  

Taste the salt on your skin after a day’s exertion in the heat. Tropical sweat bees home in to get the salt. Tiny and black, they can be intensely annoying; they tickle but don’t sting.

All five of our senses can be harnessed in this close focusing. I feel in my bones we have another, sixth, sense that hasn’t got a name and its site is somewhere in our sensibilities if you let yourself tune in. It can crop up in all sorts of circumstances. Count the rings on a felled tree trunk. Look at the distance between them, telling a story of the good and bad years it has lived through; the history it has witnessed.

 As a child, my most vivid impression from the Natural History Museum in London was the varnished cross-section of a giant tree, showing the long history of memorable events throughout the world that this tree had lived through. 

Our local landmark, referred to as “up by the Beech Tree” clung onto the top of a high retaining bank up our lane. As the years passed, ever-bigger lorries scraped their way past, damaging its roots. Every few years the great plates of a bracket fungus Grifolia erupted from the roots. I don’t think this fungus is a killer but it may have been weakening the tree. One night coming home in the dark from a meeting, we almost ran into it. It had fallen across the lane.

 

This Spruce tree shows good steady growth as a youngster. The closer rings show steady but slower growth as it got older, as it put on more height and girth.

 

Our landmark beech tree. The discoloured area indicates some sort of stress or disease, maybe caused by the bracket fungus. The Highways men had to saw off the trunk when it fell across the lane.

 From the long life of an ancient tree to the ephemeral beauty of the sparkling crystals of hoar frost on a cold quiet morning. Just breathe on them, and they are gone. 

Seize the moment!

 

 

 

 

IN SEARCH OF SPRING

IN SEARCH OF SPRING

How we used to take the freedom of movement for granted. One year, we’d planned to explore the Northumberland coast. The weather ‘Up North’ was vile and the forecast promised more of the same. By the time we turned north past Exeter, already heading towards a blackening sky we said ‘This is Stupid!’ and we turned round at the next junction and headed home. We picked up our passports and caught the next Brittany Ferry to France  for a several weeks’ trip in good weather!

Another year that freedom allowed us to escape the tail-end of a long and dreary British winter and to go to the unfolding spring migration in the south of Spain. We’d heard about the spectacle of migrating raptors coming over from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar so we booked into a small hotel between Algeciras and Tarifa, a bit to the west of Gibraltar, hired a car and had a look.

 

     View from our hotel balcony, looking down on a scrubby valley with the mountains of Africa in the near distance catching the last of the afternoon sun.

. Cetti’s and Blackcap song came clear above the sound of the stream below. Four or five, and later up to about fifteen Griffon Vultures circled high in the sky. The finale was a bunch of about six Storks, flying high.

In some ways  it was a good situation for this migration, but not so easy when it came to a more general look-round the area. The only main road was the very bendy, busy and fast coastal road. Access off it was mainly gated and padlocked farm tracks going inland and short spurs down to the coast on the other side.

However, despite these constraints, we managed to see plenty! Our first priority was to have a look at the raptor movement.  From the log:  “There are a series of lookout points along this stretch of the road with posters on boards illustrating the various raptors. Access is only legally possible from the correct side of the road. You aren’t supposed to cross the road nor park alongside it, though as we have known from other trips, Spanish roads seem largely to be constructed well up off the original ground, with a sudden and deep drop-off at the edge. No gentle pulling off to have a look at a bird or a plant; you’d smash the sump!’

From one of the lookouts.Africa looks very close, especially through the telescope.

  

According to the weather conditions we found that the birds’ directions and behaviour varied. Sometimes the following wind took them out of sight towards Gibraltar, sometimes too far west for us to see them well from our vantage point down a rough track below the coast road. If the wind was off-shore, they didn’t tackle the crossing; 

                                     If it was fine, the thermals lifted them high up.

If the weather was less promising they came in from the hills in Morocco, flying low over the sea and then rising with an effort, over our heads, to get over the ridge of land up behind us. These were the best views. Most days, we were conscious of various raptors flying over. There seemed to be a constant trickle rather than mass movement. 

Short-toed Eagle coming in low and lifting overhead to fly over the ridge behind us.

 

 This ridge just inshore in places was lined with wind turbines. The potential for slaughter seemed great, but we did watch Black Kites tackling this problem and they flew below the blades. Nevertheless, one worries.

 

 Rain and poor visibility drove us further west one day and we came upon the extensive ruins of a Roman city Baelo Claudia, in a bay. 

The ruins of Baelo Claudia

 

 We sat out the rain in the car park, watching Crested Larks running around on the gravel, undeterred by the weather.

The sun soon shone again and we got out among the flowers.

 

We explored the deserted ruins of a city we learned was a thriving commercial port in the early centuries AD before repeated earthquakes and pirate raids from across the straits made life unendurable. An important process and a valuable export was Garum. This is a pungent concentrated liquor derived from fermented fish offal and greatly prized in the Mediterranean countries in those times. The processing vats, together with well-preserved remains of a thriving city were fascinating. 

The fish-processing tanks.

 

 Temples, a theatre, a great paved forum, houses, shops, streets and the aqueduct bringing water in from the hills were all to be seen. They even had a system for running waste water and sewage down to the sea. There was a comprehensive info. centre too. 

 

A mosaic from an important house showed images of seine netting fish. It was quite moving to see the same method in use 2000 years ago. The info board told us tuna were caught in large quantities as they migrated though the Straits and they were salted in circular stone vats and exported to Tangiers.

We had the whole place to ourselves.

 

Inland the country was a mixture of hillsides with scrubby slopes and a few flowers but we suspected it was a late, wet spring and we were getting a lot of cold NW wind.  Birds were elusive. We kept seeing glimpses of Sardinian Warblers  and probably other species flitting up and diving into the depths of the bushes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scilla peruviana, a native of Spain despite its name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The coast road alternately passed stony cliffs and bays with dunes and blowing sand with low-lying and sometimes flooded farm land and huge wind farms.

From the log: “ Behind us was a great limestone crag, nearly vertical and heavily fissured. A shadow passing over made me look up, and near the top were two Griffon Vultures, one looking outwards, the other facing the cliff with outstretched wings like a cormorant. Trying to warm up in the cold wind. More shadows showed an Egyptian Vulture which did a couple of turns then flew off and two more Griffons flew in. In the middle of all this we saw a bright male Blue Rock Thrush sitting on a crest above, and a Wryneck called in the bushes below.

 

On the way back down we came across hundreds of metres of Iris germanica (Barbary Nut) now opened in the sun”

 

   The sandy ground at the head of the beach had a lovely dune flora with a few butterflies. It comes to something when you get excited about a few Large Whites! Some beetles (looking them up later they were Darkling Beetles) and masses of a handsome big Broomrape. Gannets and distant Shearwaters were flying out in the bay. 

 

Handsome Broomrapes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darkling Beetles were quite common here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Spanish Festoon butterfly was a nice change from all the 'Cabbage Whites'.

 

 From the log on another day  " Went west again to the little town of Facinas , with tortuous narrow streets and white, flat-roofed houses. Soon we were out of it and up a very pot-holed track for a couple of Kms to a very muddy reservoir. Almost at once we saw Collared Pratincoles quite close. They were flying around, perching in the grass across the track among the cattle with their attendant Egrets.

Collared Pratincole.

  

Their white rumps and forked tails, elegant swooping flight made them quite distinctive. They repeatedly flew round and came to perch on the bank near us. In the half hour we lingered, we saw a Flamingo, a Greenshank in its dark summer plumage and several Yellow Wagtails were running around in the wet-lying ground at the side of the track. They had very dark slaty-blue heads, giving rise to much discussion about their race. These wagtails never quite seem to match up with the book!

Further along, clumps of Tamarisk were alive with finches and warblers.

A man passed us with what looked like a bag full of Allium triquetrum and further on again two chaps were sitting down and apparently cutting out the fleshy midribs of what looked like Artichoke leaves. There were great tufts of these Cardoon-like plants growing here. The men discarded the leaf-blades which they left in wilting heaps. Shortly after, the track was flooded and we turned back, stopping to look at a mixed flock of Corn Bunting, Linnets, Goldfinches, Spanish Sparrow and a Meadow Pipit.”

Going inland along the road to Vejar, we stopped to look at the comings and goings of a lot of jackdaws which were nesting in the clefts of a jagged roadside cliff. We had lovely views of both Booted and Short-toed Eagles apparently coming from the Gibraltar direction to the east of us. There was much activity gathering and wheeling over the hill crests behind us as if they were re-assembling after the crossing, to make their way onwards.  A tree-lined river ran below, with the fluffy outlines of juvenile Egrets perching in the branches. Looking back at the cliff we were puzzled by biggish black birds which looked like ragged flue brushes. We were astonished to see they were a couple of pairs of Bald Ibises 

We learnt later that these endangered birds, extinct in Europe and just hanging on in the Middle East and N. Africa, were introduced some years ago and have naturalized.

 

 Continuing from the log: “We turned off south on our way back to the hotel on what started as a good causeway above an area of rice paddies.

 

 

Wash-and-Brush-up time.Cattle and Little Egrets and a couple of Shovellers in the water.

 

Spoonbills.

 

  It was all heaving with Egrets, Herons, Storks, Mallards and Sacred Ibises. The road soon became badly pot-holed, then alternating stretches of dirt, cobbles and flooded dips. 

 

Cattle and their attendant Egrets.

 

We pressed on cautiously, lured on by the birds. Eventually after some heated discussion about the sense of going on, we found a (luckily unlocked) gate back onto the main coast road. We guessed from the amount of surface water that they’d had a lot of rain pretty recently. The hotel staff’s English wasn’t up to much discussion about the recent weather, and our minimal Spanish was no help. They seemed more interested in assuring us of ‘sunny tomorrow”

The only day we saw much of other people was on the Sunday when we went to the headland of Cape Trafalgar going towards Cadiz. From the log:“Parking up in a popular ‘Recreation Area’ we had a coffee  sitting at a cafe table among cyclists and walkers heading off among the pines. 

Then set off among the trees.

 

  We heard a Yaffle and Crested Tits and a found a  little orchid like a Twayblade. There were plenty of birds hiding in the canopy, and heard, eventually saw, Bee-eaters flying overhead. People were wandering about among the trees looking intently at the sandy ground and now and then stopping to stoop and cut something with pocket-knives. Then we tumbled to it. They were cutting wild Asparagus shoots  --  very wispy but no doubt young and tender. Perhaps the Artichoke leaf-stems we saw them cutting out the other day are a sort of ‘poor man’s asparagus’.

 

Strange fungus Clathrus ruber.

          A blue cousin of the Scarlet Pmpernel.

No visit is complete without a Hoopoe.

 

We found the week’s visit interesting despite the less-than pleasant weather and the difficulties of access, but there was a good variety of habitats. With hindsight, how we took those trips away for granted! Now, Locked Down in the depths of winter we have to change our mindset.  To learn to engage more with our immediate surroundings; ‘Less is More’, no bad thing even though it takes a bit of working at.

 I follow these Blogs:

www.northcornwallnaturalist.blogspot.com

www.musingsfromhigherdowngateandelsewhere.blogspot.com 

www.downgatebatman.blogspot.com