Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  Naturally I got off the bus first when we arrived. I was highly aggrieved at being treated like a leper when I was just doing my class a favour, but I understood it. I’d learnt the hard way that town kids don’t like close contact with yucky things like blood and death, or leeches, or the contents of pan toilets—or maggots; neither did I, but I had to acknowledge they existed.

  It was another case of shooting the messenger, me, the farm kid forever tainted by real life. ‘Rats!’ I say.

  LYREBIRD LADS

  If I drive out the long way, through the national park, I have a favourite stretch of road, where it passes through the rainforest brush. This rises high on both sides, densely green, impenetrable with vines and glossy-leaved trees and mossy trunks, both standing and fallen. Creeper-draped saplings lean towards each other across the dirt road, almost touching overhead—a sparkling, dappled emerald and lime-green tunnel.

  There’s a 40-kilometre per hour speed limit in the national park, but I like to drive slowly to savour this lush beauty, and because of the wildlife that darts in front of me. The panicking pademelons, the gangly brush turkeys, and less commonly, the Superb Lyrebird, his long tail a hindrance for a dash across the road.

  I always think of lyrebirds as rainforest birds, preferring forests full of leaf litter for their courtship display areas. I don’t think I have them at my own place, as I haven’t seen any in my ferny gullies or shelves, although as my rainforest regeneration plantings grow bigger, I am hoping they’ll come back.

  Sound should tell me if they are here, or when they move in, but I’m starting to wonder if I could pick that complex mix of mimicry and invention.

  The male lyrebird is a rather ordinary looking brown bird when he’s not performing. He was named for the perceived resemblance of his elegant tail to the musical instrument, except that when he raises it in display, he doesn’t usually hold all the feathers together in that shape. The boldly notch-patterned brown and white outer feathers, each ending in a black curl, go to the sides, while two long, slim, central feathers curve up and out the back, and a whole bunch of delicate silvery plumes rise and fan forward over his head.

  However, if successful in wooing a mate, in the heat of passion he does fleetingly hold his tail feathers up and all together like a lyre with strings. Few people would see that, but we expect it because that’s how artists have represented their tails.

  Both our Australian lyrebirds, the Albert’s and the Superb, have some of the most complicated songs of all the birds in the world. From their chosen or fashioned performance stages, they not only mimic calls and sounds in their environment, by birds and other animals, including man and his machinery, but interpret and assimilate the sounds into their own songs, and pass them on to other generations.

  Friends of mine live in a sandy valley nestled up against curving sandstone ridges. There is plenty of cover for birds in the thick under-storey of native shrubs between the ironbarks, native cypress and casuarinas, and beneath them the ground cover is mainly sticks and bark and rocks and sand, with little grass.

  Water is precious there, so they have made a small rectangular pond close to their house in the dry gully, for the animals and birds who live there too. On one visit I saw a young lyrebird take a bath there.

  As with many bird couples, the female has no need of superb tail or song, for she’s the one to be courted for her favours. I thought this visitor to the pond was a female at first, because of the thickish tail, but I learnt that the tail feathers of young males can resemble those of the female or a mixture of male and female.

  They don’t breed until they have the full fantastic set for properly courting a female. Like a male being able to grow a beard, I guess, although these days it seems that a small tuft below the bottom lip will do the trick.

  This lyrebird had the broad central tail feathers of a female but the developing marked side feathers of a male, which will one day form the lyre shape. And since it was raising and fanning that tail a little, a young male it was.

  In subdued grey and brown, he walked daintily around the entire perimeter of the pond first, dipping a toe in the water every now and then, as if to test the temperature. He bent over as he did so, perhaps admiring his reflection in the pool.

  Finally he ventured in, widely splayed feet immersed first, then went in further, to the depth of his knees. He wriggled and splashed, dipping and ducking under, fluffing up his body and head feathers until he looked like a punk version of himself.

  Hopping out, he didn’t shake dry, but took off immediately up the hill. I could see another one, perhaps of his teenage mates, waiting under cover of the shrubs. Waiting to become as superb as his dad.

  What a treat to have in your front yard! I wouldn’t mind a few of those moving in as my neighbours. There must surely be males round here looking for new territory.

  Maybe I can add ‘Lyrebird’ to the Vacancies sign on the gate.

  SPIKY VISITOR

  Most mornings I pick fresh herbs, like lemon balm or peppermint, to spice up my breakfast herbal tea. My main herb garden is in a rockery just in front of the house. On this particular morning I had to go without, for that bed was occupied by an echidna, startling me with the sudden glimpse of wrongness of texture and colour, of bristling light-brown quills and dark-brown fur instead of green leaves.

  I tiptoed away to get the camera; when I returned, the echidna was still busily snuffling amongst the herbs. Crouching about a metre away, I clicked. It lifted its long, narrow, hairless snout at once, turning its head towards the sound, its small dark eyes apparently not seeing me. The snout was covered with dirt, as you’d expect, given what it does with it, but I could see the two nostrils on top, near the end. Echidnas don’t have a mouth, just a hole at the end of the very sensitive snout, or beak as it’s often called, from which they shoot a long sticky tongue to catch ants or termites. They must catch a lot of dirt at the same time.

  While their vision is not great, their sense of smell is excellent, their hearing very sensitive. So I froze until it went back to ant-hunting. I inched closer, hoping to get a shot when it looked up again. Which I did, but the click was too close for comfort and it immediately became an immobile ball of spines without a visible head. From past experience I knew its cautious nature would keep it like that for a long time, so I went back to my breakfast, herbless.

  When I came out half an hour later, I saw from the verandah that it had unrolled and was heading in my direction, with its funny sideways rocking gait. I grabbed the camera and knelt on the verandah steps. When it was sniffing at the bottom step, poised as if to climb up, its small face uplifted towards me, I clicked. It backed off and vanished under the steps at once.

  Five-year-old Jessie came later that day and I told her about the echidna being right here near the house; she’d never seen one, she said. A few hours later, as if to order, the echidna reappeared, waddling downhill across the short grass towards the bottom gate. We hurried ahead and crouched, waiting for it to emerge underneath the gate. As it did, she got a close-up look at the snout, eyes, fur and spines, and the short, clawed feet, the hind legs looking like they’d been stuck on backwards.

  Echidnas were now real to Jess. When I was her age, my world of stories was European, of woodlands and meadows, not bush and paddocks; of porcupines and hedgehogs, not echidnas.

  Once an echidna stayed in the yard long enough to get used to me being near as it went about its business, scratching itself, digging, sniffing. Echidnas stay on the move except when a female makes a burrow for the post-natal stage. In case mine decided it was safe to do that here, I kept an eye on her.

  An echidna lays a rubbery-shelled egg, the size of a grape, into her own pouch, which is really just a muscular fold on her stomach. The echidna isn’t related to the porcupine or the hedgehog at all, but to the platypus, the world’s only other egg-laying mammal, or monotreme.

  Like the rest of us mammals, the echidna is warm-blooded and suckles her young, but she
doesn’t have teats or nipples. She just sort of oozes milk through the pores of her belly skin for the baby to suck. The echidna still holds mystery for zoologists, and I’ve read varying opinions about the weaning and child-rearing process.

  When it’s still a naked, grey–blue, blind, earless, helpless little thing, perhaps only 75 millimetres long, the mother evicts it from her pouch and buries it in a nursery burrow she makes in the ground or under a log or debris. This is instigated when the baby starts to grow spines, which would be pretty uncomfortable on the mother’s tummy!

  Some say it emits a dreadful smell, which is its only protection. The mother returns every five days to feed it until it has grown quills and can head out to fend for itself. As that dependent stage goes on for about seven months, it’s not much of a childhood, is it? But whatever it does, given that it’s one of the oldest mammal species, it’s clearly successful.

  That echidna left the yard, but I know when one is visiting, because of the snout-shaped holes in the leaf litter and exposed dirt, and the bark pushed off posts as it forages for termites. Well, there was at least one time when I didn’t know.

  Long after the days of tent living and the canvas shower bag, my shower was still outdoors, next to the wall where the fuel stove’s hot-water pipes emerged. Its most sophisticated version had tin around it to chest height, and a roof. I stood on a rubber mat laid over a wooden pallet, and showered by torchlight. So it was always rather uncertain if I’d located all the creatures that had taken up residence since the last shower. Spiders in the folds of the face cloth being my main concern, a fierce and hopefully effective shaking was required before use.

  For peace of mind, I do this severe shaking routine indoors too, with any soft items, like towels or coats or dressing gowns, that have been hanging up for any time. If left hanging too long undisturbed, like over a season, they could harbour more than spiders; their folds could be sealed together with mud by wasps, who create mud honeycomb nests for their eggs, and seal in stunned living spiders for the first meal of the pink grubs that hatch. Not nice when inadvertently squashed against one’s person, or even knocked onto the floor and trodden on with bare feet.

  In the shower, I hadn’t thought of larger animals except for lizards or snakes. I always checked around, then hung the torch on a nail. I’d become complacent, which is a big mistake with wildlife.

  So I wasn’t prepared for the evening when, as hot water streamed over my shampooed head, a large dark thing bolted out from under the pallet on which I stood. By the thin peripheral light of the torch beam, both of us were shocked, but only one of us screamed.

  Dashing the soap from my eyes, I grabbed the torch and managed to spot the rear end of an echidna working its way out under the tin wall. I suppose other people in other places may have shared a shower with an echidna, but I’d say that time was a unique experience for both of us.

  I’ve only recently read that an echidna’s sex can be determined from the rear legs; while both males and females have enlarged second claws for scratching amongst their own spines—rather like those pointy ‘teasing combs’ used for 1960s bouffant hairdos—the male’s claw is greatly enlarged and very obvious.

  The next spiky visitor I see, I’ll put my sexing skills to the test, but what I’d really like to see is their mating. No one seems to know much about this, but it must be an awkward and prickly process. Like the wallabies, the lead-up can involve six males following one female, but for one to six weeks, in a ‘courtship train’, which is a sight in itself. I’d be content with that.

  Recently I saw an aspect of an echidna that I wished I hadn’t: its underside. Driving along the tar road one afternoon, I spotted it, unmistakably an upside-down echidna, shockingly, unnaturally, on its spiny back. It looked so terribly vulnerable, out there in the middle of the road, even though I knew it was probably past being able to be hurt.

  Somehow it is even worse to see an echidna roadkill than a wallaby one. Not only because I see them less often, but also because they are so unmistakably not dreaming but dead. Wallabies doze in all sorts of odd poses and places, but you’d never see a live echidna on its back. The spines are there to protect it from predators; it rolls into a tight spiky ball when threatened.

  Yet here it was, the soft belly helplessly exposed, the strong-clawed paws that once would have dug it to safety out-flung, stiff and useless. Neither its spikes nor its claws were any defence against the uncaring, unstopping driver of the vehicle that bowled it for six—and out.

  I pulled up, and seizing a coat in case the poor thing wasn’t dead and might claw me in its distress, I moved it off the road before it could get squashed by the next car. But it was very dead: cold and stiff.

  All the way home I thought about this tragedy. How could it have happened?

  It may have been an accident, if the person was driving too fast, since echidnas aren’t exactly speedy except when burrowing; they don’t leap out of nowhere onto the road, as wallabies do. That echidna can’t have realised the threat of the noise and vibrations that was rapidly approaching, or it would have rolled into a ball. Or did it, and was forced to unroll by death?

  Or did it hear the threat, and try to escape by hurrying across this unburrowable tar and gravel? But it wasn’t night; you couldn’t miss seeing and recognising an echidna on this stretch of road, flat and straight, making it visible from a long way off. So did this predator come up at high speed, see the moving target and aim for it? Not so different from shooting animals for sport, some might say.

  I say murder, hit and run at best, yet no one will be punished for this.

  HORSE DILEMMAS

  My daughter keeps her horses up here because she lives in town. Lucy’s always had horses here, and when her babies are older she might find time to ride again.

  In the meantime they have become a problem. I’ve already complained about the pesky little Shari, but in the last few years, since I wrote about them in The Woman on the Mountain, the two geldings, Sabbath and Zack, have aged enough to need supplementary feeding; they cannot keep in good condition despite all the green grass and seeding tussocks on the 30 or so acres of their fenced area. We had them checked for parasites, poor teeth and liver damage, but in the end the vet decided it was due to their inappropriate breeding.

  They simply aren’t Mountain horses.

  Over our three decades here, other, more suitably bred horses were tougher, never needing extra feeding, even in winter. Grain or hay was kept only as a treat or as bribery in catching them. Lucy’s first horse, her beloved buckskin pony, Jess, thrived on the paddocks here for sixteen years and died of old age.

  I’d always said I did not want domestic animals such as chooks or milking cows, because it would restrict my time away, tie me down, and it’s too remote to ask anyone to come and feed them. Dogs and cats are out because they’d harass, hunt, wound or kill the animals who are the primary inhabitants of this wildlife refuge. But the horses seemed to manage on their own, with Lucy coming as needed to worm them and trim their feet, which are unshod.

  Originally I hadn’t considered issues like the damage hard-hoofed large animals do to the ground, and I’ve justified their continued presence by their role in fire hazard reduction because they eat the flammable blady grass. Which is still true, but I wonder if it’s worth it, as now I feel guilty if I’m away for a few days, let alone a whole week.

  Each morning, from their positions along the fence line, with a good view of the verandah, they start neighing for breakfast from first light if they spot me, so I have to sneak out to the toilet or shower. The house yard is the easiest place to feed them twice daily, letting them graze my kikuyu ‘lawn’ menace in between.

  Of course they eat more than the kikuyu, but not every day, since they know that would cruel their chances of coming in at all. No, they do it erratically in both timing and choice: one day Sabbath will fancy a munch of citrus leaves, just enough to keep the tree bonsai’d, and then be good for weeks; or Zack a
mouthful or two of Chinese Star Jasmine, just enough to wrench it off the support and set it back a season, and then ignore it.

  This may not be as perverse as it strikes me; I was told that horses can tell when the plants have a mineral they need, or when the sap is rising—or something else that doesn’t excuse them in my books. They know very well what’s against the rules of entering these premises, because only the guilty one starts slinking off when my yell of indignation is heard. The other looks smug and gets on with eating imported grass.

  But when it’s raining, I can’t let them in because they make the ground too boggy. I don Driza-Bone, hat and gumboots, grit my teeth and do my duty.

  It will be boggy and slippery outside the fence, and getting amongst three pushy horses out there is neither appealing nor safe, so I lower the rubber buckets over the fence on my hoe: two big ones and a small token one for Shari. Then I venture gingerly out while they’re all busy, sneak a halter on Shari and tie her up, otherwise she will stick her head in Sabbath’s bucket and not remove it, even to take turns, until it’s empty. He’s the biggest horse but he can’t budge the fat little piglet.

  If displaced, he’ll move over to Zack’s bucket and try to pull it away by seizing the rim in his teeth. As Zack is the boss, theoretically, this is not allowed, so then there’s a flurry of nipping and backing up and flying hooves and skidding in mud and the last of the feed spilling.

  It’s all much easier if Shari’s not about, off feeding somewhere illegal, like in my regeneration area or out along the track, on the wrong side of the fences that are supposed to keep horses out.

  This country will support only a tougher type of horse, bred for the bush, like stock horses; not part-Arabs or thoroughbreds, bred to be spoilt by or at least part-dependent on man. The feed costs a fortune! We share the expense, and when Lucy gets her dream of a few acres near town, she will take the horses and care for them and maybe her three daughters can learn to ride on the old fellows. Shari will be kept busy finding new ways of causing havoc.