Mountain Tails (4 page)

Often we only get to know our neighbours in times of adversity. When disaster befalls us all, we emerge from our individual TV caves or backyard cloisters and pitch in to help each other get through it. Bushfires have long been one such event in Australia, and they are now becoming bigger, hotter and more unseasonal under global warming.

In 1980, when my whole mountain range burnt so thoroughly that there was no green in the landscape as far as the eye could see, just the black—tree trunks, fallen logs and the crunch and powder that once was undergrowth—criss-crossed by the whites and greys of ash and exposed tracks, you can imagine what happened to many of my animal
neighbours. As our little family was still living in the tent, which we did for fifteen months, maybe you can also imagine how scary that whole event was.

For weeks after the fires were extinguished by rain, we would hear mighty burnt-out trees give up their last hold and crash to the ground, often in the still of the night, so their falls echoed along the ridges and across the valleys like continuing death knells. As indeed they were for the many tree-dwelling creatures caught by a fast-moving and tree-crowning fire. Koalas, for example, do not cope with such an inferno.

When one big tree, burnt hollow and fragile, fell beside the track a few days after the fire, half-burying itself in the dirt and ash, it ejected a tiny creature that had apparently survived the fire, the loss of its mother, and thus sustenance since, and the fall.

Like Tom Thumb, it was no bigger than the adult human digit to which it clung with surprising strength. It was amazing that we had even noticed this mini-marsupial on the ground. A friend tried to feed it with an eyedropper and honeyed water, but it only lasted a few days.

By the way its little tail curved to hold the thumb, we thought it might have been an Eastern Pygmy Possum, young, but fully furred. This was not an animal I'd normally see, because of its small size and nocturnal habits. Now I don't think it was, as the tail was too short, but have no better idea what it might have grown up to be. We didn't find its family: they may have fallen out earlier, in the panic of the heat and smoke, and been incinerated to nothingness.

The charred ground soon became eerily strewn with the white bones of wallabies and smaller animals as their burnt-black hides fell away. Perhaps the surviving birds of prey, able to fly higher and escape, benefited from this mass barbecue, as well as helping to clean up, removing the smell of death that was very strong for a time.

One other animal that I have never seen before or after that fire was a wombat, although an old fellow had told me he'd seen a wombat or two, decades ago, way out in what is now a dedicated wilderness area.

Nor have I ever seen the distinctively rectangular wombat dung here, or found a wombat burrow. Whenever I've seen the latter in the past, in sandy country far from here, they were very obvious. We had a veritable wombat city on our previous bush block, near Merriwa. You couldn't miss seeing the holes—unless you'd fallen in one first. I used to worry about the kids disappearing down them, as such burrows can be up to 20 metres long!

The wombats there kept to their trails no matter what petty human structures, like fences, were erected in their way. You'd be an idiot to build your house over a track belonging to one of these furry bulldozers, weighing about 40 kilograms when grown.

That was where I got to know wombats—
Vombatus ursinus
: sounds like a bad actor doing a German accent, but in Latin the
‘ursinus'
bit means bear-like. These quaint, lumbering characters are more closely related to koala ‘bears' than to any other marsupial, and probably shared an ancestor about 25 million years ago.

Of course neither of them is a bear, and they live in totally different ways from each other, but they each have a backwards-opening pouch containing only two nipples, a tail so short as to be negligible, and certain internal similarities, such as digestive features, that set them apart from other marsupials.

My books tell me these ‘Common Wombats' do inhabit forested mountains, and there are certainly plenty of native grasses and sedges here for them to eat, but because my own experiences with them have been limited to sandy areas, I wouldn't have thought my rocky ridges an appealing habitat, powerful diggers though wombats are.

Yet the day after that fire went through, I saw a blocky black animal trundling purposefully down the small ridge opposite our house clearing. I was incredulous, but it was unmistakably a wombat, even though it was the wrong colour. No other marsupial has that solid shape, with the distinctive flattened battering ram of a head, the flat rump and short legs.

And colour no longer counted, as most of the living animals we saw had charred fur and would have been blackened anyway from their sooty environment. We few humans certainly were.

Where had this one wombat come from and where was it going? They
are
solitary animals, but in my post-disaster zone this one seemed tragically so, perforce rather than by choice. Since there must be very few around here, I wondered if any others had lived. Would this dark and determined survivor find a mate when the time came?

I could only hope so.

Last year the country was given many extreme displays of how chaotic our climate has already become. After weeks of rain here, the sun finally remembered how to shine. Glad to be rid of that relentlessly grey sky and sleety rain, the animals came out to make the most of the warmth. A sodden fur coat can't be all that comfortable.

I saw a small gang of young male Red-necked Wallabies basking on the grass just outside my house yard, so I edged up to the fence for closer scrutiny. They did look up, but were too sun-drowsed to bother about me, and eyelids drooped sleepily again.

They're an attractive wallaby, comprising my biggest population of hoppy marsupials. Their soft fur is subtly coloured in greys and reddish
browns, with smart black trim in well-chosen places—perfect camouflage in my tawny tussock-floored and bracken-studded forest. The small dark front paws are often held poised and loose, sometimes crossed, so they look like the neat gloved hands of shy schoolgirls.

On that occasion I could see more of their white to pale-grey undersides, for many of them were propped, leaning further back on the base of their tails than usual, to allow maximum sun on their bellies. From the looks on their faces it was bliss.

At less relaxed times, these young wallaby males front up to each other with typical teenage bluff and bravado, to practise for the challenges ahead. They often play at fighting.

It looks as if they are trying to cuff each other about the head, front paws outstretched while bending their own heads right back to avoid being cuffed, but they are actually only trying to hold off the opponent. Their necks are very exposed at such times, but perhaps they never use the claws on their front paws for anything more aggressive than scratching fleas.

Their real fighting method is kickboxing, but since they still can't balance solely on their tails, which they need to do if they want to use their big back legs to jump up and kick forward at their opponent's vulnerable abdomen, as the grown-ups do, they're always falling over, looking foolish rather than impressive.

Apart from their more-muscled build and larger size, it's easy to pick the males. Their testicles hang precariously low, and descend even lower when they're aroused. I know this not because I've been pruriently spying on them, but because they aren't at all shy about their courtship. In fact they're extremely voluble and active and there's no way I could miss it, even from my verandah.

When a female is on heat she may have just one suitor, but more often I see up to six very keen males chasing her in a grunting competitive pack, all trying to get in the lead so as to be first to sidle up to her when she stops for breath, and attempt to win her favours.

There's no forcing. The nonchalant female is in charge; they stop when she does, don't try to head her off, take off again when she does. Their courtship appears quite gentle—cheek-to-cheek rubbing, a little sniffing towards the general area of the desired destination if she allows it, much eager sideways tail swishing on the male's part, like the wagging of a dog's tail. His excitement is clear, not only from the restless tail, but also from his very pink protruding penis, thin and curving upwards, like a new moon, and the way his balls are hanging so low, on strings it seems, like Maori
poi
balls. The equipment stays at the ready the whole time, long before any prospect of success.

Given that the chase takes them crashing through fences, over fallen branches, tall blady grass and tough tussocks and even tougher clumps of
Lomandra
and
Dianella
at breakneck speed, I wince involuntarily as I watch. I imagine a bloke would wince even more.

Last summer temperatures went see-sawing between 13 and 30 degrees, sometimes in the same day. My son Sam brought his family down from Lennox Head, on the warm far north coast of New South Wales, to stay for a week in late January. They came with swimmers and shorts, jeans and singlet tops. I had to unearth winter sweaters and even beanies and mittens for them to borrow. Naturally the day they left it was as hot and sunny as a proper summer's day.

To prepare for their visit I'd been mowing and pruning like mad, not because I'm house-and-garden proud, but to remove snake havens. Edging borders were ruthlessly dispatched; ground-sweeping bushes were up-trimmed. For I'd seen more Red-bellied Black Snakes lately
than in the last 30 years put together. They weren't passing through my yard; clapping, stamping or hosing hadn't made them move on as it used to. It seems they'd taken up residence, and I finally discovered where—and why.

My vegie garden is a netted enclosure, with weed mat laid under and around the netting, a wishful kikuyu grass barrier. Weed mat is woven, black and shiny; a rolled edge of it looks remarkably like a black snake. I'd gradually learnt to calm my heart's leap, confident that the textured blackness spotted out of the corner of my eye was not a snake.

Hence on that memorable day in December, when as usual I was kneeling and weeding, delving gloveless into dense plantings, my mind took a few seconds to over-rule this and look twice—and then a few more seconds to accept the fact. Snake, not weed mat—and only half a metre away.

Heart thumping, I backed out the open gateway; the snake slid through the netting and disappeared into the lush growth beneath the hop vine. It didn't reappear on the other side, on the open grass where I wanted to see it, on its way out of my house yard. Oh-oh.

I manage here pretty well most of the time, but this was the sort of situation when I feel inadequate for my Mountain life: scared and alone and useless! I retreated to the cabin and made a coffee to help me calm down enough to consider my options; I didn't come up with any but observance and avoidance.

When I crept warily back, I saw what I assumed was the same snake, now stretched out on the warm dirt between my tomato plants. Raising its head, it seemed to ooze effortlessly through the netting and over into the adjoining compost heap, from which I'd been pulling kikuyu runners the day before. Barehanded.

Then I spotted another one, shiny black S-shaping its way across the lawn. Okay, I had two: a resident couple perhaps?

For the next week, until my snake-loving friend could come and relocate them to the national park—and rescue me—I was on high
alert, wearing gumboots whenever I left the verandah, eyes flicking left, right, near, far. And forget the homegrown vegetables!

When my friend came, he gently turned the compost with his metal crook, a long rod with a wide semi-circular hook on the end, while I watched from a distance. He found one, caught it in his crook, lifted it high enough to seize with his gloved hand in the right spot—not the neck as I'd imagined, but above the anus, he tells me, though of course you'd have to know where that is on a creature that to me seems one continuum from head to tail. It doesn't have a distinct neck either, as the head is quite small, unlike a python for example, whose head is noticeably wider and flattened. That's one reason why these can fit through my netting.

Whew! He got it. This looked easy.

Yet in the instant before he moved to drop it into the plastic drum—he standing in the compost heap, the snake's long shining body writhing beside his leg—behind him I saw another mass of red and black loops gleaming in a kind of rolling eruption, uncoiling from the partly decomposed heap which now appeared to be seething with snakes.

Indiana Jones-type nightmares of snake-filled pits rushed into my head. The snake handler himself was admirably cool, uttering just one minor four-letter word before he secured the first snake and put the lid on the bucket, while the other one, or two, or three, got away.

Over two visits in the next few weeks, he caught and relocated four Red-bellied Black Snakes, missing one small one. Watching him made me realise that they were as timid as he'd insisted. Although they are very venomous, capable of harming or killing a person, they rarely deliver that venom, as they rarely bite. Their instinct is to hide when under threat, not to attack. Sometimes when he released them from their confinement, one would rear up and flatten its head like a cobra, but it seemed like a brief perfunctory bluster—‘You'd better not try that again!'—before it slid away into cover. I'm told that's usual. It certainly worked as a deterrent for me.

My friend admires them, their sinuous and efficient way of moving, their fabulous honeycomb scale patterns; he offers them respect but not fear. He's been called to remove snakes from all sorts of odd places, such as offices, which is the sort of situation when they might panic and bite, because cornered. Consequently he advised me to make a summer barrier for my doorway from the verandah.

It had never crossed my mind to be concerned about snakes climbing the four timber steps and slithering over the rough gappy decking into my house—there to be accidentally cornered and panicked! I swiftly made and installed a slide-down Masonite barrier, above knee-height, which made access a bit awkward as I had to hop over it, but I preferred that to imagining snakes hiding under beds and behind cupboards.

He explained that the tropical wet and the warmth of the season had encouraged them, but then the abrupt cold spells had sent them seeking the compost's heat. They didn't know what season they were in. I wonder how they'll interpret signals for breeding or hibernating amidst such climatic confusion, and whether they'll have been able to eat enough to see them though the months of hibernation.

They like to be near water, as frogs are a favourite food, and the little dam below the house yard would offer them a guaranteed ongoing smorgasbord. So I understand why they want to hang about near there; I just want them to leave my yard out of the accommodation options.

But at last I had my confidence and my vegie garden back: I moved my compost into closed worm bins, pulled up the weed mat, and have started to run aviary netting, too fine for snakes to get through, around the bottom of the fence. To attempt to stop the kikuyu runners I have instead dug a spade-deep and hoe-width trench around the outside and am filling it with gravel. I may also relocate my dense strawberry bed and the jungle of my rhubarb—in the interests of greater visibility and my own peace of mind.

I've since seen the snake that got away. It was lazing in my orchard and had grown quite a lot bigger—unless it was another snake altogether.
Now that I know they have about
twenty
live young at a time, that wouldn't be surprising. This was in autumn, when it was as hot as it should have been in summer. I was wishing winter would hurry up—assuming we got such a season. Perhaps there'll be no safely snakeless season anymore.

In fact if the snakes can't sort out the seasons, and we don't get serious about sorting out global warming, the future will be very uncertain for their survival. As it will be for lots of other creatures, including us.