A glimpse into semi-arid western NSW.Mitch Hodgson takes us to an amazing landscape north of Broken Hill.
guess I should preface this article by stating that this wasn’t a normal (or dedicated) herping trip, but
there sure were a lot of herps involved by the end! Early in 2018 I got an email from my PhD
supervisor asking if I was interested in being a teaching assistant on a course she runs called ‘Life in
Arid Lands’, the obvious answer to which was, ‘YES!’ Life in Arid Lands is a third-year field course at
UNSW that involves some weekly lectures and statistics workshops (but nobody cares about that),
followed by a field trip to UNSW’s research station Fowler’s Gap in the semi-arid zone. Fowler’s Gap is
situated about 112kms north of Broken Hill and covers 39,000 hectares with a huge diversity of flora and
fauna. The station has been around since 1966 and used as the field site for a multitude of research
projects on kangaroos, finches, small mammals and western NSW geology. As a cool aside, in 2016 a
research team undertaking mammal trapping discovered a Plain’s Mouse (Pseudomys australis) on the
property, which was the first time this animal had been recorded in NSW in over 80 years!For a short video on the significance of the station, go to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klZ6cNIQJNow we have established a bit of context for the trip, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of it. We had an
early start, leaving the university just after sunrise, which thankfully put us in a good position to dodge
traffic out of the eastern suburbs of Sydney as we headed out west. Our first day of driving was relatively
uneventful, excluding the obligatory stop at the Big Bogan in Nyngan and then dinner at the Great
Western Hotel in Cobar. If you’re ever going through Cobar make sure you try to grab a meal; not only
does the pub have the longest verandah in the southern hemisphere, but they also made one of the mean-
est ‘schnittys’ I’d had in ages.Unfortunately, due to being under a strict schedule to get to Fowler’s in time to meet the students (who
came in by train and bus), there wasn’t really a chance to do any herping along the way. With that said,
anyone who’s been out west knows that you don’t really have to try to find Eastern Tree Dtellas (Gehyra
versicolor) as they infest the walls of buildings as badly as Asian House Geckos (Hemidactylus frenatus).
So, while Cobar is a well-known hotspot for a number of cool species all we saw was tonnes and tonnes
of dtellas on the exterior of our motel....yay!