White Beech: The Rainforest Years (50 page)

The biggest of the Cave Creek raptors are the Wedge-tailed Eagles (
Aquila audax
). Every now and then a pair will come sailing over the scarps. We know them immediately, no matter how high they fly, not just because of their unmistakeable silhouette and their nine-foot wingspan but because of the dead silence that falls over the valley. In some parts of Australia the Wedge-tailed Eagle has become common, mainly because of the unending food supply afforded by roadkill. If you take the train across the Nullarbor Plain you will see one perched on nearly every fence-post. Semi-arid is much more their habitat; as the canopy closes over Cave Creek we will see them no more.

Ornithologists like to say that Wedge-tailed Eagles display reverse sexual dimorphism, because the female is larger than the male. ‘Sexual dimorphism’ is the name given to difference in body shape or appearance between male and female. The term should include differences in which the female is larger than the male. By calling this ‘reverse’ or even ‘reversed’ sexual dimorphism the scientists are misunderstanding their own terminology as well as betraying their own prejudice. The female Wedge-tailed Eagle is indeed half as heavy again as her male partner; in all our raptor species the female is larger than the male.

The Wedge-tailed Eagle was first named by an English physician who was never in Australia in his life. John Latham is typical of the gentlemanly amateurs who founded what we are now pleased to call the ‘earth sciences’. He trained as a doctor and practised for many years at Dartford in Kent. At the same time he was compiling and illustrating what was to be published in 1781 as
General Synopsis of Birds
, for which he designed, executed and coloured all the illustrations, which were based on specimens that had been sent to him from all over the world, including Australia and the Pacific. Latham did not use the Linnaean system of classification; for example he named the kookaburra, of which he had been sent a specimen from New Guinea, ‘the great brown King’s Fisher’ (Latham, 1781, ii, 603).

In 1788 Latham, one of the founders of the Linnaean Society, was busy renaming bird species for
Index Ornithologicus
, published in 1790. In this he was beaten by the same Johann Georg Gmelin whose name was given by Linnaeus to the genus of the White Beeches, Gmelin having already published his own version of Linnaeus’s
Systema Naturae
in which he had given systematic binomials to birds originally described by Latham. Nevertheless Latham’s contribution is immortalised in the scientific names of a round half-dozen of our bird species, including our Brush-turkey whose proper name is
Alectura lathami
, and our Glossy Black Cockatoo,
Calyptorhynchus lathami
.

White stains on the rhyolite scarps tell us that the Australian Peregrine (
Falco peregrinus macropus
) has made a home there. One evening as I came down from the shade house I disturbed one perched in a Wild Tobacco tree, tiring on a Brown Cuckoo Dove. He raised his cruel head and fixed me with his large dark eyes in their glowing yellow rims as I fumbled with the camera, trying not to make the kind of sudden movement that would cause him to leave his prey, which was flapping feebly. Until he had torn more living flesh from it, it would remain too heavy for him to carry up to share with his mate on the scarp. If he had abandoned it, I would have had to step in and kill the suffering creature myself.

Peregrines are famous for their aerial acrobatics. As a preliminary to mating they show off by flying in high circles, or zooming in figures of eight or rolling like big pigeons. They fly up higher and higher and then stoop, heading straight for the ground at top speed, before pulling up with a bounce. Eventually they will mate on their home ledge, where the female will lay up to four eggs. The Australian Peregrine was identified as a subspecies of the worldwide species by Swainson in 1837. Nowadays they are becoming rare, and so they are being sexed and banded and badgered in the interests of conservation as well as being disturbed by ‘sight-seers, bush-wackers and illegal egg-collectors’ (Czechura).

The peregrines’ favourite food is pigeon. Feral, common or rare, it’s all the same to them. From the moment the falcon took after it, the Brown Cuckoo Dove had no way of evading the outsize talons that grabbed it in mid-air. If the fruit pigeons dive into the closed forest where the peregrines cannot follow, they escape the strike, so the peregrines tend to concentrate on high-flying Flock, Topknot and White-headed Pigeons. They also take kestrels, Lewin’s Honeyeaters, Lorikeets and Black-faced Cuckoo Shrikes. We don’t see them perched on emergent trees, as they do in other environments. At Cave Creek they launch their strikes by plummeting straight down from the scarp.

Our owls are three, the Powerful Owl, the Greater Sooty Owl and the Boobook. The Powerful Owl (
Ninox strenua
) is now rare, probably as a consequence of declining habitat, because this is one owl that hunts in trees. It looks like a wandjina, with two round staring eyes set in a black mask, which tapers to a sudden sharp point. The Greater Sooty Owl (
Tyto tenebricosa
) has an owlier face, with a heart-shaped mask. The Boobook (
Ninox boobook
) is smaller, between twenty-five and thirty-five centimetres tall, with big greeny-yellow eyes set under frowning golden brows. It likes to sit and watch for prey from the windows made by the interlocking roots of the strangler figs. I would be lying if I said I had seen any of these in the wild, but I have heard them all. The nocturnal hunter I know best, having seen it by night and day, and rescued it from mobbing magpies, is the Tawny Frogmouth (
Podargus strigoides
). It too I hear regularly, sounding its soft deep ooom-ooom. When I have supper on the verandah it often perches at the edge of the field of light, waiting for groggy insects, tame as you like. We try to tell ourselves that it is the rarer version, the Marbled Frogmouth (
Podargus ocellatus
), and it certainly has the necessary tuft of feathers over its bill, but it isn’t.

We can’t leave our hunting birds without considering the kingfisher family. Everybody knows the kookaburra, though very few are aware that kookaburras come in several species. Our is the Blue-winged Kookaburra,
Dacelo leachii
, which cannot manage to laugh. It starts up a kind of manic gargling which builds for a few seconds and then collapses into a gravelly burble. Then there are our Azure Kingfishers (
Alcedo azurea azurea
), that nest in the creek bank. They feed largely on yabbies, freshwater crayfish, which they catch and take to a designated dining rock where they dissect them, leaving a collection of empty blue claws for me to find. Our Forest Kingfisher,
Todiramphus macleayi
, is apparently a summer visitor. It makes its nest in arboreal termite nests. One fisher-bird I never expected to see at Cave Creek was a cormorant. I was scrambling along the creek, pulling out Impatiens and Mist Weed, when I became aware that something was flapping just out of sight around a bend. I waded into the creek until I could see round the bend, and was astonished to see a single Little Pied Cormorant (
Microcarbo melanoleucos
), apparently fishing in water that was no more than a foot or two deep. I watched as it dived and swam until it eventually popped out of the water onto a sunlit rock where it hung out its wings to dry, as all cormorants do.

Large birds nobody has much time for are our Brush-turkeys (
Alectura lathami
). They tend to hang around the car park scavenging for scraps, and scuttling clumsily out of the way of the traffic. I’ve seen tourists throw stones at them, apparently under the impression that pelting turkeys is one of the legitimate amusements afforded by the national park. Gardeners hate them because they scrape and scratch to build up a large nest mound of leaf litter, destroying cherished planting schemes and turning neat suburban plots into fowl yards. I love the Cave Creek turkeys, not merely because their tails are attached sideways, but also because the first verification I had of my belief that it was possible to rebuild a rainforest was when the turkeys moved into our very first planting and made a huge mound. In the car park they are abject, greasy-looking creatures, but in the forest, where they are truly wild and very timid, they are glossy and their naked heads bright red. If you hear something scraping and rustling in the forest, it is bound to be a turkey. If something bites the head off the wildflowers you have transplanted to your rainforest garden, it will be a turkey. For a few weeks one winter I was accompanied everywhere I walked by a male Brush-turkey resplendent in full mating rig. If he was foraging in the garden when I set off he would trot along behind me; if he wasn’t, he would catch me up. If I stopped, he stopped. He caused me some anxiety when he gobbled up a large slab of soap he found in the outdoor laundry, but it didn’t seem to do him any harm.

When he was maundering about how nice birds are, O’Reilly must have quite forgotten about cuckoos, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, often damaging any eggs they find already there. When the cuckoo egg hatches, the intruder nestling may throw out the host birds’ eggs or nestlings. The phenomenon of kleptoparasitism is not of course confined to birds. There are cuckoo bees, and cuckoo wasps as well. The true rainforest cuckoo is the Shining Bronze Cuckoo (
Chrysococcyx lucidus
); the female lays as many as sixteen eggs, one each in sixteen different nests of smaller species: thornbills, wrens, flycatchers and honeyeaters. We also have the Brush Cuckoo (
Cacomantis variolosus
) and the Fan-tailed Cuckoo (
C. flabelliformis
). The Channel-billed Cuckoo (
Scythrops novaehollandiae
) grows to between fifty-eight and sixty-five centimetres, making it the biggest brood parasite on earth. The male will fly over the nest of a sitting magpie, crow, currawong or butcherbird, until the occupants come out to drive him away, when his mate will slip into the nest and lay her egg. When hatched the chick is altricial, that is, helpless, blind and naked, but within weeks it will be bigger than the host bird whose own nestlings will not have survived. The genus
Scythrops
, so named by John Latham, is monotypic, and seems to be no kin to cuckoos proper at all. They eat insects; the Channel-billed Cuckoo eats fruit, especially figs and mistletoe berries. It tends to keep company with figbirds and cuckoo-shrikes.

Two birds I see often foraging in the rainforest garden are the Grey Shrike Thrush (
Colluricincla harmonica
) and the Bassian Thrush (
Zoothera lunulata
). A forager I didn’t expect to see is the Rufous Scrub-bird (
Atrichornis rufescens
). One evening, when I dawdled too long on my walk and found dusk overtaking me, I startled a bird that flew up and landed a few yards ahead. I kept coming, walking at a slow and even pace, and it continued to forage, poking around under the fallen leaves rather than flicking them away. The low light made it hard to see but, as I turned away, it uttered its loud whip-cracking call. It is one bird that has all but disappeared as its coastal rainforest habitat has been built over. To see a Rufous Scrub-bird thriving at Cave Creek is worth every penny that the rainforest has cost me.

From the beginning of settlement Australians have loved and hated cockatoos. The first Moreton Bay settlers lost no time in catching them, taming them, and teaching them to speak, and not simply because good talkers were worth a considerable amount of money. Every day the Brisbane newspapers carried advertisements begging for the return of lost and stolen cockatoos, offering large rewards, as much sometimes as for a dog or a horse. Within months, though the general attachment to pet cockies kept on growing, a different note began to be heard. Cockatoos en masse had turned out to be a serious pest, capable of destroying an entire crop of grain in a single evening. While caged individuals were loved and fussed over, wild cockatoos were being killed in all kinds of ruthless and inventive ways. In 1867 the
Brisbane Courier
ran a dramatic account of the poisoning of a huge flock of white cockatoos by spreading grain soaked in a solution of vinegar and strychnine: ‘As lie the thickly-strewn apples ere they are gathered into the press, so under that tree lay the little snowy mounds, each of which had been a white cockatoo . . . Far and wide wherever they winged their flight, there fell their dead; and the dingoes and the crows feasted on their bodies, and died.’ (
BC
, 16 March)

Most farmers contented themselves with shooting as many cockatoos as they could, greatly though they resented the cost of powder and shot. As one farmer complained:

Cockatoos keep us busy watching the little patch of early corn, which is now ripening. Early in the morning and late in the evening they visit us in clouds, their horrible screeching and cawing being equally as irritating an annoyance to the farmer as was ever a bluebottle fly to an editor. Gun in hand you may follow them from tree to tree, round and round your farm, until, wearied, tired and annoyed, you let fly one barrel after the other right at them. (
BC
, 11 January 1868)

Drought in the inland made a bad situation worse as the birds were driven towards the ranges and the coast in search of food (
BC
, 29 May 1868). All kinds of bird-scaring mechanisms were devised but nothing worked. The cockatoos were simply too intelligent. If a scarecrow was placed in a field, the cockatoos would watch it and bide their time. As soon as they registered the fact that the figure didn’t move, they simply returned and resumed feeding. In 1877 the first calls for legislation to deal with the cockatoo ‘plague’ began to be heard (
BC
, 5 May).