The white-plumed honeyeaters
swing on skinny branches
in the sprinkler sprays
whiz down to the pond for a splash
line up on a slightly bigger branch
rock madly up and down
flit off again, twittering
they hover in the spray
like humming birds
flutter in the air in front of me
the spiny-cheeked honeyeaters
are twice their size
but can’t get to the pond
the little honeyeaters fight them off
snapping their small beaks
one-to-one at the long pink beaks
the spiny-cheeks
are kept to the mulga tree
lead a singular but not uninteresting life
wobbling on tomato plants
showering under the rosemary bush
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The bat caves
Last Friday night I went to the bat caves. Like the superhero’s Bat Cave, their location is secret. The scientists who took the local field naturalists group there asked us not to give other people directions.
Mind you, many people who’ve been in Alice for a decade or more know the caves – someone took me to them years ago but I’d forgotten exactly where they were. I’m sure more than one young bloke with a ute has used the line, ‘Fancy going to the bat caves?’
Anyway, the caves are about half an hour’s drive southwest of town. That’s all I’ll say. They’re like sinkholes but unusual because they’re in conglomerate – pebbles with a limey cement – rather than limestone.
A bit over 300 million years ago, this conglomerate was a thick wedge of rubbly scree at the base of large mountains here. Since then it’s been buried to great depths, cemented, broken up by long parallel sets of cracks called joints and exposed at the surface again. The joints formed ideal pathways for rainwater, and so the caves were born.
We walked through witchetty bushes up a low slope at dusk and came to a couple of large depressions in the ground, two or three metres square, with a dark hole leading off from each of them.
In the flatter of the depressions, we turned on our torches, got down on our hands and knees and crawled into a tunnel. Very soon we found ourselves in a cavern the size of my lounge room, but rounder.
We shone our torches around and found a few bats, furry brown shapes snuggled flat singly and in pairs. They were the size of my palm, or one of the larger pebbles – dark brown pebbles could look like bats. It looked strangely comfortable, snuggling between pebbles on a cave wall.
We went through another tunnel and came out into a narrow cavern only a metre or so wide but very high, like a gorge but with no sky above and pebbly walls – almost like the walls of an old stone cottage, but even more haphazard.
Lines of green twine led off through other tunnels. The caves go for a long way. Our leader told us that there were maps of them but they weren’t very useful.
We still didn’t find the clusters of dozens of bats the scientists usually see in one of these caverns. The bats low down on the wall or ceiling succumbed to camera flashes for a while and then took off, one minute a dark outline on a wall, the next a flash of polygonal wings, then gone in the darkness.
We turned off our torches for a minute and stood around edgily in the dark, laughing uneasily.
When we came out of the caves it was dark outside. The scientists showed us some bats they’d caught in nets the previous night. Little cave bats, like the once we’d just seen, and a chocolate wattled bat, which sounds edible but didn’t look it.
The bats looked furry and mouse-like in the scientist’s hand, but when they flew off they were something else, their wings surprisingly big and strange. I’ve often heard the silvery tings of bats flying around campsites at night but, I realized now, have rarely got a proper look at them, even for a few moments.
Only the microbats, not the big fruit bats, can echo-locate – this ability is limited by size somehow. But all bats can see, quite well. So 'blind as a bat' is a misnomer.
All 16 species of bats in central Australia are microbats and eat insects, as opposed to bigger animals, fruit, flowers or blood. Most of these bats live in hollows in trees, like the big river red gums along the dry creek beds. You can watch the bats pour out of these hollows at dusk, sometimes in their hundreds.
There was one large bat in central Australia, the ghost bat, named because of its thin, ghostly wings. This 11 cm bat is the largest echo-locating bat in the world. But it has disappeared from central Australia and its numbers are declining elsewhere in the country.
The scientists had set up several harp nets near the caves. These are rectangular metal frames, several metres tall, strung with fishing line, like a harp. The bats are not hurt by the ‘net’, just drop into a trough of canvas below it, crawl up under a plastic sleeve lining the trough and, according to the scientists, often go to sleep.
You set these nets up between a couple of tall bushes or in a gully or at the entrance to a cave. We found more little cave bats in them, but no other species.
These days you have to have a series of injections before you can handle bats safely. A lot of Australian bats have a virus like rabies, so you don’t want to get bitten by them without being protected from the virus.
I must say I’m tempted to have those injections.
Mind you, many people who’ve been in Alice for a decade or more know the caves – someone took me to them years ago but I’d forgotten exactly where they were. I’m sure more than one young bloke with a ute has used the line, ‘Fancy going to the bat caves?’
Anyway, the caves are about half an hour’s drive southwest of town. That’s all I’ll say. They’re like sinkholes but unusual because they’re in conglomerate – pebbles with a limey cement – rather than limestone.
A bit over 300 million years ago, this conglomerate was a thick wedge of rubbly scree at the base of large mountains here. Since then it’s been buried to great depths, cemented, broken up by long parallel sets of cracks called joints and exposed at the surface again. The joints formed ideal pathways for rainwater, and so the caves were born.
We walked through witchetty bushes up a low slope at dusk and came to a couple of large depressions in the ground, two or three metres square, with a dark hole leading off from each of them.
In the flatter of the depressions, we turned on our torches, got down on our hands and knees and crawled into a tunnel. Very soon we found ourselves in a cavern the size of my lounge room, but rounder.
We shone our torches around and found a few bats, furry brown shapes snuggled flat singly and in pairs. They were the size of my palm, or one of the larger pebbles – dark brown pebbles could look like bats. It looked strangely comfortable, snuggling between pebbles on a cave wall.
We went through another tunnel and came out into a narrow cavern only a metre or so wide but very high, like a gorge but with no sky above and pebbly walls – almost like the walls of an old stone cottage, but even more haphazard.
Lines of green twine led off through other tunnels. The caves go for a long way. Our leader told us that there were maps of them but they weren’t very useful.
We still didn’t find the clusters of dozens of bats the scientists usually see in one of these caverns. The bats low down on the wall or ceiling succumbed to camera flashes for a while and then took off, one minute a dark outline on a wall, the next a flash of polygonal wings, then gone in the darkness.
We turned off our torches for a minute and stood around edgily in the dark, laughing uneasily.
When we came out of the caves it was dark outside. The scientists showed us some bats they’d caught in nets the previous night. Little cave bats, like the once we’d just seen, and a chocolate wattled bat, which sounds edible but didn’t look it.
The bats looked furry and mouse-like in the scientist’s hand, but when they flew off they were something else, their wings surprisingly big and strange. I’ve often heard the silvery tings of bats flying around campsites at night but, I realized now, have rarely got a proper look at them, even for a few moments.
Only the microbats, not the big fruit bats, can echo-locate – this ability is limited by size somehow. But all bats can see, quite well. So 'blind as a bat' is a misnomer.
All 16 species of bats in central Australia are microbats and eat insects, as opposed to bigger animals, fruit, flowers or blood. Most of these bats live in hollows in trees, like the big river red gums along the dry creek beds. You can watch the bats pour out of these hollows at dusk, sometimes in their hundreds.
There was one large bat in central Australia, the ghost bat, named because of its thin, ghostly wings. This 11 cm bat is the largest echo-locating bat in the world. But it has disappeared from central Australia and its numbers are declining elsewhere in the country.
The scientists had set up several harp nets near the caves. These are rectangular metal frames, several metres tall, strung with fishing line, like a harp. The bats are not hurt by the ‘net’, just drop into a trough of canvas below it, crawl up under a plastic sleeve lining the trough and, according to the scientists, often go to sleep.
You set these nets up between a couple of tall bushes or in a gully or at the entrance to a cave. We found more little cave bats in them, but no other species.
These days you have to have a series of injections before you can handle bats safely. A lot of Australian bats have a virus like rabies, so you don’t want to get bitten by them without being protected from the virus.
I must say I’m tempted to have those injections.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
A different kind of euro
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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