Musky Rat-Kangaroo ....and christmas tree!

Last night (Friday) was Tish's first of three night shifts so I bundled the children into the car and headed out to give her some peace and quiet to get to sleep - plus it was [surprise, surprise] another glorious day so who wants to be inside anyway.
I decided that we would go back to Black Mountain Road in the Kuranda National Park and walk further up the track we visited last week and just see what we could find.
If I hadn't been there myself I almost would not have believed it was the same path. The bird life was completely different and much scarcer but this was more than made up for by other things - I did see three lifers taking my OZ list to 284 but did not manage any decent pictures of them.
The highlight, and quite possibly one of the best things I have seen since we have been in Cairns, was a Musky Rat-Kangaroo. This forest dweller is the smallest member of the Kangaroo family at just 23cm long [to put this in perspective the Eastern Grey and the Red Kangaroo's are both 1.3m+ in size]. It was feeding about 35m away down a small gully and moving in and out of the shade...

my pictures are I realise absolutely awful so follow this link to the wiki page for a better photo  and / or search google images as there are some beautiful shots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musky_rat-kangaroo

The stream was occupied this time as well by this rather fearsome looking freshwater prawn

If I was a small aquatic invert I would not want to be caught by those pincers!

Butterflies in the forest are much harder to get decent pictures of than those along the forest edge. The children got rather bored waiting for me to get my photos that they turned to archaeology

Look Dad we dug up a rock....

The best butterfly I got was this one

a Large Green-Banded Blue.

As we left the forest Xanthe carried on with the archaeological / dinosaur theme and started finding fossil fingers [sticks], leg bones [bigger sticks] and teeth [rocks] so much so that when she said "Oh look an iguana" I initially ignored her, but her insistence made me turn round in time to watch this Lace Monitor lizard cross the road

and the definitive answer as to why is ....to get to the other side as quickly as possible before I get run over"

On the way home we bought our Christmas tree

the tree is about 8 foot tall - tomorrow we decorate it.