Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  If a kookaburra catches a larger creature, like a lizard or snake, that mighty beak holds it firmly while bashing the dangling prey against a branch or a rock to kill and soften it for eating. When I was a child someone told me kookaburras laughed when they did this, which made me dislike them as cruel and gloating, but I know now that this isn’t so, and in any case, only human animals have those qualities.

  I don’t see whether kooka or magpie scores this time but both are always extremely quick to react when something tasty appears. Zoom! I rarely see them disappointed—not many worms get away.

  Just beyond them a wallaby grazes steadily across the paddock outside the fence, her joey-laden pouch seeming to skim the ground as she does. She’s going about her daily business, like my feathered neighbours, and not bothering about me or mine. It’s a good neighbourhood that way—and no barking dogs, whining mowers or hedgetrimmers, nor thumping music as son-of-house-four-doors-up washes the family car under duress.

  TWO-BY-TWO

  Once I saw a strikingly symmetrical composition of creatures in the orchard, a line-up of paired animals.

  Two kookaburras sat opposite each other, on two stakes of a netting guard; below each one stood a magpie; and just beyond them, outside the fence, two kangaroos faced each other as if posing for a coat of arms.

  It was a fortuitous flash that soon broke apart, but it made me think of the animals queuing for the Ark, and thus my Refuge as being like that. Only it’s not God’s punitive Flood they need refuge from—it’s Man.

  CONSORTING COUPLES

  Not all pairings are so visually brief as my kookaburra coat of arms. Amongst the small birds here, I notice several in constant couples. I’m not a proper birdwatcher; I don’t have the binoculars and the bird books or my attention as handy as I should to qualify for that, so these birds have to be pretty obvious for me to notice details of their relationships.

  The Welcome Swallows are definitely in favour of monogamy and the nuclear family. They twitter away in their little voices only to each other, despite the intimacy you’d expect to be generated between us by their returning to take up their permanent casual lease here each year. They look kindly at me, but I suppose they think I couldn’t possibly understand, poor grounded thing that I am, so they don’t actually address me.

  Swallows don’t always choose their nesting spot well. In fact, from my personal experiences I’m inclined to substitute ‘often’ for ‘always’, if I consider the faulty choice from both points of view: my convenience and their safety.

  Needing some sort of ledge as a building platform, door and window lintels are popular. Then my hopper window gets spattered with white droppings if opened, or the doorstep perpetually does, or I occasionally do!

  And they might choose a ledge so close to the tin eaves that the nestlings run the risk of frying as the days heat up. Or one that’s too narrow; I’ve seen a half-finished nest fall off, smash and be rebuilt twice on the same inadequate support. Not real smart. Or once they chose a ledge right outside my bedroom window, to be sure I heard the incessant twittering. Mind you, I did enjoy watching their growing-up at such close quarters that year.

  What with predatory birds like currawongs always hassling and on the lookout for unguarded or fallen babies, it’s a relief to me and the parents when the nestlings are grown. Plus it’s quieter.

  On the first flight, they teeter with shock on the clothesline before discovering the obvious joy of the soaring aerobatics of the adults. I know they have to learn to do it to catch insects on the wing, but those early tries look like pure fun.

  As I write this, the swallow pair have just arrived for the year and are doing large loops across the clearing, in under my verandah roof and out again, sussing out a site. They seem to be favouring my front-door lintel, so I’m deliberately going in and out a lot, to let them know that’s not a good idea. Apart from unwanted droppings from above, on me and the mat, as the weather warms up the door will be open most days and I imagine there’d be a high chance of inadvertent flights into the cabin and an ensuing panic to find the way out again.

  The Scarlet Robin and his pale lady friend also live here for part of the year but they’re an exclusive pair, sufficient unto themselves. I read that they have a ‘trilling warble’ but I’m not aware of having heard them speak to each other, let alone to anybody, or anybirdy, else. Since they are such a solitary couple, I hope he’s more affectionate to her in private, as in public he scrupulously preserves a royal distance of several yards between them.

  They appear here in mid summer, to breed I suppose, but where they go afterwards I don’t know. I mainly see them sitting—plumply but separately—on fences or low branches, their round black eyes on the lookout for insects. He’s very notable, with a bright red waistcoat over a white shirt, and a black suit with smart contrasts of white, including a dab on his forehead. Typically, she’s much more demurely dressed, but she does wear a feminine light pink vest under all the brown tones.

  Other small birds seem to have a veritable harem, a flock of consorts. Like the Superb Blue Wren and his dusky tribe of fairy wrens, trilling and flicking in the bare wintry twists of the wisteria vine on my verandah, hopping from one level to another like fat little aerial circus performers, but fast-forwarded, double speed.

  In fact his grey and brown followers are his wife and his children of both sexes, as the young males take a few seasons to mature and develop their bright colours. Meanwhile they stay at home, and, like the kookaburra kids, help with their younger brothers and sisters. Their parents have a sort of open marriage—they remain together for good, but happily have affairs on the side.

  Their flashy father is only temporarily so, for he loses his blue plumage and moults back into asexual brown once the courtship and breeding is done, until next time. Rather like putting on the best suit to get the girl and then relaxing in the favourite baggy tracksuit until the display effort is needed again. But he’s more than just a gaily dressed dandy; he does his fair share of the upbringing and housework as well as home security, and even helps with his ‘illegitimate’ offspring.

  When his grown male children turn blue they will be his competitors and then he is as fierce in his aggression towards them as he is attentive in the fresh annual courtship of his legal lady partner. I assume it’s purely biological, to get her in the mood, but I like the thought that he doesn’t take her for granted even after they’ve been together for a few years. He may offer gifts, usually a yellow petal, to other females, but he still remembers to give one as an anniversary present to his wife.

  The tiniest birds, like the highly acrobatic Yellow Thornbills, get about in big groups, fussing, fluttering, never sitting still for more than a second, tinkling away to each other. There are so many that even if they stopped for a minute I doubt if I could tell whether they were in pairs or harems. They’re more like a handful of yellow-turning leaves being perpetually tossed up in the air to flutter quickly down. However, while they live in groups, apparently couples do peel off for a bit of privacy to reproduce and raise their young—a sort of compromise between communal and nuclear lifestyles.

  In others, like the Grey Fantails, the sexes are totally indistinguishable to my eyes. I watch them as they dart about, turning, turning, looking, looking in every direction from under their white eyebrow stripes. They land here and there for a quick proud spin-on-the-spot to spread and display their pretty grey and white tails, and then they’re off again. These restless fantails have equality in more than appearance, as they share all the work of parenting and building their interesting nests from spiderwebs and grass, easily identified because the structures are shaped like long-stemmed wine glasses.

  With birds, the fancy plumage and the showing off are usually about love or war. Sound familiar?

  OUT OF THE FIRE...

  Often we only get to know our neighbours in times of adversity. When disaster befalls us all, we emerge from our individual TV caves or backyard cloisters and pitc
h in to help each other get through it. Bushfires have long been one such event in Australia, and they are now becoming bigger, hotter and more unseasonal under global warming.

  In 1980, when my whole mountain range burnt so thoroughly that there was no green in the landscape as far as the eye could see, just the black—tree trunks, fallen logs and the crunch and powder that once was undergrowth—criss-crossed by the whites and greys of ash and exposed tracks, you can imagine what happened to many of my animal neighbours. As our little family was still living in the tent, which we did for fifteen months, maybe you can also imagine how scary that whole event was.

  For weeks after the fires were extinguished by rain, we would hear mighty burnt-out trees give up their last hold and crash to the ground, often in the still of the night, so their falls echoed along the ridges and across the valleys like continuing death knells. As indeed they were for the many tree-dwelling creatures caught by a fast-moving and tree-crowning fire. Koalas, for example, do not cope with such an inferno.

  When one big tree, burnt hollow and fragile, fell beside the track a few days after the fire, half-burying itself in the dirt and ash, it ejected a tiny creature that had apparently survived the fire, the loss of its mother, and thus sustenance since, and the fall.

  Like Tom Thumb, it was no bigger than the adult human digit to which it clung with surprising strength. It was amazing that we had even noticed this mini-marsupial on the ground. A friend tried to feed it with an eyedropper and honeyed water, but it only lasted a few days.

  By the way its little tail curved to hold the thumb, we thought it might have been an Eastern Pygmy Possum, young, but fully furred. This was not an animal I’d normally see, because of its small size and nocturnal habits. Now I don’t think it was, as the tail was too short, but have no better idea what it might have grown up to be. We didn’t find its family: they may have fallen out earlier, in the panic of the heat and smoke, and been incinerated to nothingness.

  The charred ground soon became eerily strewn with the white bones of wallabies and smaller animals as their burnt-black hides fell away. Perhaps the surviving birds of prey, able to fly higher and escape, benefited from this mass barbecue, as well as helping to clean up, removing the smell of death that was very strong for a time.

  One other animal that I have never seen before or after that fire was a wombat, although an old fellow had told me he’d seen a wombat or two, decades ago, way out in what is now a dedicated wilderness area.

  Nor have I ever seen the distinctively rectangular wombat dung here, or found a wombat burrow. Whenever I’ve seen the latter in the past, in sandy country far from here, they were very obvious. We had a veritable wombat city on our previous bush block, near Merriwa. You couldn’t miss seeing the holes—unless you’d fallen in one first. I used to worry about the kids disappearing down them, as such burrows can be up to 20 metres long!

  The wombats there kept to their trails no matter what petty human structures, like fences, were erected in their way. You’d be an idiot to build your house over a track belonging to one of these furry bulldozers, weighing about 40 kilograms when grown.

  That was where I got to know wombats— Vombatus ursinus : sounds like a bad actor doing a German accent, but in Latin the ‘ursinus’ bit means bear-like. These quaint, lumbering characters are more closely related to koala ‘bears’ than to any other marsupial, and probably shared an ancestor about 25 million years ago.

  Of course neither of them is a bear, and they live in totally different ways from each other, but they each have a backwards-opening pouch containing only two nipples, a tail so short as to be negligible, and certain internal similarities, such as digestive features, that set them apart from other marsupials.

  My books tell me these ‘Common Wombats’ do inhabit forested mountains, and there are certainly plenty of native grasses and sedges here for them to eat, but because my own experiences with them have been limited to sandy areas, I wouldn’t have thought my rocky ridges an appealing habitat, powerful diggers though wombats are.

  Yet the day after that fire went through, I saw a blocky black animal trundling purposefully down the small ridge opposite our house clearing. I was incredulous, but it was unmistakably a wombat, even though it was the wrong colour. No other marsupial has that solid shape, with the distinctive flattened battering ram of a head, the flat rump and short legs.

  And colour no longer counted, as most of the living animals we saw had charred fur and would have been blackened anyway from their sooty environment. We few humans certainly were.

  Where had this one wombat come from and where was it going? They are solitary animals, but in my post-disaster zone this one seemed tragically so, perforce rather than by choice. Since there must be very few around here, I wondered if any others had lived. Would this dark and determined survivor find a mate when the time came?

  I could only hope so.

  REDNECK BOYS

  Last year the country was given many extreme displays of how chaotic our climate has already become. After weeks of rain here, the sun finally remembered how to shine. Glad to be rid of that relentlessly grey sky and sleety rain, the animals came out to make the most of the warmth. A sodden fur coat can’t be all that comfortable.

  I saw a small gang of young male Red-necked Wallabies basking on the grass just outside my house yard, so I edged up to the fence for closer scrutiny. They did look up, but were too sun-drowsed to bother about me, and eyelids drooped sleepily again.

  They’re an attractive wallaby, comprising my biggest population of hoppy marsupials. Their soft fur is subtly coloured in greys and reddish browns, with smart black trim in well-chosen places—perfect camouflage in my tawny tussock-floored and bracken-studded forest. The small dark front paws are often held poised and loose, sometimes crossed, so they look like the neat gloved hands of shy schoolgirls.

  On that occasion I could see more of their white to pale-grey undersides, for many of them were propped, leaning further back on the base of their tails than usual, to allow maximum sun on their bellies. From the looks on their faces it was bliss.

  At less relaxed times, these young wallaby males front up to each other with typical teenage bluff and bravado, to practise for the challenges ahead. They often play at fighting.

  It looks as if they are trying to cuff each other about the head, front paws outstretched while bending their own heads right back to avoid being cuffed, but they are actually only trying to hold off the opponent. Their necks are very exposed at such times, but perhaps they never use the claws on their front paws for anything more aggressive than scratching fleas.

  Their real fighting method is kickboxing, but since they still can’t balance solely on their tails, which they need to do if they want to use their big back legs to jump up and kick forward at their opponent’s vulnerable abdomen, as the grown-ups do, they’re always falling over, looking foolish rather than impressive.

  Apart from their more-muscled build and larger size, it’s easy to pick the males. Their testicles hang precariously low, and descend even lower when they’re aroused. I know this not because I’ve been pruriently spying on them, but because they aren’t at all shy about their courtship. In fact they’re extremely voluble and active and there’s no way I could miss it, even from my verandah.

  When a female is on heat she may have just one suitor, but more often I see up to six very keen males chasing her in a grunting competitive pack, all trying to get in the lead so as to be first to sidle up to her when she stops for breath, and attempt to win her favours.

  There’s no forcing. The nonchalant female is in charge; they stop when she does, don’t try to head her off, take off again when she does. Their courtship appears quite gentle—cheek-to-cheek rubbing, a little sniffing towards the general area of the desired destination if she allows it, much eager sideways tail swishing on the male’s part, like the wagging of a dog’s tail. His excitement is clear, not only from the restless tail, but also from his very pink pro
truding penis, thin and curving upwards, like a new moon, and the way his balls are hanging so low, on strings it seems, like Maori poi balls. The equipment stays at the ready the whole time, long before any prospect of success.

  Given that the chase takes them crashing through fences, over fallen branches, tall blady grass and tough tussocks and even tougher clumps of Lomandra and Dianella at breakneck speed, I wince involuntarily as I watch. I imagine a bloke would wince even more.

  RED-BELLIED SQUATTERS

  Last summer temperatures went see-sawing between 13 and 30 degrees, sometimes in the same day. My son Sam brought his family down from Lennox Head, on the warm far north coast of New South Wales, to stay for a week in late January. They came with swimmers and shorts, jeans and singlet tops. I had to unearth winter sweaters and even beanies and mittens for them to borrow. Naturally the day they left it was as hot and sunny as a proper summer’s day.

  To prepare for their visit I’d been mowing and pruning like mad, not because I’m house-and-garden proud, but to remove snake havens. Edging borders were ruthlessly dispatched; ground-sweeping bushes were up-trimmed. For I’d seen more Red-bellied Black Snakes lately than in the last 30 years put together. They weren’t passing through my yard; clapping, stamping or hosing hadn’t made them move on as it used to. It seems they’d taken up residence, and I finally discovered where—and why.

  My vegie garden is a netted enclosure, with weed mat laid under and around the netting, a wishful kikuyu grass barrier. Weed mat is woven, black and shiny; a rolled edge of it looks remarkably like a black snake. I’d gradually learnt to calm my heart’s leap, confident that the textured blackness spotted out of the corner of my eye was not a snake.