A few days in the life of a student, day 1

Often when I get back from a res school I get asked how my exams went. I then have to explain what a res school is. Actually, they call it intensive school now, which is probably a better description.

So, for your entertainment (and education), here's my little essay on "what I did at school camp".

As you'll recall from the last post, I ended up sharing a room with one guy and five girls. The kind of thing I would have dreamed off a few years ago when I was younger and single. Once we'd dumped our gear in the room, made sure our lecturer checked our name off the list as being their, and found out where the toilets were, we all assembled outside the classroom area. This was actually the closest we ever got to using that classroom.

We were put into ten groups with about six or seven in each. These would be the groups for the rest of our time there. My group was group seven and included a couple of my room mates.

The first activity for the day was to set up a nest predation experiment. The idea behind it was to test the edge effect theory. What that means is, a bird's nest is more likely to be raided by predators if it's on the edge of a forest than inside the forest. To test the theory, each group had ten artificial nests made from tennis ball halves with two plasticine eggs inside. Five of the nests were attached to trees on the edge of the forest, about 5 metres apart and the other five were attached to trees 50 metres inside the forest. We'd already been warned about leeches, so there was a lot of nervous checking of ankles, etc when we came back out of the forest.

Our afternoon activity was about endangered species in the area. Each group was given one or more species to look for and told the best way to find them and where to look. My group got the koala. We thought that was great, how hard could it be to find koalas in Australia. Just find the right kind of tree and look up. I have enough trouble finding koalas when there's a sign at the bottom saying, "koala in tree".

We wandered off into the forest looking for suitable trees. We'd been given a description of Tallowood trees, the koala's favourite, but because we hadn't actually been shown one we weren't really sure if we were looking up the right ones. We were quite possibly barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. After a fruitless search, where we didn't even find any koala poo or scratches on the bark we headed back to camp.

A few of us decided to keep looking, so we got some advice from a ranger that was visiting. He told us to head about 500 metres down a different track and we'd find a Tallowood tree with an orange ribbon around it that he'd put there earlier. On the ribbon was written, "Tallowood". All we needed to do was start looking there.

Well, this search was much like the previous one, still no koalas but at least we thought we had a better chance of finding them. We did however get to see and hear a few birds that I hadn't seen or heard before, such as Bell Miners.

Back up to camp and we got talking to people from other groups. They'd had as much success as we had. I'd did say they were threatened species in the area didn't I. One of my room mates mentioned she'd found a tick on her jeans and a leach on her jumper earlier. This time she pulled up the leg of her jeans and there was the tell-tale blood stain where a leech had fed on her ankle. The leech paranoia went up another notch.

Dinner that night was a lovely beef stew and then most of us had an early night. Another of my room mates had left home just after midnight that morning and had driven eleven hours to Mt Hyland. She as already in bed when I went back to the room around seven thirty. My passenger from that morning had to get up at five thirty the next day to go searching for Wompoo Pigeons and I was tired from all that driving and walking.

I wasn't so tired that I went straight off to sleep though. I lay awake for a while trying to figure out who it was that kept farting loudly in her sleep.

In my next post I'll tell you about counting wallaby poo, curried beans and more farting in the night.