fauna

Sharing my spring

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A few warm days, a fat black snake with a lunchtime bulge basking in the sun, and then five degree mornings again.

I know to keep an eye out now, but I have been watching the wallabies and roos accept the snake’s presence, and even close progress, and show no sign of anxiety.

I must learn to be still.

I saw the snake again today — and managed to keep on hanging out the washing.

Almost daily an echidna potters though the yard, weaving its waddling way between the groups of macropods that laze and graze — usually around 20, not counting joeys in pouches.

I enjoy their easy acceptance of each other, as I do when the wallabies let me pass very close and don’t move. No echidna is at ease with me yet.

Yesterday I saw the first satin bower bird pecking around the bay tree, darting in and out from its low growing shelter. She could have been a ceramic figurine, with her subtle colouring and well-defined bumps of breast feathers.

There will be many more, ready for what fruit the parrots leave. While the trees bear only blossom my feelings are simple: admiration.

A mother’s lot

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Morning tea time here at Hoppy’s Playgroup and the mothers must stop eating my garden so the youngsters can have their milk. These aren’t the equivalent of babes in arms; they are big joeys, who, as I’ve noted before, can be almost as big as their mothers.

They graze, but must have their milk too, and the mothers patiently prop and let them poke their faces into the pouches and drink their fill, passing the time dozing or scratching or washing their paws.

This wallaby lot looked like the queue at the canteen. 

But as the joeys grow, the capacity of those pouches is stretched to extraordinary limits.

I had to look twice at this kangaroo. A randy young male? But the penis was too thick, too dark, too straight.

No, just such a big joey that its tail wouldn’t fit back into the pouch.  I do often see the long hind feet and a thin tail tip poking out of wallaby pouches, but there are fewer roos so I wasn’t used to the scale of this one.

I can still feel the kicks in the ribs and the elbows in the guts from babies too long in utero myself.

Just imagine a big joey diving in, nose first as they do, then trying to turn 360 degrees, scrabbling about with those long pointy — clawed — hind feet and very solid tail.

All I can say as I watch the wildly contorting pouch is ‘Ouch’!

Our place

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I know that the wallabies truly feel at home in the yard now by the way they sleep here in the warmth of the late winter days, letting me walk past so close to them. Some of the very newly outed joeys are skittish but they soon learn I’m no threat.

This mother is so unconcerned that she is fast asleep, not even pretending to keep watch through half-closed eyes, as they often do.  Note the well-stripped rose bush behind her!

The joey stays close, in physical touch with mum. This endearing joey is, I think, the first one I made eye contact with, when it was a pouch-dweller. It often has one floppy ear.

I mildly regret the roses and all the other plants they eat, but how can I not be delighted that such beautiful and gentle creatures now think of my place as as ‘our place’?

This what a Wildlife Refuge ought to be — a place of trust, of safety.

Bat squatters

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If you became homeless because your house was being demolished, obviously you’d have to find a new home to live in. It’s no different for other animals; we all need shelter, a home, habitat.

However, I suppose we wouldn’t be allowed to choose the amenities block or the bandstand in a public park, let alone bring all our relatives. Similarly, there is much ado when a whole colony of wild creatures takes up residence in civic gardens or parks. Grey-headed Flying-foxes are a common ‘nuisance’ in many town and city parks as land clearing proceeds for development such as mining or housing, and their natural habitat is disturbed or lost. Communities are then divided with debates about how to make them move on before they defoliate all the long-established and cherished trees in a park like this one.

Sydney’s Botanic Gardens has the same problem. Bat droppings, bat screechings and bare trees are not the most inviting ambience for picnickers, walkers — or Anzac Day ceremonies.

But they are merely the victims, like many of us, of shortsighted ‘planning’.  In fact, these Grey-headed Flying-foxes (sometimes called Grey-headed Fruit-bats) are listed as a vulnerable species.

I took the chance to observe them at a stop at this park. After all, it’s pretty amazing that bats are the only mammals capable of sustained flight.

They spend the day in large camps and head out to feed at night, using sight and smell to find their preferred foods, the blossom and nectar of eucalypts and native fruits and lillipillies.

From introduced trees like jacarandas and firs they were hanging like thousands of leather lanterns with bright furry tops — each upside-down, and by the claws of one forelimb, daredevil style.

They can see quite well in daytime so that must be why they tuck their heads in. Many seem to have trouble getting comfy – they screeched and chattered and wriggled, stretched and flapped their amazing wings, which can exceed a metre in span, before rewrapping themselves in their slinky Batman blankets.

These Flying-foxes, with their foxfire collars, do have faces like foxes, or dogs, as the reversed photo of this restless one shows. They are not at all ugly, and certainly fascinating.

I don’t think I’d want them as close neighbours, but then I’m increasing rather than reducing habitat here, so there’d be room for us all.

The roos move in

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While the wallabies have more than made themselves at home here in my yard-that-was-once-a-garden, the kangaroos have been wary, staying over in the far orchard end and taking off if they saw me. But I recently spotted this young one through my window;  being up near the shed, it was unusually close to my cabin, but didn’t notice me snapping its picture though the window. Then I looked along the track from the shed, even closer to me, and there they were, a little family of kangaroos sprawled about on track and bank, lazy and unperturbed.

I went outside to the steps to take a better look; they looked back, but remained at ease. At last!

Since then the family is often close by, and take their rest in the grassy front yard mostly — much softer than the track. The mother is relaxed about feeding when I am outside, and her joey seems equally unbothered, although I can’t yet walk close by, as I can with the wallabies.

I thought this a good chance to show the two very different macropod mothers and their joeys, for comparison: the large Eastern Grey Kangaroo (left) and the more petite Eastern Rednecked Wallaby. They all get along together here, separate but in close proximity.

Tolerant wallaby mums

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I have mentioned before that wallaby mothers carry their joeys long after they really don’t seem to fit in the pram or pouch any more.
They also keep allowing them to drink their specially tailored mother’s milk from their allotted nipple for a very long time.

This was brought home to me the other day when I spotted this well-grown joey indulging in a suckling session.

But nevertheless, when it had drunk its fill, and straightened up next to Mum, I was surprised by just how well-grown!  Yes, it’s on the uphill side, but still…

At least it didn’t try to get back into her pouch.

This other wallaby mum has chosen a spot up near my outdoor loo for her morning naps and I have watched her calmly allow her joey to clamber in and out, in its typical mildly panicked way. Sunsoaking, she’s almost asleep, but her joey stays on full alert, ready to dive into its furry shelter.

Seeing it now, you’d wouldn’t think it could fit, or that she could carry it and still hop as she does.  And makes it look easy.

Wallabies at home

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The wallabies took very little time to adjust to my moving back in to their domain. There are lots of mothers carrying young in pouches. Some of the joeys are very small and pink, and some, like this one, are really too big.

It is so cramped in that low-hanging pouch that you can see that its hind foot is protruding, but it stayed inside where it was warm. After all, it could reach grass and milk from there, so why not?

The mothers seem most trusting of me. Some of the others look at me quite imperiously, ears pricked, as if to say, ‘ So who are you, and what is your business here?!’ 

I have no idea why they haven’t eaten these self sown greens — as they hop in and eat the parsley in this old tank that I need to fill to be a raised bed for root vegies. Unfortunately, since it’s really a compost heap at this stage, a red-bellied black snake moved in at the end of last summer.

But if I can overcome my disappointment in the wide range of my once-treasured garden plants they are eating, they are a treat to have around to watch.

Only… I just noticed that they have started on the citrus trees! Now that’s going too far.

Tassie love affair

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A Tasmanian has stolen my heart. I might have met him once, decades ago, in my own state; in fact I’m sure I saw him twice at my place. But now Tasmania is the only place we can meet.

At the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park they also have a small area for the other carnivorous marsupial indigenous to Tasmania, the Eastern Quoll. I knew they could be different colours, and for no particular reason of sex or age.

The first one I saw here was asleep, curled up like a cat in a white-spotted caramel coat. No spots on the tail — which is the easy differentiator from my Spotted-Tailed Quoll.

‘Cute’, I thought, but then I saw the other.

Small cat-sized, black and white, alert and cheeky, lustrous dark eyes, dainty and elegant all in one. I fall for it, I exclaim aloud, tell it how beautiful I find it.

I want to have one living at my place, despite my knowledge that it eats any nestlings or eggs, lizards, larvae or worms it comes across.

The wire mesh makes it hard to photograph it with justice, but they can’t be in an open pen like the Devils, as they are superb climbers. I wish I could take one on a visit to its bigger cousin at my place, but my resident Quoll would probably eat it rather than greet it.

Even seeing it scoffing a lump of some dead animal doesn’t put vegetarian me off; after all, I have had relationships with carnivores before.

I am still in love with the Eastern Quoll.

Wild Tasmania(ns)

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Near the bottom of the east coast of Tasmania is the Tasman Peninsula, a ragged blob of land reached via another, smaller blob, the Forestier Peninsula.  They are a whisker of land away from being islands like Bruny, close to the coast — and to Hobart.

Having little time to find even a smudge of the wild Tasmania beyond the charming, hilly and human-sized Hobart,  I headed down to the Tasman Peninsula for a few days’ camping.

The coast around Eaglehawk Neck and beyond is rugged and stunning, but not totally wild, as outside the National Park, the accessible little bays in between the cliffs are dotted with small boats, and the shoreline with cottages, none of which can be called ‘shacks’ any more.

But it is this narrow ‘neck’ , only 30 metres wide at its narrowest, that has helped make it a good place to try to hold the line against the spread of the facial tumours that are rapidly slashing the population of the Tasmanian Devil, the wild Tasmanian I am most keen to meet.   Since 1996, the disease has killed 80% of them.

At Taranna is the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park, where I get my first real-life sight of the Devil, Australia’s largest surviving native carnivore, now the Tasmanian Tiger, the Thylacine, is extinct. It is also the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial.

I am shocked — he is so small. Heavier, but no bigger than a male Spotted-tail Quoll, as I see at home. And such an odd shape, as if his parts are mismatched, with that big head and blocky hindquarters. Such red ears!  Such sharp teeth!

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Their place — and mine

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Out in the real forest it is always a matter of double-take with our cleverly camouflaged creatures; I think I see a dark shadow sway, a tree trunk bend. Kangaroo? Wallaroo? One blink and they might be gone.

As majestic as the trees that give them cover, this is how I best like to see them.

But now that my house yard is their territory too, I get different, more domestic views of my macropod neighbours. In the early mornings, as the sun begins to soak up the dew and highlight the trees, it now also picks out fluffy ears, closed sundrowsing eyes, busily feeding backs, and the many babies, cosily enpouched or skittishly out-pouched.

These red-necked wallabies rule of a morning; the kangaroo and the wallaroo families visit mostly at dusk.

Tenants-in-common

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Now that all the Refuge animals have free run of my house yard, it’s been interesting to see the sharing arrangements develop, both with me as the sole human, and with the other, better adapted, species.

Eastern red-necked wallabies have the majority, as this small gang of young bloods shows.

But they are an amiable breed, and co-exist happily with anyone else, even me. This wallaby with the itchy tummy is almost overbalancing as he scratches, with no thought of the echidna that trundles past, intent on its own business.

I have learnt that minding one’s own business is the key for my survival here too — not that interfering with an echidna would be on my mind!

Sensible spider

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Following a brief but heavy shower of rain, I spotted this little arrangement in the climbing rose that hangs beyond my kitchen window. I probably only did so because the radiating central part of the web was delineated with raindrops.

So was the leaf that hung at its heart. I knew this was a Leaf-curling spider because I’d been told so before. Even my bad memory gets this visual association enough to remember its name!

But I knew nothing else about it.

It’s one of the Phonognatha family, probably Phonognatha graeffii — according to the Australian Museum site. This was a gum leaf, not a rose leaf, for the female collects her chosen leaf from the ground, and curls it to a protective shape, tightly closed at the top. 

She spins her silk to hold it in place and line it, and usually all you will see are her legs protruding from the bottom. With these she feels for the vibrations of any hapless insect that gets trapped in her web.

Until she has to make that dash, she is protected not only from rain but birds and wasps.

This day she was being sensible as well as reclusive, keeping her legs dry. If I could see her, she’d apparently be fat and oval-shaped with red-brown legs and body and a cream coloured pattern on her back.

I loved these details from the Museum site:

 ‘Sometimes other objects, such as snail shells (which come ready-curled), are used.’ Spidery labour-saving devices?

and

‘Juvenile spiders start off by bending over a small green leaf, but eventually graduate to larger dead leaves’.  Learner leaf-curlers!