The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (2 page)

I first heard the story about wallabies on Loch Lomond in a Glasgow pub, which made me initially doubt its veracity. Asking around, it seemed that about 50 percent of Glaswegians had heard the story. But knowing about wallabies on an island is one thing; actually seeing them is another. Although Inchconnachan is part of Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park and is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, it is still owned by the Colquhoun
family. My reading of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000) seemed to suggest that I had the right to walk all over the island without asking permission. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003) seemed to suggest the same. Even better, the Scottish Outdoor Access Code (2005) made it pretty clear that as long as I stayed away from residences, didn’t commit an obvious criminal act, didn’t harass the wildlife, and didn’t let a dog run free, I could pretty much tramp over any bit of Scotland that I pleased. No need to ask; just do it.

But that sort of behaviour just isn’t in my personality. I am more likely to ask for permission than for forgiveness, and so I did, and was rewarded with official sanction from Iain Sheves, factor of Luss Estates Company. Sheves asked that I write to a ranger in the national park to let officials know I would be on the island, and said I should stay clear of a small, environmentally sensitive spot on Inchconnachan, but otherwise I was welcome to have a poke around.

This still left me without a means of getting to Inchconnachan. Luckily, through mutual friends, I had struck up an acquaintance with Klarinka Farkas. Klarinka was an architect from Hungary who had visited Scotland eight years earlier and had loved it so much that she stayed. Klarinka was far more comfortable out-of-doors than in, and being particularly fond of marine sports felt Scotland would provide her with greater opportunity than landlocked Hungary. To a large extent, she was able to ply her profession from the home she had purchased in the tiny west coast community of Mosachbean. Beyond her own gear, Klarinka had a spare kayak, a spare tent, a spare sleeping bag, and all of the other outdoor equipment that I didn’t have. Further, she was willing to spend a few days away from her computer to have a paddle to look for wallabies.

T
HERE ARE FOUR SONGS
of enduring fame to have originated in Scotland. The first is the rock classic “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. The second is the bagpipe classic “Danny Boy.” The third is that other bagpipe classic that everyone knows, but
no one can ever remember the name of or the words to. “Aaaa reee braaaad daaa daaa daaaaaa, Aaaa reee broooo daaa daaa broooooo”; you know the one. The fourth is “The Bonny Banks o’ Loch Lomond.” No one seems to be able to agree on the lyrics, but one version goes:

There are endless notions about who composed the piece, when, and under what circumstances. My favourite story involves Donald Macdonald, a Scottish soldier awaiting trial after his capture at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Sitting in Carlisle jail, Macdonald was pretty sure he would be executed the following day for his role in the Jacobite Rebellion. Convinced that his soul would reach Scotland from the gallows before some of his fellow prisoners who would be set free to walk home, he wrote the poem for his beloved Moira. Whether or not Macdonald wrote the words to “Loch Lomond,” he appears to have escaped the gallows and lived for another twenty-four years.

Death is not the only way to get to the bonny, bonny shores of Loch Lomond. If you are keen on staying off the gallows, you can take the train from Glasgow’s Partick station, and for just £3.10, it will drop you off forty minutes later at the town of Balloch, just a couple of hundred metres from the loch. This is what I did.

I didn’t want to be late for my rendezvous with Klarinka, so I caught a train that got me into Balloch an hour early. I plonked myself down on a stone wall to wait. Showing typical Hungarian efficiency, when Klarinka pulled up she had already purchased all of the groceries that we would need for our three-day trip. I would have appreciated the opportunity for a bit of input on our meals, but her efforts meant that we were away that much sooner.

Klarinka drove us up the west side of Loch Lomond to one of the park’s interpretive centres. We unpacked all the gear from her car and moved the kayaks from the roof rack to the water’s edge. Now, I am generally a whiz when it comes to packing a lot of stuff into a little space. I have even been known to get two bodies into a single sleeping bag. But when it came to getting drinking water, food, and camping gear into the holds of Klarinka’s spare kayak, I just couldn’t make it work. After Klarinka had packed her kayak, she took over packing mine. Then we went through a checklist—or rather, Klarinka went through a checklist. Did I have sunglasses? No, because I was wearing eyeglasses. Did I have a rain jacket? Yes, because I was not an idiot. Was I wearing sandals? Yes, because I knew that shoes never dry on a kayaking trip. Did I have a hat? Yes, it was perched right there on top of my head. It all left me with the rather uncomfortable feeling that I was being directed by a Girl Guide leader.

I love to canoe, and I love to kayak. I haven’t done a lot of either, but I claim to be reasonably confident in either craft. This made me feel all the more incompetent when my kayak was as tippy as a Glaswegian on a Saturday night. Klarinka got back out of her kayak and steadied mine while I got in and adjusted the spray skirt.

Then we were underway, en route to an adventure with wallabies on Inchconnachan. Less than 30 seconds into the three-day trip, I discovered that my kayak had no rudder, which Klarinka described as a “North American thing.” No matter what I did, with every pull on the paddle the kayak pulled to port, and I didn’t have a rudder to counteract it. It wasn’t just that I was paddling harder on the right side; as soon as I stopped paddling, the craft coasted in a lazy arc to the left. I was told that I must be sitting wrong. I tried shifting my weight, but I had to choose between a position that made the pulling bad and one that made it even worse.

My progress was slow. Klarinka, a semi-pro with a paddle, kept looking back over her shoulder to see why I wasn’t keeping up. Then I twigged that Klarinka had the impression that I was a lot more experienced in a kayak than I am. She waited twenty minutes before asking how long it had been since I had kayaked. I told her
that it had been seven years, but really it was closer to ten, in the same way that I am closer to forty years old than to thirty.

Three days was going to be a long time if I got too hung up about my inadequacies, so I settled into a pleasant, if glacial, rhythm. Being a Sunday morning in June, the waters of Loch Lomond around Luss were littered with powerboats towing water skiers, but we slowly pulled away from the noise and confusion and entered quieter waters.

As we approached Inchconnachan, I was surprised by how big it was. On my ordnance survey map, it was shorter than a paper clip, but it took us a considerable period to paddle around it as we looked for the best place to set up camp. In various spots around the island, several big cruisers lay at anchor, their occupants drinking fancy beverages with ice cubes. We gave them a wide berth.

At the far southern tip of the island, we found an idyllic little stretch of beach for the kayaks and a wide green verge for our tents. Midges made themselves known the moment we stepped on shore. These tiny biting flies are known by the scientific name
Culicoides impunctatus,
which translates from Latin as “countless punctures.” Giving the little devils the diminutive name “midgies” was probably the local way of making them seem less irritating, but the word, strange enough in a Scottish accent, was even odder in a Hungarian accent, “madge ease.” Klarinka, an old hand at the Scottish outdoors, had brought midge veils for both of us, and although they looked silly, they were a lot better than a thousand insect bites on my face.

I can erect my own tent in about thirty seconds, but no one can throw up an unfamiliar tent rapidly on their first go. It didn’t help that a young boy had arrived in a small horsepower tin boat to chat with me while I struggled. Klarinka had her tent up long before I had figured out mine. “Just let me know if you need help.” After coffee, Klarinka set out to do some more paddling; she was in training for a two-week kayaking trip to Finland. I went in search of wallabies.

S
OME OF THE ISLANDS
in Loch Lomond have no end of fascinating recorded history and claim many famous visitors. Inchconnachan
isn’t one of them. It has been called Inchconnachan, or some variation of it (probably a corruption of the name of its owners, the Colquhouns), since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Residents of Luss may have made whisky on the island in centuries past, but that was about it. For an island just one kilometre from north to south, it has an impressive range of different habitats. Significant mixed coniferous and deciduous woodlands feature in places, although the soil is thin, as evidenced by large fallen trees with shallow root balls. In the swampier lowlands, ferns grow to chest height, and bracket fungi, white and orange, grow from dead tree trunks.

After about an hour of tramping, I began to wonder if I was a victim of a hoax. How do you hide forty wallabies? But then, on trails about halfway to the summit on the island’s north side, I discovered poop that by its shape and size (rather squarish; it made me wonder how it got out) couldn’t be from anything else. As I was ascending the peak, forty metres away I spied something that I wasn’t expecting. It was a small, old, hunched Chinese man peeping at me through the undergrowth. Well, perhaps not so much an old man as a wallaby.

Big enough to be a male, he was greyish-brown on the back and pale grey below and had a neck that would be described as “red” only by someone with colour-blindness. He was woollier than I might have guessed. He shook his head vigorously, probably to dislodge a few midges, and then hopped away. Some trick of the soil meant that he made a
thump-thump
noise as he moved.

Most people think of wallabies as small kangaroos, although wallabies themselves claim that kangaroos are oversized wallabies. The family includes such oddities as rock-wallabies, nailtail wallabies, and hare-wallabies, but if you are looking for a good old down-and-dirty garden-variety wallaby you could do worse than to look at the red-necked wallaby. With wimpy arms and powerful jumping hind legs, they stand the better part of eighty centimetres, with an equally long tail. Males clock in at around twenty kilograms, and females at a slender fourteen kilograms. They are
found along the eastern coast of Australia as far south as Tasmania, where they are also called Bennett’s wallaby. Those in Tasmania are considered a different subspecies than those on the mainland. The Tasmanian ones have thicker and longer fur, and they are the likely source of wallabies on Inchconnachan. Red-necked wallabies rest in shrubbery or long grass during the day, emerging at night to eat grasses and herbs and sometimes browse on shrubs. For most of the year they are solitary, but sometimes gather in pubs in winter.

As with everything else in Australia, red-necked wallaby sex is odd. Males have a two-part penis, attached behind the testes, not in front. Not to be outdone, females have two uteruses and two vaginas. When a female becomes sexually receptive, she is followed by a group of enthusiastic, hopeful males, but when she is at her most fertile, a single dominant male chases all the other suitors away. Unlike the situation in placental mammals, the embryo doesn’t dig its way into the wall of the uterus. About a month after conception, a tiny joey climbs from its uterus and into its mother’s pouch, where it stays for about seven months before getting the courage to climb out for a hop around. The joey will continue to pester its mother for as long as six more months. If a female lives to a ripe old age, she will give birth to about nine young. In the warmer parts of Australia, red-necked wallabies breed throughout the year, but in Tasmania, cooler weather makes reproduction a summertime thing.

Red-necked wallabies are protected from persecution in Australia, unless they become pests, in which case they can be killed with a licence. Red-necked wallabies are hunted in Tasmania, where their meat is a delicacy. A non-commercial licence costs $25.60, and the season runs from February 23 of one year to February 22 of the next. Wallabies in Tasmania are a nervous lot.

When Klarinka returned from her paddle, we had a meal of pasta, cheese, and vegetables cooked over a propane flame. We couldn’t get a fire started because all the wood we had gathered was too wet. In the fading light, I took a walk with Klarinka to try to find wallabies. After a tramp through some marshy bits and up a
slight rise, Klarinka called out, “There’s one.” At first I couldn’t see it, but said that I could. I figured that she might be seeing a wallaby-shaped bush in the diminishing light. Then the bush hopped onto the trail. As we peered at it, and it peered at us in return, it occurred to me that a Scottish wallaby was a sight that most people will never get to see. Introductions of red-necked wallabies have been attempted in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and the Ukraine, all without success in establishing breeding populations. A small number of red-necked wallabies were introduced to the south island of New Zealand from Tasmania in 1870 and 1874, and they went on to become a forestry nuisance. Between 1950 and 1960, 5,000 to 6,000 wallabies a year were destroyed there.

Back at camp, we had one more try at a campfire, but either the wood was too wet or neither of us was as woodsy as we claimed to be. Instead we used the camp stove to make hot chocolate and retired to our tents. I tucked myself into the borrowed nylon sleeping bag using its nylon bag liner. It is much easier to launder a liner than a whole sleeping bag after you have loaned out your bag. But this created a problem. The liner was slippery, the bag was slippery, and the inflated sleeping pad was slippery. The situation is probably like trying to be smoochy with someone in silk pajamas, while wearing silk pajamas, lying on silk sheets. I changed into my running tights and a T-shirt, deflated the mattress, and tossed the bag liner to one corner of the tent. It took me a very long time to fall asleep, but insomnia is not nearly so bad a thing while camping. I woke very early to the songs of Chaffinches.