As I went out to hang out the washing this morning, I startled a roo at my little pond. It jumped up and back a few metres. I went inside and watched the roo from the lounge room with my binoculars. It was back at the pond, drinking. It looked up and around with its pools of dark eyes, then drank some more, looked up again, drank.
My old cat decided to assert herself and walked over to the pond all fluffed up with her tail up. The little roo hopped off. Later, Tiger brushed against my legs as I was hanging out the washing and laid down on the ground for a pat. I told her that her species had a bad name for hassling native animals around here.
More than hassling them. Feral cats, together with foxes, are responsible for the disappearance of various small wallabies and bandicoots (smallish ground mammals, often with big ears) from central Australia in the last 60 years, including quite a few extinctions.
When I went out to check on the roo after Tiger scared if off, it was standing just over the back fence, which consists of a few strands of wire between star pickets (short steel posts). My appearance caused the roo, a young euro, to hop along the wide slope of the drain behind the backyard, and off into the bush. I was sorry, I don’t think it had had enough to drink.
These euros – a little smaller and, when they get older, stockier than red kangaroos – have been coming to drink from my one metre by half a metre pond for several summers now. Euros live in rocky hills but often come down on to plains and river flats to feed at night.
There are lots of little bouldery gneiss hills around Alice. But not many people see euros in their back yard. I’m lucky. My house backs on the bush and the fence is minimal so I can enjoy the view.
At least I thought I was lucky, until the euros started knocking branches off shrubs and all but draining the pond every night. When I go away now, I have to remind my son, or whoever is looking after the house, to fill up the pond every morning.
‘Those euros drink 40 litres of water every night!’ my son complains. He jokes that the goldfish must be immortal – he reads a lot of fantasy. We find the fish, still alive, in a few cupfuls of dark water each morning. There’s a wide flat rock, balancing on a small rock, for the fish to hide from the herons under, and so the roos can’t quite drink the pond dry.
An ecologist friend uses the nightly draining of my pond as evidence to argue against the long-held theory that roos survive in the desert because they don’t need to drink much. They may get most of the water they need from green feed, she argues, but they need to drink quite a lot in dry times.
I don’t know how many euros are using my pond, but I suspect it’s just two or three, who come regularly. When I walk through the bush out the back now, I see their trail, sprinkled with little black rectangles of dung, heading towards my back yard.
I’m surprised these euros are still alive. Aboriginal people still hunt roos, with cars and guns now instead of on foot with spears. We eat roo meat a lot too, but we buy it from the supermarket – it comes from approved culls down south.
It rained a few weeks ago and the goldfish has been left in peace since then. But it seems like the euros are back now. I don’t know what to do about them. Friends have suggested getting a child’s wading pond and filling it up just outside my fence. But I think that might attract more euros.
I can’t bring myself to empty the pond. I’m hoping the euros, goldfish and I can continue to co-habit.
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