Mountain Tails (10 page)

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.

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.

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 small 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.

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:

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.