The "Official" Waterfalls Thread

avondale87 wrote in post #18907479
I thought bats were a disaster. Reading from down here about the horrors way up north in Queensland and horses and people and illnesses, deaths etc due to the bats I always understood they were something to avoid like the plague.

Well like many animals they can pass on viruses and a couple (lyssavirus and Hendra virus) have killed a small number of people. Current advice is not to handle bats without thick gloves as lyssavirus is transmitted through bites, though there have been only two confirmed cases in Australia of direct bat to human transmission.

With Hendra virus, for a human to become infected they have to come into contact with the bodily fluids of an intermediary animal, usually a horse, that has become exposed through contact with the urine of an infected flying fox (large fruit bat of the Pteropus genus). There is now a vaccine for horses which should interrupt the cycle.

But I have strayed from waterfalls. To redeem myself I post a photo of black flying foxes (fruit bats), Pteropus alecto, at Wangi Falls in Litchfield National Park, and a photo of the falls themselves, both of which I took a few days ago. To really bring this discussion full circle, Wangi Falls would normally be chocka with swimmers at this time of year but was closed for swimming because a freshwater crocodile had bitten someone last Sunday and the rangers hadn't caught it yet!

And lest you think, well that's not much of a waterfall, here is a photo I took of the same falls in January 2010. The two ratbags are now nineteen and sixteen!

Pippan wrote in post #18907509
And lest you think, well that's not much of a waterfall, here is a photo I took of the same falls in January 2010. The two ratbags are now nineteen and sixteen!

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That must have been a fantastic wet season. I imagine that the walk was submerged. My recent shot didn't have much flow either. Shot from the same spot as yours

itsallart wrote in post #18907606
That must have been a fantastic wet season. I imagine that the walk was submerged. My recent shot didn't have much flow either. Shot from the same spot as yours

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Great photo, I love the flare. Yes it was a great wet season, just getting there was a major adventure due to flooded creeks and rivers. When I take my tourists along that boardwalk I point out bits of flood debris still in branches (probably from January 2018) 8 feet above the boardwalk. In the last 2 weeks of January 2018 we had 50" of rain and afterwards there was a line of debris that must have marked the edge of the pool near the highest part of the grassy picnic area, nearly all of which would have been underwater. But you'd have needed a helicopter to get there ...

Pippan wrote in post #18907477
That's so good to hear. Sadly and shamefully Australia's record with pipistrelles is not good. Appalling really. Christmas Island is Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, not too far from Java. It was uninhabited (by people) until the 1880s when phosphate mining started on the island. Two-thirds of the island is national park, famous for its array of unique crabs and seabirds. I worked for 20 years for the national park service that manages it and visited the island in 1998. Christmas Island pipistrelles were very common all over the island but by the early '90s their numbers had started to decline. We couldn't figure out why. By 2009 they were extinct. And we still don't know why.

Phosphate poisoning?

MedicineMan4040 wrote in post #18907836
Phosphate poisoning?

I don’t know, but phosphate mining had been going on for over a century before we became aware of the decline in numbers, and mining had itself declined by that time. There may have been a few factors: yellow crazy ants, which started to form supercolonies twenty or more years ago and are decimating the crabs, may be one factor. Many experts were called in, too late, and no one has figured it out.

Pippan wrote in post #18907687
Great photo, I love the flare. Yes it was a great wet season, just getting there was a major adventure due to flooded creeks and rivers. When I take my tourists along that boardwalk I point out bits of flood debris still in branches (probably from January 2018) 8 feet above the boardwalk. In the last 2 weeks of January 2018 we had 50" of rain and afterwards there was a line of debris that must have marked the edge of the pool near the highest part of the grassy picnic area, nearly all of which would have been underwater. But you'd have needed a helicopter to get there ...

Thanks. The flare was a bit of a surprise and I was aiming for a starburst in top left corner; didn't quite work out and I got the flare instead. I saw the high water level marks in another spot by the swimming entrance.
I remember being on a trip to Kakadu and crossing several creeks while driving toward Ubirr, Nourlangie and Arnhem Land in a Landrover where in some places I though we weren't going to make it.

The waterfall at the David Marshall Lodge, Aberfoyle...

The Falls of Clyde...

Capn Fishy wrote in post #18911198
=Cap'n Fishy;18911198]The Falls of Clyde...

River Braan at Rumbling Bridge...

Falls of Rogie, River Blackwater...

Lothian River North Esk, at Roslin Glen...

Nice ones !

TustinMike wrote in post #18911203
Nice ones !

Cheers.

The Wall of Fame

pappusrkr wrote in post #18911986
The Wall of Fame

That is SO good.

Moderately balanced framework