The most important creatures in the rainforest are the smallest, the microbes and the invertebrates. The survival of the forest ecosystem depends on them. A rainforest, being a closed ecosystem, survives by recycling itself, and for that it needs the help of the living beings that break down dead material. A leaf falls; bacteria help it to decay; worms pull the dead matter back into the soil. A tree falls; wood-chewing beetles transmute its timber into dung which is quickly mineralised and becomes soil. If the process should slow down, the survival of the forest is threatened. So no matter how serious an insect infestation of young trees at CCRRS may turn out to be, we leave it to run its course. Our young Red Cedars, for example, can be severely damaged by the larvae of a moth, Hypsipyla robusta, but we make no effort to control any infestation. Generally the affected trees recover but, the leader being irrevocably damaged, they are thenceforward multi-stemmed and will never fulfil their optimum role as rainforest emergents. The continued presence of the moth is necessary if the resistant Red Cedars are not to lose the genetic trait that protects them.
The Cave Creek invertebrates deserve a book of their own, with photographs, and perhaps one day they will have one. I’ve photographed magenta katydid nymphs, black and white striped worms, green-winged butterflies, huge hawkmoth caterpillars, much bigger millipedes, stick insects as long as an arm, iridescent blue flies with sizzling gold eyes, male and female longhorn beetles in each other’s arms, bladder cicadas like green balloons, fireflies, glow-worms, turquoise dragonflies with transparent black wings, and giant land snails. I can put names to no more than half of them; the others may not have been described and may have no names yet, for all I know. (Of the 98 per cent of terrestrial species that are invertebrates only a fraction has ever been described; an estimated five and a half million species await description.) The creek is thronged with water-mites, water-fleas and shrimps as well as the nymphs of stone flies, mayflies, dragonflies, not to mention caddis-flies, flatworms, snails and leeches, more and more of them since we began to remove the weeds that infested the waterway. The most famous inhabitant of the creek is another invertebrate, a blue crayfish, probably but not necessarily Euastacus sulcatus. After torrential rain we can come across blue crayfishes washed out of their creeks and wandering about on land. When they see us coming they rear up and wave their red, white and blue claws in a vain attempt to strike fear into our hearts. Our creek is too rocky for platypuses or long-neck turtles to make homes on, or so I think. Besides, when the freshes come, which they do regularly but unpredictably, the creek is so violently reconfigured that the nests of such burrowmakers would be destroyed.
The creek is one place the sun can always get to, and so the weeds come back year on year, and year on year we remove them. As a result even our threatened frog species have been able to build up their numbers. These days, when the rains come, the frog chorus is deafening.
One wet night the frog noise was so very loud that I went out to see what was afoot. I followed the unholy din towards the old muster yard, and the cattle drinker in the middle of it. The drinker, which held a couple of feet of warm rainwater, was full of Southern Orange-eyed Treefrogs (Litoria chloris) all yelling fit to bust, their throat membranes inflated to transparency. As I watched other tree frogs climbed in, or hung from the rim of the tank, and joined in the yelling. In the water I could see frogs grabbing other frogs, and other frogs grabbing them, in a mad group grope. When frogs mate the male does not penetrate the female, who simply ejects her eggs into the water while the male frog ejaculates in the same water, so all this embracing was hardly necessary, but the frogs were hugging anyway. Altogether it was the wildest party that could ever be imagined. It went on till dawn. (My rather inept video of this event can be seen on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.)
The next day the drinker was full of spawn, but the sun was up and the water level in the drinker was falling. The tadpoles that hatched ate the tadpoles that hatched after them, till there were only a few dozen metamorphs left to climb out of the drinker on the branchlets I had positioned to take them safely over the rim. A few days after rain we will find tadpoles in most of the puddles, but I have never been able to figure out how many of them ever make it to being frogs.
Frogs are stupendous creatures because, even when they are metamorphs no bigger than a fly, they can hear and see, and catch prey, and leap forty times their own length. It is tempting to think they are smart. An old Green Treefrog who turned up on the bedroom windowsill one evening sat there through the night and the whole of the following day, apparently dozing, but every time I turned to look at him, I’d find his horizontal pupil trained on me. He was as big as a half-kilo bag of sugar and much the same shape. To get to such a size he must have outwitted a long line of predators, for frogs are food for most rainforest creatures, including other frogs. I didn’t try to pat him for fear that my hand on his silky green skin would have felt scalding hot. He was still there when I fell asleep the next night; in the morning he was gone as quietly as he came. His scientific name is Litoria caerulea; the species name, which means ‘blue’, came about because the spirit in which the specimen sent to Banks had been preserved had dissolved the yellow glaze over its blue underskin. The genus name has changed several times, but the misleading epithet hangs on.
Tree frogs are the insignia of rainforests the world over. Of the dozen or more species that make their home at Cave Creek my favourite is the Cascade Treefrog (Litoria pearsoniana). The scientific name given to the species by Stephen J. Copland in 1960 commemorates Oliver Pearson, Professor of Zoology at Berkeley. Copland had two gos at the name, which he rendered first as Hyla pearsoni (1960) and then Hyla pearsoniana; in 1970, after the Litoria genus had been separated from the genus Hyla, Michael Tyler renamed the frog Litoria pearsoni; that name was corrected to Litoria pearsoniana by John Barker and Gordon Grigg in 1977. The confusion has not quite dissipated; the genus Litoria is once more under revision. There is considerable variation in the colouring of Cascade Treefrogs. The ones at Cave Creek are pale green with pearl-white bellies, and their skin is shagreened, so that it looks like frosted glass. To my eye they are the most beautiful tree frogs of all.
Under the Queensland Nature Conservation Act of 1992 the species is listed as endangered, but you can hear Cascade Treefrogs calling any warm evening along Cave Creek. There is nevertheless a good deal that we don’t understand about these little creatures. Immature frogs are very seldom found, so the current thinking is that this is one tree frog that ascends to the canopy as a juvenile and doesn’t come down again for two or three years, until it is mature and ready to mate. Until we have ways of observing canopy life without disrupting it, this hypothesis cannot be verified. In the winter Cascade Treefrogs are supposed to group together in large mixed-sex aggregations, squeezed tightly into narrow rock crevices, in lethargy, with their eyes closed.
Even smaller although less vulnerable is the Dainty Treefrog (Litoria gracilenta), which overwinters in the canopy. We often find this frog, with its limbs drawn under it and its eyes closed, at the base of the spadix of the Cunjevoi Flower, sleeping off a meal of pollen weevils. I was once scanning the forest edge for birds when the glasses picked up a fringed flower of Trichosanthes subvelutina. Inside it, glowing in the early morning sunlight like a chip of polished jade, I could clearly see a Dainty Treefrog. We have many more frogs, tusked frogs, pouched frogs, rocket frogs, froglets, toadlets, thousands of frogs. We also have the odd cane toad. The workforce kill them outright, by cutting them up the middle and turning them inside out, which means the birds can make a meal of them, a technique we learnt from the birds in question. I, being more squeamish, euthanase any toad I find by putting it in the refrigerator and then in the freezer.
The rainforest has fewer lizard species than you will find in other types of habitat, but that’s not to say that we don’t have at least as many lizards as we have frogs. I have never found our most famous lizard, the Leaf-tailed Gecko (Saltuarius swaini), though everyone else seems to have. Herpetologists appear to have decided that the ‘ii’ ending for the honorific epithet was otiose, and removed the second ‘i’, otherwise the skink named for Tasmanian herpetologist Roy Swain would be called Saltuarius swainii. Some authorities insist on the correct Latin; others don’t. If I think botany is a mare’s nest, herpetology is worse.
At Cave Creek there are lots of tiny skinks; one, Calyptotis scutirostrum, five centimetres from snout to vent, which rejoices in the common name of ‘Scute-snouted Skink’, referring to the bony plate between its eyes, lays eggs. All our other lizard species, except the monitors, are live-bearing. Eulamprus martini grows to 7.5 centimetres or so, if it’s lucky; E. tenuis grows bigger still, E. murrayi bigger than that and E. quoyii and E. tryoni about the same. I am sorry to have to admit that I can’t always tell them apart, all of them being spangled and speckled in similar ways. Moreover they are nearly always running away, and I don’t like to grab at them in case they shed their tails. One skink I can tell from the others because it is bigger and less patterned is the Eastern Crevice Skink, Egernia mcpheei. Another is the shiny black Land Mullet, largest of our skinks, thirty centimetres from snout to vent when full-grown. Most people know it as Egernia major; it recently underwent a long overdue name change to Bellatorias major. That name was first published in 1984 by Wells and Wellington, but it was not used until it was ‘resurrected’ in 2008. Thereby hangs an astonishing tale.
In the mid-1980s Richard Wells, who had been working as a collector for several Australian museums, decided ‘that many of the specimens he had provided had simply been ignored by qualified professionals who were comfortably polishing their chairs while producing little if anything of scientific value’ (Williams, D., et al., 926). It seemed to Wells that the Australian herpetological establishment was dragging its heels when it came to rationalising reptile and amphibian taxa. He joined forces with Cliff Ross Wellington and together they analysed all the available data and came to their own conclusions, which involved renaming scores of species. To publish the new names they set up a journal which they called The Australian Journal of Herpetology, in the first and only number of which they published ‘A Synopsis of the Class Reptilia’, and its Supplement, ‘A Classification of the Amphibia and Reptilia of Australia’. The result was uproar. Wells and Wellington were accused of having broken the rules; their descriptions were too brief, and there was no way they could have examined the type material for so many species. A serious attempt – recorded as Case 2531 in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature for 1987 – was made to ban their articles and jettison their names.
Not all the species named by Wells and Wellington were good, but even those that were were not adopted. For years there was resistance; herpetologists frequently referred to species named by Wells and Wellington as undescribed, and continued to use names which they knew were invalid rather than recognise the authority of Wells and Wellington. Eventually, and patchily, common sense has begun to prevail (e.g., Hoser). Wells is still around, still working with reptiles, and profoundly uninterested in public – or academic – recognition. As he is apt to say: ‘Universities are not really places where you learn about animals.’ Wellington now works for the Central Directorate Threatened Species Unit of the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service.
My favourites among the Cave Creek lizardry are the Eastern Water Dragons (Physignathus lesueuri lesueuri) that have come into their own since we reforested the headland above the creek. In warmer weather they can be found basking on the causeway and all the way up the steep track to the gate. As the car creeps by they lift their heads and look directly into my eyes, holding my gaze for a second or two before leaping down the rocks. They are the more remarkable because a fossil dragon from the Miocene recently found at Riversleigh is almost identical. The dragons are another reason for keeping the CCRRS gate locked. If deliveries are on the way we have to scare the dragons off before the truck comes in, because not everybody drives as slowly as I do. (Every day, on the main road, you will see dead and dying dragons.) Another dragon, the Angle-headed Dragon (Hypsilurus spinipes) forages in the canopy, where it feeds on the invertebrates that defoliate the big stingers.
Most people would be more impressed by the CCRRS Lace Monitors (Varanus varius) of which there are many. These are largely diurnal, so we see them quite often but they almost always run off, except when they are in courtship mode, when nothing seems to faze them. One warm afternoon in an otherwise very wet spring I was weeding a patch of Aneilema when I realised that I was not alone. A full-grown Lace Monitor, a good seven feet long, had moved up close beside me. At first I thought he was just basking in the sun, and then I saw the head of the female, less than half his size, emerging under his foreleg. By inserting his tail under hers, the male was manoeuvring one of his hemipenes into her vagina. He would thrust rhythmically for five minutes or so, and then she would slip out from under him. I expected her to run away but she stayed still as he rested, waiting for him to move towards her again. As he slid his body over hers, he would touch her gently all over the head and neck with his forked tongue, almost as if kissing her, before beginning to slide his tail under hers. I removed myself discreetly and ran to set up the video camera, not knowing how often this behaviour had been observed in the wild. (The video can be seen on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.) The lizards continued to perform for a very long time, until the sun slipped behind the trees and the ground began to cool. The truly disturbing thing about the video is that the female is so very much smaller than the male that the whole process looks unnatural, but every time I have seen these big goannas in mating mode, when they usually open their mouths, which are upholstered in knicker-pink satin, and roar hoarsely at me to make me go away, the female has been very, very much smaller. This extreme sexual dimorphism has not been described, let alone explained, as far as I know. (My own attempt can be found in the Prologue, above.)
A few days later I was walking in a five-year-old planting, marvelling at how soon equilibrium had been established in it, when I heard a large Lace Monitor moving close by and then another, and another. Altogether I counted five. They could not have been less concerned at my presence. They appeared to be following each other’s pheromonal trails, tasting the air with their tongues. I walked at a slow but steady pace, as they circled round me. I was hoping I might see their ritual fighting, for they seemed to be all males, but dusk threw its blanket over us, and I had to make my way back to the house too soon to witness the outcome. As usual I was left marvelling at how little we know of the behaviour of our rainforest species. Those same Lace Monitors eat the corpses of all the animals that meet their death in the forest, bones, hair, eyes, teeth and all. Because they are egg eaters they are the great enemies of the Brush-turkeys, and many carry scars where the turkeys have defended their mounds with beak and claw.
The snakes we see most often, that is to say almost every day, are pythons, commonly called Carpet Snakes. I can still remember the first time I met one. I was walking the forest edge track with Garry, when he gently touched my arm. In front of me a big beautiful bronze and gold serpent was moving almost imperceptibly up the bank and out of our way. I had the distinct feeling that Garry expected me to shriek and flee. I was more likely to fall on my knees before such a beautiful creature. Since then I have seen hundreds of pythons at Cave Creek, greeny-goldy ones, black and grey ones, mahogany and ivory ones, some patterned with black and blood red, a dozen different colourways at least, fat ones, thin ones, torpid ones, wounded ones, dead ones. I was prowling another part of the forest track one afternoon when I became aware that in the forest ahead of me a python had reared up six feet or so off the ground, propping itself on its huge body as it felt for a branch. A stout branch found, it wrapped its neck around it and then hauled the supporting body up loop by loop, from one branch to another and then another, until it had disappeared into the canopy.
Pythons are ambush feeders; they coil themselves up at the side of a track used by warm-blooded creatures and lie there for days at a time, only moving to have a bit of a stretch or to soak up the odd ray if sunlight touches the forest floor. I have had four at a time within feet of the house for weeks on end. One very wet day I was squelching through a planting when I almost trod on the head of a big python that was hiding in a flooded tractor wheel-rut with just its nostrils above the surface of the water. Charlie Booth, who used to grow plants for us, told me he had never seen so many pythons anywhere. Python skins hang like pennants all around the house. I have had a python sliding through the louvres of the bedroom, feeling towards the warmth of my body, his neck concertinaed for the strike. I have seen another python hunting for a way of getting into the house, sliding along the windowsills, following the heat of the marsupial mice snoring in the wall cavity.
I love the Cave Creek pythons at least as much as I have ever loved a cat or dog. I am ashamed that so many of my countrymen think that it is fine to kill Carpet Snakes because they eat domestic fowls. They eat many more rats than fowls, but still people think it appropriate to chop at them with rakes and spades or blow their heads off with shotguns.
Pythons are almost deaf and almost blind, and yet they are our top predators. They detect warm-blooded prey through heat-sensitive pits along their lips. How they detect cold-blooded prey like frogs is less obvious, though it has been suggested they can sense sound and movement through the bones of their skulls. The Cave Creek pythons are supposed to be Morelia spilota mcdowelli, the Coastal Carpet Python, identified as a species (M. mcdowelli) by Wells and Wellington and then relegated to a subspecies in 1994 by Dave and Tracy Barker, all of which suggests that our most intimate animal associate is not very well understood by even herpetologists and python breeders. Pythons described as separate species are capable of breeding with each other, which is a pretty good indicator that the species are not distinct. Morelia spilota mcdowelli is supposed to be ‘irascible’, which reared in captivity it may well be. I don’t find the wild ones irascible in the least. I have all but tripped over them, and they have simply flowed quietly away. I can sit by them reading and they go on dozing, occasionally stretching themselves and rearranging their coils. They happily coexist with dozens of other pythons, their home ranges not so much overlapping as coinciding.
The key to python personality is energy conservation. Because they are cold-blooded, they can shut down their energy requirements to near zero, by keeping still. They take small prey like frogs and large prey like pademelons that may weigh up to 60 per cent of their body weight; in both cases they do it with minimal exertion. By following each other’s scent trails male pythons form ‘breeding aggregations with several males attending a single female’. In the late winter of 2011 I had the opportunity to watch this process, as three male pythons waited patiently for a sign of recognition from the huge dark pythoness I call Jessye. One afternoon two of them began mock fighting to impress her, winding their tails together, rearing up, each trying to push the other to the ground. Then Jessye disappeared and they were left grieving.
Jessye may not have been ready to breed in 2011. The generation and laying of up to thirty eggs greatly depletes a python’s stores of fat and energy; during the ten- to fifteen-week incubation period she has to keep the eggs at a constant temperature, which she does by shivering, which uses up more of her calories. When the young hatch they go their separate ways, leaving the weakened mother python to recover as best she can. During this period she is extremely vulnerable to a variety of predators and diseases. In 2012 Jessye was courted again by an assortment of younger males; she also attracted a massive grey and gold male python and this time she capitulated. They were together for ten days or more as other snakes came and went, often coiling on top of them and occasionally mating with Jessye. This highly social period persisted for many weeks. The usual notion, that pythons are solitary animals by nature with little or no social interaction, seems completely wrong.
Years ago, Jane and I and a CCRRS worker were clambering through the steep forest, following the boundary which, on the principle of good fences making good neighbours, I had just had very expensively surveyed. I was, as usual, bringing up the rear, so I got the best view of the very large snake that was doing its best to get out of our way. As it slid past at eye-level its tail touched my sister’s shoulder. ‘Oh, a python,’ she said. But it wasn’t. When it came towards me I could see clearly that there were no heat pits along its underlip. I would have said that it was a tiger snake, but I’d never seen one anywhere near that big. The snake that flowed past me was nearly two metres long, and the colour of wet sand, with shadow bands of darker brown. It looked as if it might try constriction to immobilise its prey, but it wasn’t a constrictor. Its scales were too big, and the wrong pattern and there weren’t enough of them. I hunted for it on line and in reptile books, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Nobody had described a tiger snake of such a size – until I read, in Gresty’s account of the Numinbah Valley in the early twentieth century, about ‘an uncommon member of the reptilian fauna . . . the giant Tiger Snake or Banded Broadhead, said to attain a length of ten feet. The valley Aborigines had an exaggerated fear of the admittedly venomous reptile, known to them as “Boggul” . . . full grown specimens are now seen on extremely rare occasions.’(58) So lucky me. And lucky the three of us. If any of us had had the bad luck to step on the snake the outcome could have been very different. As it is my sister continues to insist that the snake whose tail brushed her shoulder was a python. The confusion is inspissated by the fact that until well into the twentieth century there was a snake known to naturalists as Hoplocephalus curtus, and to the common folk as the Brown-banded Snake. The genus Hoplocephalus includes all the Australian broadheads, to which many people assumed the tiger snakes belonged. The Tiger Snake genus was variously called Naja, then Alecto, and in 1867 Hoplocephalus; it seems to have become Notechis in 1948 (Glauert). As far as I can tell the possibility that the early herpetologists were talking about two different snake species has not been dispelled.
Earlier observers had great difficulty distinguishing the Brown-banded Snake from a Carpet Snake. In 1873, the tiger snake is described in The Queenslander as the one ‘which resembles in appearance the carpet snake of Queensland’ (19 July); in 1874 another tells us that it is to be ‘known by its unmistakable stripes’ (Q, 26 December, 273). In May 1879 another observer refers to the tiger snake as ‘our brown banded snake’ (Q, 10 May, 588), and ‘The Naturalist’ writing in The Queenslander in 1879 tells a cautionary tale of this ‘the most vicious and venomous of the serpent tribe’:
Not long ago I came across a young man who had deliberately picked up a snake; and on my asking him what he was doing he said, ‘Oh this wouldn’t hurt a baby; why it’s the prettiest carpet snake that ever I saw.’ And yet the foolish fellow was dangling a tiger snake, holding it tightly round the neck . . . and no sooner did he drop it than it seized him by the calf of the leg. (Q, 19 April, 500)
Seizing the young man by the calf of the leg is a reaction more typical of a carpet snake than any venomous snake. A tiger snake would have either struck or sprung away. The Englishman who wrote under the pseudonym ‘George Carrington’ remarked in 1871: ‘There is a great variety and number of poisonous and deadly snakes in Queensland, yet cases of snakebite are rare, for the reptiles invariably try to escape, and do not bite, except in self-defence.’ Nevertheless TV naturalists who persecute animals for the entertainment of couch-potatoes insist that tiger snakes are aggressive, and not simply towards each other, but towards humans. Certainly the terrified snakes that wildlife warriors manhandle do try very hard to bite them, but this behaviour can hardly be said to amount to aggression. Snakes don’t come hunting us. Give them a chance to get out of the way and they will.
The next most commonly seen snake at Cave Creek is the good old Red-bellied Black, Pseudechis porphyriacus, possibly the commonest snake in Australia, though few places could harbour as many as we do. According to Rhianna Blackthorn of WIRES Northern Rivers, in every square kilometre of this region there are around three hundred Red-bellied Black Snakes. According to John Drake, writing in The Argus in 1952, the Red-bellied Black ‘has a sunny, placid nature which causes it to bite only when it is cornered or attacked’. Sunny-natured they may be, but our Red-bellied Blacks have a habit of getting themselves into tight corners, where we are likely to come into contact with them by accident, between empty tubes stacked in the nursery perhaps, or hidden in plant trays or asleep in mulch piles. So far no one has been bitten, but it has been a near thing once or twice.
More numerous possibly are our Yellow-faced Whipsnakes (Demansia psammophis) which the locals call copperheads, perhaps because their coppery-pink backs are dusted with pale greeny-blue rather like the colour of verdigris. These small snakes have an odd propensity for hanging out with other much bigger snakes; one used to turn up regularly to bask alongside one of the pythons by the back door. When I appeared it would fling itself over the python to get out of the way, no matter how far away I was, its large black eyes, huge in proportion to its tiny head, being clearly able to focus on distant objects. My theory about this behaviour is that the Yellow-faced Whipsnake, being heavily predated by a variety of raptors, chooses to bask with much bigger snakes for its own protection. One day the workforce came upon two Yellow-faced Whipsnakes that were coiling themselves around each other and spinning in a hoop. This I take to be ritual combat of two males but I have never found any such phenomenon described. We managed to grab a few seconds of video before our tame Butcherbird turned up, whereupon the snakes vanished. To live with snakes and observe them daily is to be disgusted with field guides that give no account of their behaviour and devote far too much space to discussions of the dangerousness of their bite. Descriptions of the habitat of the Yellow-faced Whipsnake do not mention rainforest; the Cave Creek rainforest seems to be full of them, as well as Banded Snakes, Bandy Bandies, various Ramphotyphlops, Brown and Green Tree Snakes, Keelbacks, Rough-scaled Snakes, Eastern Small-eyed Snakes, Eastern Brown Snakes and Marsh Snakes.
The most visible and the most spectacular of the Cave Creek fauna are the birds. The more I see of birds the more I wonder why it is that snakes are considered nasty and birds considered sweet. Bernard O’Reilly tells us in Green Mountains that wild birds are ‘the most beautiful of living things; the most sweet-voiced and the gentlest of creatures’. (83) I hope I was tough-minded enough even as a nipper to have raised my head when I read this, sniffed the air and thought ‘Seagulls? Hawks? Magpies?’ Most birds are not sweet-voiced; none, not even the dove itself, is all that gentle. O’Reilly prattles on:
There is one other great lesson which human neighbours could learn from bird neighbours, and this is why they are gentler and nicer than humans – they never say a cruel word about anyone. You may say that this is just because they cannot speak, but I know birds well enough to know that if they could talk, they would only say the nicest things. So next time you see a gentle feathered creature in a tree, just pause to think how inferior you are.
There is hardly a bird, however cute, that will not steal eggs or nestlings. And practically all of them, bar the ones we least like, the carrion birds, prefer their food alive and vociferating. Even honeyeaters and seed-eating birds need to feed their fledglings on protein, and that means live invertebrates. Lewin’s Honeyeaters are amongst the most efficient predators in the Cave Creek rainforest. They are as adroit and acrobatic as any fly-catcher, and when the larvae of the leafrolling moths are at their biggest and juiciest, they will spend whole days unpacking every leaf, cleaning the infested trees completely. Nectar, fruit and seed are not available in all seasons, but invertebrates are.
It is probably inevitable that human beings will play favourites among the lower orders, and that they will express an irrational preference in moral terms. Fluffy means sweet; scaly means nasty. Settlers in Queensland made war on any species that incommoded them, and justified the onslaught on all kinds of moral and aesthetic grounds. A report from Coomera in 1880 exulted:
morning, noon and night, the sharp report of the gun is heard; . . . For the destruction of flying-fox, whose ghastly flappings and flittings from tree to tree disturb our rest, or cockatoo either, there need be little compunction, but parents and guardians might well forbid the massacre of insectivorous birds, or our fields and gardens will ultimately suffer. (Q, 6 March, 296)
God forbid that our rest should be disturbed, especially by ‘ghastly flittings and flappings’. Speciesism dies hard; even at this late stage most people do not understand that if the earth is to survive we have to respect the entire system, not just the bits we consider cute or useful.
Even the fluffiest birds are capable of terrifying ferocity. On spring evenings a Grey Goshawk (Accipiter novaehollandiae) will come drifting gently down towards Cave Creek and at once all the other birds will take to the air to drive him away, flying so close to the much bigger bird that they risk serious injury. Most savage in their attacks are the Butcherbirds, that dive on the goshawk, clattering their beaks like machine-gun fire. In fact goshawks feed more readily on small mammals than on birds, but when birds are breeding they will not tolerate a raptor’s presence anywhere near a nest site.
The goshawk, which nests in the tallest of the rainforest trees, on a platform of twigs around a central depression lined with green leaves, is one raptor whose life is getting much better as the canopy closes in. For one thing the Butcherbirds have moved to open country elsewhere. For another the possums, bats, reptiles and insects that the goshawk lives on are becoming more numerous. His competitors, the Black-shouldered Kite (Elanus axillaris) and the Nankeen Kestrel (Falco cenchroides), are now seldom seen, because they exist to hunt small rodents in grassland. Years ago a Collared Sparrowhawk (Accipiter cirrocephalus) chased a Noisy Miner onto the verandah and nearly collected me instead, as I put my head out the window to see why all the birds were giving their alarm calls, but I haven’t seen one since. It looks very much as if the goshawks are finally coming into their own.
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).
The pest cockatoos were mainly white. Far rarer were the black, which were greatly prized as novelties. The newspapers of 1866 carried reports of ‘a handsome black cockatoo from Port Denison’, rejoicing that ‘. . . as this bird is extremely rare, it will form an admirable item for export . . .’ (BC, 11 October) Black cockatoos were said to be selling in England ‘for as much as sixty guineas per pair’ (BC, 30 October).
At Cave Creek we usually see Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus funereus funereus). They were first described by George Shaw, head keeper of the British Museum, who was working from a specimen from the collection of Sir Hans Sloane. He named it Psittacus funereus; French zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest renamed the genus in 1826 Calyptorhynchus, meaning ‘covered beak’ (39:21). John Gould called it the Funereal Cockatoo. Its range extends along the Dividing Range from Wilson’s Promontory to Cape York.
In most years Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos have nested in the eucalypts on the top of the ridge to the west of Cave Creek. We generally see them in winter when they come to dig out the larvae of cossid moths and longhorn beetles from their tunnels under the bark of old trees, bringing their newly fledged offspring with them. You hear these family groups before you see them, chuckling and chattering to each other, all the while cracking and crunching through bark and wood. As you peer up into the branches you will see a bright black or brown eye peering down quizzically. They will let you get quite close, as they keep up what seems to be a commentary on who and what you are, for the benefit of the younger generation. As they live for maybe forty years the littl’uns have time to learn. We most often see them flying high through the mountains in formation, screaming ‘Yeee-ow!’, usually before rain.
The genus Calyptorhynchus has now been divided into two subgenera, Calyptorhynchus Calyptorhynchus, and C. Zanda, to which the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos belong. Our Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos used to be simply Cacatua sulphurea, and are now Cacatua cacatua sulphurea. These are all in the family Cacatuidae in the order Psittaciformes, which includes as well the Strigopidae of New Zealand, and the parrots. Parrots have besides the obvious parrot face, two claws facing frontwards and two back, a feature called zygodactyly.
Altogether more than a hundred bird species have been observed at Cave Creek. I would happily write about all of them but this book has to end somewhere. You may be wondering if, now that the canopy is closing, I still see the Regent Bowerbird who persuaded me to buy the land at Cave Creek. During the big rains of December 2010, Regent Bowerbirds came every day to the top of the biggest quandong I can see from the verandah. I have seen an extraordinary variety of birds playing in that tree, but the Regent is the one that, when we have big rain, comes every day to groom himself, combing the rainwater through every dazzling feather, as I eat breakfast on the verandah a hundred yards away. His wives and juveniles come with him, and sometimes other males, till there are five or six in the tree together. What can they be doing? What explanation can there be for this socialising? All I can hope is that I will live long enough to find out.