Overdid it

20th April 2011

This was my doing. We spent far too long night-driving in search of animals this evening and have overdone it.

Unhappily, Old Wesleydale the Georgian house was only available for one night so we moved along to a nice old B&B in the same village of Mole Creek. This was our base to spend a day out at Cradle Mountain, Tasmania’s crown jewel of mountainous terrain and predictably busy. Although very few people actually walked the two hour Dove Lake circuit in the drizzle, so we had peace and quiet for that. It really does look a beautiful place, but apparently grizzly days are very, very common here even when it’s sunny back in the lowlands. Our hope was to spotlight here, but a helpful fellow explained that the sheer number of people means the wildlife often doesn’t come out until things have quietened down properly after 10pm. Ugh. So we settled on driving part-way back to Mole Creek and picking out some dirt roads into the mountains to try.

So yeah, how to explain myself? Maureen looks to me for things related to driving and timing, as I’m much more able to juggle speed, kilometers and minutes in my head. The one really lovely animal we haven’t seen in Tasmania is the Spotted-tailed Quoll, which is fairly rare but not impossibly so. Tomorrow we’ll head south away from the areas where this critter is found, so this evening I let myself get into a frame of mind which was “perhaps if we just go around the next corner…” or “well, the forest looks different here, maybe we’ll go on a bit longer…” Bad frame of mind to get into.

We saw 63 Brush-tailed Possums this evening, along with 40+ Pademelons and Bennet’s Wallabies, 2 Ring-tailed Possums, 1 Wombat and 1 Eastern Quoll. But no Spotted-tail Quoll. We left our B&B at 10am this morning for Cradle Mountain. It got dark around 6pm when we started spotlighting and finally returned to our accommodation at 10pm, spent. Rather like a teenager who has drunk way too much on a Saturday night, we’re at the stage of swearing that we never want to look for mammals ever again.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 1:41 am and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.