Wild BNE

A great barred frog and leech in Tamborine National Park.  Last Friday, I headed up to Mount Tamborine so that I could visit the Piccabeen Bookshop run by the local Landcare group, and find some rainforest snails to photograph after dark.  The trip was a great success, as not only did I find beautiful books and snails, I also found a menagerie of other amazing creatures, most of which I’d never seen before. Here is a gallery of some of those finds, including notes on each.

Tommy roundhead, Collingwood Park. A search for reptiles out in degraded bushland near Ipswich proved fruitful last week, with a variety of interesting animals found.

White-throated nightjar, Cedar Creek. A foray into Plunkett Regional Park last Saturday night resulted in many excellent wildlife sightings, the highlight being white-throated nightjars (Eurostopodus mystacalis) .

A peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) flies over the rooftops on the Sunshine Coast. 2017 was a great year for adventures in the bush and encounters with incredible wildlife! Here’s some of the creatures, places and events that made an impact on me, and in some cases, the entire region:

Red-eyed tree frog, Springbrook. Last Sunday evening, I headed up into the Gold Coast hinterland to attend a frog-spotting walk organised by Ceris Ash of the Springbrook Wildlife Appreciation Group . Meeting at the Springbrook Community Hall at 7:15pm, I joined a lovely group of people led by Adam Maund, a local wildlife expert and talented photographer , who found a great selection of stunning frogs for us to admire.

As a subtropical city, Brisbane has a rich and visible frog fauna, with forty-one native species (and one cursed toad) calling it home. Familiar to most people would be that friendly windowsill giant, the green treefrog (Litoria caerulea) , and anyone with a garden pond would also perhaps be acquainted with the striped marsh frog (Limnodynastes peronii) . Sharing our suburbs and green spaces, however, are a whole host of other fascinating amphibians that many South-east Queensland residents may never notice or know much about. It’s a fair assumption to make, for example, that Kippa-Ring locals wouldn’t ever suspect that on balmy spring nights, patches of nearby sandy soil suddenly erupt with ornate burrowing frogs (Platyplectrum ornatum) . Nor would dog-walkers along Bulimba Creek deduce that among the streambank rubble on which their puppy plays lives a little fellow called the stony-creek frog (Litoria wilcoxii) , who turns a bright lemon-yellow colour when he’s ready for some ...

Book review Reed New Holland Publishing, 2002. It’s noon on a warm autumn day and I am driving south along Beaudesert Road towards the peripheral suburbs of Brisbane’s southside that remain largely a mystery to me. I have decided that not knowing the amphibian fauna inhabiting the suburb of Algester is a personal error that I simply must rectify. My favourite way to search for frogs is to go spotlighting on humid spring and summer nights, but I have left it a little late this year and doubt my chances at finding them now that the evenings have mercifully turned cooler. Instead, I am going to survey the local amphibian population in a way that is quite new to me, aided by a secret weapon sitting in the passenger seat next to me: Marion Anstis’s book, Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys .

2015 was a beautiful year to be in the bush (or the sea in some cases!), and I had many wonderful encounters with unusual, rarely seen animal species, all within a short drive of Brisbane. Here are my ten favourites! 1. Budgerigar, Haigslea. It might seem funny to have such a seemingly common and ordinary bird in the top spot, but until you've seen a wild budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) , you haven't seen the real thing! Budgerigar have only been recorded in South-east Queensland on a handful of occasions, but persistent drought and El Nino conditions led to a spate of observations this year from the Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Scenic Rim areas, beginning when I sighted the species near Raysource Road in May. Two things about the wild version of this bird surprised me: firstly, that it was such a secretive seed-eater, keeping closer to cover more so than the doves and finches around it; and secondly, that its shimmering green plumage is more beautiful than I'd eve...

The Naked Treefrog is often a light cream colour that camouflages it against dried grass and dead wood. With South-east Queensland enduring such a warm and wet summer this year, people have been quick to notice the inevitable insect population boom that has arisen from these conditions. It seems that every week, there are news reports and press releases on mosquito issues and butterfly swarms, and social media is buzzing with complaints about ants and cockroaches inside houses. What has gone unremarked, however, is that this surge in insect numbers and wet weather has been great for another kind of animal around Brisbane: frogs!

Of the top ten wildlife encounters I had this year, seven of them were with species I had never seen before. The amazing thing is, I didn't exactly have to travel to far-flung places to see these creatures either. Some of them were even seen in places like the outskirts of Caloundra, or among the busy new housing estates of North Lakes. This is why I love Brisbane, a place where the wilderness can creep into our suburbs and enrich our lives if we take the opportunity to notice it. Here is what I noticed this year! 1. Black Falcon , Jeebropilly. Black Falcon; Photo by David Jenkins courtesy of  'Birds as Poetry'. At a wetland out near Amberley Air Force Base in May, I saw nature's own version of a jet-fighter plane, and it was very impressive. Swooping in low over the water and scattering flocks of wildfowl into flight, I watched a Black Falcon - my first ever!

Brisbane is changing.  When people say this, they usually refer to the cosmopolitan aspirations of a city no longer content to be regarded as an overgrown country town. It is now a city that caters to an affluent, expansive and modern middle class, offering fine-dining, bars, shopping precincts and lifestyle options that rival those found in Sydney and Melbourne, perhaps for the first time in its history. But I have lived here long enough to notice other ways in which Brisbane is changing. Rainbow Lorikeet, Bracken Ridge When I was a young boy with a bird interest, I could study the feathered visitors to my garden and neighbourhood for hours. I especially loved the evenly-mixed flocks of Rainbow (Trichoglossus haematodus) and Scaly-breasted Lorikeets (T. chlorolepidotus) that would visit the grevilleas Mum had planted around our housing commission yard in Bracken Ridge. Today, the Rainbow Lorikeets are as numerous as ever around Brisbane's suburbs, but the Scaly-breast...

I spent Monday night of this week in the Redlands, searching along Hilliards Creek for frogs. Surveying wildlife in this area is not a new thing for me, and some of you may remember that I wrote a  feature last year on the fish found in this waterway.  I

I enjoyed many outdoor adventures this year, and for the first time, I paid attention to a whole variety of animals rather than just birds. Though I had amazing wildlife experiences in North Queensland and the NSW Central Coast, the following animals were all seen around South-East Queensland. Keep an eye out for these wonders when you're out and about! 1. Eastern Brown Snake, Mooloolaba. This was such a shock! Me and a friend were strolling along Mooloolaba Spit Beach on a busy Sunday morning, when this beauty washed in from the surf! I was so

Airlie Beach Airlie Beach; courtesy of Google Maps Bidding farewell to the beautiful Eungella National Park (see 'Part One' of this trip report), me and my travelling companions packed our tents up and drove two hours through the canefields to our next destination: Airlie Beach. Being close to the Great Barrier Reef, the name of this town conjures up images of pristine white sands and clear waters, but the reality is quite different. It is actually more of a harbour town, with the nearby Whitsunday Islands absorbing the worst of the ocean swells so that Airlie's waters are calm and its shores muddy. To make swimming matters worse, the entire coastline is subject to swarms of Box Jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri) from October to April. This almost-invisible menace is arguably the world's most venomous animal,

Eungella National Park Eungella National Park location; Image courtesy of Google Maps. My home state of Queensland is a huge place. Bigger than any of the United States, it is considered the sixth largest sub-national entity in the world, behind such remote provinces as Nunavut in Canada, and the Danish territory of Greenland. Though I've lived in and travelled through Europe and Canada, much of my birthplace remains a mystery to me. To rectify this situation, I planned a road-tripping holiday this year with my sister and her partner, in the Northern section of the state. My first visit to anywhere in the Tropics, I have since returned home with some of the most amazing wildlife experiences possible!

In some ways, I must have been a dream kid for my parents to raise. I brought home report cards filled with glowing praise and recommendations from teachers. I had an inbuilt respect for authority that more or less guided me to make the right decisions at any given time. I was good-natured with enough friends to easily fill out a birthday party, and I had a lot of interests. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if my parents wished I had just a few less interests, or at least more "normal" ones. While other kids dragged their parents to Saturday morning sports games, I would make mine rise at 4:30am so that we could all get to the Mount Glorious rainforest in time for the sunrise. Sometimes we'd arrive so early that it would still actually be night time, and we'd have to wait in the car until the darkness turned to early morning grey. Then we'd begin to carefully navigate the forest trail - which we always had to ourselves. You might think this sounds like a won...