White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  Even smaller although less vulnerable is the Dainty Treefrog (Litoria gracilenta), which overwinters in the canopy. We often find this frog, with its limbs drawn under it and its eyes closed, at the base of the spadix of the Cunjevoi Flower, sleeping off a meal of pollen weevils. I was once scanning the forest edge for birds when the glasses picked up a fringed flower of Trichosanthes subvelutina. Inside it, glowing in the early morning sunlight like a chip of polished jade, I could clearly see a Dainty Treefrog. We have many more frogs, tusked frogs, pouched frogs, rocket frogs, froglets, toadlets, thousands of frogs. We also have the odd cane toad. The workforce kill them outright, by cutting them up the middle and turning them inside out, which means the birds can make a meal of them, a technique we learnt from the birds in question. I, being more squeamish, euthanase any toad I find by putting it in the refrigerator and then in the freezer.

  The rainforest has fewer lizard species than you will find in other types of habitat, but that’s not to say that we don’t have at least as many lizards as we have frogs. I have never found our most famous lizard, the Leaf-tailed Gecko (Saltuarius swaini), though everyone else seems to have. Herpetologists appear to have decided that the ‘ii’ ending for the honorific epithet was otiose, and removed the second ‘i’, otherwise the skink named for Tasmanian herpetologist Roy Swain would be called Saltuarius swainii. Some authorities insist on the correct Latin; others don’t. If I think botany is a mare’s nest, herpetology is worse.

  At Cave Creek there are lots of tiny skinks; one, Calyptotis scutirostrum, five centimetres from snout to vent, which rejoices in the common name of ‘Scute-snouted Skink’, referring to the bony plate between its eyes, lays eggs. All our other lizard species, except the monitors, are live-bearing. Eulamprus martini grows to 7.5 centimetres or so, if it’s lucky; E. tenuis grows bigger still, E. murrayi bigger than that and E. quoyii and E. tryoni about the same. I am sorry to have to admit that I can’t always tell them apart, all of them being spangled and speckled in similar ways. Moreover they are nearly always running away, and I don’t like to grab at them in case they shed their tails. One skink I can tell from the others because it is bigger and less patterned is the Eastern Crevice Skink, Egernia mcpheei. Another is the shiny black Land Mullet, largest of our skinks, thirty centimetres from snout to vent when full-grown. Most people know it as Egernia major; it recently underwent a long overdue name change to Bellatorias major. That name was first published in 1984 by Wells and Wellington, but it was not used until it was ‘resurrected’ in 2008. Thereby hangs an astonishing tale.

  In the mid-1980s Richard Wells, who had been working as a collector for several Australian museums, decided ‘that many of the specimens he had provided had simply been ignored by qualified professionals who were comfortably polishing their chairs while producing little if anything of scientific value’ (Williams, D., et al., 926). It seemed to Wells that the Australian herpetological establishment was dragging its heels when it came to rationalising reptile and amphibian taxa. He joined forces with Cliff Ross Wellington and together they analysed all the available data and came to their own conclusions, which involved renaming scores of species. To publish the new names they set up a journal which they called The Australian Journal of Herpetology, in the first and only number of which they published ‘A Synopsis of the Class Reptilia’, and its Supplement, ‘A Classification of the Amphibia and Reptilia of Australia’. The result was uproar. Wells and Wellington were accused of having broken the rules; their descriptions were too brief, and there was no way they could have examined the type material for so many species. A serious attempt – recorded as Case 2531 in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature for 1987 – was made to ban their articles and jettison their names.

  Not all the species named by Wells and Wellington were good, but even those that were were not adopted. For years there was resistance; herpetologists frequently referred to species named by Wells and Wellington as undescribed, and continued to use names which they knew were invalid rather than recognise the authority of Wells and Wellington. Eventually, and patchily, common sense has begun to prevail (e.g., Hoser). Wells is still around, still working with reptiles, and profoundly uninterested in public – or academic – recognition. As he is apt to say: ‘Universities are not really places where you learn about animals.’ Wellington now works for the Central Directorate Threatened Species Unit of the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service.

  My favourites among the Cave Creek lizardry are the Eastern Water Dragons (Physignathus lesueuri lesueuri) that have come into their own since we reforested the headland above the creek. In warmer weather they can be found basking on the causeway and all the way up the steep track to the gate. As the car creeps by they lift their heads and look directly into my eyes, holding my gaze for a second or two before leaping down the rocks. They are the more remarkable because a fossil dragon from the Miocene recently found at Riversleigh is almost identical. The dragons are another reason for keeping the CCRRS gate locked. If deliveries are on the way we have to scare the dragons off before the truck comes in, because not everybody drives as slowly as I do. (Every day, on the main road, you will see dead and dying dragons.) Another dragon, the Angle-headed Dragon (Hypsilurus spinipes) forages in the canopy, where it feeds on the invertebrates that defoliate the big stingers.

  Most people would be more impressed by the CCRRS Lace Monitors (Varanus varius) of which there are many. These are largely diurnal, so we see them quite often but they almost always run off, except when they are in courtship mode, when nothing seems to faze them. One warm afternoon in an otherwise very wet spring I was weeding a patch of Aneilema when I realised that I was not alone. A full-grown Lace Monitor, a good seven feet long, had moved up close beside me. At first I thought he was just basking in the sun, and then I saw the head of the female, less than half his size, emerging under his foreleg. By inserting his tail under hers, the male was manoeuvring one of his hemipenes into her vagina. He would thrust rhythmically for five minutes or so, and then she would slip out from under him. I expected her to run away but she stayed still as he rested, waiting for him to move towards her again. As he slid his body over hers, he would touch her gently all over the head and neck with his forked tongue, almost as if kissing her, before beginning to slide his tail under hers. I removed myself discreetly and ran to set up the video camera, not knowing how often this behaviour had been observed in the wild. (The video can be seen on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.) The lizards continued to perform for a very long time, until the sun slipped behind the trees and the ground began to cool. The truly disturbing thing about the video is that the female is so very much smaller than the male that the whole process looks unnatural, but every time I have seen these big goannas in mating mode, when they usually open their mouths, which are upholstered in knicker-pink satin, and roar hoarsely at me to make me go away, the female has been very, very much smaller. This extreme sexual dimorphism has not been described, let alone explained, as far as I know. (My own attempt can be found in the Prologue, above.)

  A few days later I was walking in a five-year-old planting, marvelling at how soon equilibrium had been established in it, when I heard a large Lace Monitor moving close by and then another, and another. Altogether I counted five. They could not have been less concerned at my presence. They appeared to be following each other’s pheromonal trails, tasting the air with their tongues. I walked at a slow but steady pace, as they circled round me. I was hoping I might see their ritual fighting, for they seemed to be all males, but dusk threw its blanket over us, and I had to make my way back to the house too soon to witness the outcome. As usual I was left marvelling at how little we know of the behaviour of our rainforest species. Those same Lace Monitors eat the corpses of all the animals that meet their death in the forest, bones, hair, eyes, teeth and all. Because they are egg eaters they are the great enemies of the Brush-turkeys, and many carry scars where the turkeys have defended their mounds with beak and claw.


  The snakes we see most often, that is to say almost every day, are pythons, commonly called Carpet Snakes. I can still remember the first time I met one. I was walking the forest edge track with Garry, when he gently touched my arm. In front of me a big beautiful bronze and gold serpent was moving almost imperceptibly up the bank and out of our way. I had the distinct feeling that Garry expected me to shriek and flee. I was more likely to fall on my knees before such a beautiful creature. Since then I have seen hundreds of pythons at Cave Creek, greeny-goldy ones, black and grey ones, mahogany and ivory ones, some patterned with black and blood red, a dozen different colourways at least, fat ones, thin ones, torpid ones, wounded ones, dead ones. I was prowling another part of the forest track one afternoon when I became aware that in the forest ahead of me a python had reared up six feet or so off the ground, propping itself on its huge body as it felt for a branch. A stout branch found, it wrapped its neck around it and then hauled the supporting body up loop by loop, from one branch to another and then another, until it had disappeared into the canopy.

  Pythons are ambush feeders; they coil themselves up at the side of a track used by warm-blooded creatures and lie there for days at a time, only moving to have a bit of a stretch or to soak up the odd ray if sunlight touches the forest floor. I have had four at a time within feet of the house for weeks on end. One very wet day I was squelching through a planting when I almost trod on the head of a big python that was hiding in a flooded tractor wheel-rut with just its nostrils above the surface of the water. Charlie Booth, who used to grow plants for us, told me he had never seen so many pythons anywhere. Python skins hang like pennants all around the house. I have had a python sliding through the louvres of the bedroom, feeling towards the warmth of my body, his neck concertinaed for the strike. I have seen another python hunting for a way of getting into the house, sliding along the windowsills, following the heat of the marsupial mice snoring in the wall cavity.

  I love the Cave Creek pythons at least as much as I have ever loved a cat or dog. I am ashamed that so many of my countrymen think that it is fine to kill Carpet Snakes because they eat domestic fowls. They eat many more rats than fowls, but still people think it appropriate to chop at them with rakes and spades or blow their heads off with shotguns.

  Pythons are almost deaf and almost blind, and yet they are our top predators. They detect warm-blooded prey through heat-sensitive pits along their lips. How they detect cold-blooded prey like frogs is less obvious, though it has been suggested they can sense sound and movement through the bones of their skulls. The Cave Creek pythons are supposed to be Morelia spilota mcdowelli, the Coastal Carpet Python, identified as a species (M. mcdowelli) by Wells and Wellington and then relegated to a subspecies in 1994 by Dave and Tracy Barker, all of which suggests that our most intimate animal associate is not very well understood by even herpetologists and python breeders. Pythons described as separate species are capable of breeding with each other, which is a pretty good indicator that the species are not distinct. Morelia spilota mcdowelli is supposed to be ‘irascible’, which reared in captivity it may well be. I don’t find the wild ones irascible in the least. I have all but tripped over them, and they have simply flowed quietly away. I can sit by them reading and they go on dozing, occasionally stretching themselves and rearranging their coils. They happily coexist with dozens of other pythons, their home ranges not so much overlapping as coinciding.

  The key to python personality is energy conservation. Because they are cold-blooded, they can shut down their energy requirements to near zero, by keeping still. They take small prey like frogs and large prey like pademelons that may weigh up to 60 per cent of their body weight; in both cases they do it with minimal exertion. By following each other’s scent trails male pythons form ‘breeding aggregations with several males attending a single female’. In the late winter of 2011 I had the opportunity to watch this process, as three male pythons waited patiently for a sign of recognition from the huge dark pythoness I call Jessye. One afternoon two of them began mock fighting to impress her, winding their tails together, rearing up, each trying to push the other to the ground. Then Jessye disappeared and they were left grieving.

  Jessye may not have been ready to breed in 2011. The generation and laying of up to thirty eggs greatly depletes a python’s stores of fat and energy; during the ten- to fifteen-week incubation period she has to keep the eggs at a constant temperature, which she does by shivering, which uses up more of her calories. When the young hatch they go their separate ways, leaving the weakened mother python to recover as best she can. During this period she is extremely vulnerable to a variety of predators and diseases. In 2012 Jessye was courted again by an assortment of younger males; she also attracted a massive grey and gold male python and this time she capitulated. They were together for ten days or more as other snakes came and went, often coiling on top of them and occasionally mating with Jessye. This highly social period persisted for many weeks. The usual notion, that pythons are solitary animals by nature with little or no social interaction, seems completely wrong.

  Years ago, Jane and I and a CCRRS worker were clambering through the steep forest, following the boundary which, on the principle of good fences making good neighbours, I had just had very expensively surveyed. I was, as usual, bringing up the rear, so I got the best view of the very large snake that was doing its best to get out of our way. As it slid past at eye-level its tail touched my sister’s shoulder. ‘Oh, a python,’ she said. But it wasn’t. When it came towards me I could see clearly that there were no heat pits along its underlip. I would have said that it was a tiger snake, but I’d never seen one anywhere near that big. The snake that flowed past me was nearly two metres long, and the colour of wet sand, with shadow bands of darker brown. It looked as if it might try constriction to immobilise its prey, but it wasn’t a constrictor. Its scales were too big, and the wrong pattern and there weren’t enough of them. I hunted for it on line and in reptile books, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Nobody had described a tiger snake of such a size – until I read, in Gresty’s account of the Numinbah Valley in the early twentieth century, about ‘an uncommon member of the reptilian fauna . . . the giant Tiger Snake or Banded Broadhead, said to attain a length of ten feet. The valley Aborigines had an exaggerated fear of the admittedly venomous reptile, known to them as “Boggul” . . . full grown specimens are now seen on extremely rare occasions.’(58) So lucky me. And lucky the three of us. If any of us had had the bad luck to step on the snake the outcome could have been very different. As it is my sister continues to insist that the snake whose tail brushed her shoulder was a python. The confusion is inspissated by the fact that until well into the twentieth century there was a snake known to naturalists as Hoplocephalus curtus, and to the common folk as the Brown-banded Snake. The genus Hoplocephalus includes all the Australian broadheads, to which many people assumed the tiger snakes belonged. The Tiger Snake genus was variously called Naja, then Alecto, and in 1867 Hoplocephalus; it seems to have become Notechis in 1948 (Glauert). As far as I can tell the possibility that the early herpetologists were talking about two different snake species has not been dispelled.

  Earlier observers had great difficulty distinguishing the Brown-banded Snake from a Carpet Snake. In 1873, the tiger snake is described in The Queenslander as the one ‘which resembles in appearance the carpet snake of Queensland’ (19 July); in 1874 another tells us that it is to be ‘known by its unmistakable stripes’ (Q, 26 December, 273). In May 1879 another observer refers to the tiger snake as ‘our brown banded snake’ (Q, 10 May, 588), and ‘The Naturalist’ writing in The Queenslander in 1879 tells a cautionary tale of this ‘the most vicious and venomous of the serpent tribe’:

  Not long ago I came across a young man who had deliberately picked up a snake; and on my asking him what he was doing he said, ‘Oh this wouldn’t hurt a baby; why it’s the prettiest carpet snake that ever I saw.’ And yet the foolish fellow was dangling a tig
er snake, holding it tightly round the neck . . . and no sooner did he drop it than it seized him by the calf of the leg. (Q, 19 April, 500)

  Seizing the young man by the calf of the leg is a reaction more typical of a carpet snake than any venomous snake. A tiger snake would have either struck or sprung away. The Englishman who wrote under the pseudonym ‘George Carrington’ remarked in 1871: ‘There is a great variety and number of poisonous and deadly snakes in Queensland, yet cases of snakebite are rare, for the reptiles invariably try to escape, and do not bite, except in self-defence.’ Nevertheless TV naturalists who persecute animals for the entertainment of couch-potatoes insist that tiger snakes are aggressive, and not simply towards each other, but towards humans. Certainly the terrified snakes that wildlife warriors manhandle do try very hard to bite them, but this behaviour can hardly be said to amount to aggression. Snakes don’t come hunting us. Give them a chance to get out of the way and they will.

  The next most commonly seen snake at Cave Creek is the good old Red-bellied Black, Pseudechis porphyriacus, possibly the commonest snake in Australia, though few places could harbour as many as we do. According to Rhianna Blackthorn of WIRES Northern Rivers, in every square kilometre of this region there are around three hundred Red-bellied Black Snakes. According to John Drake, writing in The Argus in 1952, the Red-bellied Black ‘has a sunny, placid nature which causes it to bite only when it is cornered or attacked’. Sunny-natured they may be, but our Red-bellied Blacks have a habit of getting themselves into tight corners, where we are likely to come into contact with them by accident, between empty tubes stacked in the nursery perhaps, or hidden in plant trays or asleep in mulch piles. So far no one has been bitten, but it has been a near thing once or twice.