There is a surprising amount of digging required out on a project for Desert Discovery.
Some of the survey teams needed to move a lot of sand for their data collection methods and the base camp needed deep pits for the toilets.
Geoff and Jenny ran both the Logistics Team, which managed the base camp set up, and the Mole Team, so they were up to their armpits, literally, in holes and trenches.
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Transcript
Tiana: Can we just take in how beautiful the shovel is? Geeze, that’s a good shovel. (laughter) That’s a good shovel. Love me a good shovel.
Allie: You gotta appreciate a good shovel.
Tiana: Gotta appreciate a good shovel (digging sounds) There’s like a fine line of where you get to where, like, you can’t get any more dirt out.
Geoff: Where are you off to today, Allie?
Allie: I haven’t decided yet. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.
Tiana: Come moling with us.
Allie: Well, I hear you guys are just digging holes and things.
Tiana: Oh, yeah, we’re just digging holes.
Allie: Which is fine.
Tiana: You’re like, “I love that,” but I wanted to, like, be there for the moles
that’s in a couple of days.
Allie: Yeah.
Tiana: You wanna be back there when it dries out and be like, “Oh, my God” everyone’s excited about a mole.
Allie: Yeah, exactly. You get the enthusiasm.
Allie narrating: Welcome to another episode of Saltgrass and our seventh episode following the not-for-profit citizen science group, Desert Discovery that was Tiana, one of the staff members from The Western Australian Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, which is known as the DBCA. She and her team were there for a week, and they brought with them to the Desert Discovery Project a trailer with a huge tank of water on it, which was much appreciated, and an auger.
So an auger is one of these machines that spirals down into the earth to help dig holes
these young and energetic women were instrumental in digging all of the holes around camp, which was a real treat for many of the teams.
For example, the mammals and reptiles team, who we haven’t covered yet, but we’ll get to them soon. One of their trapping methods is a pitfall trap, which
Involves digging a series of holes in a line placing a bucket in the holes , and then running a net along the ground to, guide animals that normally would cross over that piece of land into the buckets they do this several times in different sites, so it involves a lot of digging. Then logistics team who run the camp, they basically set up the camp and make sure everything functions the way people need it to for the weeks that we’re out in the desert, and that includes digging holes for toilets.
So they have these drop toilets where they dig a deep hole, and they’ve got a wooden seat that sits on top of the hole that we can all sit on as we go to the loo, and a little tent goes around that. Those holes need to be big and if one of them fills up, we need to dig another one and then finally, the mole team.
There are little animals in the desert called marsupial moles, and they’re fascinating.
I’ll tell you more about them later in the episode, but the way that you find them is by digging a large trench and then looking at the sides of the trench to see if there’s any evidence of mole activity or if a mole has moved through the sand, ’cause they don’t actually dig burrows or tunnels.
They just sort of swim through the sand, and it closes in after them. But the disturbance in the sand is visible enough if you know what you’re looking for.
So these young, energetic DBCA women were instrumental in helping all of these teams do what would normally be hours’ worth of back-breaking labor, digging holes. we’re gonna give the mammals and reptiles team a whole episode later on in the series, and today we’re gonna focus on trenches and holes for toilets and moles.
Saltgrass theme music and standard episode intro:
A couple of years ago, my partner and I drove three and a half thousand kilometers from our home in Castlemaine, Victoria, across the Nullarbor and into the remote deserts of Western Australia. Our destination was a place called Yeo Lake Nature Reserve to join a citizen science group called Desert Discovery.
For two weeks we camped with them and each day was an adventure to see what life is out there in the desert. A treasure hunt for rare and obscure species. I took along my sound recorder and went on a treasure hunt of my own for stories about who these people were and why they were doing this.
Season six of Saltgrass is still about salt of the earth people and grassroots change. It’s just a bit further from home.
You can hear all episodes of Saltgrass on your podcast app or at saltgrasspodcast.com. Saltgrass is produced on Djaara Country, home of the Dja Dja Wurrung. Yeo Lake Nature Reserve is on central desert country where the Yilka people, the Sullivan and Edwards families, and the Ngaanyatjarra and Nangaanya Ku peoples have walked for thousands of years.
Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Allie narrating: It’s all well and good to talk about all the fun people have out on an adventure like this, but a lot of effort and consideration goes into all the stuff no one really wants to think about. Everyone is expected to be self-sufficient in terms of your food, your medicines, anything you might need for camping, and to bring enough water for yourself for however long you’re out there. Do your own vehicle maintenance really be self-sufficient.
But Desert Discovery does also try to make sure that there’s a backup if things go wrong for people, so they have a whole team just dedicated to the logistics of setting up camp. That includes common use items erecting and dismantling tents and marquees setting up toilets around camp first aid and make sure things run as smoothly as possible.
this team is, so fundamental to the whole of Desert Discovery and everyone being able to be out there for two weeks. It’s not a very glorious or exciting job to do. It’s not as intriguing as looking at tiny marsupial rodent-type things, or finding pseudoscorpions or moths or, finding the prints of, elusive animals in the sand.
Or being that person who finds the rare plant and it gets to extend the range of a particular species.
But it is so fundamental to everybody else being able to do their bit, and I thought we’d start the episode by looking at the logistics, and I’ll keep you hanging for these very cute little moles, and we’ll talk about them near the end.
Geoff Young and Jenny Taylor are longstanding Desert Discovery members, and the two of them ran the logistics of the camp and also the mole survey. So they were very involved with a lot of hole digging. We’re gonna hear them talk about both the moles and the camp setup today.
And interestingly, Geoff had spent his career working for organisations like the DBCA in Western Australia, and he had actually spent time at the Yeo Lake Homestead, and we’ll hear that story as well .
My first experience of the work that they were doing was being very grateful for the toilets that had been set up around camp. They were scattered around the site, strategically so that everyone had a bit of access.
Yeo Lake did have a permanent toilet structure, but it was just one or two drop toilets in a little tin shed. Certainly wasn’t enough to accommodate the whole camp, and not every Desert Discovery project is on a site that has any facilities at all. So the team is very used to being completely self-sufficient in terms of working out hygiene and toileting for the whole camp, which is often forty to sixty people, that’s no small feat for a two or three-week project. There’s a lot of digestion happening over that amount of time.
I caught up with Geoff and Jenny at their campsite.
a lot of the interviews or chats I had with people out on Desert Discovery was at their campsite and next to a little fire that they’d built. Everyone on DD enjoyed a bit of solitude. None of them had any desire to camp super close to any neighbours. So the camping situation was quite spread out, and most people had a little fire of their own at their campsite, and Geoff and Jenny were no different.
And often in these little chats that I had with people from DD, you can hear the fire in the background crackling away.
As well as the ever-present wind. A still day out on Desert Discovery was a rare day. And made sound recording quite tricky. Some of the interviews I’ve done for this series have been in people’s cars or in tents so that we can, avoid the wind sound in the microphone.
They had an excellent camper trailer and a well-practiced system of camping out bush and very remotely. They had a couple of fridges and I think even a freezer and lots of foods that they’d prepped long before they came out.
They were experienced at being out in really remote landscapes and being very comfortable at the same time.
Allie: So you guys are the core team that’s been helping set up camp and it takes a fair bit to safely and happily have this many people living far from any kind of other facilities and support. So what sort of things do you need to think about to set up a camp like this?
Geoff: So the key thing is the availability of water. There’s gotta be a water source. that really dictates where the camp can be. Anything else can be worked around, but you’ve gotta have that water source. I understand that in the past, some DDs have occurred or been based where there wasn’t water and they used a large bladder that fitted in the back of a trailer and someone had to go off every two or three days for a day’s drive to go and fill the bladder and, bring it back to the camp. So I don’t think that would be much fun.
Jenny: The second thing you need is toilets. Proper toilet facilities. Pit toilets, of course. Bush toilets. So that we don’t have toilet paper everywhere. That it’s contained and hygienic. And it’s cleaned daily.
So basically it’s checking ‘have they got enough toilet rolls?’ And you’ve gotta estimate how many times is a bottom going to be on this seat. (Laughter) And it’s amazing the amount of toilet paper people use.
It’s just astounding. Also or a small lime bottles that need to be filled from a large drum of lime. Lime is put down the toilet every time someone does a poo.
And, so to fill those up to make it easier for people to, to deal with.
Allie narrating: So what Jenny’s talking about is hydrated lime, which is a white powder which changes the pH of the solid matter that lands in the loo. So it helps break it down, reduces odor, and reduces flies and other pests that might be attracted by the odor. And I’ll talk about one of the main pests in a minute.
Jenny: Also making sure a, if the hand wash container is there, we seem to have lost one down a hole. And if there’s still enough in there and stuff like that.
Then if I think things are getting a, a wee bit full Geoff goes round and with his poo stick and pushes it down. ’cause people think the toilet is full when it’s just mounded in the middle like a mountain. And he pushes it down and into it every little nook and cranny
Allie: get a few more days outta that same pit.
Jenny: Got it In one though, we did have a, a toilet collapse.
And you were sinking every time you walked in. You ended up sort of almost in the hole.
so we moved one and one got blown down.
At the end, before we close the pits, we’re going to tip more lime down to discourage the dogs coming in and wanting to dig it up.
And they all of a sudden hit a great pile of lime and that won’t be nice.
Allie narrating: So this is our other pest, dingoes. They get very interested in what the humans are doing
And I noticed over the time we were at Yeo Lake, at first we saw no indication of them except maybe a howl in the distance. But by the end of the camp, they were circling our tent at night, and they have been known to scavenge people’s food supplies if you haven’t packed it away securely, in your tent, in your vehicle, or in some kind of lock box. And they also will dig up old toilets or latrines and try and eat what’s in there, which is really gross.
So Desert Discovery has a really simple system to try and prevent dingo disturbing the pit toilets once they’ve been closed up, and that’s just by adding more lime
Which does two things really. It stops the scent from being as strong, so it neutralises the odour of the pit toilet, but it also becomes a very unpleasant thing for the dingo to encounter as they’re trying to dig. And I have, some photos actually of, dingo paw prints where they’ve got their paws in the lime and got coated in this white powder, and then they’ve moved off through the sand, and so you get these white crusted paw prints sitting in this red earth. So the method obviously works.
The next issue of hygiene on a camp like this was showering and how people clean themselves, especially when you come in from a really dusty day out in the desert.
Nate and I had brought our own tall standing pop-up tent. It’s just big enough for you to stand in, a cubicle of a shower size. And we just did bucket washes, and I have to say, I was really surprised by how clean and refreshed I felt just from doing a bucket wash with a face cloth. I mean, it’s a really ancient way of washing yourself aside from jumping in a river or a lake. Before we all had plumbed water and showers, people just washed with a cloth and a bucket of water or had a bath. So a bucket wash is a classic way of cleaning yourself, and it really does the job. It was really good. But other people used, quite a unique facility that was already on site
Geoff: There’s been an old bush shower set up here for about 30 years. It needed a bit of a renovation.
Allie: So it looks like it’s in an old water tank.
Geoff: Yes. It’s one of the old water tanks, which has had a door cut into the side of it and a framework with a shower bucket suspended above it, and it’s actually got a concrete floor, which is quite handy.
So surprising the number of people that have been using that. A lot of people have got their own little tent shower enclosure. Mm-hmm. But the old water tank shower is, has been popular.
Allie narrating: Now, still with the logistics team, but on a different topic, aside from all the hygiene-related infrastructure that needed to be put in place for a camp like that to function for a couple of weeks, there was also communal or shared resources and spaces to exist in, living spaces, I guess. There was a huge marquee that had walls and was a really nice shelter from the wind held the urns that we could have our evening cuppa from, documents, and the sign in, sign out sheets, and all of those sort of things, and the first aid stuff.
And a few other tents that were used by teams for various purposes were also the responsibility of the logistics team
Allie: The marquee is a group effort to mantle and dismantle.
Jenny: Oh yes. Yes, everyone holds a pole or a rope.
Geoff: Very heavy too.
Jenny: Yeah. So yes, you need lots of helping in hands to grab a pole each. And how many poles are there? One, two, three, 5, 6, 12. 1, 2, 3, 4. about 20 odd poles, so you need 20 odd people and two people in the middle. ’cause there’s two middle poles. To hoist the middle up, so it’s a coordinated effort.
Hold meetings and the botanist people keep their samples in there, all that sort of thing. And paperwork to be signed, you know, when you sign in and sign out when you’re going out in the desert, those forms, stay in there, all that sort of thing.
Allie: And the urn with a cup of tea and the biscuits at nighttime.
Jenny: Important stuff.
Yeah, the important stuff,
Allie narrating: Every night on DD, we had a communal fire, which was set up next to this big marquee that we were just talking about.
I really appreciated that there was always sweet biscuits and an urn running for in the evenings when we would gather for a campfire chat. So almost every day there’d be a communal fire, which was much larger than the individual campfires, and the urn would run, which required a generator, which was sometimes a bit noisy and annoying, and it would also run the lights and everything that were needed at night.
We’d all walk over from our individual camp spots with our head torches on having had our dinner and grab a sweet biscuit, make a cup of tea, and listen to whoever was the one doing the campfire chat that day. Colleen, who you’ve heard in previous episodes, was managing and organising who was gonna chat each night around the fire and tell their story.
And Geoff did that one night, and he told us a whole story of his life, working for organisations like the DBCA. And he’d actually come out to Yeo Lake many years ago, and he tells us the story of what the site was like back then and what he and his team were able to do to build it up into what it is today.
And of course, these campfire chats every evening the gathering of everyone together was a chance for teams to swap notes and tell each other about things they’d seen that day that might be relevant to other teams.
And also do a little bit of housekeeping and keep everyone on the straight and narrow.
Bevin: Can I bring up a safety issue as well?
Just when I was signing up this morning, I noticed that one of the teams hadn’t arrived back from yesterday. (laughter) I mean there, there’s two issues there. One is that the team was obviously back, so they need to actually sign back in.
The other issue is do we actually have somebody who checks to make sure that everybody’s back, so who’s not back today? It was yesterday. That was yesterday. It was probably the same team that was missing from yesterday who hadn’t got back at all.
Mark: We might laugh a bit, but I think it is a serious issue that Bevin’s brought us. So it is important that we did pay attention to safety is the number one thing and the botany team when we’ve been in clear area, we can sort of stand around and see where the cars are and see where we are, but there’s been a couple of days that we’ve been in some mulga and scrub and you need to go about 50 meters and you can’t find anyone.
So we have been trying to do a GPS point in the cars and all have radios and is very helpful. So I think safety is certainly important.
Allie narrating: I was a total newbie to any kind of living in remote areas of Australia or the desert, and I picked up a lot of very practical tips there’s a lot of very experienced travellers in the group and people who have lived and worked in really remote areas.
some things that it’s really easy to overlook, like signing in and out at the end of each day, was actually a really important part of, making sure everyone came back. I learnt from Bevan also to, even if you’re just going for a short walk, always take a water bottle, ’cause if you sprain your ankle, it might be a couple of hours before someone finds you, and if that’s in the heat of the day, it could be vital that you have your water bottle on you.
So after that Mark introduced Geoff to the group, and we all sat around the campfire and listened to him talk about his work before becoming a member of DD and what he knows about the Yeo Lake Homestead.
Geoff: I’m Geoff Young and my wife Jenny Taylor. I’m just gonna speak tonight briefly about my background, the DBCA pastoral lease purchases that happened in the gold fields through the 1990s. A little bit of history about the buildings here and some biological records that I found in my notebook this morning from when I was right here in September, 1994.
So I’m from the lower southwest of WA from Manjimup, the tall timber country. When I left school, I went straight into a forest department, two year cadet ship, and then spent 18 years as a forester in six different locations through the southwest. In those days, the forest department’s activities were almost entirely confined to the southwest of WA.
But there were one or two staff employed in Kalgoorlie where they would’ve been looking after the sandalwood industry.
And also there are a number of timber reserves in Kalgoorlie, and there would’ve been other wood gathering operations that they looked after. And in Esperence there were one or two staff.
They were developing farm forestry type projects back then. So, as a forester, our opportunities were really limited pretty much to the southwest in those days. However, in 1985, a department which was known as CALM, which was conservation and land management. That department was created by the amalgamation of the Forest Department, the wildlife section of what had been Fisheries and Wildlife and the National Parks Authority.
So all of a sudden in 1985, the doors were open in terms of those of us who were originally foresters working in the southwest. All of a sudden, wherever there were national parks or nature reserves throughout the state, suddenly those doors were thrown open to us in terms of being able to move around.
So after having spent 18 years in the Southwest Forest, I was ready for a change. And so I came to Kalgoorlie as the senior operations officer and worked out of there for nine years.
I was just fascinated by the variety in the terrain, the landscapes, the vegetation. Compared with the Southwest Forest where you were generally either working in jarrah forests or karri whereas out here in the Goldfields region of CALM, we had one third of Western Australia to run around in on the job. We had all the eucalypt woodlands, the mulga woodlands, and the desert country.
So it was just fantastic. That was the one good thing about coming to Kalgoorlie. The other good thing was I met Jenny there.
So for nine years I operated from the Kalgoorlie office with four other staff and we were basically involved in planning and carrying out operational duties right throughout the Goldfields region.
Some of the things that we were doing were fire management, both prescribed burning and fighting wildfires. We were setting up and maintaining recreation facilities. Dealing with neighbours typically pastoralists and aboriginal communities. We were doing reserve inspections, so I’m talking national parks, nature reserves, timber reserves.
Back then there were over 60 either existing or proposed conservation reserves or other areas of interest. And my ambition was to try and get one of my staff to each of those sites, at least once a year. I never achieved it in nine years. We were just too flat out. My operations team, spent a lot of time with the nature conservation staff, where we were involved in biological survey work, like what’s going on here now, and particularly rare flora searches.
I also dealt with the mining industry, particularly with the rehabilitation side of things, post exploration. I ran the sandalwood industry for a while. And then something really interesting happened, the department started purchasing pastoral leases for conservation purposes.
So back then, the reason for purchasing pastoral leases for conservation was that within WA there was a broad objective that in order to preserve all the landscapes, the vegetation complexes and the land forms for posterity, the ambition was to have 20% of the total area of all the different land forms and landscapes securely locked up in some form of conservation estate.
20%. Now, that was a pretty lofty target. The thing with the pastoral leases in the 1990s that a lot of them had become unviable mainly from a sheep grazing point of view. And pastoralists were looking to get out and so these stations came up on the open market. Fortunately, typically, the unviable pastoral leases were the ones where there were extensive salt lakes, mountain ranges other sort of landscapes that didn’t suit themselves to the pastoralism, but were brilliant when it came to flora and fauna . So, when I arrived in 1991 in Kalgoorlie, the department had just purchased two stations. And I got involved in the initial management of those.
We were looking at de-stocking, dewatering gradually so that the environment would return to its stable, original condition before pastoralism was involved. But that had to be a gradual process. Then of course, all of these stations that were purchased had buildings on them, so we used to have busy bees involving everybody from the regional manager to the newest conservation employee hands on, like the whole 12 of us would be out there for a week at a time renovating the building so that they would become available for the general public to use.
Moving on to what I termed Yeo Homestead, other people know it as Bonnie’s Hut. In the 1960s Leo Bonnie, and his wife. Now, I’m pretty sure his wife was Betty Hill, because I met Betty at a Laverton Shire council meeting once. Their aim was to establish a pastoral activity here running cattle. So they brought secondhand materials out here in the 1960s from Leonora. They built the infrastructure here, the cottage, the sheds, they dug the well, 30 feet deep.
They put bores in that were intended to water the cattle. But those bores were all salty, so no cattle ever arrived and they eventually walked off the place. So 1960s, I think the next significant thing that happened, I’m not 100% on this, but I’ve got a good memory of it, in the 1970s a committee was formed called the Conservation Through Reserves Committee.
They did a study of the conservation values in the arid zone, and from that study all of these existing nature reserves that are out in the desert here were created. So this was about mid 1970s? I think. So, Yeo Lake Nature Reserve, Queen Victoria Springs Nature Reserve, Gibson Desert Nature Reserve, Neil Junction. They were all created following that investigation by the Conservation Through Reserves Committee in the seventies. So 1960s, this could have become a pastoral lease, 1970s it became a nature reserve for conservation purposes. Round about 1992 on my first work visit here, I found the buildings here in a bad state of repair, and I thought this facility was just far too valuable to let it go to rack and ruin when it’s sitting right on the edge of the Anne Beadell highway, which was becoming a popular four wheel drive route.
So I made the decision. To renovate the place and organise a series of busy bees with my staff. We put a lot of effort into it. Didn’t spend much money ’cause budgets were tight, but we fixed it up so that the general public could safely use it.
It’s been good over the years to come back and see that the place is still here. And I met the current regional manager of DBCA, which is the current name for my old department, and he assures me that funding has been obtained and next winter, a crew of workers from the southwest forests and a carpenter will be coming here.
And giving the cottage building here a major work-over, but maintaining the fabric of the building as it is. So I was really pleased to hear that.
Right now to the quiz.
I brought my field notebook out from September, 1994 when I was on one of my numerous work trips here to this very site, and back then I’d been taught quite a bit about identifying birds, and I had a particularly interest in identifying eucalypt trees because there are 150 different eucalypt species in the Goldfields region.
So I was reasonably okay at that. I’m bloody hopeless at it now . But anyway, checking my notebook from September ’94. I have a bird list of 20, so I thought I’d just run through it and see whether you’ve got them all.
So I dunno whether you want to yell out that you’ve got them or yell out if you didn’t get them. But Mulga parrot (check) Ring neck Parrot. (Yes) Crested pigeon. No. No. Yes, yes. Somebody got one. Black faced wood swallow. (Yes) Brown Fly Catcher. We also called it a Jackie Winter. Jackie Winter. (No) Oh, there were heaps of them. Magpie? (Yes) Zebra Finch. (Yep.) Chestnut rumped thornbill. (Yep) Pied Butcherbird. (Yep) Masked wood swallow. (Yes) Little crow. (Yes) Brown Falcon. (Yep) Crested Bellbird. (Mm-hmm) Tawny Frog mouth. (Yep) Little button quail? No, no. Wedge tail Eagle, I guess so. Black faced Cuckoo strike. (Yep) White brow Babbler? (Yes) Kestral, Australian kestrel. (Okay) Oh, you got what? 17 outta 20, 18 outta 20.
Righto. Well, that ends the quiz.
Allie narrating: Geoff then opened up the discussion for questions and was asked whether these nature reserves and the various efforts of departments like CALM, which then became DBCA, have actually protected any of these areas from mining by establishing their, importance as habitat and ecosystems.
And I think the general consensus was that they have not. Unfortunately, that mining generally wins the game, and it’s only if something’s been declared a National Park in Western Australia that, that it, it has any kind of protection from the mining industry. Almost anything else is pretty much up for grabs.
In spite of that situation, what Desert Discovery does and why I wanted to make this series is that the ecological value of the desert is often really misunderstood or underestimated. It’s really easy to drive along those big highways and just see it as this blurry grey mass of not much happening.
It can be hard to convince people that it’s worth preserving, to help people understand just how nuanced and important ecosystems and niches are out in those desert Country areas.
And I guess an extreme example of the hidden life of the desert is marsupial moles. A lot of life in the desert is hard to find, but you can’t get much more hidden than a creature that spends almost all of its life underground.
So in spite of their name and how much they look like our Northern Hemisphere mole friends, they really are not at all closely related to a true mole.
But as with so many things in Australia, when white people came and colonised and started looking at the flora and fauna of this place, they called things after what they already knew.
So magpies in England are black and white birds, and when British people came to Australia, they saw black and white birds and decided to call them magpies. They’re not at all related to the British birds. And now the naming is confusing because the two countries have the word magpie for a black and white bird, and it’s not the same thing.
And when all of these Europeans came over to Australia and started naming things as if for the first time, as if they had discovered them, in inverted commas.
The obvious truth is that all of those things had already been known and named by Indigenous people, and there’s over 500 different Indigenous language groups in Australia. So the magpie had many names in Australia, and when European settlers came, they could have adopted any one of those Aboriginal names for magpie, but they didn’t understand the and breadth of Indigenous knowledge of the local flora and fauna. I think they completely underestimated that.
So these marsupial moles are very, very far separated from true moles because they’re marsupials, so they’re so much further apart than the two different types of magpies, in fact, the marsupial moles are more closely related to bilbies and bandicoots and other marsupials found in Australia than they are to the placental or true moles found in the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s just a really good example of convergent evolution
they’ve ended up looking like the Northern Hemisphere placental moles because they have maximised their efficiency in a very particular niche in the ecosystem. They’ve developed the same traits and features as those moles, like big claws on the front paws and strong forearms that help them dig through the earth, because that’s one of the main things they have to do in their life, is dig through the earth.
There are two marsupial moles in Australia, the southern and the northern. And I think that Yeo Lake potentially could have either the range of both of those overlaps around that area of Western Australia.
They spend almost all of their time underground, coming to the surface only occasionally.
Like so many of the digging marsupials in Australia, their pouches are reversed so that when they dig, they don’t fill their pouch with dirt or sand.
They’re only about the length of a pencil. They have golden fur and little tiny stubby legs.
They are the only marsupials with a true cloaca, like birds. So they only have one orifice to let all of their waste out and serve their reproductive purposes.
They don’t have functioning eyes. They do have eyes, but the skin doesn’t ever part, so they don’t use them.
And because they live most of their life underground, it’s really, really hard to find them.
The method that Desert Discovery uses looks for traces of their movement through the sand underground. So you dig a trench, and then you look for signs of their movement so that shows up as a circle basically on the side of your trench
Which is what Tiana was referring to at the start of the episode when she was saying we had to wait a few days for it to dry out before we could see if there was any evidence of mole activity, at which point everyone would become very excited, but on the day that you dig the trench it’s not really visible.
Geoff: I didn’t even know that they existed until my first DD, despite having worked out in this country for nine years. So it’s been a learning curve.
We were shown the basic procedures on the DD trip in 2016.
The marsupial moles tunnel their way through the sand, and as they pass through the sand, they move the sand in behind them. So they don’t actually make a tunnel, they just move through the sand. We went out to some sand dune country and put in a series of trenches. The trenches are 120 centimetres wide, 80 centimetres deep and about. 40 centimetres in width. Just wide enough so that someone can actually jump down into the trench to examine it. The trenches are aligned east- west, and then we focus on the southern wall of the trench, which is the wall that receives the warmth from the sun as the sun passes over.
And the idea is to make sure that the southern wall is absolutely vertical and smooth. We do the trenches in groups of three, one down near the bottom of the dune, one about mid slope, and one up towards the crown of the dune. And on this occasion, we put in four groups of three. We then have to wait for the sand to dry out in the trench in that southern wall.
Because what we’re looking for is the very slight difference in the soils appearance where the mole has tunnelled through compared with the rest of the face. So that requires the trench to be dried out. So we dug the trenches. Three days later, we came back and did the first inspection. Out of the 12 trenches we found one, what we call a mole hole, not actually a hole, but the circle that indicates where the mole went through.
Those circles are typically about 38 to 42 millimetres in diameter.
We were a bit disappointed to only get the one, out of 12 trenches. But realised that the weather hasn’t actually been all that hot. So perhaps a couple more days of drying would make a difference. So we came back again on day five and found three more mole holes. So that was really good. So Jenny was assisting Merinda.
Jenny: Yeah. I took the role of recorder. And the gentleman who is doing the research on marsupial moles supplied those work data sheets to Merinda. So, I was just making sure that she did everything that was required, ’cause lots of measurements are required. For example, not only the size of the trench, but if you find a mole hole,
how far down from the top, from the surface. And then it says for statistical purposes, how far from the left face or from the left side. So particular measurements. We also use a penetrometer to confirmed how soft or how hard. The difference between what was in the mole hole, what was on the wall of the trench. Quite interesting results. We also had to look at what we estimated was the age, was it fresh, oldish, you know, really, really old? I think one of the last ones we found we thought was very fresh, which was really quite exciting.
So my job after this is to take all that data back. And just put it in a readable table format and then send it back to Merinda, who will then send it on to the researcher.
So yeah, i’m just sort of like the clerk.
Geoff: The really good thing was that the, the girls from the Kalgoorlie office of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions were here and were very enthusiastic when it came to digging the trenches.
So we had a great team digging the trenches,
Pwah. That’s the hard bit. And then of course, on day five when we did the, the final inspections we had a group of assistants with us as well to help fill the trenches in again. That was much easier.
So one of the points I made at the beginning was to ensure that as we were digging the trenches, we were throwing the sand uphill, wherever possible.
Jenny: And it was interesting too, going back after the five days, practice does make perfect. You could see, some things sort of jumped out at you and other things you weren’t quite sure.
So just that experience means that the next time we’ll be a lot better at it and having the varying conditions we can then perhaps judge better when to go out again and things like that. So that’s been very valuable, from my perspective.
Allie narrating: So there you go, There was our episode all about trenches and holes for toilets and moles, and Geoff and Jenny who ran both of those teams, the logistic team and the mole survey team, and all of the digging that they had to do for both of those purposes. And it may not be the most glamorous topic talking about hygiene at camp, but it was really important and it worked really well.
And to keep a group like that tidy is a really important part of what Desert Discovery does, is managing those daily necessities and they do it really well. I never once felt like it was gross or uncomfortable or unsafe. And I think that’s highly commendable.
Jenny was telling me about how a lot of people when they go camping or four-wheel driving, they just dig a shallow hole and bury their stuff and then it very quickly gets dug up and then you get bits of dirty toilet paper just drifting through the bush or the desert and it’s gross.
So Desert Discovery was really careful never to be that guy.
And I thought we might end the episode with the person that we began it with. So Tiana was one of the team from the DBCA, and at the start we heard her digging a hole and talking about digging trenches for the mole survey.
And I thought I’d finish with her reflection on how being on Desert Discovery for herself and for the DBCA team broadly was not just about digging holes, but was quite an incredible professional development opportunity and just how much they appreciated being amongst all the various teams and learning so much while out there. So the appreciation was mutual.
The DBCA team brought a lot of youthful energy some very valuable skills and muscle power around digging trenches and holes. But also, they gained a lot just by being around all the experts that are out there and watching and learning from all the processes that Desert Discovery does.
So, here’s Tiana
Tiana: I think it’s just more than I even expected. It’s been fabulous. Absolutely every second of it, I think we’ve just been so grateful to be a part of it and to know that this can happen on DBCA Reserve, in such a wonderful partnership.
And what I’ve really got out of it and why we have five DBCA of team here, because we’re here to learn from flora, mammals, reptiles, birds, invertebrates, fungi. Like, and these are just little snippets of what we can do in our job that my team get to take away. Like how to dig mole trenches. We haven’t done that.
Yeah, you can read about it, but now we’ve done that, and we’re gonna take that away to where there’s s- been some recordings believed up at Morawa . And just getting more comfortable with pit trap setup and handling that may be few and far between in the Gold fields due to priority and resources and logistics and all that sort of stuff.
So it’s just been wonderful that everyone’s got to have a little bit of a taste. It’s been fantastic. It has not disappointed whatsoever.
Theme music and outro
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My name is Allie Hanly. Thanks for listening.
