Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  I used to dream of Haflingers, the blond-maned Austrian horses that are beautiful in appearance and temperament, and could double as carriage horses when the world’s oil runs out or gets too expensive. That was considered an extremist idea, back in the 1970s: it’s looking very realistic now, isn’t it? But then, just a few years ago, man-made global warming was generally placed in the same crazy category. My ‘greenie’ ideas are almost mainstream now that the chickens are flying home to roost, tragically even faster than we’d ever predicted.

  But Haflingers are expensive, and soft-hoofed animals that ate blady grass would be better, if such a creature exists. Alpacas have been suggested, but I suspect they’d need netting fences to hold them. And being smaller, they might be susceptible to the paralysis ticks we have here in abundance. There’d surely be an attendant problem: there always is, but we don’t always know its nature in advance.

  Whatever the solution, I know that responsibilities come with keeping domestic animals of any sort. We have bred them to be dependent, taken them generations and continents away from their original ecosystem of survival.

  But some, like dogs and cats, survive only too well in our native environments when their owners lose control of them, or choose to let them loose: they turn feral; breed bigger, fiercer offspring; and destroy the native fauna, the animals that belong there and that have no designed mechanism of defence against these alien creatures. Others, like rabbits, goats, wild pigs and deer, destroy the vegetation, and thus often the native animals that depend on it for habitat and food.

  If we want to use animals, be it for producing food, mowing grass or keeping us company, we have to accept those responsibilities.

  It’s why I prefer the wild animals. They inhabit and run their own world independently in a sustainable balance, feed themselves, sort out their own squabbles, cost me nothing—and they let me live alongside them, hopefully causing no harm.

  The only problem is that they don’t eat blady grass!

  MASTER OF ART

  We humans think we’re pretty clever, that we are the highest of the animals, often citing our degree of culture, our appreciation of the arts, as the justification.

  But when you look at nature, there are so-called minor creatures who embody in their very selves several of the artistic techniques or ‘movements’ we thought we invented. There are Day-Glo lizards, Rococo frogs, the Surrealist platypus, the Art Nouveau lyrebird, the Pointillist goanna—to name but a few.

  The stick insect is the epitome of trompe l’oeil, a term used in the decorative arts that literally means ‘deception of the eye’, a technique giving a convincing illusion of reality. You may have seen this used as a painting on a blank wall, creating a fake window or door with a view beyond.

  Stick insects are often missed because of their intricate deceptive details. I only spotted this one because it had alighted, or fallen, onto the back of the truck, probably overnight when it was climbing the nearby tree. My brain wasn’t deceived here because the fake stick was out of place against flat metal. Once carefully relocated with a real stick to a young birch tree, silhouetted, it would have easily deceived a fresh eye.

  Closer inspection showed tiny bumps, as if a twig had snapped off here and there, and shades and patterns of bark-like colour. As delicate an art as any miniaturist’s, as clever as any sculptor’s, as fanciful an extension of natural forms as any Art Nouveau practitioner—or perhaps Art Deco, it being more geometric of line. The folded wings I could see might cover softer bigger wings, but mostly only males get to fly; the females usually just glide.

  Such creatures were once lumped into the same family as grasshoppers and crickets and cockroaches, but now they have their own order, Phasmida. Also called Walking Sticks—meaning sticks that walk rather than props for the infirm—Phasmids are vegetarian.

  I was astonished to learn that they are now popular as pets! Why? Unusual, harmless, quiet, cheap to feed? But not much action, and awfully fragile!

  And, given that their whole being is dedicated to the art of trompe l’oeil, I imagine they’d feel exposed in a glass cage with a token stick or two. Perhaps that’s part of the fun for the owner—creating an equally trompe l’oeil environment so visitors can play ‘spot the stick insect’?

  RUSTY ARISTOCRATS

  Speaking of art, some of the most magnificent creations here are the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos—living sculptures of ebony.

  Impressive at about 60 centimetres tall, Australia’s biggest cockatoo, they seem oversized for the branches they perch on, regally deliberate in their movements, blackish-brown feathers stiffly carved and defined, the ebony relieved only by pale yellow dabs on their cheeks and yellow bands across the tails.

  Farthest down the line when the singing talents were handed out, they don’t seem to care, for they’re uninhibitedly raucous. When a small group flies over or sits in my nearby trees for a spell, usually when it’s wet and misty, all else gets drowned out. They sound like something mechanical that’s rusting up and badly needs oiling. There’s often about six of them, and they don’t perch long, but while they do they sort of creak loudly at each other; it’s hard to describe it as ‘calling’ to each other.

  Then one will take off and gradually the others follow. To watch them fly through the dense forest here is an aviation spectacle, for they seem too large to make their way between the trees as easily as they do. Their mode of flying is unmistakable: deep wing movements, grand and deliberate, with nothing ‘flappy’ about them. The wings hang heavy and straight on the down strokes, like the caped arms of a kid playing Superman.

  Once I came across two of them sitting in a low branch of a battered and twisty old forest she-oak, neatly cracking open the woody ‘nuts’. They took no notice of me standing only metres away, but continued calmly with their feast, each with one claw clamped to the branch, the other claw manipulating one nut after another up to the hooked beak to break the hard seed-pod compartments open and prise out the small seeds. Low squawks every now and then expressed approval of the quality of this year’s crop. These cockatoos like the bigger and harder cones of introduced pine plantations too.

  My closer view on that occasion let me see why the feathers appear to be carved: they are each edged with a very fine line of pale yellow. While these cockatoos can’t raise a high and showy crest, the way some of their longer-crested relatives can, the thick badge or tuft of feathers above the beak does ripple forward and back, like raising an eyebrow, in punctuation of their conversation. In side silhouette they can look as if they have a rather unruly mohawk ‘headstyle’.

  They reminded me that day of two formidable elderly Victorian widows in black bombazine dresses, tut-tutting aristocratically over high tea. When I think of the whalebone corsetry that went under those costumes, the high brooched collars, the stiff necks, stiff upper lips and hair tightly drawn into buns under black top combs and short black veils—perhaps that impression is not so far removed from my earlier one of the carved images, only less exotic. In fact, they are sometimes called the Funeral Cockatoo, with ‘funereus’ as part of their proper name.

  I am always grateful when they visit: cuteness I get lots of, but magnificence is rare, even if incongruously rusty.

  A QUESTING COCKATOO

  The Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo is a little less grating of voice than his big black cousin, but there’s only one who ever passes over here and he appears not to like my place, since he never stops by.

  Once or twice a day, early morning and/or towards sunset, he flies over, uttering no more than one or two squawks. Sometimes he’s low enough for me to see the lemon-flushed feathers underneath, against all that snowy white. Mostly his ‘sulphur crest’ is just a bright yellow Leunig curl at the back of his head, but occasionally I have seen him raise it like a tall Mardi Gras head-dress, almost interrogatively, it seems.

  I wonder about him. The mundane theory is that he’s a scout, checking my orchard and garden for readiness to call in
the flock for a feast. If so, he’s a poor one, as for 30 years he’s apparently been doing it without spotting, or reporting, anything worthwhile, since no flock has ever turned up here. But as he’s away all day, every day, the journey must be long, the destination precise and regular.

  My theory is that my cocky’s a tragic figure, like the ancient mariner, not content to join the great white clamorous flocks eating farmers’ corn and decorating dead gum trees, or getting their kicks destroying people’s timber decking and windowsills.

  Instead he’s condemned to wing his lonely way over the remote mountain forests and valleys, searching for his soulmate, who, like himself, has the spirit, not of a white cockatoo, but of a poet, belonging to more ethereal realms than the paddocks. Shades of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who also bucked his predetermined path and fate, but I’ll be very disappointed—indeed, disillusioned—if I ever see him with more than one other cocky.

  These cockatoos are highly intelligent, like some of us, can readily learn to talk like us, and can live for more than 70 years, like most of us in Australia—unless you’re indigenous. Cockies aren’t solitary creatures; the family groups tend to stay together indefinitely. So my cocky is very unusual in his solitude, and it’s not unrealistic to think that he is the same one who’s been on this quest for decades.

  If courting he would raise his sulphur crest, so when I see him do that, does he think he’s spotted a kindred spirit at last? Is the question he seems to be asking, ‘Are you The One?’

  There is something about these mountains that draws eccentrics. Perhaps it’s the rugged grandeur of their scale, the extent of their forested wilderness, where anything is possible and the civilised norm doesn’t exist. They certainly drew me in.

  THE LONELY EMU

  One Sunday afternoon during our part-time years here, my daughter and her visiting schoolfriend came running down the track to the house. Red-faced, breathless, they insisted an emu was chasing them.

  Naturally I scoffed at the idea and exhorted them to be sensible: there are no emus up here! Or ostriches—or elephants, I’d laughed.

  Yet a few minutes later a very real emu did come loping over the last rise of the track. There was no house fence then, so as it drew closer we all hopped up on the verandah. Having visited the Koala Park Sanctuary in Sydney, we well remembered being harassed by emus booming at us as they demanded our playlunch or morning tea or lunch or snack pack—there was no denying the persistent power of a hungry emu. Greedy, we’d thought at the time. We had all been shorter than the great gawky creatures, and quite frightened of their strong, sharp beaks, their imperious eyes under dark fluffy eyebrows, and their snaky, half-naked necks, stretched out low to reach our clutched food, as they chased us on those powerful long scaly legs. We squealed and ran for cover; some of us panicked and as we ran we threw the birds our potato crisps or whatever they seemed to desire so much.

  Emus, we thus knew, were not like normal birds: they were bigger than any eagle, reaching up to 2 metres tall; they didn’t fly; and they could be pushier than any schoolyard bully.

  But this was mountain forest country, not the western plains. What was an emu doing here? Where on earth had it come from—and why come so far into these mountains?

  As we fed it biscuits and set out water for it, we decided that it must have been a tame emu, a pet. We got up the nerve to descend from the verandah, as we had to pack the car for the trip back to Sydney. The emu followed us everywhere, with its splayfooted rocking bounce, its darting neck and plaintive booming. It seemed to like being near people.

  I made a few phone calls around the region but no one had heard of any pet emus or seen any wandering ones. What could we do with this one? An emu is not like a budgie; you can’t put it in a box and take it to a zoo or a farm. For the same reason, it wouldn’t have been easy to dump it up here had it been someone’s pesky pet.

  It was getting late; we had a four and a half hour drive ahead. There was nothing for it but to leave and hope the emu found its way to a new home or back to its old one. Guilt set in as the emu followed us.

  Have you ever tried to out-drive an emu over a rough road? They can sprint up to 50 kilometres per hour!

  Finally the kids reported that they could no longer see it in our cloud of dust. We all felt sad and guilty, imagining its fretful slowing, its puzzled watching of our disappearance, our rejection. But none could think of what else we might have done.

  I often wonder about the fate—and the history—of that lone and lonely emu. I knew the emu was our tallest bird, and that it was on our Australian coat of arms, along with the Red Kangaroo, but that was about all. I now know that they are nomadic, will travel hundreds of kilometres to a new territory, are good swimmers as well as runners, and that they eat a wide variety of plants and fruit and seeds and insects, so I’m hoping it would have made it to a suitable new home. But it ought to have been doing this in a flock, not on its own.

  I had no idea that the males take over the incubating once the female has built the nest and laid the eggs. While the gadabout female heads off and finds herself a new bloke, or two, the male sits on the nest for about 55 days, not eating or drinking or defecating, standing only to turn the eggs, until they hatch. Now that’s some father love.

  In my grandparents’ house in rural New South Wales, where I’d spend each September holidays in the 1950s, they had emu eggs, huge dark greenish-blue ovals, in a bowl. My Pop, a shearer and miner, said people in the country, especially the Kooris (we no longer use the word he employed), liked to carve them, because the shell had a thick white inner layer that showed up when you cut the dark top layer away. He himself carved and polished cow horns and made bird sculptures from them: there’s one looking down at me now. I expect he got them from the abattoirs, but I tried not to think about that.

  These days people farm emus, and, like the first people, use the lot: eggs, leather, oil, meat and feathers.

  Nanna and Pop also had two whole emu plumage rugs, thick and fluffy, one dyed deep red, the other green, on the polished linoleum of the ‘best’ room that nobody used much. I didn’t like to stand on them, didn’t like to imagine how they got the feathers off in one piece, nor what the emu looked like, skinned—but I couldn’t help it.

  I have often found my overactive imagination to be a double-edged gift.

  WALLABY WEIRDO

  At one stage I had a rogue wallaby who consistently broke the rule of staying on the wild side of the house yard netting fence. He was a male Eastern Red-necked Wallaby: darker and more evenly red on the back and whiter on the front than is usual, and with a distinctively kinked tuft of fur at the base of his tail. I’d looked up the mammal book in case he was a separate species but it seemed he was just a weird member of that family. The outcast, the black sheep.

  When I first spotted him in my orchard I went looking for breaks in the fence, but there were none. He must be an especially good jumper, I’d thought. Not even the kangaroos had ever jumped this fence in the eight years since I built it.

  Then I saw him get through it. Hingelock netting is composed of 320-millimetre-wide rectangles that gradually increase in height. Mine has 600-millimetre-high chickenwire clipped over it at the base. It had occurred to me that a joey might get through the top rectangles, but only if it could jump high and aim well at the same time, which would be unlikely given how scatterbrained and uncoordinated they are.

  But a grown male? He had to be double-jointed!

  He became a regular visitor and I saw him come and go at many different spots with ease—definitely double-jointed, I decided. I also concluded that he was a loner, out of place in the busy social scene beyond the fence. Much like me, really. And, since in those days I never saw him eating anything but grass, I didn’t mind him visiting.

  I began to say hello and have a bit of a chat when I saw him. Not that he contributed much, but he’d look up and acknowledge me before resuming grazing. I could use the excuse that I like to use my voic
e around the wild creatures so they get to know my ‘call’—and that’s true—but the fact is that, living by myself, I have started talking to my wild neighbours. Nothing too deep, just passing pleasantries.

  When I caught him eating the small rose bushes on the bank, I angrily reprimanded him—‘Why must you do that? Why can’t you just eat grass!?’ He just kept at it. But in between my small explosions of outrage we were quite comfortable in each other’s presence. He began to take his midday nap in the shade of the trees uphill from the toilet, or under the cherry tree. He might lift his head if I appeared, then resume dozing.

  Then I started to worry. What if it was genetic? A tribe of double-jointed wallabies would be quite another matter!

  I watched him carefully when he was outside the fence, but he was always alone. Whatever made him an outcast, it put him off the ladies. Not once did I see him chase a female. Nor did he hang around with the males—something else we had in common, at the time. Perhaps he was asexual, a neuter? The reason remained a mystery, but it seemed I was safe from being overrun by his offspring.

  I hadn’t reckoned on him passing on his strange ability by example.

  One spring, I’d had to go away for a month, and on my return, even from the gate I could see that the garden was newly green and blooming. I immediately walked around the yard to see what delights spring had brought.

  The air was full of perfume—the honeyed white cloud of the May bush, the exotic intensity of the jasmine smothering a stump nearby, the innocence of the old-fashioned pink sweetpeas in front of the verandah, and the faint almond scent of the Banksia Rose that had turned my clothesline post into a fountain of foaming white. But the Banksia Rose didn’t look right. The lower parts of its drooping stems were all bare.