The New Nature Read online

  Whisson, D., Dixon, V., Taylor, M., et al. (2016), ‘Failure to respond to food resource decline has catastrophic consequences for koalas in a high-density population in Southern Australia’, PLOS ONE 11(1): e0144348.

  Williams, N., McDonnell, M., Phelan, G., et al. (2006), ‘Range expansion due to urbanization: Increased food resources attract grey-headed flying-foxes (Pteropus poliocephalus) to Melbourne’, Austral Ecology 31, 190–8.

  ‘Humans and nature construct one another.’

  – Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature (1992)

  A brown snake visits my Brisbane garden. She’s a metre long, sleek and shiny, with enough juice in her jaws to kill everyone in my street. I’ve seen her only five times in nine years, so I know she spends most of her days in other people’s gardens. My neighbours sometimes see her. I’m amazed she’s never been hit by a stick, mauled by a dog or mashed by a car. By some act of grace she never harms anyone and never comes to harm herself. She used to slide down a hole under my front doorstep, until she grew too big to fit in. I say ‘she’ because I’ve sometimes found baby brown snakes gliding over my lawn. (I was snapped at in the laundry once. I think my doorstep was her hatchery.)

  No-one wants to say it, but brown snakes are doing rather well these days, thank you very much. Their numbers are probably higher now than ever before. They benefit when bulldozers push down forests to make grassy fields that are attractive to rats and mice. Most browns today live on farms – and eat exotic rodents.

  We hear so much these days about wildlife dying out, as if nature en masse were sliding down the drain. The truth is more interesting. Many native things are thriving by riding on our coat-tails. Seagulls, ravens, magpies, red-back spiders and bulrushes have never known better times. Their futures brightened when people came to the great south land.

  Whenever humans destroy habitats there are species that benefit. In this story I call them ‘winners’. (Many winners are exotic invaders, but only Australian species concern me here.) I use the word iron­ically, to convey an idea. My point is that many threatened species, ‘losers’, aren’t threatened by us directly, but more by the behaviour of the winners. Rare shorebirds, for example, are losing eggs to seagulls and ravens. Whenever we build cities or roads, dam rivers or move species around, we create winners who in turn create losers. That said, there’s no neat division into winning and losing species. The world isn’t divided up into opposite pairs. A winner in one place can easily be a loser in another.

  Last year I went looking for rare species on Queen’s Domain, a woodland reserve near the heart of Hobart. My map showed the hot spots for rare plants. One proved to be a footpath shaded by American cypress pines. A road ran along one side and a carpark on the other. I looked under the pines and found three rare species – two daisies and a peppercress. Then I wandered over to the nearby manna gum woodland. No rare plants.

  Losers as well as winners are moving in with us. Sydney has an endangered frog that supposedly benefits from heavy metals. Our toilet flushings sustain great hosts of birds and fish. We have engineered the earth to meet our needs, and many other species find their needs met too.

  Change prevails. ‘Nature’, conceived as a balanced, harmonious, timeless whole, is a romantic myth dating back to early Greek cosmologies. ‘“The balance of nature” does not exist, and perhaps has never existed,’ declared leading biologist Charles Elton in 1930. Prominent scientists (Paul Ehrlick and Charles Birch included) keep repeating this refrain, yet the idea of a balance of nature persists as an implicit assumption behind much ecological and everyday thought. But if a balance of nature ever was, it can’t have been for quite some time. The earth has just come through the Pleistocene glaciations, when climates swung wildly. The species around today survived that traumatic era. They now have a new force to contend with – Homo sapiens. Some species are coping rather well, and not by hiding themselves away in the wilderness.

  Nature is sold to us as something separate that lives far away from us in wild places, when really it’s all around us, engaging with us more than we guess. The wilderness begins right here where we live. The ‘new nature’ is really the story of animals and plants responding to the latest environmental challenge – us.

  ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . .’

  Robert Burns, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1788)

  Animals were exploiting us a long time ago. The first grain grown in Australia was plundered by king parrots, rosellas, bowerbirds and currawongs. Naturalist George Caley, arriving in Sydney in 1800 when the colony was twelve years old, recorded this. Blue wrens skipped through his garden and flycatchers danced on his roof. Birds were busy exploring new dwellings and fields.

  Welcome swallows soon decided that houses made good nest sites. ‘These old houses,’ Caley wrote, ‘are the derelict huts of settlers, who have abandoned their worn-out farms; and the nests are constructed on the wall-plates, as they are called in the colony.’ The houses came with free meals supplied in the form of all the flying insects drawn to old fields. The swallows got what they wanted, and they still get it today. Paddocks with sheds, and ovals with pavilions, suit them perfectly. By 1834 naturalist George Bennett had decided that swallows ‘always seem to prefer the society or protection of the human race’. The messy nests were often removed from buildings, but ‘this will not deter the industrious little creatures from rebuilding in the same situations’, he noted, ‘until, being repeatedly destroyed, they are obliged to seek for another place of refuge’. More than a century later, in 1948, naturalist Alec Chisholm concluded that ‘aside from an occasional nest in the “step” of a mining shaft, or in a cave, it is a rare event to find him [the swallow] housekeeping anywhere but in a building or a culvert’.

  Swallows keep on pushing the boundaries. They have bred inside Rockhampton’s railway station, operating the doors by hovering before the sensors. This is a true story, properly documented. So, it seems, is the tale told in 1912 (in the bird journal Emu) of swallows nesting on a train that rattled its way twice each day from Mornington, near Melbourne, to Stony Point. According to Chisholm: ‘An observer in Western Australia states that Swallows regularly nested on a 6-ton cutter that lay at anchor two miles from the mainland, and on one occasion a pair of the birds followed the vessel a distance of thirty-five miles and back, meanwhile feeding their young in the nest.’ My friend Terry Reis saw swallows nesting on a car ferry that crosses the Brisbane River (near Moggill). A ferry driver in New Zealand told me that swallows nest each year on his catamaran. They follow him half a kilometre out on Lake Rotorua, then meet him on the way back.

  Swallows are not desperate or displaced when they nest on buildings and boats – they are responding to favourable cues. England’s barn swallows took to barns and halls long ago, and our own birds, closely related, have followed suit. Buildings offer protection against predators and rain, and they often stand near insect-rich fields. Snakes and goannas are less likely to scale walls and mount boats than enter caves and hollow trees where nests were traditionally placed.

  Fear of predators may also motivate yellow-bellied sunbirds, tiny tropical birds, when they choose to live on verandahs. Their dangling fibre nests are often slung from clotheslines and wires, perhaps to escape rain and be close to garden flowers, but probably to elude enemies as well. These tiny birds show little fear of people. A nest on Great Keppel Island was built in a doorway, hanging at eye level, obliging the humans to duck to enter their home. The birds later moved this nest, piece by piece, to the lounge room. Finches often nest near wasps to discourage predators, and sunbirds may be using us in the same way.

  How else do we explain the remarkable night roosts of rainbow lorikeets? I know of one busy Brisbane intersection where hundreds of lorikeets sleep in a few scrawny trees, unfazed by roaring traffic, glaring supermarket lights, and blaring music from a nearby bar. Why sleep here and not in the forest a few kilometres away? Another roost in Maroochydore stands above a McDonald’s takeaway on a bu
sy road. The proprietors have tried hard to evict their tenants because they soil cars, drown out important announcements about hamburgers, and clog ventilation shafts with stray feathers. The largest roost I’ve ever seen was right by Kingfisher Bay Resort on Fraser Island, where hundreds and hundreds of lorikeets streamed in from the wilderness to sleep in a few isolated trees right by the buildings.

  One biologist suggested to me that these roosts are traditional, dating back hundreds of years, and that the birds are responding to conditioned behaviour. I can’t swallow this. Townsville, a very old town, has two roosts in its main street, one in small exotic trees around a McDonald’s takeaway. I have peered at these parrots perched only three metres above my head, right beside bright lights, wondering why they didn’t move to more secluded trees only a few wingflaps away. In malls and at intersections they probably feel safe from goshawks and snakes. The same thinking must apply to the noisy miners roosting in small leopard trees on a footpath outside the railway station near my house. They sleep right by a major intersection, between a Red Rooster takeaway and a pub, a few metres from an underground walkway exit, in sparse foliage two or three metres above people’s heads. I stare and stare but can’t quite make sense of this.

  And what about fruit bats? In the nineteenth century John Gould wrote about these grey-headed ‘vampires’ sleeping ‘in the more secluded parts of the forest’. That’s not true today. Sydney and Melbourne have both had big bat camps in their botanic gardens in the inner city. Brisbane has more than a dozen bat colonies within its suburban sprawl and none at all in surrounding forest, despite plenty of secluded gullies. Bats also roost in Mt Isa, Hervey Bay, Gladstone, Dalby, Ballina, and many other towns. Why do little red flying-foxes like the tiny township of Coen on Cape York Peninsula? It is bounded by wilderness, so why sleep in town? Towns are probably chosen for their bountiful supply of fruit and nectar, safety from shotguns and ease of navigation. Bat expert Les Hall suggests bats use lights to navigate home at night. It’s an amazing idea. Should we string up bat lights in national parks? Lights certainly help birds forage at night. Seagulls and kookaburras often feed after dark in well-lit ovals and malls, and I’ve seen a willie wagtail feeding under lights in a Pizza Hut carpark. Bright lights were trialled in orchards as a way of deterring bats, but (not surprisingly) the experiment didn’t last long.

  Bats aren’t always the best of neighbours. In December 2000 some 15000 little red flying-foxes descended on Moranbah, a small mining town in central Queensland. More secluded digs were available along creeks or in vast woodlands nearby, but the bats chose town. They were soiling washing, waking children and provoking nightmares. Concerns were raised about sleep-deprived miners operating heavy machinery. Chris Blackburn of Today Tonight depicted Moranbah as ‘a Queensland town under siege; held to ransom by an airborne enemy that has overwhelmed the local population’. Residents used mine sirens and horns to drive off the bats, only to have them settle around the school. Clashes like this are becoming common.

  Bats in cities, like swallows on buildings, are acting by choice. About seventy years ago, biologist Francis Ratcliffe visited a big bat colony in a ‘patch of jungle’ atop Mt Tamborine. He wrote of passing through a grove of palms and grand figs to reach them. Old-timers on Mt Tamborine tell me that very patch of ‘jungle’ still survives – inside a national park – but the bats have moved on. The nearest permanent camps are now on the Gold Coast – one beside a housing estate, the other in a park near Jupiters Casino, Broadbeach. Some of the Broadbeach bats roost within eight metres of the hectic four-lane Gold Coast Highway. Ratcliffe must be spinning in his grave.

  Cities all over the world are valued for roosting. Europe’s starlings and wagtails form vast sleeping flocks on buildings, starlings preferring Gothic and Victorian architecture. In Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, thousands of red-footed kestrels wheel into town to roost in three Australian eucalypts on a poor housing estate. Australian diplomat Doug Laing took me there, and also showed me an urban waterbird roost where hundreds of egrets, herons, cormorants and ibises crowd six bird-soiled Eucalyptus grandis. Eucalypts grow taller than most African trees, and birds like them for sleeping and nesting. They are large enough to accommodate great hosts of birds and their pale boughs show up in dim light.

  What are these examples showing? That nature is more opportunistic than we think; that animals aren’t always fixed in their ways; that they will exploit the opportunities we provide. This certainly holds true for the birds that use the things we make.

  Magpies are fond of wire, and why not? Wire nests last longer than nests made of sticks. Magpies search assiduously around barns and yards for good lengths of wire. One nest I know of was made from 243 strands with a total length of 100 metres. Cormorants have been known to use barbed wire. Peewees (magpie-larks) sometimes steal so much fresh putty from window frames that the panes fall out. Other birds choose softer and safer substances, such as paper, string, cloth, cotton wool. White-eared honeyeaters like human hair. They will slip and slide on bald pates trying to reach strands on the sides.

  Male satin bowerbirds colour their display bowers blue – with feathers, berries and flowers, but more often these days with pens, drinking straws, clothes pegs, bottle caps and food wrappers. They rob from each other, blue plastic working its way up into remote mountains. Most bowers today advertise in plastic. The males inseminate every female seduced by the artificial hues. Plastic, therefore, now shapes genetic selection in the species, influencing future evolution. This is happening not because blue flowers, feathers and berries have grown scarce, but because bowerbirds appreciate modern technology. Factory blues are richer and more durable than nature’s ephemeral offerings.

  Spotted bowerbirds go for artefacts too. These outback birds will steal glass eyes, jewellery, nails, wire, bullet casings, aluminium foil and pull-tops from cans, but rely mainly on sheep bones, which they drape around the edges of their bowers, and on glass fragments, which are placed closer in. ‘Bones function primarily to attract females to the bower,’ researcher Gerald Borgia explained, ‘and glass enhances their willingness to mate once they arrive.’ In other words, smashed windscreen glass is a bowerbird turn-on.

  Alec Chisholm wrote of one spotted bowerbird that came to camp each day to steal: ‘It was one of the duties of the small son of the bushman to toddle to the bower before each meal and regain a battered pepper-tin particularly cherished by the whimsical owner of that playground.’ Great bowerbirds in northern Australia have become the world’s keenest collectors of human artefacts. One bower contained hundreds of aluminium bottle tops, along with toy teacups, bottle stoppers, shards of glass, milk bottle tops, a toothbrush, a plastic rabbit, a toy Santa Claus, a zip fastener, a safety pin, a toy fork, red cloth and pieces of wire. Opal and gold are sometimes displayed as well.

  Satin bowerbirds even exploit the presence of people. Bowers are placed around campgrounds close to paths but subtly hidden. I found one on Lamington Plateau, in southern Queensland, right by the toilet block stairs – the busiest place possible.1 Great bowerbirds in Townsville build in gardens, right up against front fences close to busy footpaths. At James Cook University a bower stands right near the administration building a metre and a half from a busy path. These birds are surely showing off. Like James Dean racing a car to a cliff edge, they are out to impress females. ‘Look at me, not afraid of humans!’

  Old tales about bowerbirds are very intriguing, implying that birds were thieving from people long before Europeans reached Australia. Here is anthropologist Donald Thomson, in 1935, on the great bowerbird:

  The bower is a large and elaborate structure, in which the twigs forming the side walls often meet over the central run-way; it is adorned with quantities of grey and white pebbles, shells of land molluscs . . . as well as with native fruits, fragments of leaves, galls, and rosette-like growths of plants, and odds and ends gathered from the native camps. Although the bowers of these birds are often built close to native cam
ps, the birds are not molested. Bower-birds are not eaten and the aboriginal does not destroy bird life wantonly.

  Here, too, bowerbirds were impressing females by building near people – something they’ve evidently been doing for thousands of years.

  Satin bowerbirds also stole from Aborigines. Gould noted in 1865:

  The propensity of these birds to fly off with any attractive object, is so well known to the natives that they always search the runs for any small missing article that may have been accidentally dropped in the brush. I myself found at the entrance of one of them a small neatly-worked stone tomahawk, of an inch and a half in length, together with some slips of blue cotton rags, which the birds had doubtless picked up at a deserted encampment of the natives.

  Cloth went from English settlers to Aborigines to birds.

  I have pored over many old books searching for other tales about animals using Aborigines, and numerous examples have emerged. None is more remarkable than the trusting relationship between Aborigines and bottle-nosed dolphins in southern Queensland. In Moreton Bay tame dolphins drove schools of tailor and mullet to human hunters waiting in the shallows. Henry Stuart Russell was one of several colonists who witnessed the remarkable teamwork:

  At Amity Point, if the watchful natives can detect one of the shoals so common in the offing there, a few of the men would at once walk into the water and beat it with their spears.

  The wary porpoises would be seen presently coming in from seawards, fully alive and accustomed to the summons, driving the shoal towards the shelving beach. Scores of the tribe would be ready with their scoop nets to rush in and capture all they could, but not before the men who had summoned all their ministering servants had speared some good-sized fish, which were held out and taken off the end of the weapons by the porpoise nearest at hand.