Quollunteers

The mining industry lays gasping on the canvas trying desperately to, at least, rise up to it's haunches before the 8 count. Some of us have had it so great for so long and I have most certainly not lost sight of that. But I feel truly and desperately sorry for those young graduates out there that can't find work in this industry at the moment. Being a consultant biologist really does enable one to get out there and get down and dirty with the Australian native flora and fauna.

It is very easy for we, the older generation, to say 'too bad so sad - what is happening to you happened to us when we were your age'. It still numbs my mind to think that when I graduated high school in 1990 there were no jobs and you had to be some sort of child prodigy to stand any chance into getting in to a decent sandstone uni. In fact it was so bad that the enrollment queue at Mt Lawley TAFE resembled a ticket sale sleep-out for a 1D concert.

But this is not another rant ragging on the so-called 'me me me me' generation so a big 'up yours' to anyone who was expecting it to be so.Rather, I want to take up some of your time to thank a couple of fantastic volunteers that have, very recently, departed our current survey on Koolan Island in the Kimberley, Western Australia.

Koolan Island is a pretty groovy place that has been the site for high grade iron ore mining for years and years. BHP picked over it for many years and actually had a village on the island where the miners and their families lived!! Then Aztec had it and now MGI is mining it; or at least they were until that pesky sea wall gave way and the main pit became the blue lagoon, minus Brooke Shields. Koolan Island has been in the paper very recently as they want to turn the mine waste dumps into an airstrip and make the island a logistics hub for the oil and gas industry (Koolan Island Logistics Base), which I personally think is a very very cool idea indeed.

For years Animal Plant Mineral have been on the island undertaking the annual Northern Quoll monitoring. The survey comprises Elliot Box Trapping of 400 trap sites for five nights in a row. We catch a lot of quoll. In the morning we clear and close traps, during the day we process quoll (measuring morphometrics and recording sex and reproductive status) and in the late afternoon we re-bait and re-set traps so we can do it all over again the next day. 

It is one of those jobs that, if you considered only the mechanics of the tasks at hand, it is not dissimilar to working on a factory floor - you do the same thing day in day out and there is not a lot of scope for surprises. But if you are a biologist with an acute sense of self and an appreciation for ecology and the natural world that surrounds you, then I swear there is no place you would rather be. This is what the office looks like in the morning (tide out) and the afternoon (tide in), respectively.

Quoll have teeth and they bite, but so what? Quoll have a big appetite coupled to a fast digestive system and a turbo-charged metabolism so that means they crap constantly and when they have been eating bait (peanut butter, rolled oats and tuna) their turds stink. I personally loath setting and checking Elliot traps as it is so monotonous.Elliot traps are to me what stairs are to a geriatric with chronic rheumatoid arthritis; a pain in the ass but important in getting through the process from A - B.

Despite all of this I knew very well that when I put the call out for volunteers the first people I approached would immediately and without hesitation jump at the chance to get shat on and bitten by one of natures little wonders. These guys are so feisty and animated that handling and working with them never ever gets dull, but what made a great job even better is the unabated enthusiasm of our two volunteers. These guys (they were actually girls) are not recent graduates trying to improve their Curriculum Vitaes for future job applications; they were young professional biologists that simply wanted to come because they knew they were going to have a great time.......and I hope they did. Thanks guys (you know who you are - please ignore the shady man on the left as he is an APM employee that gets paid to have this much fun).