The New Nature Read online

  One friendly old dolphin with a stick stuck in his back was taken to be the dolphin leader. I’ve met Aboriginal women on Stradbroke Island whose fathers remembered this amazing relationship. Cooperative hunting took place up and down the coast, from Fraser Island to Coffs Harbour, says geographer David Neil, who has collected many old stories. On Moreton Island tame dolphins are now hand-fed fish at a resort, and it’s tempting to think of this as behaviour that somehow persists from the old fishing days.

  Animals benefited when Aborigines dug wells along ‘dry’ riverbeds. In the Top End explorer Ludwig Leichhardt saw chestnut-quilled rock pigeons at a well, ‘clustered like flies round a drop of syrup’. One of his men also saw a crocodile sip at a small clay dam around a soak; other Aboriginal wells attracted hornets. All over the Outback these works must have saved the lives of animals during droughts, just as dams help kangaroos and pigeons today.

  In the wilds of central Queensland Leichhardt fought winged scavengers whom he compared to the Harpies of Greek legend. ‘Their boldness was indeed remarkable’, he concluded after ‘swarms of crows and kites’ gathered round his camp trying to swipe the bullock meat he was drying. At another camp the black kites were unbelievable: ‘when we were eating our meals, they perched around us on the branches of overhanging trees, and pounced down even upon our plates, although held in our hands, to rob us of our dinners’. Naturalist John Gilbert, accompanying the expedition, lost to the kites a precious new honeyeater he had procured. At another camp whips were wielded to keep kites away from the emu meat being dried, and at yet another a kite stole a morsel of bustard meat from Leichhardt’s very hand. Leichhardt was passing by untended Aboriginal camps at every large lagoon, and these birds obviously knew that people and tucker went together.

  Charles Sturt was also harried by kites when he trekked through the Outback in 1845.

  We were in the centre of the plain, lying between us and the hills, when Mr. Browne drew my attention to a number of small black specks in the upper air. These spots increasing momentarily in size, were evidently approaching us rapidly. In an incredibly short time we were surrounded by several hundreds of the common kite, stooping down to within a few feet of us, and then turning away, after having eyed us steadily. Several hundred approached us so closely, that they threw themselves back to avoid contact, opening their beaks and spreading out their talons.

  This reads like the script from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But as the weeks went by, Sturt forged an affinity with these birds: ‘there still remained with us about fifty of the common kites and as many crows: these birds continued with us for the offals of the sheep, and had become exceedingly tame; the kites in particular came flying from the tree when a whistle was sounded, to the great amusement of the men, who threw up pieces of meat for them to catch before they fell to the ground’.

  Donald Thomson was trekking through Cape York in 1928 when he found a pool poisoned by Aborigines (with crushed plants) to catch fish. The poisoned fish were safe to eat. Whistling kites ‘rose in a cloud’ above the pool – the most birds of prey Thomson had ever seen. In 1832 naturalist George Bennett visited the Snowy Mountains, where ravens were drawn like flies to Aborigines roasting millions of hibernating bogong moths in batches in hot sand. The birds stole part of the repast; hurling waddies in reply, the Aborigines often added raven to the menu.

  David Collins, an officer with the First Fleet, learned of a trick deployed by Sydney Aborigines: ‘A native stretched himself on a rock, as if asleep in the sun, holding a piece of fish in his hand. The bird – hawk or crow – seeing the prey, and not observing any motion in the native, pounced on the fish; and in the instant of seizing it was caught by the savage, who cooked it quickly on the fire, making a meal that for enjoyment might be envied by an epicure.’ I know of other stories implying that crows, ravens and kites loitered around Aboriginal camps, stealing scraps when they could, and scavenged from deserted camps. Aborigines moved regularly, leaving ample rubbish to pick over after the camp dingoes had taken their share. ‘Bones of kangaroos and wallabies, and heaps of mussel-shells, were commonly seen in their camps’, observed Leichhardt.

  The crows we see around us today and the kites hovering above country dumps are acting out very old roles. Sydney’s rubbish tip ravens are following the vocations of forebears who raided human dumps 50000 years ago. Crows have been teaching their broods to exploit us for countless generations. Ancient cunning shines from their eyes. Leichhardt’s journal implies that crows and kites drew no apparent distinction between blacks and whites. Our bond with these birds is many thousands of years old, very much older than the link in Europe between people and sparrows that arose with agriculture 6000 years ago.

  Another very significant bird-human relationship may have come to an end a century or so ago. The pioneer James Dawson became a friend and protector of the Aboriginal people of western Victoria, and in a book he mentioned that ‘The eagle is hated on account of its readiness to attack young children’ He was told about a baby that was carried off by one, while crawling outside a wuurn [family dwelling] near the spot where the village of Caramut now stands. We should not find such a story surprising. There is no reason why eagles, which prey on kangaroos and wallabies, would not prey on children as well, as other eagles are known to do elsewhere in the world.

  The very oldest relationship between bird and person may date back millions of years – in Africa. A book I had as a child told how the greater honeyguide, a drab bird, acts symbiotically with honey badgers (ratels). Because honeyguides dote on beeswax but can’t open hives themselves, they lure in a honey badger (or occasionally a baboon or human) to do the work, then harvest the wax when the honey is taken. ‘The honey-guide bird leads the way to the hive by flying ahead of its partner and giving out repeated calls’, the book explained. A picture showed a honeyguide settling down to feed as a satiated badger ambled away.

  This story is a myth. No-one has ever seen a honeyguide leading a badger. It dates back to the adventurer Anders Sparrman, who recorded it second-hand in the 1770s. In 1990 three African biologists set the record straight: ‘Naturalists and biologists have been active in Africa for more than 200 years’, wrote Dean, Siegfried and MacDonald. ‘During this period, to the best of our knowledge, no biologist or naturalist, amateur or professional, has observed a Greater Honeyguide leading a Honey Badger to a beehive.’ Honey badgers are mostly nocturnal, don’t see or hear well, and show no interest in honeyguide calls. The story is actually based on an ancient relationship between honeyguides and people.

  A honeyguide once approached me in a Zimbabwean woodland. So keen are these birds to solicit people, they will fly up to campfire smoke, chase cars and boats, follow sounds of chopping wood and enter busy villages and towns. When the Boran people of Kenya want honey they call in a honeyguide by whistling, and may then be led more than two kilometres to the golden trove. Fables and taboos indicate that this relationship is very old. Dean, Siegfried and MacDonald suggest that it is ‘possibly the most advanced bird–mammal relationship in the world’. It probably has a genetic base dating back to early humans, perhaps to Homo erectus. ‘My own gut feel is that it is instinctive but probably requires reinforcement,’ Ian MacDonald told me. He said the birds are exceedingly difficult to follow. The relationship is now dying out because most honeyguides now live in national parks where honey-gathering is forbidden. The bird I saw, in a national park, had probably never tasted beeswax. The badger myth has prevailed because humans are taught not to think of themselves as part of ecosystems.

  I know of other bonds that may be old. Whenever I mow my lawn, butcherbirds appear from nowhere to snatch up startled grasshoppers and skinks. In The Life of Birds David Attenborough proposed that European robins are confiding (trusting) because their forebears learned to consort with hunter-gatherers, plucking up insects stirred by sticks and hoes. Similarly, in Australia, I can easily imagine willie wagtails and butcherbirds tagging along to snatch up grubs and wor
ms while women dug yams. Willie wagtails were very quick to befriend pioneers. ‘In its disposition this little bird is one of the tamest imaginable’, John Gould wrote in 1865, ‘allowing of a near approach without evincing the slightest timidity, and will even enter the houses of persons resident in the bush in pursuit of gnats and other insects.’ When a willie wagtail perches on my mother’s spade while she pulls out weeds, is an ancient relationship being revived?

  Black falcons sometimes hunt with people; this too may be an old relationship. Birdwatcher Claude Austin noted that a black falcon ‘would fly lazily above a mob of cattle or a man on horseback, til some small bird was flushed, when it would dive, with incredible speed, on its prey’. Falcons probably hunted above diprotodon herds in older days.

  Decaying huts at old Aboriginal camps must have provided homes for spiders, rats and snakes. I don’t have evidence for this but I did read about something similar in the Torres Strait Islands. In 1845 HMS Bramble pulled in at a tiny isle at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, only 50 kilometres south of New Guinea, to find a large cache of turtle shells. New Guinea villagers, after consuming the meat, had laid about sixty of them out head to tail, ‘for what purposes we could not imagine’, wrote seaman J. Sweatman, ‘but I fancy through some mere idle whim. On capsizing them numbers of large rats made their escape from beneath them’, he noted, ‘and our people, who (being Sunday) had an afternoon’s leave on shore to collect eggs for their messes, amused themselves with shooting them with the bows and arrows they had obtained from the natives of Erub!’ The rats were a new species, the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), confined to this one speck of sand and rock, a shrinking cay 340 metres long and nearly half as wide. This endangered species, numbering only a few hundred, must have benefited enormously from the shells – big, domed homes offering respite from scalding sun and torrential rain.

  Native plants were helped along when Aborigines discarded the seeds of the fruits they ate. In north Queensland groves of lady apples (Syzygium suborbiculare) and wongi plums (Manilkara kauki) mark out the sites of ancient camps. Aborigines were probably the main agents of seed spread for some big-fruited trees, such as durobby (Syzygium moorei), wild orange (Capparis mitchellii) and lady apple. Aborigines still disperse seeds today. The earth around their camps provides a fertile medium for germinating plants. First Fleet settlers took compost from their cave shelters to fertilise farms.

  When Aborigines dug up foods, they must have helped some plants by recycling soil and providing sites for germination. In Western Australia explorer George Grey stumbled upon ‘tracts of land several square miles in extent, so thickly studded with holes, where the natives had been digging up yams (Dioscorea), that it was difficult to walk across it’. Colonising plants such as velvety peppercress may have germinated in such places.

  Aboriginal fires also aided vast numbers of plants and animals, although others, of course, suffered. Fires were very important to birds of prey, who caught the rats and reptiles flushed by the flames. Leichhardt saw black kites hunting over Aboriginal fires. These birds still appear today when farmers burn cane. In north Queensland I’ve seen great hosts of them floating above the flames, perpetuating an ancient relationship. Fire-adapted blady grass (Imperata cylindrica) grew so well around Sydney that convicts were harvesting it for thatch. It thrives today on overburned land. Aborigines torched grasses to lure kangaroos in to new growth, and this could also help explain why brown snakes do so well among people. They like short grass, and would often have crossed paths with Aborigines hunting game. Is the snake in my street adept at eluding people because it has honed this skill over thousands of years of adaptation?

  I could offer many more examples but I think my points are made – that animals often exploit the opportunities we create, that they can do it quickly, and that they were doing it long ago. These points refute a widely held misconception about nature expounded by Roger Rosenblatt in Time magazine for Earth Day 2000: ‘The real difficulty with sustaining a useful connection with nature . . . comes from the fact that nature does not seek to make a connection with us. It is a hard truth to swallow, but nature does not care if we live or die.’ Rosenblatt is blind to the connections going on around us, to all the animals and plants that see in us an opportunity or two. His message is as bleak as it is wrong. Nature is not a separate domain hiding away in the wilderness. Animals and plants live all around us and exploit us when they can.

  1  Satin bowerbirds also mimic artificial sounds, such as the ringing of mobile phones. Lyrebirds and butcherbirds do this too.

  ‘Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again.

  And suddenly we take the hint.’

  Robert Frost

  The green and golden bell-frog (Litoria aurea) is a wonder to behold. Its colours are intense, oversaturated, like paint on a plastic toy. They match the frog’s artificial lifestyle – it lives today mainly in flooded quarries, mine pits, farm dams and golf course ponds. Green and gold are also Australia’s Olympic colours, a wry coincidence given that bell-frogs turned up at Sydney’s Olympic site at Homebush Bay.

  Graham Pyke of the Australian Museum calls this animal an ‘endangered weed’. Once abundant in New South Wales, it is now an endangered species that is found mainly in unnatural settings. These range from Grafton to Gippsland and all but two of the thirty known sites in New South Wales are artificial, with most of them clustered around Sydney. The frogs appear to prefer pools dug by people, especially those that are ringed by bulrushes and weeds. They also shelter under garbage, sheds, and stacks of bricks. ‘They’re really very fond of paspalum,’ Graham told me, while showing me one bell-frog site. ‘That’s great stuff for them,’ he said, pointing to a tangle of exotic grasses, cobbler’s pegs and turkey rhubarb. He calls the frog a weed because it behaves like one, appearing in large numbers where earth has been excavated.

  Homebush Bay was once a vast industrial zone housing government brickworks and abattoirs. Workers dug shale and later sandstone, supplying powder for the concrete in many a Sydney building. When quarrying ended in 1992, the bottom of the huge ‘Brickpit’, as it’s called, filled with water. We know that bell-frogs moved in fast, because they were thriving there in late 1993 when a pre-Olympics fauna survey was conducted. They may have come from an old trench at the quarry, or from swampy landfill sites nearby, or maybe from nutrient treatment ponds at the adjoining abattoir, although none of these sites held many frogs in the 1990s. No natural pools survive around Homebush, which is bounded by mangroves and miles upon miles of housing. The new bell-frog colony proved to be the largest in Sydney and one of the largest in existence.

  The Olympic Coordination Authority (OCA) had promised a green Olympics and they pledged to save the frogs. This proved a challenge – helping an endangered species survive inside Australia’s largest construction site. Olympic tennis courts planned for the Brickpit site had to go elsewhere. Nineteen new frog ponds (costing almost a million dollars) were installed before the base of the Brickpit was filled to meet another green goal – water conservation. Frog-proof fences were strung around work sites and sceptical workers were trained in frog-friendliness. ‘They couldn’t understand how a frog that will use a pothole made by a truck could be an endangered species,’ said Trent Penman from the Australian Museum. No-one else really understands either. This place was so degraded it provided George Miller with the set for his post-apocalyptic film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

  The bell-frog became an Olympic celebrity, with media stories running in Europe, North America, China, Japan and South Korea. The OCA won a major conservation award. The new ponds are now part of the Millenium Parklands, soon to become Sydney’s biggest urban park. Frog numbers have reached 1500.

  Biologists struggle to explain why this frog is rare. In the past it was gathered by the bucketful around Sydney for student dissections. Graham Pyke points a finger at exotic mosquito fish (Gambusia holbrooki), which devour bell-frog tadpoles. Spread
widely by people and floods, these fish now occupy most ponds in eastern Australia. However, the Homebush ponds, isolated inside an industrial zone, are fish-free. Another problem may be competition from striped marsh-frogs (Limnodynastes peronii), which like the same pools as bell-frogs. A third problem is the chytrid fungus, a lethal exotic disease implicated in extinctions of rainforest frogs. Frog expert Arthur White told me that chytrid fungus, which can live in soil, is rare at bell-frog sites. ‘Chytrid doesn’t have a tolerance for heavy metals,’ he said, ‘and most bell-frog sites have contaminated soil.’ Indeed, the Homebush site has been described by chemistry professor Ben Selinger as ‘one of the most industrially polluted in the southern hemisphere’. Is industrial pollution the saviour of this frog?

  The southern bell-frog (Litoria raniformis) is also rare and enigmatic, surviving best in artificial environments. Graham Pyke found huge colonies, perhaps the largest anywhere, prospering on farms in the Riverina. ‘This frog really likes rice paddies,’ he explained. ‘We humans have come along and created these vast wetland areas. We keep them flooded in spring and summer, and then turn the tap off in winter. We’ve created giant ephemeral wetlands.’ Southern bell-frogs are dying out around Melbourne, except for a colony thriving in the sewage farm at Werribee. I’ve watched them plunging into putrid sewage drains there.

  ‘Endangered weed’ is a perverse term that I’ve found useful in describing many a rare plant growing somewhere strange. Such plants challenge the popular notion that rare and threatened species typically live far away from us in remote national parks. (Rare and threatened species are ranked in one of three categories – endangered, vulnerable or rare – depending on the level of threat, with ‘endangered’ being the most precarious category and ‘vulnerable’ coming next. These official categories are followed in this book, although I also use ‘rare’ as a catch-all term for vulnerable and endangered species, since rare they invariably are.)