buggin with teej: White Rock

After finishing work, we headed back to Pete's place to change clothes and check all our equipment. While Pete was getting changed, I checked out his reptile collection - it's grown quite a bit since he lived next door! His Central Netted Dragons have grown quite a bit, the legless lizard is still without legs, his rainbow skink is still refracting brightly, but it was his Angle Headed Dragon breeding pair that have really come along - laying 4 eggs after some old fashioned lovin' back in November. He's made his own custom incubator, which also has eggs from the legless lizard and rainbow skink. A week ago, he was able to film the Angle Headed Dragons breaking out of their prison and seeing the world for the first time. Very cool. I got a few shots of them to make sure the settings on the camera were right.

Angle Headed Dragon

I only got a chance to get a few shots of the hatchlings before Pete was ready and rushing me out the door, keen to get going. So we loaded up the car and headed off.

Upon arriving at White Rock, we left the car parked outside of the parking lot which gets locked at 6pm every night and headed towards one of the small man-made frog ponds, which was full of large frog tadpoles. There were lots of flying insects hovering about, which explains the large number of spider webs all around the pond. Most of them were Jewel Spiders (Austracantha minax), which i've never seen before and found quite pretty.

So Beautiful!

The native tadpoles were very large and had some nice patterns on them. They can be easily distinguished from the pest Cane Toad tadpoles because they aren't jet black, and don't hang around in big schools like the Cane Toad's do. The Cane Toad tadpoles are also poisonous and will eat anything, including the native tadpoles. They seem to prefer rancid water though, and luckily we didn't find any despite the presence of several large (and now dead) toads.

With the sun still shining, we left the relative safety of the carpark and started the journey to White Rock. Just after you start walking there is a detour to go via Little White Rock, which is a smaller version and has a man-made lookout. We stopped by this smaller granite outcrop and turned over a few rocks in search of interesting critters, and found lots of ants and the occasional scorpion, which just loves to munch on the termites we were finding under most of the rocks we overturned.

Small Scorpion

After finding a few creepy crawlies and getting lightly rained on a few times, we got back on the walking trail and headed towards our main objective - White Rock. The walking trail was sandy, and we observed quite a few tracks made by snakes, legless lizards, goannas, and large insects. After what seemed like a short time walking (which seemed 10x longer on the way back) we arrived at the base of the hill that leads up to a large sandstone and granite outcrop which is White Rock, and made the climb over several boulders and steep inclines right to the very top. What an amazing view! I'll definitely be going back on a nice sunny day to take some fantastic landscape shots of White Rock itself and the views it presents. There was a downside up the top though - it seems as though everyone who goes there wants to leave their mark, so the top was literally covered in the names and other scribble that people have hammered into the rock itself. It really spoilt the experience. We sat up there for a while, admiring the view and all we could see. You can see 3 or 4 other rocky outcrops that we plan on exploring once I get my hands on a GPS.

After climbing down, we went for a walk along the surrounding trails, looking for anything interesting. Being so overcast, it was a challenge to find anything unusual. What we did notice was the abundance of spiders! Every two steps you'd run into a web or see one hunting on a piece of grass. It was only when night fell that we could see the true scale of the spider infestation - our head lamps would reflect a green colour in their eyes, and those 2 green spots were everywhere you went! Before last light, we climbed up another outcrop where a perigrine falcon was nesting in some inaccessable caves on the side of the cliff. This was a really cool find and I hope to get some great shots of them when I return for a day trip. The number of caves we found was a great bonus! There were big ones and small ones, deep ones and shallow ones, all with different signs of life. Pete went there by himself a few weeks beforehand and was lucky enough to film some microbats chasing large moths in some of the deeper caves.

Soon after we got down that outcrop and back to White Rock itself, darkness fell and out came the head lamps. We hunted all over White Rock, searching every rock for the elusive gecko. It was a real challenge to find them - they are nothing like Leaf Tail geckos which stay still. As soon as you find them and get light on them, they pop their head up and then run for dear life, into the nearest crack or crevice, never to be seen again. We saw some Robust Velvet Geckos (Oedura robusta), which liked rock faces, and some Eastern Stone Geckos (Diplodactylus vittatus), which preferred to hang out at the base of rocks and on the ground near them. I didn't have any luck getting any shots of them as by the time I got in position they'd already retreated to a crack or some kind of hideout.

We searched all over the large rocky outcrop right next to White Rock. After searching the top for a while, Pete made his way down a steep ledge (what he calls the "taking the scenic route") on our way back down to try somewhere new. After he had jumped down, I started my descent and saw something out of the corner of my eye, right near my foot (and where Pete had just climbed down). It was a juvenile Brown Tree Snake! Since the ledge Pete was on was only about a meter and a half long with a 3 meter drop to rocks below, he couldn't move the snake as there were no sticks (just spiny, irritating bushes) and he couldn't help me down. I waited for him to get some video footage of the snake, which really put on a great show for him. It was in it's defensive "S" pose, ready to strike if threatened, but it never did and decided to curl up and hide it's head under the curls. This let me sneak down the rock face to where Pete was without the danger of a snake bite. It would have been difficult for this snake to bite and get venom into me as only the larger snakes are considered capable of doing this as the fangs are at the rear of the mouth and not at the front like our native elapids. I wasn't taking any chances though and used it's defensive pose to get down so I could try my hand at taking some shots of him. He eventually decided to unravel himself and seemed to pose in a few different positions for me - very photogenic! We even found one of his shed skins, so that ledge must have been his home.

Brown Tree Snake

Sssssssssssssssmiley!

He had plenty of geckos to hunt, so we left him in peace and continued our climb down, checking for geckos along the way.

Under most of the rock ledges, we found several types of spider trying to catch dinner. The most interesting of which was a marbled spider that looked very similar to a redback. I even saw a live centipede suspeneded by one strand of silk underneath one's web! Maybe it had bitten it and was waiting for it to die or maybe it had just got caught by accident and the spider had separated it from the main web in the hope of keeping out of harms way - who knows. It was cool all the same.

white spider

We got some great video of the geckos, but most were too quick for me to get some still shots. It was a real shame, as the Robust Velvet Gecko has some really nice patterns and a nice big fat tail. It was getting late, and we both had to work in the morning, so we started the trek back. I was getting very tired by that time, so the journey back went on for what seemed an eternity. We found a lot of spiders and other critters, but I was just too exhausted to get my camera out of my bag. Pete stumbled across my old mate, the Ornate Burrowing Frog, and a different colour variation at that! I had to get a shot of that. He really didn't like the flash, I don't blame him, and his eyes shut up somewhat after the first shot so I got another quick one and left him in peace. Pete half burried him so he had some cover while getting his eyesight back ;)

Sandy Frog

Half way back, we heard motorbikes and saw car headlights coming across the track. It was some locals out heading to another mountain range where their mates were camping. They'd already rolled the car once and had to jack the drivers side roof up - madness! They had a huge esky of Jim Beam in the back, and asked if we wanted to go on a "death rally". No thanks :P They were really drunk and happy, so we chatted for a while, showed them some video, then left them to whatever fate had in for them. Hopefully not a horrific crash!

We were almost back at the carpark when Pete dragged me on yet another detour. My legs were very sore at this stage as I forgot my hiking shoes and only had my workboots on, which are steel capped and very heavy. I had also forgotten to take out the 70-200 so the weight in my backpack was really giving my shoulders a hard time. I moaned and groaned and eventually followed him - and i'm glad I did! We found two more types of gecko, the first one of which I couldn't muster the energy to open my backpack. But when he found a Southern Spotted Velvet Gecko (Oedura tryoni), the first one of the trip, I found the energy and snapped off a few shots. It was a very beautiful gecko, and I hope we can find more on our future adventures.

Southern Spotted Velvet Gecko

Relieved to be back at the car, we packed up all our gear, had a rest, and started the journey home. I hope to get back there during the day time, as i'm sure there's much more to find.

I hope you enjoyed the experience as much as I did!