In that special time which straddles the old and the new year, my family and I spent four days camping amongst the sublime rainforest of Washpool National Park. Washpool NP is part of the Gondwana Rain Forests of Australia World Heritage Area and is choc-a-block with beautiful gorges, sparkling rock pools and giant tracts of some of our most pristine ancient rainforest. It has been my favorite camping destination since my first visit, almost 20 years ago.
Below is a gallery of some of the beautiful things to see at Washpool NP including some of the local flora and fauna. If you hover the cursor over the image it will tell you what it is. On my last night there I headed out with my brother, who was camping with us, with our spotlights to see what we could find. On this occasion it was not the glowing eyes of amphibians we discovered (see previous blog entry for more info about this) but the reflected light from the eyes of two different varieties of marsupial! The first, with it's glowing orange eyes was well known to us, the brush tail possum, who often frequents the campground at night foraging for edible scraps. I have had, as well as heard about, many funny possum encounters and wars waged over rubbish bags - one of the joys of camping in Australia! We saw little else for some time and had walked a few kilometers before a new set of eyes started to reveal themselves. This second set of eyes had a greenish glow about them and came from much higher up in the trees. Once we saw the first pair of green eyes we started seeing more and more - all consistently in the tops of the trees. It was a real challenge to get a clear enough photograph to identify what this creature was as it was so high up in the eucalyptus trees and the only illumination came from our spotlights. But as you can see below I eventually managed to get enough of it so that we would be able to identify it. It was clearly a marsupial, but which species we had no idea. Obviously one of its defining features is it's huge ears! Since returning and consultating with a marsupial specialist, we have discovered that it is in fact the Greater Glider. To get an idea where Washpool National Park and it's very close neighbour Gibraltar National Park are situated check out the map below.
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AuthorOwl Eyes AKA Nikki Archives
January 2020
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