QUANDONGS

Two of the volunteers trying quandongs.....obvious what they think!

At Mount Gibson many of the Quandong fruits are just ripening. There are three different types of quandongs in Australia: the desert quandong, the bitter quandong and the blue quandong. One article describes quandong as a’sweet and juicy apple sized fruit’; so I think the ones here must be the bitter quandongs since they are smaller then apples, not sweet and the flesh is very thin.  The blue ones I think I saw in Daintree, where they were referred to as Cassowary plums, because the cassowaries liked to eat them.

The quandongs here are loved by emus. They eat them and their droppings are full of the rather large and pricky seeds which are in the centre of the fruit. All the volunteers tried the fruit and although it wasn’t as bitter as we thought it probably wasn’t something we would sit and eat a bowl of. However as a survival food it would be acceptable.

The word quandong comes from the Wiradjuri language and means ‘nut’. It is possibly one of the oldest fruits found on the planet, there are fossilized remains dating back 40 million years. The leaves can be used to produce a tropical ointment for skin sores. The fruit can also be eaten fresh, dried or as an infusion for tea. The seeds can be crushed and used as a hair conditioner. Stockman sometimes put quandongs into a damper for a little variety.

 

Quandongs on the tree

Quandongs on the ground

Emu droppings....full of quandong seeds

THE SANCTUARY

So why am I at Mount Gibson? Well, Mount Gibson is an Australian Wildlife Conservancy(AWC) sanctuary. It covers 132,500 hectares in the south-west of Western Australia, about 3 to 4 hours north-east of Perth. AWC is currently building a feral-free fence over 40 kilometres long and enclosing some 8,000 hectares. This will be the largest enclosed feral-free area in Western Australia. Once this fence is completed and any feral predators, such as cats and foxes, are removed from this area then AWC will reintroduce nine of Australia’s most endangered mammals.

At present we are doing surveys to see which animals are present, and in what numbers, on the Mount Gibson sanctuary. Annual surveys will be able to look at the impact the removal of feral predators and the reintroduction of these new mammals are having on the wildlife populations which are there now.

Accommodation while at the sanctuary

The salt lakes

The volunteers and staff making dinner

A view from one of the hills

TRAPPING

At the end of the first day some of the team left, they were ecologists from other reserves but had stayed for the first day because that is the hardest, as we have to dig in the fences for the pitfall traps. Now we have two teams, one of three and one of four. Our daily routine is to check the traps each morning at 6am. We empty the bait out of the cages and the Gilbert traps and leave them so they are not set up. This is because the mammals we are trapping are nocturnal and so are trapped at night , and we do not want them left in the traps in the hot sun. We again check the traps in the afternoon at 3 pm and rebait, and reset the traps. The pitfall traps stay set all the time. They can trap small mammals during the night and trap reptiles in the day.

At our accommodation we are having problems with the water. The pump from the bore has stopped and so we are left without water for a couple of days. On Monday we buy a load of water and on Monday night get our first shower. We do have a water tank so drinking water has not been a problem.

The traps so far have been turning up small reptiles, mainly skinks. We have seen a few larger monitors. We have caught one or two house mice but the other team have already caught two hopping mice.

One of the large monitors seen

Checking the teeth of a mouse to see if it is a field mouse or a house mouse

MOUNT GIBSON

I picked up Laura, one of the volunteers, from Perth and headed for the sanctuary at Mt Gibson, about four hours drive away. Laura is from New Zealand and has a degree and honours in ecology and has moved to Perth because the job opportunities are greater here. On the way we passed through a number of ‘towns’. These towns were very small, often just a garage and one or two other buildings. The directions were vague, as is usual with AWC. But we followed them and 70 kms past Wubin took a right turn down a dirt track. Thirty kilometres later and a few false stops we found where we were staying.

Laura

The first day there were ten of us there. We had to set up the traps. We worked in two teams, each team covering six sites. At each site we set up two pitfall traps, two wire traps and twenty Gilbert traps. The pitfalls involve erecting a small fence in a T shape. At each end and in the middle there are buckets, so that reptiles and small mammals follow the fence line and fall into the bucket. There are also six funnel traps along the T. These are to trap snakes and larger lizards. The cages are to trap larger mammals, such as bettongs and the Gilbert traps are for hopping mice, dunnerts and field mice.

For the first day we have ten people here. All of the others are young females and all have science degrees or doctorates. There are four volunteers, one intern and the other five are ecologists. Some of the ecologists are leaving after the first day to go back to their own sanctuaries. The weather is reasonably mild.

Constructing pitfall walls

Setting up the funnels

Constructing dinner

ZOO

Young numbat

Reaching Perth the first place I visited was Perth zoo. In particular I wanted to see the numbat breeding program. Perth is the only place breeding numbats and they released them into the wild at Yookamurra and at Scottia. When I was at Scottia the second time it was to see a group of these numbats. My job was to monitor the numbats that had been released. A number of them had radio-tracking collars and I would drive around each day locating these individuals.

At the zoo I talked to the numbat keeper, Dani, and she showed me where the numbats were bred. At present they had a batch of young numbats just being weaned from their mothers in preparation for their release, this time at Yookamurra. It was good to see how the program operated and to hear about the anti-predator training that they gave the young numbats. I was able to get some good photographs of the young numbats and of the female numbat on public display.

I also visited the African Painted Dogs which I have a soft spot for after working with them in South Africa. The Perth zoo was well laid out and there were a good number of people there. I had hoped also to see the squirrels which live in the trees around the zoo. These are the only squirrel colony in Australia and probably came from individuals that have escaped from the zoo. However very few of these have been seen in recent years and their population may have died out or at least is very reduced in numbers.

Dani, one of the keepers