Mountain Tails (9 page)

Only once have I seen a goanna here. It was climbing a stringy-bark tree. Perhaps it was forced out of lower sandstone country by a fire, as this is not typical goanna territory. I've kept my eyes open for it or others since, knowing they are shy in the wild, but with no luck. My carnivorous quoll would be a competitor for food, so they may not coexist here.

This particular type of large, long goanna is properly called a Lace Monitor. It's a matter of personal choice whether you call the family monitors or goannas. They are all predators, so ‘monitor' might come from the Latin word meaning ‘to warn'. Apparently the word ‘goanna' is a corruption of ‘iguana', a tropical American tree-climbing lizard.

As this is the only type I've ever seen, mostly in sandy areas, you could say it's my generic goanna. It's one of Australia's largest lizards, with the males sometimes exceeding 2 metres in length. They are strikingly handsome, prehistoric-looking creatures, so on a recent camping trip with a friend, I was pleased to have one visit our campsite.

It checked out the cold campfire and the garbage bag, but was disappointed in our vegetarian scraps—fruit peelings and limp lettuce leaves just can't compete with chop bones or charred sausages.

Having always been told that, when disturbed, goannas will run up the nearest vertical object, be it tree or person, I kept my distance, wary of those sharp claws. While goannas are not aggressive, their powers are to be respected. Males fight fiercely and in prolonged bouts for the favours of a female, clawing and biting, sometimes to the death.

Spotting us, this one headed up the closest tree and splayed himself like a designer brooch across its broad trunk. He was so long it was hard to fit him in the camera lens. My close clicking disturbed him, and he moved higher up the tree.

He must greet the holiday season with very mixed reactions: possibilities of interesting tucker, but what nuisances people are, never minding their own business, always staring, pointing, exclaiming, clicking, forcing him up trees when he has work to do.

Admiring the dramatic pixellated pattern of stripes and spots on his loose tough skin, I could see where the ‘lace' part of the name came from. It also recalled certain indigenous art styles, for which perhaps it had been the model. Its colour palette ranged from black to grey, white to cream, with touches of amber—smart and showy.

They are carnivorous, eating any carrion. Where my husband and I used to camp at the Myall Lakes in the early '70s, before it became a national park, there were lots of goannas, and they would wolf down the stale meat pies a friend saved for them from his takeaway shop.

And many a farmer has cursed the egg thief in the hen house.

I once saw a goanna catch an egg that was tossed to it. It simply opened its vast mouth, flicked its head up and caught the egg in mid-air, swallowing the whole object effortlessly. No more eggs forthcoming, it turned and lumbered away, swishing its long tail in poised arcs, defined by the fine pale-brown point at its very end.

In the shade of a nearby ironbark, it sprawled its back legs flat and settled down to contemplative digestion of that egg which had so mysteriously arrived in time for brunch.

P.S. I have just seen another goanna here on the Mountain—only the second in 30 years!

One sunny winter's morning I took my morning coffee out to the verandah, as I like to do when there's no chilly breeze. Comfortably ensconced, feet up on the railing, I let my eyes wander idly over the remaining foliage of the vines and climbers that had provided my summer shade.

The apricot-blooming Crépuscule Rose is the only non-deciduous one, although its corner is being invaded by a similarly evergreen self-sown passionfruit vine, whose fate I haven't yet decided. I was considering this matter when I noticed a movement amongst the leaves of the rose.

I put down my coffee and went closer. A small bug-eyed space creature clung there. It was a green Praying Mantis, well camouflaged, with the
spines on its large forelegs seeming to mimic the serrated leaf edges. For this carnivorous insect, the main purpose of those powerful legs is akin to that of a rabbit trap: to snap shut, interlocking the spines and imprisoning the prey.

A mantis often holds these legs in a closely folded position that resembles hands joined in prayer, hence the name ‘praying' mantis, when actually it's holding them ready to swiftly grab prey once within range. They are very efficient hunters, mainly by day, possessing the ability, rare amongst insects, of being able to turn their heads—300 degrees in some species—and follow prey with their large eyes. Mantids have big appetites, eating live flies, aphids, moths, caterpillars, spiders. Bigger species will apparently ambush and eat small lizards, frogs, birds, snakes or mice!

Mantids are also known to be cannibals, eating each other or their young. The female often eats her smaller partner after mating. Perhaps, like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, she ‘can't get no-oo satisfaction'?

This one was a safely small variety, not that I was thinking of picking it up; although they have no venom, they can bite. My mantis looked very frail, but then danger is a matter of scale: to a ladybird it would have been a veritable King Kong.

It's a good thing they're only human-sized in science fiction films, and looking at that blank-eyed head I could see why they've been used as the models for so many ‘aliens'. It is a quintessentially inhuman ‘face': there's nothing to relate to.

Although the shed is quoll-less at present, a quoll family has taken up residence there almost every year and I hope will do so again.

Since there's not much to hunt in the shed, the mother quoll has to go out foraging every night to feed herself while her young ones are growing. Once they're older, she takes them with her or sends them out on forays of their own. These runs include my verandah, where I have my various waste containers, including a simple metal holder for a supermarket plastic bag as my ‘true garbage' bin (it's very old, from the days before we woke up to the plastic bag nightmare).

She jumps in, scrabbles around, selects and jumps out. I hear her every night, and if I shine the torch on her through the window above,
she takes no notice. Her boisterous kids make so much noise they often don't hear me open the door, so sometimes I surprise two pink-nosed little faces peering in astonishment over the edge of the suspended plastic bag, followed by an explosion of spots as they make their getaway, gambolling off like runaway rocking horses.

The quolls prefer strong cheeses like Blue Castello, and even though I think I've scraped the wrappers clean, they find them worthwhile. Anything dairy-based will do, or even substitute-dairy, like tofu. Spinach and ricotta lasagne, dropped on the floor and dumped on the compost, was popular, but bliss was an oily tuna tin when I had visitors. It was passionately and noisily licked from one end of the verandah to the other.

I always thought my quoll had twins, as each summer, from dusk till dawn, I'd seen just two spotted bundles of mischief cavorting about the house yard while she went hunting. They're fully furred, although less spotty than their mother, old enough to be left unattended in the playpen.

I shut the front windows at night ever since two of them got inside into the sink, where they made a terrible racket cleaning up the unwashed dishes. When sprung by the torch, a flurry of spots leapt out the window, which I quickly shut before hopping back into bed. I soon realised that only one had got away, as an almighty din began; one had got confused and leapt down behind the fridge, where, once recovered from the shock, it was banging away at the coils trying to get out.

Quolls are not reluctant to make their wishes known, or, as my Nanna used to say, they're not backward in coming forward. Once I temporarily added some timber to a hotch-potch pile near the house, not bothering to remove the corrugated-iron covering. I knew the quoll used this as her halfway house, but not how often.

Within minutes an extremely loud banging began from inside the pile and did not stop. ‘What the hell do you think you're doing? How's a
quoll supposed to survive if you squash my space? Get those extra planks off at once!'

We rushed to do as told and lifted off the planks one by one until, the load apparently being light enough, the banging ceased. We were allowed to leave two planks on.

But for all her ferocity, the quoll doesn't always win. One day she came home late—midday—and along the track, which was unusual. She was moving slowly, awkwardly. Then I saw why. On her back she was carrying one of her offspring, who was far too old for that, almost as big as herself. But this was a rescue operation for, as she passed close by the window, I could see that the young one had a large area of raw flesh on its hind leg. Only a dog could have done that.

Too exhausted to make it to the shed, she took her sad burden to her halfway house and disappeared into its dark depths. I put a container of water at the entrance to it, and hoped for the best. It was an even greater tragedy, because one had drowned in the horse trough weeks earlier. I'd cried at that, thinking she must only have one left—which now was badly hurt.

Next day, I glimpsed a patch of brown and white just beyond the stack; it must be the injured one resting in the sun, I thought, and tiptoed round the back to see better.

A spotted furry carpet of young ones, sleeping, curled together like kittens! I counted six. The mother must have brought them down from the shed to keep the sick one company. I was delighted that she felt so secure with me; they were only about 5 metres from the house, right next to my woodheap.

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.

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.'