Mountain Tails (15 page)

Being inside a cloud makes for mystery, not clarity, and at 1000 metres up, I get a lot of cloud visits. My large double dam, slowly being throttled by reeds, was floating in the filtered light of thin cloud as I walked around it, glad to be out of the cabin after a week of wet days.

I like to see what's sprung up or out after such weather. For example, there's usually some new fungi, glowing in pleated orange lampshades on blackened tree trunks or erupting in pristine white parasols in the middle of a paddock. They may not last long, so I like to photograph them in their prime.

Not so ephemeral, but certainly shy, are the waterbirds who use my big dam. As it's not near the house, they usually have it to themselves,
watched only by the kangaroos and wallabies and the horses. These all love the native grass in the clearing above the dam, and keep it cropped so short you'd swear it was mown, which is probably also why no trees seed there.

The waterbirds get a shock whenever I do appear, to start the pump for example, and either take off in flutter and flurry, dive under the water or scoot into the reeds. Often only the dark ruffled chicks of the Dusky Moorhens are left circling and chattering to each other.

But this day, the enveloping cloud seemed to muffle sound as well as sight, and through the reeds I spotted a pair of Wood Ducks. I crept towards them, and got closer than usual, but they sensed me coming and waddled off into the mist. Keeping their heads averted as if I didn't exist, they were muttering to each other at the disturbance. I've noticed that they rarely do look at me.

This shy and very elegant native duck is my most consistently resident waterbird.

The male has little patterning on his pearl-grey body, and a chestnut-brown head, with a black strip, a feathery mane, at the back of his head. His folded wings create bold dark stripes down his back. While he gets the smart tuxedo treatment, she has a more delicate feminine patterning. She's a softly spotted greyish-brown, with white stripes across her brown head; since her mane is also brown, it's only noticeable in profile, as an odd shape. Hence they are sometimes called Maned Wood Ducks. Until they are grown up, the young ones of both sexes look like their mum.

Occasionally the couple fly over to the small dam below my house yard, but they hardly get to land on the surface, trailing arrows of ripples behind them, before the bossy magpies hassle them to leave. After a lot of protesting squawks on their part and insistent cries from the maggies, the pair take wing, back over the treetops to where they belong. No outsiders allowed in the magpies' local pool. They will allow the ducks to fossick amongst the tussocks around the dam wall for a time, but not to go in.

Just once, I saw a lone cormorant on this dam. Looking very out of place, it remained there for quite a few hours, perhaps resting after a long flight. Black and white, distinctly shaped, I think it was a Little Pied Cormorant. The magpies didn't bother it, so maybe there is a hospitality code for weary travellers?

Recently I spotted the ducks pecking about on the bank. By the time I got there with the camera, they'd taken flight. I waited as they wheeled about; they headed back to land on the water. As the female hit the surface, her mane feathers fluffed out, punkish, backlit by low sunlight, as noticeable as her partner's for once. The magpie sentinels must have been on a break, for the pair swam about for several minutes before waddling up the bank.

Some years ago, my partner and I found a baby Wood Duck stumbling up our track, a long, dry, and very exposed way from the big dam where its parents were based. It had obviously been attacked, with an open wound on the side of its head. We wrapped it in a sweater and took it home to keep warm and safe at least, but without much hope that it would survive. It didn't.

Further up the track to the dam we found two dead ducklings. There were none visible on the water. The parents could have been frightened off by a predator and abandoned the nest. I wonder how any young survive, since it's fairly common to see a Wood Duck couple leading their string of ducklings right into the traffic to cross a busy road; they aren't the smartest or most responsible of parents.

I guess they just have lots of ducklings and consider them expendable. Cute and fluffy to our eyes they may be, but that counts for nothing in their tough world. With Wood Ducks, it's survival of the luckiest.

Just when I think I have the measure of the small creatures that might possibly invade my cabin's inner sanctity, they confound me anew, as did this particular ‘tail'.

I had been using cotton buds—those plastic sticks with cotton wool on the ends—for dabbing Hypericum oil (St John's Wort). As I was only using one end at a time, I would lay the cotton bud in the saucer beside the little brown bottle of oil. This sat on my high chest of drawers in the bedroom.

For about a week I kept going to use the other end of the half-used cotton bud that I thought I'd left in the saucer, but since none was there I clearly hadn't. Senility was approaching faster than I'd expected. Then
I began saying to myself, ‘But I'm sure ... well, almost sure ... I left one there!' Had it been bumped off, blown off? But to where? I began to suspect theft, but by what, for what purpose?

Agatha Christie's Poirot would have been proud of me: I moved the saucer and bottle to the kitchen, to a lower, more watchable bench; I made a note whenever I left a half-used cotton bud there. They kept disappearing. Whew! I was no more senile than I'd been a few weeks ago.

I placed an unused cotton bud there instead. It was still there in the morning. So it was the oil that was the attraction, but why not just suck it or eat the cotton wool off the stick? Why take the stick away, and to where?

Thinking of the tooth fairy's palace of baby teeth, I began imagining a delicate white edifice of criss-crossed plastic sticks, a summerhouse for some small creature. But what was it and where did it live? Surely my cabin had no cracks big enough for a creature lugging cotton buds to squeeze through?

Nothing was being caught in the live trap, although the cheese was taken every night, so it must be something so small, so light, that it didn't set off the spring under the cheese platform. Mature antechinus are heavy enough to spring the trap. The other odd thing was that something was also dragging my little yellow pear tomatoes from their dish, and eating them. Antechinus are carnivores.

Then one night I heard the trap door snap shut, but none of the usual noisy scrabblings followed. In the morning I carried the trap down to the forest to release whatever it was. I turned it up towards me, so my captive could slip to the bottom, and opened the door for a peek first. There were two very small critters in there; two slim, sleek, grey animals with pale tummies, pointy noses, pink ears and delicate legs that seemed longer than those on any antechinus I'd seen. They leapt up towards me—or freedom—which was not antechinus behaviour either. I quickly tipped them into the tussocks and they disappeared.

Were these my cotton bud thieves? Or were the two events unrelated? Poirot, where are you when I need you?

Despite looking through my books and asking friends at another wildlife refuge, I still don't know what they were, nor if they took the cotton buds, or where to. A Dunnart? A New Holland Mouse? Or a House Mouse, at which I should go ‘E-eek!'?

Having no further need of oiled cotton buds, the thefts were stopped; the mystery remained unsolved. But I am still hoping to find that fanciful white structure; after all, if a bowerbird has an aesthetic sense, why can't a mini marsupial?

When I'm not murdering earthworms in my erratic forays in the garden, I'm probably coming close to scalping witchetty grubs. When exposed to the sudden light, these fat white corrugated grubs, like Michelin Men amputees, curl helplessly and wave their ends at me.

One end is yellowish-orange and black, which I'm told is the head, although I haven't looked very closely. I always quickly re-bury them elsewhere and hope for the best.

The name ‘witchetty grub' is used for wood-eating larvae, not only of the cossid moth of Central Australia, where it was/is an important protein food for indigenous peoples, but of other moths and longicorn beetles. It seems that they get called witchetty grubs only in the context
of being considered as food. As a vegetarian, I don't even have to consider whether I'd eat one. Since they're quite fat, and grow to about 70 millimetres long, there'd be more substance to one than on a frog's leg I imagine, but I'm not tempted.

And yes, once upon a long pre-vegetarian time ago, being wined and dined by a prospective lover at a fancy French restaurant in Sydney, I did try frog's legs in some sort of sauce—and snails. The garlic butter on the snails was the best part of the meal. Isn't it amazing what you do when you're young and silly and want to impress with your sophistication?

According to others, witchetty grubs can be eaten raw, when it's said they taste like almonds, or cooked in hot ashes, when they're like cooked egg in a crispy chicken-skin wrapper. I'll take their word for it. Raw! Can you imagine it writhing on your tongue before you bite? Ugh! But then, in my young-married days, I did eventually overcome my distaste and eat raw oysters, knowing they were alive, by blanking out the knowledge for that instant. I couldn't have managed that if they'd wriggled.

Real witchetty grubs live underground and feed on the roots of certain trees, especially acacias, but I find my variety well away from any trees, perhaps feeding on old rotting wood buried in the ground. I assume they'll become big grey wood moths of some sort.

I love those intricate drawings of cut-through sections of multilayered man-made or natural environments. Yet if I saw one that showed all the tunnels and hidey-holes of the busy and burgeoning life underground, no matter how small the creatures, it would possibly stop me ever putting spade to soil again.

It's that old concept of ‘out of sight, out of mind'. Once awakened, alerted, informed, my sensitivity and my conscience will give me hell about life under earth, and I have enough trouble dealing with life
on
earth.

I have great admiration and affection for the nocturnal birds called Tawny Frogmouths. As a teenager, hurrying home along our darkening country lane after the late bus had dropped me up at the main road, I would often start at the faint glint of eyes in an oddly angled silhouette on a fence post.

This being the early sixties, I was not only allowed but expected to walk the several kilometres home by myself, even if it was winter, with night coming in early and no street lights along the road. I never had a torch with me.

My family owned one but it was kept for blackouts and for going to the outside toilet, the ‘dunny', on moonless nights—a scary trip to be
avoided if at all possible, moon or torch or no. If I couldn't talk someone into coming outside with me, I'd first peer out from the back door to check if the axe was still embedded in the woodchopping block, so I'd know no baddie was hiding behind the tank stand with axe raised to murder me. Then I'd dash across the yard to the toilet, where at least only spiders threatened.

Back then I didn't know what the fence-sitting creature was, but I grew to know well its shape, its silhouette. Years later, when first living here, I came across that familiar shape in a very wrong time and place. Daytime, driving down the dirt road through the forest, my husband and I saw a large streaked and spotted brownish-grey bird entangled in the barbed-wire fence beside the road.

It must have been struggling for some time, as it had wound itself further around the twists of a barb through a wing. Gritting our teeth at the pain we knew we must cause, we put a coat over the bird and unwound it off the fence as carefully as we could. Still wrapped, we brought it home, and made a temporary shelter for it.

Cutting the top off a box, we attached a screenwire flap and set the ‘nest' in a sunny spot by the window. We eased the bird out of the coat and onto the soft dry grass bedding in the box. There was a bit of flapping and then it settled. Nothing else seemed to be wrong with it apart from the wound on its wing and the shock. We didn't know if it had torn a tendon or just flesh, so whether it would mend to fly again.

We left it alone for a few hours to adjust. But what
was
this very odd-looking creature? From our bird book, it was unmistakably a Tawny Frogmouth, and the attitude depicted there was also unmistakably that of my fence-sitter of years ago. When alarmed, at night they fly away, but by day or at its dim edges, their defence is to freeze in that extended pose—petrified in several senses of the word.

I tried to give it water from an eyedropper, and after a few goes it accepted the drops. I shall never forget the way it did so. Head up, neck outstretched, beak raised and slightly parted as if for a kiss, eyes closed.
The quaint erect fluff of feathers above its beak, like a lady's ‘fascinator' hair adornment that had slipped slightly, waved gently each time it sipped a water drop.

As we grew more accustomed to each other, I saw more attitudes and aspects. Its mouth or beak was a very wide gape, so that's where the ‘frog mouth' comes from. There was also something froglike about the flattish sloped head and the way the round black and yellow eyes looked up at me from its extended ‘eyebrow', where a frog often has a stripe of different colour.

After a few days it seemed more active, especially at night, so we put the open box on its side in our small interim vegetable garden, which had a netting fence surround but no roof. We'd had no success in getting our frogmouth to take any food, as mushed up oats or similar vegetarian offerings or even dead flies didn't appeal to a hunter like this.

For a few days more it sort of stumbled about lopsidedly in the garden, moving the injured wing more and more, hopefully catching food like beetles. Then one morning it had gone. Flown the coop, we hoped, to resume its wild life.

Decades later, I was walking through my forest in the late morning, when I spotted two of
those
shapes ahead, silhouetted on a branch. I started at the familiarity. One would have gone unnoticed, taken for a broken-off dead branch, but two almost identical broken branches side-by-side stood out—as two Tawny Frogmouths playing dead.

Even when I went right up below them, they held the pose, frozen at a half-upright angle, brown and grey, mottled and flecked and streaked just like the branch on which they were perched. Their eyes were tightly closed, like a child when first learning to hide: ‘I can't see you, so you can't see me.' These birds were adding, ‘And if I stay very still you'll go away.'

I did.