Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  Hence on that memorable day in December, when as usual I was kneeling and weeding, delving gloveless into dense plantings, my mind took a few seconds to over-rule this and look twice—and then a few more seconds to accept the fact. Snake, not weed mat—and only half a metre away.

  Heart thumping, I backed out the open gateway; the snake slid through the netting and disappeared into the lush growth beneath the hop vine. It didn’t reappear on the other side, on the open grass where I wanted to see it, on its way out of my house yard. Oh-oh.

  I manage here pretty well most of the time, but this was the sort of situation when I feel inadequate for my Mountain life: scared and alone and useless! I retreated to the cabin and made a coffee to help me calm down enough to consider my options; I didn’t come up with any but observance and avoidance.

  When I crept warily back, I saw what I assumed was the same snake, now stretched out on the warm dirt between my tomato plants. Raising its head, it seemed to ooze effortlessly through the netting and over into the adjoining compost heap, from which I’d been pulling kikuyu runners the day before. Barehanded.

  Then I spotted another one, shiny black S-shaping its way across the lawn. Okay, I had two: a resident couple perhaps?

  For the next week, until my snake-loving friend could come and relocate them to the national park—and rescue me—I was on high alert, wearing gumboots whenever I left the verandah, eyes flicking left, right, near, far. And forget the homegrown vegetables!

  When my friend came, he gently turned the compost with his metal crook, a long rod with a wide semi-circular hook on the end, while I watched from a distance. He found one, caught it in his crook, lifted it high enough to seize with his gloved hand in the right spot—not the neck as I’d imagined, but above the anus, he tells me, though of course you’d have to know where that is on a creature that to me seems one continuum from head to tail. It doesn’t have a distinct neck either, as the head is quite small, unlike a python for example, whose head is noticeably wider and flattened. That’s one reason why these can fit through my netting.

  Whew! He got it. This looked easy.

  Yet in the instant before he moved to drop it into the plastic drum—he standing in the compost heap, the snake’s long shining body writhing beside his leg—behind him I saw another mass of red and black loops gleaming in a kind of rolling eruption, uncoiling from the partly decomposed heap which now appeared to be seething with snakes.

  Indiana Jones-type nightmares of snake-filled pits rushed into my head. The snake handler himself was admirably cool, uttering just one minor four-letter word before he secured the first snake and put the lid on the bucket, while the other one, or two, or three, got away.

  Over two visits in the next few weeks, he caught and relocated four Red-bellied Black Snakes, missing one small one. Watching him made me realise that they were as timid as he’d insisted. Although they are very venomous, capable of harming or killing a person, they rarely deliver that venom, as they rarely bite. Their instinct is to hide when under threat, not to attack. Sometimes when he released them from their confinement, one would rear up and flatten its head like a cobra, but it seemed like a brief perfunctory bluster—‘You’d better not try that again!’—before it slid away into cover. I’m told that’s usual. It certainly worked as a deterrent for me.

  My friend admires them, their sinuous and efficient way of moving, their fabulous honeycomb scale patterns; he offers them respect but not fear. He’s been called to remove snakes from all sorts of odd places, such as offices, which is the sort of situation when they might panic and bite, because cornered. Consequently he advised me to make a summer barrier for my doorway from the verandah.

  It had never crossed my mind to be concerned about snakes climbing the four timber steps and slithering over the rough gappy decking into my house—there to be accidentally cornered and panicked! I swiftly made and installed a slide-down Masonite barrier, above knee-height, which made access a bit awkward as I had to hop over it, but I preferred that to imagining snakes hiding under beds and behind cupboards.

  He explained that the tropical wet and the warmth of the season had encouraged them, but then the abrupt cold spells had sent them seeking the compost’s heat. They didn’t know what season they were in. I wonder how they’ll interpret signals for breeding or hibernating amidst such climatic confusion, and whether they’ll have been able to eat enough to see them though the months of hibernation.

  They like to be near water, as frogs are a favourite food, and the little dam below the house yard would offer them a guaranteed ongoing smorgasbord. So I understand why they want to hang about near there; I just want them to leave my yard out of the accommodation options.

  But at last I had my confidence and my vegie garden back: I moved my compost into closed worm bins, pulled up the weed mat, and have started to run aviary netting, too fine for snakes to get through, around the bottom of the fence. To attempt to stop the kikuyu runners I have instead dug a spade-deep and hoe-width trench around the outside and am filling it with gravel. I may also relocate my dense strawberry bed and the jungle of my rhubarb—in the interests of greater visibility and my own peace of mind.

  I’ve since seen the snake that got away. It was lazing in my orchard and had grown quite a lot bigger—unless it was another snake altogether. Now that I know they have about twenty live young at a time, that wouldn’t be surprising. This was in autumn, when it was as hot as it should have been in summer. I was wishing winter would hurry up—assuming we got such a season. Perhaps there’ll be no safely snakeless season anymore.

  In fact if the snakes can’t sort out the seasons, and we don’t get serious about sorting out global warming, the future will be very uncertain for their survival. As it will be for lots of other creatures, including us.

  ROSIES ARE RED

  A wet day on the Mountain, the rain cold and lashing and miserable-making. From my desk window the autumn leaves of the verandah vines were dull shadows of themselves, ochre rather than gold, without their sunny backlighting.

  Then a flash of rich red refocused the scene. A Crimson Rosella had landed on the birdfeeder there and was skulking amongst the dripping leaves, pecking at sodden sunflower seed husks and keeping a watchful eye out for a currawong or magpie. I put out a handful of feed only occasionally, and at random, to keep them interested in including my verandah on their food-source check run, but not often enough to make them dependent.

  The rosella flew off when a strong gust sent a cane chair flat on its face and loudly skittering along the boards. When the rain stopped, it, or a cousin, came back, less startlingly exotic a contrast now as the vine reclaimed a little of its colour with the increasing light.

  I smiled at the quaint and clever way this rosella perched on one leg, clawed foot clinging to the narrow rim, and used the other as a hand, daintily holding the sunflower seed and raising it to its curved beak to nibble. Its head was cocked on one side for ease of feeding, but also to watch me.

  ‘What’s she up to now?’ its intelligent eye led me to imagine it was thinking.

  These ‘rosies’ are my most common parrot, in the sense of most often seen—and uncommonly beautiful—a bright rich red, with blue cheeks and underwings and tail, and striking wings of black scallops edged with red. The young are mostly green.

  Crimson Rosellas are my flying jewels, my singing stars. For, sequined at will amongst their repertoire of squawks and chatter, they have a sweet song, all musical trills and whistles. Good looks and a voice. Aren’t they lucky? Aren’t I?

  There are times when they are quiet, with hardly a sound beyond a mutter or two, because it’s harvest time. When the predominant native grass in my ‘lawn’ is seeding, my yard is taken over by a purposeful band of Crimson Rosellas. They proceed en masse up the slope, through thin grass stalks as tall as themselves. Standing on one leg, each parrot daintily grasps a seedhead stem with the claw of the other, bends it towards its beak and neatly strips it, rather as we
’d munch sideways along a cob of corn.

  The harvest appears organised and amicable: no crossing of territory, no debate about personal patches, not one squawk of protest. It’s a silent harvest, though highly visible, as the richness of their red and blue plumage turns my plain yard into a moving tapestry.

  A cleared yard isn’t a natural setting, but you’d think such brightly coloured birds would also seem out of place in my eucalypt forests. It’s only when I see them perched up there in the branches, amongst the dangling mops of gumleaves, that I realise how much red and purple there is in the apparently green foliage, how much blue and mauve in the greys and browns of the smooth-barked trunks and branches. And because they’re up so high, against the sky they are often in silhouette; only shape and sound give them away.

  They belong.

  Australia is rich in parrots of many sizes and colours. Many people are most familiar with the multi-coloured one that Arnott’s Biscuits made their logo in another century and a very different Australia. I always assumed that was supposed to be an Eastern Rosella, common in more open country than mine, such as Newcastle, where Mr Arnott began baking his biscuits in 1865.

  However, I’ve learnt that this parrot was actually drawn from a caged Mexican one that Mr Arnott had been given, Newcastle being a seafaring port. I don’t suppose it matters that a foreign parrot became an Aussie icon, given that Arnott’s has been owned by an American company for over a decade now. Nothing’s sacred in a global economy, not even SAO biscuits!

  AQUATIC JEWELS

  When the waterlilies are blooming on my small dam, their large circular leaves are so abundant that they overlap, curling up at their edges. There are two green floating islands of them, one bearing lotus-like cups of pale pink, the other of pale lemon, almost white.

  Since these aquatic plants had all but disappeared in the drought, I was eager to have a closer look at their new burst of life this season. And it is Life with a capital ‘L’, for the waterlily rafts host a multitude of fauna. Not Thumbelina, the miniature girl left on one in the fairy story, but many creatures just as pretty.

  Two tiny pointed faces disappeared under the surface of the water as I approached. All that had been exposed were their protruding eyes, like those of frogs, and their nostrils. They are refugees, two of the Eastern Long-necked Tortoises individually rescued from being squashed on the tarred road closer to town, and relocated here. As even experts have trouble sexing a tortoise, I don’t know if I have any mating couples and hence a growing colony.

  I was always taught that tortoises live in fresh water, turtles live in the sea, but I’ve just discovered that this has been changed, so that the term ‘tortoise’ only refers to purely land-dwelling ones. So Australia no longer has any real tortoises, as ours all need water. Name changes take a while to come into common usage: they will have to bear both old and new in the interim.

  These little Eastern Long-necked Turtles or Tortoises get called Eastern Snake-neck Turtles or Tortoises as well, because their necks are as long as their bodies. They are also called ‘Stinkers’, and you’ll quickly find out why if you ever pick one up on the road when it’s off looking for a new home: it’s the turtle’s defence mechanism when it’s frightened, and it’s very effective! The other trick it has is to hide its neck and head under the shell, by twisting sideways. Or if annoyed, it might bite.

  Like snakes, they eat frogs, and tadpoles. My mind boggles at the number of frogs I’d have in this dam if there were no predators. On this visit, I could easily see hundreds of tadpoles dangling from the water surface, of several types, and all fat and healthy. Some of the smaller ones already had legs sprouting from their translucent brown sides.

  In the middle of the lily pads I spotted a tiny jewel of a frog. Dainty, brilliantly costumed in a white cravat and shirtfront under his neat suit of light green, a fit and princely frog groom for Thumbelina should she appear, banishing any image of an ugly, slimy thing at which she’d shudder.

  What I have always called ‘water boatmen’ lightly rowed their skinny insect selves across the dam, trailing ripples that criss-crossed as they negotiated this busy waterway. I have now learnt that these are actually ‘backswimmers’ who swim upside-down just near the surface, holding a bubble of air to breathe from. The real water boatmen prefer the bottom of the pond or dam, look more like beetles with oars, and swim right-way up. But they both have four long fringed rear legs for rowing and two short front legs for paddling themselves along.

  The online Buglopedia also told me that there are aquatic insects called ‘water striders’ and ‘water treaders’!

  Other insects sat motionless on the lily pads, rather than working the water. A most strangely shaped one turned out to be a ‘water scorpion’ or ‘needle bug’, and the long thin tail I’d noted, reminiscent of land scorpions, was actually a respiratory siphon. Air bubbles, air siphons: such varied and clever designs for breathing under water.

  For sheer beauty, I most admired the brilliant blue- or red-patterned and delicately jointed stick creatures, with fragile gauze wings, that were perched rigidly solo on lily leaves or curved in pairs on reed stems. Dragonflies. Were these incredible creations mating? It seemed so, as they often fly in tandem like that as part of the mating ritual—the male gripping the female around the back of her head, using claspers at the end of his body. Like going on a joint freefall drop with your partner: trust is all.

  The spectacular-looking dragonflies are exceptional flyers, doing aerial sweeps to patrol for insects. As they fly, they catch their prey with their legs, which are edged with minute bristles like mini-garden rakes.

  I came inside to refer to my old pond life book, to be able to say with authority what the strange dam inhabitants were, but like so many other books, I must have lent it out long ago and forgotten to whom. Being an hour and a half’s drive from the library, I had to resort to the Internet, but I’d always prefer a book.

  The frog I could look up properly, flipping from one coloured picture to another to compare, checking out distribution maps, referring to the old State Forests environmental impact statement list of species found in this area. I think it’s an Eastern Dwarf Tree Frog. I am not happy about the ‘Dwarf’: sounds too clumsy for my little fellow. ‘Elf’ would be more delicately appropriate, and he is dressed in elfin green of the brightest new-leaf shade. I like to know the proper term, but privately, he’ll remain my small dam princeling—even though the book says he’s common!

  A new water feature like a pond or a dam soon develops from a bare clay hole into such a different world, with its own special ecology, its aquatic weeds and rushes and wildlife. How they all find out about it or get there is a mystery to me; I’m just grateful they do.

  WILD CHILD DAY CARE

  Building my house yard netting fence was essential to keep the wild creatures out, I thought. They had other ideas.

  The quoll first decided it was a safe nocturnal playpen for her kids, so they covered the night shift until the baby magpie got dropped off. Each year I get at least one of these, and they’ve all been whingers.

  Last summer’s magpie junior was no exception.

  ‘Wah! Wah! Wah!’ he whined, non stop, as he waddled about the lawn. One bird book describes the noise as ‘almost continuous squawking’. I take issue only with the ‘almost’. He’d be momentarily distracted by a hose or a piece of poly pipe that he’d try to extract from the ground, but then the whining would resume. Mum would drop in often to check on him and shut him up with a worm or two, then fly off, with him clumsily trying to follow, whingeing even louder.

  When he outgrew his mother and the nest, but was still wearing the mottled greyish plumage of the young, he followed her in short bursts of flight round the yard. On the ground he loomed over her, ever asking, ‘What’s for dinner? When’s dinner ready?’ He was well able to feed himself, but preferred the readymade meals from Mum.

  It reminded me of when my son was a teenager: he’d stand staring into
our full fridge—of course annoyingly holding the door open—and complain, ‘There’s nothing to eat!’ meaning nothing assembled for him to seize and scoff, just all the ingredients. As fruit was not the sort of takeaway he had in mind and he professed not to like leftovers, he had a hard life growing to the muscular six-foot-something man he eventually became.

  I bet the magpie mum can’t wait until her lad is two, which is the accepted age to kick him out of the family. Peace and quiet at last.

  She’d be especially exhausted because female magpies have to do all the work: find the site, build the nest, incubate the eggs and feed the young. Her snappy songbird partner will bring her a morsel or two when she’s nest-bound, but that’s it. The token washing of the dishes. Those show ponies are all the same!

  While the magpie junior was still in care, the Crimson Rosellas turned up, and for a week the lawn and lower branches were bedecked with young ones, still green-backed for camouflage and still totally ignorant of the melodic calls of their parents. With heads bobbing and beaks open, all they produced was a constant rusty chorus of ‘N-y-air, n-y-air, n-y-air!’

  But the slowest developers are the kookaburra kids. In season, I can have many young ones about, sitting in groups from three to six, turning every raised object in the garden into totem poles, and all muttering. They have a totally flat delivery and are hopeless at learning the words, beyond a creaky ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’

  Listening to their progress is painful as they move relentlessly throughout the next trainee stage, ‘Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah! Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah!’ This seems to last a month, despite plentiful demonstrations from parents and relatives of how to get all the rises and falls of the proper song right.

  Then one year I became aware of the King Parrots using the facilities too. Seeking the source of a single scratchy repeated note, like a stuck machine that needed oiling, I found two of them in a small tree in the orchard. The young one’s head was still green like the mother’s, not yet the vivid scarlet of a male, if that’s what he was. Leaning forward, beak open, he was emitting that one note without a break.