by Sharyn Munro
I then read that the average litter size is five, but they play in pairs. She’d had seven, so my shed must be a good breeding place.
And the quoll pairs were very playful, taking turns to keep me awake at night with their thumpings and crashings, chasing each other over my tin roof and along the windowsills. At such times I would grit my teeth and remind myself that all kids must grow up and leave home sometime.
But having seen the result of a foray beyond the netting, I wished she could keep them in the playpen forever. Or that I could net the whole property. Quolls can climb, dogs can’t.
LOST KOALAS
Since the 2002 fires, which reduced my green 65 hectares to stark monotones of black and white, I have seen no koalas on my ridge. Nor, more significantly, have I heard one at night, as I often used to.
There is no mistaking the call of a male koala, and it is such a deep, loud bellow that once you hear it you’ll never again think of this animal as cute and cuddly. It is a cross between the roaring of a lion, the grunting of a pig and the growling of a bear. Not that the koala is a bear; it’s the sole representative of its unique family.
Koalas are solitary animals, coming together only to mate, and over the years I had only seen a koala here on perhaps five or six occasions, although hearing one every year.
The first time we saw one was in early 1979. It was daytime, and five-year-old Sam spotted an unusual animal bounding up the track. ‘Look! A sheep!’ he said, pointing at the fat and woolly grey creature ahead. When it began to climb a small tree, and he could see its broad fluffy ears and its long black pad of a nose, he knew what it was, but its behind had indeed looked more like that of a tail-less sheep than of our national icon. Our first koala climbed effortlessly to a fork of the trunk, wedged itself, turned and peered down at us with surprised currant eyes. Perhaps we were its first humans.
They can climb and cling so well not only because of their sizeable curved claws, but because their hands and feet are designed to encircle branches. Just as our thumb is ‘opposed’ to our fingers and can touch them, their first two fingers are opposed to the other three, and the first toe is opposed to the other four. Koalas are our only tree-climbing mammal without a tail to help them, so I probably should feel more kinship with them!
Once when I was repairing an old fence, a visitor accompanying me was asking whether I saw koalas much. ‘No,’ I’d replied as I re-banged in a spike, ‘although this is the sort of tree they’d like. But you can’t look up when you’re bushwalking in this country or you’d break a leg.’ To demonstrate, I looked up to the top of the tree in front of me—and there was a hefty koala, looking down with great indignation, no doubt having been woken by all my banging.
Last year I saw a koala in the adjoining national park, on the next ridge where those fires did not reach. This one looked healthy, and was gadding about in bright morning daylight instead of sleeping. The fur of its rump was almost yellow in colour. So I know they are still around in these mountains, and can only hope they breed up enough to reclaim my place as new territory, for the young ones must move away when about eighteen months old to make their own way in the world.
In any given area koalas feed on only a few species of eucalypts; here one of their preferred trees might be the blue gums, of which there are plenty. To process the large amount of leaves eaten daily, I read that a koala has an extraordinarily long caecum, the pouch between the small and large intestines. At about 2 metres long, even compared to that of other herbivores like rabbits or horses, it’s huge.
I had to look up the word ‘caecum’, and it really just means ‘blind’, in the sense of a blind alley, a dead end. So koalas have a long blind alley, whereas we just have a sort of bay window in our intestinal pathway. You’ll locate it better if I tell you that ours is what the appendix tags on to, another dead end which has evolved to be so small that its proper name is the ‘vermiform’ appendix—that means wormlike!
We don’t eat as many raw greens as our ancestors did, when the appendix wasn’t just a vestigial organ, a small nonfunctioning remnant, a mere vestige of one that was once necessary. (I confess I checked ‘vestigial’ when I looked up ‘vermiform’; I love dictionaries!) Now its only purpose seems to be to become blocked, get inflamed, cause the pain of appendicitis, require removal and hence stress out young ladies who wear very skimpy bikinis. We must be evolving, as some people are born without one at all.
In poorer countries, less subject to marketing, with less access to takeaways and processed food, and thus where people still eat more fresh plant material and fibre—although not gum leaves—appendectomies are rare and the appendix is still considered to have a purpose. So are we in the West evolving backwards?
The koala could teach us a few things about surviving on a restricted diet, as not many animals have so narrow a menu. Baby koalas have to be specifically prepared for this otherwise indigestible gum tree product diet. For seven months the usually lone offspring stays cosily milk-fed, developing in the pouch. Then it enjoys the good life, with free transport on Mum’s back and free food of milk and leaves for the next five months, until weaned at twelve months.
Apart from their super caecum, koalas need certain bacteria to digest so much cellulose, plant fibre. The mother introduces the necessary bacteria to the intestines of her young one by also feeding it a special soft green faecal substance she produces from her anus—pre-digested leaf pap. This unusual and effective process might spoil some tourists’ romanticised image of koalas, but after all, a koala’s normal droppings are just processed leaves, aren’t they?
I think it’s an extraordinary example of super-adaptation. Living here, I often find myself shaking my head: evolution, God—I don’t know to whom the credit is due, but I know it’s truly amazing and we’re the dumbest of the lot if we think we know even half of how it works. And that’s despite centuries of killing and cutting up creatures to try to find out.
Watch, and wonder, is a better way.
But to do that with koalas, I need them back here. In the mating season, apart from the savage sounds they make, males rub against tree trunks, marking them with their scent from a gland on their chests, to warn off other males. So I ought to be able to spot such rubbings.
I’ll be on the alert, looking and listening this year. Maybe I need to hang a sign on the gate: ‘Vacancies. Koalas wanted. Apply within.’
THE NIGHT MONSTER
Koalas aren’t the only roaring beasties in the bush. When we first lived here, the plan was for my husband to be away for work at uni several days a week, staying overnight, while the kids and I stayed here alone, with no phone, no car, no human neighbours.
In my blithe new-chum way, I wasn’t worried and I didn’t expect to be scared. Yet I was, the very first night he was away...
I was awoken by the most fearsome noise I had ever heard in real life. It seemed to be inches from my ear, just the other side of the fragile canvas wall of the tent. I knew there were no savage man-eating animals in the Australian bush, no bears, no tigers, and yet the sound was as if both of those had bred with a rabid dog to produce this offspring. Such a noise had to be accompanied by bared, sharp teeth. One slash of a claw and my children and I would be exposed to this monster of the night!
Very scared, but acting the grown-up, I grabbed the torch and rushed to unzip the tent door to the tiny annexe of mosquito netting, where we had stored tools and the kero fridge. Here I seized a hammer as a defending weapon on my way to unzip the outer netting door.
But zips are too slow and noisy to surprise an enemy, and the sounds had stopped long before I emerged into the darkness. The torch beam revealed nothing but the gum tree, looming, and the canvas shower bag, swinging. I zipped my way back to bed and lay in trepidation until nearly dawn. The kids woke me shortly after.
Later that day I lit the fire and balanced the billies on the old fridge rack, itself balanced on four rocks, that formed our ‘stove’, to boil water for the kids’ shower.
We had four billies made from large fruit juice tins, with fencing-wire handles. At this early stage water for everything had to be carted in buckets up the steep slope from the spring. My legs soon became stronger, my back straighter, and I think my arms grew longer with the weight of the buckets!
From a fairly horizontal branch of the grey gum beside the tent we’d erected a pulley system for the canvas shower bag, which had a luxuriously adjustable copper rose. Four thin poles supported hessian modesty panels that still allowed great views to the far mountains, and bush rocks prevented muddy feet. However, my 30-something daughter would now prefer I hadn’t taken certain photos which show that the modesty panels began too high up to cover her three-year-old bottom.
I let down the bag to fill it—a bucket of cold water and two billies of hot water gave a surprisingly long and satisfying shower. I tipped it up to empty out any leaves first. Instead, a handful of black pellets fell to the rock floor.
At that stage I was unfamiliar with the various calling cards of my neighbours, so I couldn’t say who’d left these. Next night, and most nights afterwards, the night monster came to loudly mark its territory, wake us up, walk along the branch of the grey gum, shit in the shower bag, and depart. ‘Take that!’
On his return, my husband, who’d grown up in a leafy Newcastle suburb, had known the noise immediately and had laughed at my terrified descriptions. It was ‘only’ a possum, an all-too-common brushtail. On the farm and orchard where I grew up we’d had a dog, and no trees except two tall fir trees near the house, so I’d never heard or seen a possum. As you now know, I wish I could have stayed in that blissful state!
After a short time of our tent living, the night monster possum began including us on his route earlier in the evening, so he too could sample the dinner. The tent being tiny, we did everything outdoors except sleeping. Any dish placed on the ground or on the washing-up stand would be lumbered up to with his full-nappy gait, inspected, and usually cleaned up. Rice was very popular. No matter if the dish happened to be beside our feet; we were irrelevant. After all, he was here first. We didn’t mind because he then ceased to wake us in the middle of the night, and no longer felt the need to mark his territory in our shower bag.
The charm of possums faded for me at the same rate as their tastes developed for my garden plants, vegetables and fruit trees. In retrospect, it’s surprising how long that took.
NIGHT TIME IS OUR TIME
In the late 1990s, one moonless winter night that I won’t forget easily, I was driven outdoors to head up the hill to our pit toilet. I’d hardly left the cabin steps when I heard harsh screaming coming from roughly that direction. I could only shine the torch up there in fits and starts, because I needed to illuminate where I was walking, to avoid falling up the rough steps cut into the bank.
Reaching the track, I stopped and flicked the torch beam about, to see what was making those noises. I wasn’t at all sure anymore if I really wanted to keep going towards the toilet.
On a low branch of the spreading white mahogany tree, one large light-coloured bird was perched, flapping big wings and screaming, while a similarly sized bird was frantically flapping in mid air just below it, apparently attacking. Between the two of them the racket was loud and sounded aggressive, but I knew, from koalas for example, that this could be a wrong, human-centric impression.
Were they fighting—over disputed territory, a caught dinner—or were they mating? I started to move closer, to try to identify the birds and the cause of all the commotion. Used to shy nocturnal creatures like possums, I shone the torch directly on them. Big mistake.
Sudden silence as their faces turned towards this source of interruption. A brief meeting with their round eyes, before a great pale rush of wings, as the one on the branch took off and flew straight at me and the torch. I screamed, ducked, and fell over, dropping the torch.
Thinking they were about to attack me, I covered my head with my arms and yelled for my partner, who was cosily oblivious inside the cabin. I’d seen that Hitchcock film, The Birds! But they didn’t attack; having vanquished me at one swoop, they disappeared into the blackness. Just as well, for my partner remained oblivious—until I burst in the door, a babbling, shaking wreck who, unable to find the torch again, had fallen over twice as she stumbled downhill in the dark.
Having later tried to identify them, I think they may have been Barking Owls, who don’t have the iconic owl face mask, and are said to have growls and ‘tremulous screams’ amongst their repertoire. It happened so swiftly that I couldn’t be sure, but these owls are sometimes called the ‘screaming-woman bird’.
Whatever they were, their message was clear: ‘Mind your own business and stay inside at night. That’s our time!’
Interestingly, I read that Barking Owls prey on magpies. Since I’ve always considered magpies the bosses of the bird world here, at least in daytime, I can’t imagine they’d be easy pickings; they wouldn’t give up without a fight. Maybe the Barking Owls’ screaming frightens them out of their wits—and nests?
My usual experiences with owls are limited to a ‘mopoke’ call heard in the night or a regurgitated pellet of undigested food found on the verandah railing. I’ve heard the ‘mo-poke’ all my life: on the farm where I grew up, when we just called it a mopoke, and here, where I learnt that it’s the call of the Boobook Owl.
We have Powerful Owls here too, and apparently Masked Owls and Sooty Owls, which I haven’t seen, but none of them say ‘Tu-whit-tuwhoo’ as storybook owls do. I have no idea how owls came to be associated with solemnity and wisdom, unless it’s their large staring eyes and surrounds, vaguely resembling spectacles?
The contrast between Pooh Bear’s gentle and scholarly friend, Owl, and my wild night creatures couldn’t be greater. Can you imagine Owl screaming at anyone?
Or how about Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’? Had he seen and heard an owl like mine, it would surely never have given rise to an image of owlish elopement in ‘a beautiful pea green boat’ with a feline lover, and certainly not of singing to her, ‘small guitar’ accompaniment or not. ‘Tremulous screams’ in tremolo?
I have loved that poem since I learnt it by heart at about eight years old, when I was moved to do a large picture in poster paints of the postnuptial couple, as ‘hand in hand on the edge of the sand they danced by the light of the moon’. I can still remember the artistic problems posed by the moonlight on the water; the illustration urge must have been present from an early age.
I knew the poem was bit crazy, wordwise—I mean, eating ‘mince and slices of quince’ with a ‘runcible’ spoon?—and I was aware then that this was part of its charm for me. That it was entirely fanciful was obvious even to my book-fed romantic self, but it truly never occurred to me that if an owl waxed lyrical about Pussy’s charms, it would be for her qualities as flesh for supper rather than as a prospective wife; that any owl as big as a cat would kill and eat it if it could.
What did I think owls ate? I probably tried not to, same as I was trying not to think about the origin of the lamb chops Mum served up for tea; mince was less evocative. Mince, quince—I often preferred the world of words to the real one.
I am now more realistic and accepting of the rules of survival of the wild natural world; I am not often able to be so with the wider human world, because the rules are wrong. Greed is not natural.
SKY LORDS
A pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles lord it over these mountains, often accompanied by a third, presumably their young one. They circle overhead on the air currents, barely moving a wing. At times so high as to be mere floating specks, at others low enough for me to see their pale hooked beaks and the colours on their plumage; at heights in between, dark silhouettes of the distinctive wedge-shaped tail and the up-curved swoop of wings.
They seem to be the natural kings of the upper sky, effortlessly surfing the invisible currents, crossing from ridge to ridge, watching the clearings in the valleys far below for a rabbit or other s
mall mammal. Their main mode of flight is thus elegantly languid, appearing to be almost lazy, yet it is absolutely economical, perfectly poised, ready to bundle themselves into an aerodynamic lightning bolt to hurtle earthwards after the prey detected by their extraordinary eyesight.
That eyesight is equivalent to mine—if I was using binoculars with 20 times magnification power!
Elaborate aerobatics are also used as foreplay, to impress the female partner. She plays hard to get, feigns nonchalance, now and then surfing the air currents on her back to briefly ‘hold hands’, link claws, with her slightly smaller suitor. When she gives in, her mate helps repair whichever of their several nests they have decided to use that year. She often has two young hatch, but usually only one survives to adulthood—by killing its sibling. So we shouldn’t complain about pushy brothers or sisters; at least they didn’t push us right out of a (probably very high) nest.
For years I didn’t, or couldn’t, hear their plaintive calls, so didn’t know they spoke, but perhaps it took me a few years here to rid my ears and head of the ingrained city-noise and city-ness. Their call doesn’t fit the image of a fierce and mighty hunter. My bird book describes it as ‘pseet-you, pseet-you’; it’s a very thin piping. When I first connected it to them I thought one must have been hurt, somewhere in the trees below me, and the other was fretting. Perhaps when I hear it a lot it is actually a young one? Unbecoming as it is, toddler eagles might be whingers too.
Being so regal, you’d think they’d be removed from all the noise and squabble down here, but if they are the lords of the upper sky, the magpies have a clear opinion of where their dominion ends, and 6 metres above the treetops is far too close to the border.