Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  The magpies harry them away noisily and fearlessly, like yapping fox terriers shooing a lumbering bull. Eagles aren’t good at quick evasive action and must manipulate their large wings with unaccustomed frequency to move up and out of this enemy airspace and back into their own thinner air.

  Perhaps the magpies’ supremacy is not so surprising when you consider how fiercely those red-eyed black-and-white speedsters defend their nesting tribe against the perceived possible threat presented by humans entering their space: dive-bombing walkers and bike-riders in suburbs and rural towns, forcing councils to erect warning signs and people to put odd things on their heads, like ice-cream containers with eyes painted on the bases. Their swooping is mainly done as a warning and they don’t often persist if people leave the area, but, like humans, some are more aggressive than others.

  Maybe the eagles are the born kings, and the magpies are the dictators who claim power and run the show on the ground. It always strikes me as odd that these same ‘bully birds’ are among our best songbirds. The last part of the Latin name of my species of magpie, properly called Black-backed Magpies, Gymnorhina tibicen, means ‘flute player’.

  And I love their song as much as they seem to love warbling it.

  My mother wasn’t the sort of person to go about singing much, but one song from her schooldays in the 1920s stuck in her head, found voice on her rare fine days when nothing had gone especially wrong, and thus became lodged in my own head:

  Maggie, maggie magpie, high up in the tree,

  Do you whistle early in the morning cool,

  To wake us up for breakfast and in time for school?

  Why does the magpie sing, and why so beautifully, and does he do it because he must, or because he wants to, or both?

  This whole question of ‘why birds sing’ is freshly and fascinatingly discussed in the book of that name by an American Professor of Philosophy and Music, David Rothenberg. He came to Australia to play with lyrebirds—and I mean play as in musical instruments, for he’s a clarinettist who likes to jam with birds, to improvise around their songs. I met him at the 2008 Watermark Writers’ Muster in Kendall, New South Wales, where I heard him perform with birdsongs he had recorded. You can listen to some of his lyrebird sessions on the book’s website.

  But not all birds have songs; many only have calls, with specific meanings and for practical purposes. I mean, we all talk but we don’t all sing. In my case, it’s out of consideration for my neighbours that I don’t.

  Eagles don’t sing either, but then they seem to be serious creatures, and I’ve been fairly close, such as when I’ve surprised one on the road, busy with the mush of red flesh and grey fur of roadkill, once a wallaby. Or landed on my track, where something must have caught its eye to bring it down to earth, but had escaped.

  Close up, the immense bulk of their feathered legs is a shock, bringing with it the reality of how much weight they can carry. Driving back one day, in sight of home, I saw an eagle fly low across the track in front of me, heading through the forest and down the gully, and carrying an obviously long-dead, partly disintegrating wallaby in its claws. It must have been difficult to manoeuvre between the trees and gain height at the same time, and it dropped the body. No doubt it came back later when I was safely out of the way.

  I’ve never seen more than two together on the ground, but apparently if there are more around a carcass, they feed in twos and the others wait their turn! This isn’t manners, it’s being smart enough to know that sharing works better than wasting time and energy fighting amongst themselves or being greedy. I think we’d call that sustainability.

  And they do mostly feed on carrion. Until the fairly recent past, farmers believed they preyed on sheep flocks, but it has now been realised that they only go for dead or dying lambs that are already down. Thousands of wedgies were killed annually by farmers, bounties offered in some states, and the mighty bodies strung on fences as warnings. Now they are protected all over Australia.

  When they spread their wings to take off, which is hardly a quick getaway, I see they span more than 2 metres. What power they must exert to become airborne! Once one took off from the track in front of me, on a low trajectory that went right over my head. Needless to say, I ducked. And squealed.

  When my daughter was small, her hair blonde like the tussocks and she about the same height, an eagle came so low to investigate that I worried it might think her a plump rabbit, swoop down and pick her up. It easily could have.

  I think of that whenever they swoop low over me now: looking into an eagle’s eye is not a friendly experience. But then royalty never would be too familiar with flightless riff-raff like me, I suppose.

  A QUESTION OF MURDER

  This being a wildlife refuge, all native animals are protected, but as these get smaller, avoiding harming them gets harder. It can be accidental—a matter of visibility, a reflex action—or a deliberate decision following a philosophical dilemma.

  For example, you wouldn’t step on a small lizard, but what about a native cockroach, a spider or an ant? You wouldn’t swat a butterfly, but what about a pesky moth or a nesting wasp? Do all buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes automatically deserve to be stunned or squished?

  It soon becomes complicated when you go down the path of deciding where to draw the line and why. Often it simply comes down to survival.

  Gardeners pick off and squash or compost caterpillars, drown snails or glue up aphids so the birds can get them—organic pest control just means no nasty slow lingering deaths by poisons or powders. I can’t do the first two but I have used glue spray in the past. I’m not sure what I’d do now, but as I no longer bother about gardening to that extent, I don’t have that dilemma. There’s no point in protecting the roses from aphids if I can’t save them from possums.

  Yet almost every time I sink my spade into the earth, slice through the grass and lift out a beautiful slab of topsoil ... I murder a worm. Just cut it in two. I don’t mean to and I do apologise to the waving cut pink ends, but that’s no comfort to the worm, is it?

  I used to have a vague idea that the halves could operate independently, but I’ve looked it up—no. Wishful thinking by a guilty, big-footed human. They have heads and nervous systems, tails and sex organs—they even have five hearts! And they do so much for us, cleaning up the planet’s debris and turning it into soil; I add ingratitude to my guilt.

  Worm farms are quite trendy now in suburban gardens; it’s a perfectly acceptable and quite competitive topic at dinner parties, as people compare their worms’ rates of consumption and range of diet.

  ‘Oh, mine eat anything I give them; I’m not about to tolerate fussy eaters.’

  ‘I find mine are actually quite discriminating: they won’t eat sliced white bread but they love a good hard rye!’

  ‘Well, my heap went down 3 inches overnight: they’re real goers, my lot!’

  ‘Mine take their time but I must say they do a very thorough job. Quality, not quantity, you know.’

  And even though I’ve never heard anyone talking to their worms, I wouldn’t be surprised if they silently admonished them: ‘Chew your food thoroughly or you’ll get indigestion! Crusts are good for you! Yes, I know this is rather a lot of Aunt Gwen’s gramma pie to get through at one go, but there’s really nothing wrong with it—truly!’

  There’s a lot of worms in my soil, perhaps because it’s a high rainfall forest ecology, with the humus being broken down by them. The theory has been advanced that they are the reason I have fewer termites than drier areas, where termites are the cleaner-uppers. I’m grateful for that, having seen the incredible amount of damage termites can do.

  A friend of mine is rebuilding his mud-brick house with steel framing and windows and doors after the little beggars ate everything made of timber, and then kept going—furniture, books, toilet paper. They rapidly find and eat anything they fancy, even coming through the mud-brick floor exactly at the four wooden bed legs and eating their way up them!<
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  So I thank my mountain worms on several counts for being here.

  I cope with my guilt about the accidental slaughter of average earthworms, slim threads of flesh, but I have trouble with the larger ones. For every now and then I come across a worm as thick as my middle finger and up to a foot long, that is so evidently an ‘animal’ of distinct body parts and colours and habitat, that it feels as bad as killing a lizard. ‘Sorry’ isn’t enough.

  So you see what I mean about the slippery moral scale on where to draw the line.

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Some small creature had been forcing its way in or out of the house, which is supposedly my territory. It was quite a saga to find out what and where.

  First I heard an odd plop on the verandah. On investigating, I found a plug of mud in the shower base; it had fallen, or been pushed out, from under the iron corrugation of the roof above. Odd. Maybe the possum’s heavy lumbering over the roof had caused the fill to vibrate out? Something else I can be annoyed with it for.

  I didn’t get around to plugging the gap for a week. I mixed up the mud in a bowl, but made it too wet, too sloppy to hold its shape, so I had to wait for it to dry out more. In the meantime, a visitor kindly threw the mud out and washed the bowl, so I had to start again. But I did eventually plug the hole, and could see no others.

  Then something ate through the kickboard under the kitchen sink cupboard; it was just old flaky chipboard, easy to nibble a hole in that, but was the something nibbling in, or out?

  I mixed up sawdust and wood glue and plugged that hole. It got eaten through again. I found a length of thick plywood in the shed and nailed it over the whole kickboard. Take that!

  Next I saw that a small neat hole had been apparently drilled in my western mud wall, near a vent to the underfloor. Coincidence, said a friend, just an enlargement of a wasp hole. Wasps do pinch mud for their nests, so that sounded likely. I plugged that hole.

  But the following morning a small stone in the rock and cement footings below had been worked loose by digging around it. That took effort, determination—or desperation. Perhaps it was a bush rat. But did it desperately want to get in or out? They are nocturnal, so when should I cement that hole, night, or day, to ensure it was out when I did?

  Under the floor is my ‘cellar’, an accidental, too-low but useful space, where I store my full and empty homebrew bottles. As I have to go down there for supplies now and then, I’d rather not share that space with trapped bush rats.

  All I was catching in the live trap on my bench at night were antechinus, tiny marsupials that can slip through a minute crack. I saw each one clearly when I relocated it down the hill in the morning, tipping it out into the tussocks where it bounced once, then regained its feet and raced into cover, unfazed by its night of incarceration. They wouldn’t need to go to all this trouble to break in, although I thought I’d managed to seal all their possible entrances. But if something bigger was creating a freeway, they wouldn’t be shy of using it.

  One night I spotted a large greyish animal on the verandah railing. A bush rat. I groaned. They are bold and persistent but they stay away when the quoll’s here—where was she?!

  Next day I heard a grating sound in the pantry roof; it must have been trying to gnaw through the ceiling. I banged the broom handle up many times and demanded it desist and leave, complaining like any downstairs tenant. The noise stopped.

  That night I saw a slim dark shape run nimbly along the rafter above the couch where I was lying, reading. So it was inside now.

  Next morning a small yellow dish on the bench caught my attention. It was so so empty and clean that I couldn’t recall what, if anything, had been in there, but I often use that dish to dry seeds. Ah yes, pumpkin seeds from a particularly good organic Queensland Blue I’d bought. Had it eaten every scrap?

  I looked around, behind the fridge, under the cupboard, behind jars; there under the portable gas stove, perhaps a metre away from the dish, was a neat pile of rat shit and pumpkin shells. It must have taken the seeds there one by one, to eat in private.

  I went out and checked the footings: the rock plug had been pushed out again. But how was it getting from under the floor into the house—and the roof? These native critters are always ingenious, and always one step ahead of me.

  Meanwhile I decided to defrost the fridge. Taking advantage of the 10 degree or less weather, I set the breakables in a fridge bag out on the verandah—so the clumsy possum wouldn’t knock them over. I simply sat the plastic lidded containers of soup and fetta and yoghurt on the table there, as they wouldn’t spill.

  Next morning I found the lid off the fetta, which was still there swimming in its brine, pale but apparently unharmed. The lid must have blown off. Perhaps I hadn’t pressed it down tightly enough.

  Then I noticed the tiny blue fragments on the table, shavings of what was once a lid. Ah yes, there was the frayed lid not too far away on the decking. The rat must have been responsible, since they gnaw through plastic, rubber and timber. It hadn’t eaten the fetta or tipped it over. Must have been disappointing after all that effort to find it was cheese, I thought, since bush rats don’t seem to like it much. Served it right! I took the fetta inside and washed the thick slabs, replacing the brine. No real harm done.

  Later I noticed that on the verandah boards near the old (unlit) kero fridge were strewn a few pegs, a rectangle of white polystyrene, probably from one of my seed boxes, and scraps of string. The damn rat must have been mucking about up there and knocked things off. I picked up the pegs and reached for the foam—only it wasn’t.

  The soft sogginess quickly told me that the fetta had been tried after all—and rejected. Nibbled round the edges, air-hardened and slightly yellowed, it looked exactly like a bit of deteriorating foam.

  Over the next few weeks, that pesky rat also gnawed photo albums and—unforgivably—books. It had to go.

  Bush rats, possums—Mrs Q, where were you?! Having read just the other day that quolls only live for about five years, although I don’t know why that’s so, I was worried now that mine may have met her end. I hoped a female from the next generation turned up soon, overcome with nostalgic yearnings for a home like that of her childhood; good accommodation must be hard to find.

  My live trap was too small, so a friend lent me two wire mesh rat traps and I baited them with slices of apple spread with peanut butter. Next morning I had two very lively creatures, brown with paler tummies; mini versions of the rat I’d seen, although less grey. Quite cute for rats, but still they went for a ride to the national park.

  So my ‘it’ was a ‘she’.

  The holes in the footings were cemented up. She made a new one on the other side of the house; having been told rats don’t like kero, I poked a kerosene-soaked rag in there as I had no time to cement that one.

  The following morning I caught Mum. She went for a ride too.

  Since then, for months there were no new holes or evident gnawing.

  And yet, just last week I saw the big one—Mum?—inside the house. My heart sank. ‘How, where??!!’ I demanded, but she scurried along her old familiar route on the rafter and ignored me. Had she taken all this time to find her way ‘home’?

  If so, she’s come back not only older, but wiser, as the hurriedly set mesh traps have remained untouched, untripped—and the rat untrapped.

  These bush rats are not the ‘bad’ rodents introduced by Europeans, which are the black rats, the brown rats and the house mouse. They are Rattus fuscipes, one of Australia’s seven rat species of the ‘new endemics’, having come here around a million years ago. So they have more right to be here than I do—just not inside my little house!

  When I was growing up we had the ‘bad’ mice and rats in the shed where grain and corn were kept. Dad was always setting traps—the ‘Snap! You’re dead! (or maimed) sort—and catching them. I once offered to bring one in for my senior high school biology class to dissect, as the teacher had been pondering aloud how
to procure a rat. She was grateful, but in the end it wasn’t to win me any brownie points with my classmates.

  I hadn’t thought how I would get it there. Dad just popped the body into a plastic bag before he went to work, and left it for me. Unfortunately the tail was hanging out, and neither myself nor Mum nor my small sisters wanted to touch it to poke it out of sight. I carried it at arm’s length as I walked to the bus stop, my school port in the other hand.

  The bus was late. I didn’t like to put the rat bag down, as the body seemed more real when it slumped. I imagined I’d put it under my seat on the bus, out of sight. But when the bus came, it was very crowded; there were no seats. I had to stand and hang on somehow. I stood my port on the floor between my feet, held on to a seat corner with one hand, the rat bag suspended from the other at a safe distance from my legs, trying to keep it low so no one would notice.

  It was a 5-mile trip to school. Every time the bus stopped, I had to let someone squeeze past, manoeuvring the rat bag so it didn’t touch me—or anyone else. We were into the suburban edges of town, getting near our school stop, near the end of my ordeal, when I began to think that I could smell a rat—my rat. So did some others.

  Which led them to seek the source, to look—and to see the tail. ‘Ugh! What’s that!?’ the nearest girl standing in the aisle asked. She was a rather snobby girl anyway, but from the disgusted look on her face when I told her, I knew I’d ruined any chance of ever being invited to her parties!

  Of course she squealed. And then ... well, can you imagine the exponential vocal force of a bus full of schoolgirls?

  The bus driver pulled up. I edged forward to him, mumbled an explanation. He looked pretty disgusted too, and told me to stay up there right behind him, then yelled at the bus to quieten down or we’d all be walking to school.