White Beech: The Rainforest Years (55 page)

At CCRRS, where there is no barbed wire and power cables run underground, our eighteen bat species, many of which are listed as vulnerable or threatened, can live and breed in relative safety. Besides the Grey-headed Flying Fox, we have the Black Flying Fox (
Pteropus alecto
), thought by some people to be displacing the Grey-headed than which it is slightly bigger and heavier. In the mating season the male of this species has a mildly unpleasant habit of selecting a length of branch upon which to groom himself repeatedly and display his engorged genitalia. The Little Red Flying Fox (
P. scapulatus
), which is nomadic and roosts alone in a different place after every night’s foraging, visits when the Silky Oaks and other proteaceous plants are in flower. The miniature flying fox called the Common Blossom Bat (
Synconycteris australis
)
is entirely dependent upon rainforest. It too roosts alone in the canopy and feeds nightly among the flowering and fruiting trees. As it bustles among the flower spathes it collects pollen on its fur. Walking in the forest at dusk I sometimes hear it defending its food plant, vocalising and clapping its wings. The Eastern Tube-nosed Bat (
Nyctimene robinsoni
) is another that can only live in rainforest, but its range is even narrower. Like the Blossom Bat it loves the flowers of quandongs and Black Beans and it specialises in figs. I have never managed to see it or even to hear its characteristic whistling call, but I know it’s about.

Many bat species nest in tree hollows. The Eastern Free-tail Bat or East Coast Free-tailed Bat or Eastern Little Mastiff Bat (
Mormopterus
norfolkensis
) is one such. Very little is known about it because it is not often trapped but it, or something very like it, has been found in the caldera. Another is the White-striped Free-tailed Bat (
Tadarida australis
) which can form maternal colonies of several hundred in tree hollows of thirty centimetres diameter. The Eastern Long-eared Bat (
Nyctophilus bifax
) is another rainforest denizen, that is likely to roost among the interlaced roots of strangler figs or in tree ferns. The rare Golden Tipped Bat (
Phoniscus
or
Kerivoula papuensis
) is another rainforest bat so tiny that it chooses to roost in the abandoned nests of scrubwrens and gerygones. Unusually its diet consists almost entirely of orb-weaving spiders. There are half a dozen species of forest bats in the genus
Vespadelus
, and perhaps more. As these can be told apart only by a comparison of their penes, it is more than I can do to tell you which ones live at Cave Creek and which don’t.

Several species of bat have probably taken up residence in the old house. Certainly we find droppings on the floor. One day, in an old tar pot hanging on the house wall, I found the tiny desiccated corpse of an Eastern Horseshoe Bat (
Rhinolophus megaphyllus
) with her baby in her arms. These little bats fly by echolocation, hunting moths, beetles, flies, crickets, bugs, cockroaches and wasps through the dense forest; somehow this mother and child ended up in the tar pot unable to get out. Of all the creatures in the forest, the bats are the ones we know least, and of the bats, the insectivores are the ones we know least about. It is my fervent hope that a bat specialist will come to work with the bats at Cave Creek.

We can only wonder now which bats used to live in the cave from which Cave Creek takes its name. These days it houses no bats, though according to a visitor in 1908 it was then ‘filled with bats which when disturbed fly about in hundreds; they were so thick in the air that a person kept involuntarily dodging his head to avoid them’. These may have been Eastern Cave Bats (
Vespadelus troughtoni
) typically found close to escarpments along the scenic rim. They like to hunt the insects feeding on Booyongs, Rosewood, Stingers and Carabeens, all of which are common in the Cave Creek forest. The Large-eared Pied Bat (
Chalinolobus dwyeri
) is another that lives in sandstone caves close to the forest edge. It was not discovered until 1966 at Copeton in northern New South Wales, at a site that is now under the Copeton Dam. It has been found in Lamington National Park, where it is supposed that it was roosting in basalt. The land at CCRRS is traversed by a broad stripe of sandstone that crops out over the forest and the creek, perfect habitat for
Chalinolobus dwyeri
.

Placental rats and mice made their way to Australia five to ten million years after the bats. Viewers of
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here
will have seen C-list celebrities being buried with rats, having rats tipped into their trousers and so forth, and they will have been told that the creatures in question are fierce ‘bush rats’. In fact they are common
Rattus rattus
, from the nearest rat-fancy. To have been genuine local bush rats they would have had to be
Rattus fuscipes
subspecies
assimilis
. This animal is not commensal with human beings and would have left the site of
IACGMOOH
as soon as it was taken over by television crews in 2002. Though bush rats are supposed to be strictly nocturnal, I have seen them by daylight. I have never seen more than one at a time, and always in the same place on a track about fifty yards from the old house. The rat would pop out of the kikuyu on one side of a track, cross it and disappear into a tunnel in the grass on the other side. The tunnel appears to have been in use for generations, because I have been seeing a bush rat near it for seven or eight years, much longer than the life cycle of an individual rat, which lives only a year.
Rattus fuscipes
typically has a snub nose, dark feet (hence its name) and a short tail.

There are two species of native mice as well as imported house mice at Cave Creek, but both are elusive and increasingly rare. One is the Fawn-footed Melomys (
Melomys cervinipes
). I am supposed now to call it a Korril, a word that originates from the language of the Stradbroke Island people, but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything but a mouse. The other is the Hastings River Mouse (
Pseudomys oralis
), which I’m sorry to say was caught in a deadfall trap by someone seeking to display his credentials as an academic mammalologist.

Our biggest placental mammals are our dingoes. I was walking alone on the edge of the forest only days after I first slept at CCRRS, when a big blond dingo with a plumy tail came trotting down a pademelon track to within a few yards of where I had come to a stop. He had been sniffing amongst the undergrowth and hadn’t seen me until that point. He stood and looked. I looked back. I vaguely remembered that you’re not supposed to stare dogs in the eye, because it is confrontational, so I broke the gaze once or twice. I didn’t dare turn my back to him because it might have triggered his chase reflex, so I stood my ground and talked to him, as is my wont. The path was steep and he was slightly above me, motionless, his golden eyes looking intelligently into my face. Then he wheeled and trotted back up the path. I watched his plumy tail floating above the undergrowth until it disappeared.

I have seen him several times since, and even managed to catch him on video. The last time I saw him it was broad midday. I was sitting on the verandah of the old house, reading, when some small unfamiliar sound made me look up. Plumy Tail was standing a hundred yards away keeping nit for his pack, as they crossed the main track on their way to the creek. I was too late to see the leader of the pack, who would have been a senior bitch, but even so I counted more than a dozen animals, as well as a horde of smaller pups of whom I could see just tail tips and the odd ear. Plumy Tail stood still, head up, ears pricked, gazing down the track towards me as they trotted over the crossing and into our planting, almost as if he was showing them to me. Then he too was gone.

Plumy Tail has at least one rival, a darker ginger dingo whom I’ve seen once or twice from a distance. Now that the forest is growing up we see dingoes less often, but we hear them more and sometimes from very close quarters. They emerge at night from their refuge in the forest to take prey in the neighbouring cleared areas, usually young lambs. Every now and then we get a circular advising us that 1080 baits are being laid, as long as all the landowners within a five-kilometre radius consent. This has the effect of rendering the baiting impossible, which is just as well. We couldn’t agree to the baiting of wild dogs if we wanted to because, in an attempt to protect quolls from ingesting the poison, baits may not be laid within 300 metres of a forest edge. There is now nowhere at CCRRS that is more than 300 metres from a forest edge.

A dingo is a dog, nowadays called
Canis lupus dingo
; domestic dogs are also
Canis lupus
. The two can and do breed with each other. One school of thought holds that dingoes have become more dangerous because of interbreeding with introduced dogs, which has weakened their shyness trait so that they no longer avoid humans. This is probably bunk. From what I see of dingoes at Cave Creek they are quite capable of observing humans and familiarising themselves with them. They certainly know me a lot better than I know them. They are as easy to tame and train as any other dog breed. They were essential members of Aboriginal communities, as hunting companions who found, harassed and sometimes took game, and as guardians who identified hazards before humans became aware of them. Yet, from the beginning of settlement ‘wild dogs’ have been persecuted. Steel-jaw traps were set for them; they were shot and poisoned with strychnine, with small regard to the degree of suffering involved. In Queensland between 1932 and 1967 doggers collected 685,000 dingo scalps. Since 1968 ‘wild dogs’ are poisoned with 1080, sodium monofluoroacetate, a toxin derived from West Australian pea species. The thinking was that because the dingo was introduced from Asia only 4,000 or so years ago, it had no immunity to 1080, but native species could ingest it without ill effect. There was never any good reason to believe that the immunity acquired by south-western fauna was shared with the fauna of the discontinuous eastern region, but for nearly forty years the idea was accepted, along with an equally ill-founded notion that this method of killing was humane. Anyone who saw a dog die of 1080 poisoning knew that it wasn’t. In 2007 a Queensland drover called Bill Little, thirty of whose cattle dogs had been poisoned with 1080 over the years, told ABC TV news programme
PM
: ‘You get up in the middle of the night and your dog’s screaming in pain and he’s climbing the wall of your van, you’ve got to get out in the middle of the night and shoot your best dog.’

At CCRRS the dingo is not a problem that we need to solve. We have no livestock to protect from predation, or from the diseases thought to be carried by dingoes. The way I see it the dingoes have more right to our mountains than do sheep. One morning the workforce surprised a dingo bitch who had chosen to give birth on one of our warm mulch-heaps. She ran away, leaving four newborn pups. When she didn’t come back, Luke took the pups home to his mother who reared them. They were supposed to be going to a dingo sanctuary in Victoria, but when tests were done to find if they were pure bred, it turned out that they were only fifteen-sixteenths, mongrels like the rest of us. They are still living over the hill with Luke’s mum.

Every day I meet animals going about their business. I have become used to surprises and still they keep coming. I had finished writing this chapter, and was putting the laptop away when I heard a rustling in the gathering dusk. I leaned over the verandah rail and peered into the heaving vegetation. Whatever was causing the upheaval seemed fairly clumsy. Every now and then I glimpsed a round bottom parting the fern fronds. A bandicoot, I thought. But then it climbed onto a rock and I saw that it had a beak and spines.

An echidna. An
echidna
!
Tachyglossus aculeatus
. A creature more ancient than a marsupial. A monotreme! I felt weak at the knees. I had thought that the rainforest was too wet for echidnas, and here, calm and comfy as you like in the sodden forest, was a wild echidna. It rambled off down the gully we have planted with Bangalow and Walking-stick Palms and my heartfelt blessing went with it.

Whenever a truly wild creature lets me see it behaving naturally, I feel a blessedness, as if I had been allowed to enter a realm far more special than the celebrity A-list. When I look up from a book, and see a few yards away a pademelon grazing with her joey, I feel vindicated, as if I had won acceptance as an animal in my turn. Lots of people are persuaded to spend lots of money on shelter and food for wild creatures, when all they have to do is to stop making lawns and weeding and tidying up, and turning the bush into an outdoor room. While it’s not true that all you have to do is to let your garden run to seed, before wild vegetation and wild creatures will return to it, it is true that if you remove weeds and do your best to restore the original vegetation, the endemic animal species will reappear as if by magic. You won’t be able to keep a dog or a cat or even hens, because all of them do tremendous damage to wild creatures, but you won’t miss them, because all around you the bush will rustle with to-ings and fro-ings of a vast range of creatures great and small. A patch of rescued bush is a sanctuary where the special creatures who evolved with the vegetation can stave off extinction.

This book must end, but the story will continue. As the forest community at Cave Creek rebuilds itself, we will do our best to record the process on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.