As we return to Brisbane to drop off the Buzz Bus, we stop for a celebratory ice cream and a dip in the Pacific Ocean in the beautiful coast of Eastern Australia. Surfers float waiting for bigger waves and signs on the beach warn potential swimmers to look for another place to dip their toes as the list of potential dangers is long here. It is early and few people have descended on the beach yet. The gorgeous Pandanus hold on to the shallow soil between the rocks and sand. The water is cool and the sun harsh and we chat the time away. By the time we return the Buzz Bus at Brisbane airport we have driven more than 2,600 km in Eastern Australia alone.
I am excited to go back home in Sweden after three weeks away from my family. It has been hard to keep up with news at home, and I had barely been there three weeks since our big move from Scotland. The Australian trip has been amazing. So long in the planning and delayed for years, and it somehow has now passed so fast.
I have learned a lot about the plants, wildlife, and people of Australia. The mysterious continent has lived up to my expectations of natural wonder, and David and Daniel, my project collaborators and travel partners, have been amazing. Spending three weeks driving and working in the constrained space of a campervan brings its challenges and rewards, and I feel we have built our friendship and shared so many fun and amazing experiences together. Thanks guys!
Now the slog of the return trip begins. The distance I must travel to go back home, including several flight connections, amounts to 19,631 km.
The end of the fieldwork component of the project means the start of the next phase. We will have to identify the species we studied with the help of Australian bee experts. I will have to process and analyse the thousands of buzzes we collected and to do that I need to write and refine methods that enable to recognise buzzes automatically. It will be some time to do these analyses and then we get a chance to test our hypotheses and make inferences of what we have found in this project. At the end we hope to have a paper to tell others about our scientific discoveries. Each part, from the conception of the project, to fieldwork, analysis, and write-up, has aspects that I love. Doing science is fun, and I certainly feel lucky that I get to do this for a living. Thanks for funding this expedition to Australia National Geographic!
30 September. This is the last stretch of the trip. The last chance of finding bees before starting to wrap up this expedition. It has been a mixed bag for finding bees for studying vibrations. Perhaps is the cool, rainy days we have encountered, or Spring, or trying to cover too much ground, or any other reason that makes field work in a new continent hard. But it has been a blast and somehow we have managed to scrape a few measurements in bees across Australia. Today is our last push and the bright sun and blue skies with relatively little wind are promising.
We leave Hervey Bay after exploring some Solanum torvum growing behind the campground. We drive down the Bruce Highway and Daniel has an inspired suggestion to get off and explore a side road. With the corner of my eye I spy a large shrub with bright yellow flowers in a spike. ‘Stop here’, I ask Daniel who pulls over near a farm. We climb down to the river bank where I saw the plant and confirm is the (exotic) Senna didymobotrya with large, buzz pollinated flowers. Within seconds we hear the deep buzz of a large carpenter bee (Xylocopa sp.) above our heads. With some tricks and patience we sample a few bees including Xylocopa. We are thrilled of this strike of luck to locate the bees that will allow us to close the trip with more observations.
A farmer comes by intrigued by our excitement at a weedy plant and we tell him about the Buzz Bus, he allows us to go deeper up the river bank to look for more buzz pollinated flowers of Solanum and Senna that he says are plentiful here. ‘Just watch out for the carcasses of the feral pigs we shot last week!’, he warns us. We find many bees of different species and collect buzz after buzz in our mobile lab. This is the most productive day of the whole Eastern trip!
The day has been a complete success, and we pull over late in the afternoon on our next campsite at the edge of a pine plantation. How here to cut down Eucalyptus forests to plant Scott Pines (Pinus sylvestris), while the rest of the world cut their native forests to plant Eucalyptus?
The usual brush turkeys watch us set up camp, and we spend the evening cooking, measuring and photographing bees. A pair of kookaburras huddle together above our heads as the sun sets. The campsites light up their fire pits as the darkness quickly engulfs everybody. Tomorrow we head to Brisbane to return the Buzz Bus and end three weeks of wonderful fieldwork.
29 September. Today we continue our drive south, guided by the records of invasive Solanum that we have been able to find online through the patchy internet reception we can get. The first stop is in Granite Creek in a rest stop that advertises free coffee for tired drivers. The parking area off the road is an invasive plant paradise. Surrounded by a national park, here you can find a wide range of invasive plants from around the world. The invasives include Solanum americanum, Tecoma stans, Argemone ochroleuca, Thunbergiaalata, Verbascum virgatum, and others. But we are here for buzz pollinated Solanum and find plenty of S. mauritianum, S. seaforthianum, and even tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). The perennial honeybee is here trying clumsily to get pollen from S. mauritianum without ever vibrating. Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), another exotic organism, seem to also thrive in this part of Australia and I tell Daniel about their wintering grounds in western Mexico. There, the monarch butterflies can be found in enormous numbers, hanging from conifer trees, resting after their long migration from the USA and Canada. Or at least they used to be there in large numbers when I visited; who knows how they are coping with the brutal deforestation going on in the forests of Michoacan. Here in a roadside of Eastern Australia, lonely monarchs flutter a bit lost. The grass is tall and as we walk around, I think of snakes hiding in the grass. No wild bees here in the cloudy, cool morning, so we drive again.
Eventually we make it to our next destination in Hervey Bay. This is a touristic town on the coast, but with plenty of records of the plants we look. It is getting late (drives in Australia are long), and we go to the Botanic Gardens where we find some stingless bees.
As we drive back to the campground I hear a strange noise coming from the trees. We stop in a park in the coastal road and we saw giant black fruits hanging from some trees. Something doesn’t add up. Then one of the fruits rattles, crawls on a branch and extends its enormous membranous wings. They are flying foxes! I couldn’t be more excited of seeing these giant bats (Pteroptus alecto) for the first time. There are several dozens in this tree and several more in the next one. A tree further down is also full with flying foxes and we realise that there are several hundred bats around us. As we approach the trees and look through the binoculars, I see a pair of eyes looking right back. The bats are becoming active and are well aware of our presence. Their terse fur, sometimes forming a lighter collar in some individuals gives these wonderful animals an elegantly sinister look. The bats stretch their wings, and you can almost feel the texture of the skin that stretches in their hands-turned-wings. They communicate and interact with one another. They keep their sights on us, and when a drunken woman hits their tree with a branch, they take off with the sound of leather cutting the wind. Their silhouettes swish across the blue sky of the dying daylight, and the trees rattle with their movement. I wish you could hear them.
28 September. Not much to report today. It has been raining all day. In the morning we waited for bees in Solanum mauritianum but the rain kept them away. After a while, and without hope that the sky would clear, we decide to leave and start our drive back south. It is a long way to Brisbane (about 1,000 km from here), and perhaps we will have better luck with the weather tomorrow.
We stop in Finch Hatton gorge, at the base of Mount Dalrymple, which at 1,260m above sea level is one of Queensland’s tallest mountains. The vegetation is amazing and we reach a pool in the river called the Ring of Fire. An ominous board suggests caution while exploring the boulders around the gorge. Others have died while miscalculating the risks of navigating the slippery rocks and cold pools. Daniel, unfazed jumps in the water and explores a small waterfall. The name Ring of Fire comes from a plant that produces red flowers in a crown-shaped structure. Sadly is not flowering at the moment. We explore the trail a bit more and keep driving south.
It has continued to rain into the evening. The night surprises us while approaching the campground for tonight, which is located in a working farm south of Rockhampton. We are glad to pull over at last, as thick rain and fast trucks along the Bruce Highway make for a scary combination. In the campground, we eat an early dinner and go to bed. The camp kitchen has some very interesting decorations, and people here seem to like quite a bit Ned Kelly, the infamous outlaw.
27 September. It’s before 6:00am and we are waiting by the Broken River. We stand on the edge of a murky, slow flowing river guarded by tree ferns and lianas that touch the water surface. The muddy water hides a platypus somewhere. Bubbles raising to the surface and a cloud of mud in the water reveal the location of the almost mythical platypus. A small creature breaks the water surface, the colour of its fur barely distinct from the colour of the mud at the bottom of the river. Its duck-like bill chews rapidly, probably on invertebrates dug out of the bottom.
Before we can fix the binoculars or the camera it dives again. A little while later it re-emerges, its clawed paws stretched on the surface along with its flat tail giving us a glimpse just long enough to get a good view before the platypus dives again. We spend sometime admiring this extraordinary animal in silence. I think of the book I am reading (appropriately called Platypus Matters by Jack Ashby), and the story of how Europeans sought to settle the questions of whether the platypus lays eggs and feeds its young with milk, and, if so, what kind of strange mammal this is. Together with a handful of species of Echidnas (the hedgehog-like creatures that also lay eggs), the platypus forms an unusual branch in the family tree of mammals called the Monotremes. Platypus go by many names in different countries but is an animal well known despite its localised distribution and the fact that only one zoo outside Australia has a living platypus (San Diego Zoo). In Spanish the name is ornitorrinco.
If you squint you can see a platypus (ornitorrinco)
We pack and move to look for bees. We search first the montane forest, looking carefully in the few flowers that manage to grow in the understory of this dense forest. Palms grow at every gap in the canopy, and we see stag-horn ferns (another ‘platy’, Platycerium in the fern family Polypodiaceae) hanging onto every tree. These stag-horn ferns make their own hanging basket using modified leaves that catch debris and vegetation, and make long bifurcated leaves that extend like vegetal stag horns. Some of the ferns look so big that they seem capable to bring the smaller trees down with their sheer weight. A smallish goana (a large reptile also called monitor lizards) stays still by the water hoping we haven’t noticed it. We find some flowers and catch a glimpse of a bee. We stay still to see it foraging fast as lightning and zooming away in the vegetation in search for another rare flower. We wait for a while but the bee decides not to return.
We try our luck in the nearby pastures where a few farmers maintain cattle herds. The grassy mess of cattle farms has replaced here the ancient forest. Besides the grasses, several other non-native weeds make their home along the road. A spear thistle (Cirsium vulgare, Asteraceae) spreads its spiny leaves and shows off a purple inflorescence head. Mexican poppy (Argemone ochroleuca, Papaveraceae) grows here and there. In the 1930s, the Australian government leased land to young men on the condition of clearing out 35 acres of forest and transform it into cattle pastures. The exotic grasses and the cattle to go with it were considered more valuable.
Solanum mauritianum, a buzz pollinated species that is at home in cattle fields and disturbed sites
Along the dirt road, we spot our good-old Solanum mauritianum (Solanaceae). As other Solanum, this one loves the disturbance of the roadsides and pastures. We stop, and soon find the first bees. The sun is shinning and bees are busy buzzing the Solanum flowers for pollen. On the roadside we measure and photograph.
We are lucky enough to come across a territory guarded by male carpenter bees (Xylocopasp.). The male bees fight with one and other to defend a patch of Solanum, where the female bees come to collect pollen. They zoom around us and chase each other away. These are some of the most beautiful bees I have ever seen, and are restricted to Eastern Australia. The males of Xylocopa bombylans, have a metallic green-blue body that shifts to yellow-orange in the thorax. The iridescence of its exoskeleton is wonderful, and yellow hairs adorn their legs. The face carries an elegant ivory mask, and they are not shy or fearful of anybody entering their land. We spend a few hours observing these bees and studying their buzzes. This is a good day for the Buzz Bus!
In the evening we find a local campground, which used to be the school of the ranchers’ kids, and has now turned into a nice place to spend the night. We make a fire and enjoy a quiet evening under the stars. In the night, a rainstorm comes in and batters the roof of the Buzz Bus. I dream that the campsite is flooded and wake up to check whether we are at risk of being washed away. It looks fine, but the people in tents that were near us have had to move under the roof of the old school. The rain carries on all night.
