Floods!

 

The local (usually dry) creek crossing

in full flood

7 Feb 2012:  We live in a land of drought and flooding rains.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in the arid and semi-arid parts of southern Queensland.  After many years of drought we have now had three years of record-breaking floods.  As I write this, the town of St George is experiencing unprecedented flooding and has been evacuated, and residents of Mitchell and Roma are returning and recovering upstream.  This year the woma study site experienced record rainfall in the catchment leading to very swollen creeks, new wetlands and absolutely saturated woma burrows.


Woma Gaillee's coil at her burrow entry.
Note the water level!

 
What does a woma do when his or her burrow is flooded by record rainfall?  Most (but not all) of the womas took option 1 – they escaped into a dry hollow log nearby.  However womas Humphrey and James took option 2 – they abandoned shelters all together and hid under fallen stems and in grass clumps.  Woma Gaillee was unique in taking up option 3 - staying coiled up and squashed into the burrow entry (in the water) and leaving her nostrils free so she could breathe every now and then.  Formerly incubating woma Lola had a slight twist on this last option – she stayed stretched out in her burrow, completely submerged, with her head partially above water at the burrow entry so she could breathe. 

Woma Lola at the entry to her flooded
burrow.

Imagine my alarm and concern when I pinpointed Lola's signal 1m down a completely flooded burrow!  I was very relieved when I finally spied her little yellow head just back from the entry.  She was alive!  But aquatic.  I really hope her eggs hatched before the floods.  It is well past the 65 day mark since we believe she laid her eggs so here’s hoping that her little ones escaped the eggs and escaped the floods.  I’m not sure if the yakka skinks living with the womas in all these ground burrows were so lucky though.  I hope so.

Woma James eating a sand
goanna outside his log

There have been two other exciting events over the past few weeks.  Firstly, I was lucky enough to see woma James eat an adult sand goanna!  In fact I saw the goanna basking in the sun before it tried to retreat into James’ hollow log.  The strange thing is that there were plenty of logs around but the goanna decided it wanted to go into THAT log – bad decision.  James was so fast!  I didn’t see the strike but I definitely heard it!  The goanna was hardly inside the log before James responded with a bite to the neck and the goanna pulled James (a big woma!) out of the log!  James managed to throw a few more coils over the goanna once he was free of the log and within 1m he had it wrapped up and was stopping it from breathing.  It was midday on a hot day so James didn’t mess around – he swallowed the goanna in less than an hour, before retreating back into his log to digest.  Unlucky goanna, lucky James!

Woma Chilli - a rare sighting

The second exciting happening was that the first woma implanted for this project was caught after 15 months of tracking so he could have his transmitter removed!  Amazingly, despite their incredibly elusive nature, woma Chilli was found on only the fourth day of this project - back in October 2010 – and yet he has been particularly elusive ever since, even for a woma!  In fact, I’ve only seen Chilli out and about during 5 out of over 200 tracking sessions, so I was very lucky to find him cruising along on a warm night at the end of January.  Chilli has now had his transmitter removed by the vet team at Australia Zoo and he will be cared for there until his wound has healed.  He is doing very well and we are expecting to release him back into his last known burrow – a hollow log – in another few weeks.  We are very thankful to Chilli for teaching us so much about womas in the Brigalow Belt!

Since the rain stopped, the womas have certainly become active again!  I’m sure they will provide me with many more stories to tell you in the months to come!