January 23

Today was our first full day with Mike Pole. We had lecture in the morning at 8:30, a change from Ron's 9:00 lectures. Then we headed out into the field at around 9:00. First we went to Flinders Beach, which wasn't really a beach at all since we were looking at the vegetation of the area before hitting the sand. He walked around showing us some key trees, and we eventually climbed over a large sand hill to see the beach on the other side. We saw some pretty interesting animals--kookaburra, large meat ants, tons of spiders. I personally found the plants a little boring, but eventually they started warming up to me.

We headed over to Cylinder Beach for lunch, and were given 2 hours total to eat and mess around. It's interesting that on every beach there are designated areas for swimming (between 2 flags) because the currents can get so strong.

Unfortunately I didn't bring a change of clothes, so I had to head back to Flinders Beach dripping wet. We split up into groups based on darkness of hair color, and I was with RK, AL, and JB. We headed off into the forest to do biodiversity quadrats and 50m transects. The biodiversity quadrat was the hardest because we had to try and identify what plants were the same, and what the new species were. Moreover, none of the tutors came by to help us, so we ended up taking pictures of all the plants that we thought were different (which was probably more than were actually different, but anyways). AL is really good with plants, and luckily JB and RK weren't too squeamish about traipsing through the understory. There were so many spiders and spiderwebs--I could really imagine some groups being stuck with whiners. The transect was a little easier since we only had to mark down the location and species of trees larger than 10 cm in diameter. I realized that I'm really uncomfortable with the metric system--approximating and everything. We had to go about guessing height by measuring the number of "RK's" of a tree--2 m. A little makeshift, but we got through it.

I think we were the last group to finish--we tried being pretty thorough, but after all of that, we realized that it really didn't matter all that much. And it was really funny that both Mike Pole and all the rest of the tutors had no idea that we were still out there. It was a huge contrast from Ron and Tony, who were very fatherly and overly concerned for us.

I think the worst part about the CFE schedule is that we had evening lectures. After dinner, we would just be exhausted and I definitely dozed off a fair bit in that dark, warm room. Most people were too tired to go out, so we watched Wildboys and There's Something about Mary in the computer lab. Initially we had planned on doing a bible study, but everyone was so exhausted that we postponed it to the next day.

I was highly amused, yet a little horrified by Wildboys--the animal version of Jackass. Apparently they don't harm any animals in the making of the show, but they definitely harass them a fair amount, and both guys often get injured. It's an interesting, sadistic concept, though I must say that a lot of the scenes are amusing if only because the guys get beaten up by animals.