White Beech: The Rainforest Years (49 page)

I love the Cave Creek pythons at least as much as I have ever loved a cat or dog. I am ashamed that so many of my countrymen think that it is fine to kill Carpet Snakes because they eat domestic fowls. They eat many more rats than fowls, but still people think it appropriate to chop at them with rakes and spades or blow their heads off with shotguns.

Pythons are almost deaf and almost blind, and yet they are our top predators. They detect warm-blooded prey through heat-sensitive pits along their lips. How they detect cold-blooded prey like frogs is less obvious, though it has been suggested they can sense sound and movement through the bones of their skulls. The Cave Creek pythons are supposed to be
Morelia spilota mcdowelli
, the Coastal Carpet Python, identified as a species (
M. mcdowelli
) by Wells and Wellington and then relegated to a subspecies in 1994 by Dave and Tracy Barker, all of which suggests that our most intimate animal associate is not very well understood by even herpetologists and python breeders. Pythons described as separate species are capable of breeding with each other, which is a pretty good indicator that the species are not distinct.
Morelia spilota mcdowelli
is supposed to be ‘irascible’, which reared in captivity it may well be. I don’t find the wild ones irascible in the least. I have all but tripped over them, and they have simply flowed quietly away. I can sit by them reading and they go on dozing, occasionally stretching themselves and rearranging their coils. They happily coexist with dozens of other pythons, their home ranges not so much overlapping as coinciding.

The key to python personality is energy conservation. Because they are cold-blooded, they can shut down their energy requirements to near zero, by keeping still. They take small prey like frogs and large prey like pademelons that may weigh up to 60 per cent of their body weight; in both cases they do it with minimal exertion. By following each other’s scent trails male pythons form ‘breeding aggregations with several males attending a single female’. In the late winter of 2011 I had the opportunity to watch this process, as three male pythons waited patiently for a sign of recognition from the huge dark pythoness I call Jessye. One afternoon two of them began mock fighting to impress her, winding their tails together, rearing up, each trying to push the other to the ground. Then Jessye disappeared and they were left grieving.

Jessye may not have been ready to breed in 2011. The generation and laying of up to thirty eggs greatly depletes a python’s stores of fat and energy; during the ten- to fifteen-week incubation period she has to keep the eggs at a constant temperature, which she does by shivering, which uses up more of her calories. When the young hatch they go their separate ways, leaving the weakened mother python to recover as best she can. During this period she is extremely vulnerable to a variety of predators and diseases. In 2012 Jessye was courted again by an assortment of younger males; she also attracted a massive grey and gold male python and this time she capitulated. They were together for ten days or more as other snakes came and went, often coiling on top of them and occasionally mating with Jessye. This highly social period persisted for many weeks. The usual notion, that pythons are solitary animals by nature with little or no social interaction, seems completely wrong.

Years ago, Jane and I and a CCRRS worker were clambering through the steep forest, following the boundary which, on the principle of good fences making good neighbours, I had just had very expensively surveyed. I was, as usual, bringing up the rear, so I got the best view of the very large snake that was doing its best to get out of our way. As it slid past at eye-level its tail touched my sister’s shoulder. ‘Oh, a python,’ she said. But it wasn’t. When it came towards me I could see clearly that there were no heat pits along its underlip. I would have said that it was a tiger snake, but I’d never seen one anywhere near that big. The snake that flowed past me was nearly two metres long, and the colour of wet sand, with shadow bands of darker brown. It looked as if it might try constriction to immobilise its prey, but it wasn’t a constrictor. Its scales were too big, and the wrong pattern and there weren’t enough of them. I hunted for it on line and in reptile books, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Nobody had described a tiger snake of such a size – until I read, in Gresty’s account of the Numinbah Valley in the early twentieth century, about ‘an uncommon member of the reptilian fauna . . . the giant Tiger Snake or Banded Broadhead, said to attain a length of ten feet. The valley Aborigines had an exaggerated fear of the admittedly venomous reptile, known to them as “Boggul” . . . full grown specimens are now seen on extremely rare occasions.’(58) So lucky me. And lucky the three of us. If any of us had had the bad luck to step on the snake the outcome could have been very different. As it is my sister continues to insist that the snake whose tail brushed her shoulder was a python. The confusion is inspissated by the fact that until well into the twentieth century there was a snake known to naturalists as
Hoplocephalus curtus
, and to the common folk as the Brown-banded Snake. The genus
Hoplocephalus
includes all the Australian broadheads, to which many people assumed the tiger snakes belonged. The Tiger Snake genus was variously called
Naja
, then
Alecto
, and in 1867
Hoplocephalus
; it seems to have become
Notechis
in 1948 (Glauert). As far as I can tell the possibility that the early herpetologists were talking about two different snake species has not been dispelled.

Earlier observers had great difficulty distinguishing the Brown-banded Snake from a Carpet Snake. In 1873, the tiger snake is described in
The Queenslander
as the one ‘which resembles in appearance the carpet snake of Queensland’ (19 July); in 1874 another tells us that it is to be ‘known by its unmistakable stripes’ (
Q
, 26 December, 273). In May 1879 another observer refers to the tiger snake as ‘our brown banded snake’ (
Q
, 10 May, 588), and ‘The Naturalist’ writing in
The Queenslander
in 1879 tells a cautionary tale of this ‘the most vicious and venomous of the serpent tribe’:

Not long ago I came across a young man who had deliberately picked up a snake; and on my asking him what he was doing he said, ‘Oh this wouldn’t hurt a baby; why it’s the prettiest carpet snake that ever I saw.’ And yet the foolish fellow was dangling a tiger snake, holding it tightly round the neck . . . and no sooner did he drop it than it seized him by the calf of the leg. (
Q
, 19 April, 500)

Seizing the young man by the calf of the leg is a reaction more typical of a carpet snake than any venomous snake. A tiger snake would have either struck or sprung away. The Englishman who wrote under the pseudonym ‘George Carrington’ remarked in 1871: ‘There is a great variety and number of poisonous and deadly snakes in Queensland, yet cases of snakebite are rare, for the reptiles invariably try to escape, and do not bite, except in self-defence.’ Nevertheless TV naturalists who persecute animals for the entertainment of couch-potatoes insist that tiger snakes are aggressive, and not simply towards each other, but towards humans. Certainly the terrified snakes that wildlife warriors manhandle do try very hard to bite them, but this behaviour can hardly be said to amount to aggression. Snakes don’t come hunting us. Give them a chance to get out of the way and they will.

The next most commonly seen snake at Cave Creek is the good old Red-bellied Black,
Pseudechis porphyriacus
, possibly the commonest snake in Australia, though few places could harbour as many as we do. According to Rhianna Blackthorn of WIRES Northern Rivers, in every square kilometre of this region there are around three hundred Red-bellied Black Snakes. According to John Drake, writing in
The Argus
in 1952, the Red-bellied Black ‘has a sunny, placid nature which causes it to bite only when it is cornered or attacked’. Sunny-natured they may be, but our Red-bellied Blacks have a habit of getting themselves into tight corners, where we are likely to come into contact with them by accident, between empty tubes stacked in the nursery perhaps, or hidden in plant trays or asleep in mulch piles. So far no one has been bitten, but it has been a near thing once or twice.

More numerous possibly are our Yellow-faced Whipsnakes (
Demansia psammophis
) which the locals call copperheads, perhaps because their coppery-pink backs are dusted with pale greeny-blue rather like the colour of verdigris. These small snakes have an odd propensity for hanging out with other much bigger snakes; one used to turn up regularly to bask alongside one of the pythons by the back door. When I appeared it would fling itself over the python to get out of the way, no matter how far away I was, its large black eyes, huge in proportion to its tiny head, being clearly able to focus on distant objects. My theory about this behaviour is that the Yellow-faced Whipsnake, being heavily predated by a variety of raptors, chooses to bask with much bigger snakes for its own protection. One day the workforce came upon two Yellow-faced Whipsnakes that were coiling themselves around each other and spinning in a hoop. This I take to be ritual combat of two males but I have never found any such phenomenon described. We managed to grab a few seconds of video before our tame Butcherbird turned up, whereupon the snakes vanished. To live with snakes and observe them daily is to be disgusted with field guides that give no account of their behaviour and devote far too much space to discussions of the dangerousness of their bite. Descriptions of the habitat of the Yellow-faced Whipsnake do not mention rainforest; the Cave Creek rainforest seems to be full of them, as well as Banded Snakes, Bandy Bandies, various Ramphotyphlops, Brown and Green Tree Snakes, Keelbacks, Rough-scaled Snakes, Eastern Small-eyed Snakes, Eastern Brown Snakes and Marsh Snakes.

The most visible and the most spectacular of the Cave Creek fauna are the birds. The more I see of birds the more I wonder why it is that snakes are considered nasty and birds considered sweet. Bernard O’Reilly tells us in
Green Mountains
that wild birds are ‘the most beautiful of living things; the most sweet-voiced and the gentlest of creatures’. (83) I hope I was tough-minded enough even as a nipper to have raised my head when I read this, sniffed the air and thought ‘Seagulls? Hawks? Magpies?’ Most birds are not sweet-voiced; none, not even the dove itself, is all that gentle. O’Reilly prattles on:

There is one other great lesson which human neighbours could learn from bird neighbours, and this is why they are gentler and nicer than humans – they never say a cruel word about anyone. You may say that this is just because they cannot speak, but I know birds well enough to know that if they could talk, they would only say the nicest things. So next time you see a gentle feathered creature in a tree, just pause to think how inferior you are.

There is hardly a bird, however cute, that will not steal eggs or nestlings. And practically all of them, bar the ones we least like, the carrion birds, prefer their food alive and vociferating. Even honeyeaters and seed-eating birds need to feed their fledglings on protein, and that means live invertebrates. Lewin’s Honeyeaters are amongst the most efficient predators in the Cave Creek rainforest. They are as adroit and acrobatic as any fly-catcher, and when the larvae of the leafrolling moths are at their biggest and juiciest, they will spend whole days unpacking every leaf, cleaning the infested trees completely. Nectar, fruit and seed are not available in all seasons, but invertebrates are.

It is probably inevitable that human beings will play favourites among the lower orders, and that they will express an irrational preference in moral terms. Fluffy means sweet; scaly means nasty. Settlers in Queensland made war on any species that incommoded them, and justified the onslaught on all kinds of moral and aesthetic grounds. A report from Coomera in 1880 exulted:

morning, noon and night, the sharp report of the gun is heard; . . . For the destruction of flying-fox, whose ghastly flappings and flittings from tree to tree disturb our rest, or cockatoo either, there need be little compunction, but parents and guardians might well forbid the massacre of insectivorous birds, or our fields and gardens will ultimately suffer. (
Q
, 6 March, 296)

God forbid that our rest should be disturbed, especially by ‘ghastly flittings and flappings’. Speciesism dies hard; even at this late stage most people do not understand that if the earth is to survive we have to respect the entire system, not just the bits we consider cute or useful.

Even the fluffiest birds are capable of terrifying ferocity. On spring evenings a Grey Goshawk (
Accipiter novaehollandiae
) will come drifting gently down towards Cave Creek and at once all the other birds will take to the air to drive him away, flying so close to the much bigger bird that they risk serious injury. Most savage in their attacks are the Butcherbirds, that dive on the goshawk, clattering their beaks like machine-gun fire. In fact goshawks feed more readily on small mammals than on birds, but when birds are breeding they will not tolerate a raptor’s presence anywhere near a nest site.

The goshawk, which nests in the tallest of the rainforest trees, on a platform of twigs around a central depression lined with green leaves, is one raptor whose life is getting much better as the canopy closes in. For one thing the Butcherbirds have moved to open country elsewhere. For another the possums, bats, reptiles and insects that the goshawk lives on are becoming more numerous. His competitors, the Black-shouldered Kite (
Elanus axillaris
) and the Nankeen Kestrel (
Falco cenchroides
),
are now seldom seen, because they exist to hunt small rodents in grassland. Years ago a Collared Sparrowhawk (
Accipiter cirrocephalus
) chased a Noisy Miner onto the verandah and nearly collected me instead, as I put my head out the window to see why all the birds were giving their alarm calls, but I haven’t seen one since. It looks very much as if the goshawks are finally coming into their own.