Two in the Bush (18 page)

Soon, when we had finished examining the mound, Bevan led us deeper into the Mallee scrub in search of the birds. We quartered the scrub for about an hour without success, and were just about to
give up when Bevan came to a sudden standstill and pointed. Ahead of us, in a small clearing, stood two mallee-fowl, regarding us suspiciously. Basically they were a soft and lovely shade of
pinky-grey, but with the back, wings and tail handsomely spotted and flecked with reddish-brown, old gold and grey; from under the chin down the front of the breast was a sort of cravat of similar
markings. They were far more handsome than I had imagined, and I dearly wanted to get closer to them. We started to drift through the undergrowth towards them, but we had only progressed a few
yards when they took fright. They shuffled to and fro nervously for a minute or so, and then set off through the scrub, stalking along with the stately precision of slightly alarmed turkeys near
Christmas-time, and very soon they disappeared. It seemed to me a terrible thought that – unless urgent measures are taken within the next ten years or so – this incredible bird might
well become extinct. To a certain extent their mounds are preyed on by the introduced fox, who steals their eggs, but there is much more dangerous competition from rabbits and sheep who invade the
Mallee and eat the seeds and plants that the bird lives on, and, by feeding both indiscriminately and voraciously, change the whole ecology of the Mallee scrub. When this happens the birds can no
longer find food and so they have to move away (if there is anywhere to move to), or else die of starvation. Recently, too, there has been another threat to the bird in the shape of agriculture. At
one time the Mallee scrub was inviolate, for the soil was considered too poor for crops, but now, with the discovery of a new chemical, it has been found that Mallee country can support crops of
wheat. This means that vast areas of Mallee scrub which up until now have provided a sanctuary for the mallee-fowl, will be felled and planted and the birds will disappear. You cannot, of course,
halt progress, but is it necessary to destroy everything in your path to achieve it? The mallee-fowl is one of the most incredible birds in the world, and for this reason alone deserves the right
to exist. Much time and trouble has been taken to publicise and protect certain other members of the Australian fauna, and quite rightly; should it not be possible to do the same good promotion job
for the mallee-fowl, and thus save it and some of its extra-ordinary environment for the enjoyment of future generations?

It wasn’t far from Griffiths that we came across a sight that illustrated very forcibly the necessity for conservation. Strung along a barbed wire fence that surrounded a huge field at the
side of the road were twenty-eight wedge-tailed eagles. They had been shot and then strung along the fence with their wings outspread as if crucified – a sort of avian Golgotha. Most of the
birds were newly‑fledged youngsters. As we were filming this macabre sight, a truckload of Australians passed.

‘Don’t waste your time on that,’ they shouted, ‘that’s
nothing.’

‘What do they mean – that’s nothing?’ I asked Bevan. ‘I would have thought that twenty-eight dead wedge-tails would have been considered a good bag by their
standards.’

‘No, they don’t consider this a good bag,’ said Bevan gloomily. ‘You can sometimes see as many as fifty or more strung along a fence.’

Now, the wedge-tail is a large and powerful bird, and undoubtedly does damage to the farmers by taking their lambs, so obviously, as a predator, it must be kept under control. Although at the
moment the wedge-tail is fairly common, if this sort of slaughter increases, what chance of survival does the bird have? There are very few species prolific and cunning enough to combat this sort
of depredation of their numbers. Considerably depressed by this gory sight, we continued on our way down to Melbourne where we were going to film, we hoped, a conservation success story starring
what is, without doubt, Australia’s most popular animal: the koala bear.

Koala bears are, of course, not bears at all, but marsupials carrying their young in a pouch like the other Australian animals. At one time there was widespread shooting of koala bears for their
skins. They made the most helpless of prey since they did not appear to have any fear of mankind and would simply sit in the trees staring down at the hunters while their companions were shot all
around them. In 1924 over two million koala skins were exported. This uncontrolled slaughter came at a time when the koala bear colonies were being seriously depleted by a strange virus disease
that was killing them off in hundreds, so that within a very short time the koala was tottering on the border of extinction. Fortunately, before it became too late, the government stepped in and
passed laws strictly protecting the koalas, and slowly over the years their numbers have built up again. The problem with them now is that they tend to breed so successfully that they soon
over-populate an area and start to eat out their food supply. It is at this juncture that the Wildlife Department has to step in and organise a bear hunt to catch up all the surplus koalas and move
them to a new feeding area, before they starve to death.

The scene of our bear hunt was some eucalyptus forest not far away from Melbourne, a place called by the unlikely name of Stoney Pines. It was a grey, windy, rainy day when we met up with the
group of bear hunters who had arrived with a large truck containing the necessary accoutrements for the job, which included a large series of wooden crates in which to put the captured koalas. Over
the years the Wildlife Department has evolved an excellent method of capturing the bears without doing them any harm and without getting bitten themselves. The necessary equipment is a long,
telescopic pole to the end of which is fixed a noose with a knot in it so that it cannot tighten round the koala’s neck and kill it. The other vital piece of equipment is a circular canvas
sheet such as firemen use in rescuing people from burning buildings. The process is that you find your koala, put a noose round its neck (which it readily agrees to), and you then pull it off the
tree so that it falls into the canvas sheet, this being held out below by the rest of the bear hunters.

Having assembled the equipment, we set off through the trees and it was not very long before we came upon a group of eight koala bears, three of them being mothers with babies. They just sat in
the trees staring down at us vacantly and displaying no alarm whatsoever. I regret to say that my experience that day with koala bears left me with an extremely low opinion of their mentality; like
film starlets, they are delightful to look at but completely devoid of brain. The first one we caught was a big male, who allowed us to slip the noose over his head and continued to beam down at
us, apparently completely unaware of what we were trying to do. When he felt the noose tighten, however, he clasped the tree more firmly with his curved claws and uttered a series of harsh growls
that would have done justice to a tiger. Finally the tension on the rope became too great and he released his hold on the tree trunk and came crashing down into the canvas sheet; then we had the
jolly job of getting the noose off his neck and putting him into one of the travelling crates. People who imagine that koala bears are cuddly, inoffensive creatures should have a go at trying to
get a noose off one. The koala snarled and growled, slashed at us with his razor-sharp claws, and endeavoured to bite us whenever we got within range. Eventually, after a considerable amount of
trouble, we bundled him, still growling ferociously, into the crate. It took us a couple of hours to catch up the little band of eight koalas, and when we had them all safely boxed up, we drove off
to the new area where they were to be released. It was curious that when we opened the cages and tipped the koalas out on to the ground, they stood there staring at us and made absolutely no
attempt to get away, and we had to literally shoo them along the ground and up into the eucalyptus trees. They shinned up the smooth bark of the trees effortlessly and settled among the branches,
where they suddenly burst into a chorus of wails and squeaky cries like a group of distressed babies. One fascinating thing about the koala bears which I hoped we would be able to film, but
unfortunately we could not, was their method of weaning their youngsters. When the baby koala has left the pouch and is ready to go on a solid diet, its mother by some internal alchemy, produces
not excreta but a soft paste of semi-digested eucalyptus leaves which resembles the tinned strained foods which you give to babies, and this the baby koala feeds on until he is old enough to start
eating the rather coarse eucalyptus leaves off his own bat. This is, without doubt, the most amazing method any animal has of weaning its young.

Although the koalas were enchanting to look at, I found them disappointing, completely lacking in personality and having a rather vacuous approach to life in general. But how the skin hunters
had the heart to shoot these trusting, attractive and harmless little animals in such quantity is a thing that defeats me. When we had successfully filmed the bear hunt and I had put a bandage on
my thumb where a cuddly koala (which I was endeavouring to help up a tree) had laid it open to the bone, we headed up-country towards Canberra. Here the CSIRO had a large research station in which
they kept a great variety of marsupials and I was hoping that we would get some interesting film. What we actually saw and filmed there was one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen in my
life, and it happened quite by chance.

The Miracle Climb

The fauna of Australia is something that makes any self-respecting naturalist excited. It has been described by one person as ‘the attic of the world’, the place
where all the old things are stored; this is quite an apt description but is not strictly accurate. The two most interesting orders in Australia are the monotremes and the marsupials. The
monotremes are the most primitive of mammals and have retained many of the characteristics which prove how mammals are descended from the reptiles. Superficially, the monotremes resemble
conventional mammals in the sense that they breathe air, they are covered with fur, and they are warm blooded, but their chief and most astonishing reptilian characteristic is the fact that they
lay eggs, and then, when the young hatch from the eggs, the parents feed them on milk. Most famous of the monotremes, of course, is the duck-billed platypus, and another member of the group is the
echidna, that strange spiky creature that looks like a giant Martian hedgehog with long, pointed snout and heavy, outwardly curved claws on the front feet.

The marsupials are remarkable for a number of characteristics, best known of which is, of course, that the majority of them have a very short gestation period and give birth to their young in an
almost embryonic condition. The baby then finds its way to the mother’s pouch and continues its development there. The marsupials are very primitive creatures and it is lucky for them that
the land bridge over which they spread into Australia was destroyed, for the more conventional mammals (such as tigers, leopards, lions and so on) would have made short work of them. However, cut
off as they were, with this great continent to themselves, they evolved along the most amazing lines – a sort of parallel evolution took place; instead of the great herds of hoofed animals
that developed in Africa, Asia and America, you get the kangaroos and wallabies, who filled the same grazing niche. The places occupied by bushbabies or squirrels in other parts of the world were
occupied in Australia by possums and phalangers. A creature like the badger has its equivalent in Australia in the wombat, and the predators are represented by such things as the Tasmanian wolf
– not a true wolf, of course, but a marsupial, looking remarkably like its counterpart. So not only did the marsupials adapt themselves to the various niches but they came to resemble, in
habits and sometimes in appearance, totally unrelated creatures that had evolved in other parts of the world: thus, the little honey-eaters look, at first glance, exactly like some of the smaller
species of mouse; the wombat resembles the badger; the Tasmanian wolf a member of the dog family, and there is even a banded anteater, to complete the picture. As an example of evolution the
continent of Australia, with its monotremes and marsupials, is just as extraordinary as the Galapagos Islands, which so excited Darwin’s imagination that he evolved the whole evolutionary
thesis.

By and large, before the coming of man the marsupials had a pretty idyllic set-up. There were some predators in the shape of the Tasmanian wolf, wedge-tailed eagles, and the larger constricting
snakes, but by and large they led a fairly trouble-free existence. Then came the aborigines and with them (one suspects) came the dingo, a very cunning predator who rapidly became, together with
his owners, the aborigines, Public Enemy Number One to the fauna. Although the dingoes multiplied and spread, they did not appear to upset the balance of nature very much; neither did the
aborigines, for there were too few of them, but with the advent of white men, the picture became very much blacker for the marsupials. Not only were their numbers depleted by human beings, but
their habitat was invaded by introduced creatures such as the European fox and rabbit, the fox on the one hand acting as a predator and the rabbit acting as competition to the grazing marsupials
for the food. Then came the sheep, and this is where the larger grazing marsupials started to acquire a bad reputation, for now they were in competition with the sheep and the sheep was more
important to man. The farmers opened up whole new areas which, prior to this, had been arid and unsuitable country even for kangaroos and wallabies, and by driving wells and bore-holes they
produced lush pastures for their sheep. They also found, to their annoyance, that the kangaroos and wallabies were deeply appreciative of this and poured into these new areas in numbers equalling,
and in some cases exceeding, the sheep. So what is called the ‘kangaroo menace’ came into being.