Many Australian birds are highly intelligent, a factor that contributes in no small measure to their success. Parrots and songbirds – groups that thrive in Australia – have large brains relative to their body size. According to research, they can outdo apes in some tasks, exhibiting ‘cultural transmission of tool design, theory of mind, and Piagetian object permanence to a high level’. Like many humans, they are also playful. The apogee of avian intelligence arguably occurs on New Caledonia – an island adjacent to Australia – where a native crow (a songbird) makes a variety of tools, including hooks.
Low notes that ‘complicated calls and intelligence seem to go together’. There may be a link here with our own species. Charles Darwin wrote that birds
have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. This is shewn by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women, both civilized and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes …
Indeed, it may be that songbirds taught us humans how to sing by ‘influencing the evolution of human acoustic perception’.
The highly social nature of many Australian birds is also notable. In some species it’s not only the parents who feed the chicks, but distantly related or even unrelated birds. According to Low, white-winged choughs – a large black bird with a sinister-looking red eye – even practise a form of slavery. They abduct fledglings from the nests of other choughs and induce them to feed their own chicks. But in this ‘dishonest society’ the abductees sometimes only fake helping.
For those feeling safe from large, intelligent and aggressive birds in their mammal-dominated northern hemisphere homes, Low has some alarming news. Australian birds have taken over the world. The remarkable fact has been revealed through genetic studies, and when first announced it was flatly disbelieved, for it flew in the face of all that we thought we knew about the way evolution works. Prior to the discovery, it was thought that species from the larger, northern continents were competitively superior, which means that faunal exchange should be one-way – from north to south. Darwin put the idea as succinctly as anyone:
I suspect that this preponderant migration from the north to the south is due to the greater extent of land in the north, and to the northern forms having existed in their homes in greater numbers, and having consequently been advanced through natural selection and competition to a higher stage of perfection, or domineering power, than the southern forms.
The first significant questioning of the idea came from Charles Sibley, an ornithologist working at Yale in the early 1970s, who discovered that if he boiled double-stranded bird DNA, when the mixture cooled the strands would recombine. He found that if he mixed the DNA of two species, the strength of the rebonding was an index of evolutionary relatedness. His work revealed that ‘Australia’s robins, flycatchers, warblers and babblers were not what their names suggested’. Instead, they were part of an ancient Australian group that over time had come to resemble birds from elsewhere. They were, Sibley concluded, part of an ancient songbird radiation as diverse and unique as Australia’s marsupials.
Since Sibley’s day, genetic studies have become immensely more sophisticated, and some have revealed entirely unexpected relationships. Several detailed genetic studies, including a comprehensive mapping of retroposons (repetitive DNA fragments that insert randomly into the genome), for example, agree that songbirds, parrots and falcons are one another’s closest relatives, and that this group probably originated close to the time of the dinosaur extinction in what was then the Australian section of the supercontinent Gondwana. It seems astonishing that falcons and robins could be more closely related to each other than are falcons and hawks. But the avian body plan is highly restricted by the requirements of flight, and because there are so few options for becoming a flying predator, convergent evolution is widespread among birds.
Occasionally, anatomists and behaviourists discover clues to relationships by re-examining the earliest members of a bird family tree in light of genetic studies. New Zealand’s kea, for example, is a member of the most basal branch of the parrot family tree. It is a predator with a vicious beak, and can kill and eat sheep, making a relationship between parrots and falcons seem a little less improbable.
Songbirds are by far the largest and most successful group of birds in the world. Their 5000 species, divided between forty orders, make up 47 per cent of all bird species. Eighteen of Britain’s twenty most abundant species are songbirds, as is the most abundant wild bird on earth, Africa’s red-billed quelea, of which 1.5 billion are thought to exist. The great majority of songbirds fall into just one order, the perching birds or Passeriformes, which take their name from the Latin term for the sparrow. All of the little birds that forage among leaves are perching birds, as are crows and magpies, and one thing that sets them apart from all other birds is the possession of a hind toe operated by an independent set of tendons.
In 2002 a genetic study revealed that New Zealand’s wrens sit at the base of the songbird family tree. They are mostly extinct, and the survivors don’t sing at all, instead vocalising with high, thin squeaks. Other studies show that the second branch of the songbird family tree includes Australia’s lyrebirds and scrub birds, while the third includes Australia’s treecreepers and bowerbirds. None of these branches has many species, and all are exclusively Australasian. This abundance of early types, along with the discovery in Australia of the oldest songbird fossils in the world, provides convincing evidence that Darwin’s dictum, at least when it comes to the songbirds, is wrong. One of the most successful groups of vertebrates ever to have evolved – the songbirds – originated in Australia and has since spread around the globe.
Low has some fascinating ideas about why and how the songbirds evolved. The group that first spread successfully outside Australia seems to have discovered a new ecological niche that developed, paradoxically, courtesy of Australia’s infertile soils. Australia is low, flat and geologically comatose, so its soils have not been rejuvenated by volcanoes, the uplift and erosion of mountains, or glaciers for tens of millions of years. As a result, its ancient soils are largely leached of nutrients, so plants growing in them tend to hoard what nutrients they can get. Nectar, being sugary, requires minimal nutrients in order to be produced, and Australia’s eucalypts and their relatives are some of the greatest nectar producers on earth. Moreover, their flowers are simple in structure and animals require no special adaptations to harvest the rich liquid, making it attractive to a wide range of species. Visitors to Australia will easily see the consequences: flowering gum trees pulsate with the screams of lorikeets and the raucous cries of half a dozen species of honeyeaters. Relatively small species like noisy miners have triumphed in this melee only by becoming highly social, aggressive and intelligent.
Beginning around thirty million years ago, Australia’s aggressive, social songbirds found their way across the stepping-stone island arc lying to Australia’s north. When they reached mainland Asia, an entire new world opened to them. The fossil record of Europe, which is particularly complete, tells the story of what happened next. Prior to the arrival of songbirds, Europe was host to myriad primitive birds such as mousebirds (a few of which survive today in Africa). As soon as the songbirds arrived, they vanished permanently. The initial songbird invasion was no one-off event. Just as Africa has been the point of origin of one hominid type after another – from Homo erectus to modern humans – so Australia has acted as a fountainhead for songbird lineages that have gone on to spread around the globe. One example of a more recent invasion concerns the orioles, a group of songbirds that, until a few million years ago, were most probably restricted to New Guinea.
The oriole family is a small element in New Guinea’s avifauna. But it does include the world’s only poisonous bird, the hooded pitohui. So toxic are its feathers and skin that merely handling a stuffed museum specimen that is decades old can induce nausea. It was only after one branch of this family reached foreign shores and gave rise to all the Old World orioles
that orioles became an avian success. Fans of the Baltimore Orioles should know, incidentally, that the bird is a member of an entirely different family, the Icteriidae, which is restricted to the New World.
Where Song Began provides a novel interpretation of Australia’s avifauna that will enrich the understanding of anyone interested in birds. As a professional biologist familiar with much of its matter, I found myself again and again astonished. Indeed, it seems to prove that what Mark Twain said of Australia’s history – that ‘it does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’ – applies equally well to Australian nature.
Lessons from Camels
Robert Skinner
For reasons that are still unclear to me, I agreed to go on a ten-day camel trek with my parents. When they invited me my initial reaction was I’ve got a whole LIFE going on here, I can’t just take off. I had a pile of junk mail to read and some pretty firm dinner plans. A few weeks later I was at a party where I didn’t think much of the people. Or, more accurately, I didn’t think the people thought much of me. So I wandered outside, thought, Phooey to you, city living, and texted my parents. ‘I’m in.’
A week before departure they called me from Adelaide, huddled together and shouting into the speakerphone.
‘When you get here, we need you to pick up thirty kilograms of potatoes. We’re in charge of the potatoes.’
‘Don’t stress him out,’ said my mum. ‘You just bring yourself.’
‘Yeah, yeah, but just – and the potatoes.’
My dad explained where we’d be going: from Orroroo, in the Flinders Ranges, east towards Yunta, north to Koonamore, and then south-west along Pipeline Road.
‘It’s a triangle, Bob. We’re doing a triangle.’
I asked how far we’d be riding, all up. There was a moment’s silence.
‘We’re not riding, mate. They’re wagon camels.’
We would be walking, said my dad. Next to the camels, and for twenty-five kilometres a day. He paused.
‘You have been training, haven’t you?’
I said yes, in the sense that I’d managed to keep my legs in pretty much mint unused condition. I started to panic.
‘I thought I was supposed to be practising sitting down.’
*
My dad’s cousin Robyn had married a bushman called Don, and together they raced camels and went on wagon expeditions. This was the first time they were bringing other people along. There would be between nine and fourteen people on the trek. Being in such close quarters with strangers for ten days was not my dad’s idea of a good time. He would have preferred to be at home with a book or tinkering in his shed. But his own dad had a reputation for disappearing out the back door every time someone showed up at the front door, and my dad was forever trying not to be that guy.
The night before we left Adelaide he did that thing nervous parents do, where they start fussing over their kids instead. He looked at me gruffly and said, ‘Now listen, Bob. What are you going to do out there for entertainment?’
‘I dunno. I brought a few books.’
‘You understand that these are country folk we’ll be travelling with. They like different things to us.’
‘Well, what about you? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to look at the fire,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
*
My parents and I drove north from our house in Adelaide to meet up with the crew in Orroroo. On the way we picked up a thirty-one-year-old cameleer called Brian. He had a huge camel-coloured beard, and a smile that took over his whole face. ‘G’day, folks,’ he said as he climbed in.
We drove for four hours through small towns and low ranges, alongside dry creek beds and stubbly wheatfields. We peppered Brian with questions about camels. (‘Is it true that they spit?’ ‘Can Jewish people eat them?’ ‘Why don’t you ride horses instead?’) He had two camels of his own, Firestorm and Vicky, and every time he talked about them he got a faraway look in his eyes.
In the late afternoon we drove down a dirt driveway and pulled up outside a big shearing shed. The head of our expedition, old bushman Don, came up to the car. From where I was sitting I could only make out his waistline. His jeans were covered in dirt and were about six sizes too big. They were held up by a rope, a belt and a pair of braces.
He leaned in through the window and said, ‘Now, the important thing about this trip is not to panic.’
The first thing we were supposed to not panic about was the state of one of the wagons. It had been refurbished by Greg, a local naturalist and council worker who would be joining us on the trek. ‘You can tell he worked on the highways,’ said Don, pointing at the wagon. ‘It’s all held together by street signs.’ That wasn’t the problem so much as its rickety, lopsided canopy. The wagon looked as though it wanted to veer off into the bushes and lie down.
I walked over to the holding pen to see if maybe I had a magic touch with camels. This is the persistent dream of dilettantes: that we will, at some point, uncover a superpower that will make sense of lives filled with false starts, failures and endless dabbling.
I stood up on the railing and said ‘Hello, ladies!’ to what I would later learn was mostly a bunch of bullocks. The camels looked at me with long-lashed eyes. The biggest camel, Weet-Bix, came over and nuzzled my hand. I stroked his fleshy lips and hummed a Middle Eastern tune I knew; he bit me affectionately on the arm. Things were looking good!
*
On the morning of departure I asked Brian if he wanted some help wrangling the camels. ‘I’ve got kind of a special rapport with them,’ I said, and explained about the deep looks, the nibbling and so forth.
‘They’ve been biting you? Mate, you can’t let them do that!’
So I went and helped my dad instead. He had designed and built a solar-powered electrical system and was ready to install it. I wanted to be useful, so I kept suggesting we bolt things to hard-to-reach poles that only I could climb up to.
Our procession was two wagons long. The main one had a canvas roof and was fitted out with bench seats from an old Kingswood. The smaller wagon was still looking pretty rickety, but they’d braced it as best they could.
We spent the rest of the morning loading the main wagon with our worldly possessions, and then (it sounds crazy when you see it written down) attached the wagon to four camels. Those outback camel trains look so stately and peaceful in the photographs! But when our camels felt the weight of the wagon they bolted, and took the wagon bouncing through bushes and rabbit holes. One of the camels started bucking wildly, throwing his head around and generally not taking very good care of our things. Brian was pumping the handbrake and hanging on.
‘Pull ’em up, Brian!’
‘I’m fucking trying!’
In the ruckus, another four camels broke loose and charged off in the direction of Brian and the wagon. They were tied together but going at high speed. Brian had, by now, managed to stop the wagon/get tangled in a fence line, but the four-pack of rogue camels headed straight for him.
Don yelled out to me, ‘Get between them and the wagon, Bob! Head ’em off!’
Leadership is a hard-to-pin-down quality. But if, after two days of knowing someone, they tell you to jump in front of a pack of charging camels and you find yourself willingly obliging, then they’ve probably got it.
The camels were looking like a pretty dumb idea, but we were on to a good thing with Don.
We managed to round up the camels and get the wagons back on track. Don took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘That’s normal,’ he said. ‘They always start off like that. Let’s push on.’
One of the reasons we go bush is to trade our old, boring problems (scrounging for rent money, beating the traffic) for new and refreshing ones. On our daily treks we had to pull down stock fences, navigate creek crossings and get cooking fires started in the rain. This is living! I thought to myself. My dad didn’t quite share my enthusiasm. He was up to his
neck in living already. What he really wanted was a nice sit-down.
Getting the camels mustered every morning was a real snafu. There was one problem camel called Blister who’d been raised as a pet and suffered all the same problems as a trust-fund kid. Don was trying to break him in as a wagon camel and get some herd mentality back into him. One morning Blister was really making him sweat. Don was yelling, ‘Fucking hoosh down, you bird-brained bastard!’ and the camel – stubborn, outraged – was bellowing back. Meanwhile, Brian and his friend Chantelle (a dreadlocked camel racer) were trying to corral the two lead camels, who’d gotten tangled up somehow.
My dad saw me writing in my diary and came over. He stood next to me for a while. Just the two of us.
‘If I was writing a book,’ he said, ‘I’d call it Why We Invented the Internal Combustion Engine.’
*
Brian or Nat usually drove the main wagon. Nat was a bosomy powerhouse who raised a family, kept a menagerie of pets and broke in camels for a living. She wore the same singlet, shorts and thongs the whole trip. Even on frosty nights. One evening she reached into her bra looking for a cigarette, and I saw her pull out a lighter, a tobacco pouch, a packet of tissues, a hunting knife, $20 (in change) and a bundle of keys before she looked up and said, ‘Oh, here it is. It’s in my fucking mouth.’ On the fourth day she got kicked full in the face by a camel and just started kicking it back.
The smaller wagon was driven by the camp cook, who drank white wine and soda with one hand and swished the reins around with the other. She shouted so relentlessly at her camels (Chrystal and Sapphire) that they could no longer tell what was a command and what was general chitchat. So they ignored her completely and just ambled along cheerfully at their own pace. If you really wanted the camels to do something, you had to put on a high-pitched voice or a foreign accent to get their attention.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 2
