INVESTIGATION AT SITE PGX – 24 September 2008
In attendance: Forestguy & Anonimust
INTRODUCTION
This site is to the North West of our initial site. We’ve made a short visit here before (the one where we found a half-eaten lemon) but as I never wrote that one up properly I thought I’d better for this visit.
ENVIRONMENT & SETTING
It’s mostly still part of the water catchment reserve, but makes up part of the boundary of it. Site is accessed by following a (mostly) dry creek bed. While most of the flat sections of the reserve are heavily grassed with only occasional trees, this part is heavily weeded on the flat, with the Northern section is hills covered in light scrub.
ACTIVITIES
We wanted to use this visit to follow the creek further than we have before to see where it goes (and maybe find a spot to wet a line…). As is becoming the norm, I took the lead and promptly came across a re-bellied black snake.
With Anonimust now taking the lead we followed the dry creek bed for a few hundred metres, with the last 100 metres or so scrambling over rocks alongside a nice stretch of water. As I’d pointed out before the scrambling, this led us to a dead end – on a rock with water too far to jump over on one side, and a cliff on the other.
Of course, we then took the sensible option and dragged ourselves up the cliff. Where we climbed it there was what almost looked like a track, but it was too steep to be of practical use – I’ve included a pic of the trail at the top of the cliff to give a sense of how faint it was.
Just before the top I noticed a pretty fresh tree break, and then on top we came out right beside a stack made up of a number of sections of different trees. This was a fair way off any established track, and I could see no reason why rangers would have pushed this pile together here.
We then followed a game trail into a small valley where I found an x at the bottom. Once we came out back on top again we found an interesting clearing. The first thing that caught my eye was 2 tree breaks which were pointing in the same direction (which was back the way we’d come). In front of these were a number of small saplings that had been snapped off, but the trunks/branches were nowhere in sight.
Heading towards the fence line I found another cross – this one in the bottom of a tree, a tall skinny sapling bent over into a bow, a couple of stacks, and a small sort of tepee.
Generally speaking, I would almost described the site as trashed – there was a fair amount of damage to the vegetation, and a lot of the branches on the ground still had (dead) leaves attached.
Soon after this we started heading back to the car. As I mentioned, on an earlier visit to this site we found a bush lemon that had been bitten in half, so this time I’ve left two mandarins – the second one is on a sand bar, in hope of a print.
Speaking of prints, we also found some in the creek bed at the start of our walk. It’s pretty small, and hard to make out in the pic so I outlined it – it looks barefoot, the heel and toes were sunken with an arch-like ridge between them.
Also, as we were returning to the car we heard a loud bang that sounded like rock on metal coming from where we were parked. The only metal in the area is the tin roof of a picnic shelter and a little drop-toilet hut (severely beaten-up). There was no-one else in the vicinity, and no other cars parked in the area.
CONCLUSIONS
This was an interesting visit, and the amount of apparent damage on the clearing up on top of the hill surprised me. Apart from the snake the absence of any wildlife was again really noticeable.
Someone’s been having a feed, as we also found remains of a heap of blue yabbies throughout the visit. The odd thing was that after seeing the scraps we looked for some live ones for Anonimust’s fishtank – we only found dull drown ones, and even those were under heavy rocks, so whichever bird is catching the blues is doing very well for itself.
We plan to visit again in the next few days to check the mandarins, as well as the area on the other side of the creek.
