Mountain Tails: The Lives and Loves of My Animal Neighbours

172 Pages·2008·7.08 MB·English

by  Munro Sharyn

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ountain
M
Tails
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ountain
M
Tails
The lives and loves of
my animal neighbours
Sharyn Munro
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First published 2009
Exisle Publishing Limited
‘Moonrising’, Narone Creek Road, Wollombi, NSW 2325, Australia
P.O. Box 60–490, Titirangi, Auckland 0642, New Zealand
www.exislepublishing.com
Copyright © 2009 in text: Sharyn Munro
Copyright © 2009 in illustrations: Sharyn Munro
Sharyn Munro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Except for short extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this book
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
Munro, Sharyn (Sharyn Therese)
Mountain tails : the lives and loves of my animal neighbours / Sharyn Munro.
ISBN: 9781921497209 (pbk.)
Animals – Australia – Anecdotes.
Wildlife refuges – Australia – Anecdotes.
Human–animal relationships – Anecdotes.
591.944
Designed by saso content & design pty ltd
Typeset in Adobe Jenson 10.5/15
Printed in China through Colorcraft Limited, Hong Kong
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For my father, Frank Munro, who always listened.
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Contents
Welcome to my Mountain 1
A quoll in the kitchen 5
Sneaky skink 11
Mini-mice 15
Kookaburra kingdom 20
Two-by-two 24
Consorting couples 25
Out of the fire ... 29
Redneck boys 33
Red-bellied squatters 36
Rosies are red 41
Aquatic jewels 44
Wild child day care 48
A bathful of tadpoles 52
Seeking a mate? 55
Poolside loungers 58
Free to good home … 63
The guzzler 66
Jacky dragon 70
Macropod mothers’ club 72
Snake perversity 75
Pesky possums 78
Shy yet showy goannas 82
Praying for prey 85
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The quoll kids 87
Lost koalas 91
The night monster 95
Night time is our time 98
Sky lords 102
A question of murder 107
Breaking and entering 110
Lyrebird lads 116
A spiky visitor 119
Domestic dilemmas 124
Master of Art 128
Rusty aristocrats 130
A questing cockatoo 133
The lonely emu 135
Wallaby weirdo 138
Elegant, negligent ducks 143
Mystery thief 146
Inedible edible grubs 149
Petrified birds 151
Missing tails 154
Addendum 159
Contacts 162
Sources 164
Acknowledgements 167
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welcome to my mountain
Short or tall or really small,
Furred or feathered, smooth or scaly —
I’m the poorest creature here, without a tail at all.
Being the only human resident of a wildlife refuge, on the edge of a
national park that is far from any town, I see lots of creatures behaving
‘wildly’. They can be so natural because they ignore me, as they should.
After all, I’m obviously of an inferior and inadequate species: no tail,
only two legs, pathetic hearing, poor vision that’s shockingly so at night,
no built-in insulation of fur or feathers, and an apparent inability to
survive on the local abundance of grass, leaves and roots — or other
creatures.
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mountain tails
To that general picture of modern white Australians, my neighbours
might add other deficiencies peculiar to me: knees that can’t be relied on
to bend, as knees must, to climb up and down slopes; inappropriate
Celtic skin that burns to cancerous spots under our sunshine; and a lack
of any singing talent.
I love where I live, high on my forested mountain, surrounded by even
higher, wilder mountains, but I admit to being the least well-adapted to
my surroundings, because still dependent to some extent on the outside
world.
But not for entertainment! My fellow wild residents, and their
relatives from the national park next door, are always up to new tricks.
These may well frustrate my own activities and infuriate me with the
apparent perversity of their choice and timing, but they never fail to
interest, surprise and cause me to seek further information.
Such tales usually amuse other people — and me, once I’ve calmed
down. I mean how would you like it if your neighbours ate your roses,
solicited for sex in your front yard, or commandeered your shed?
Many people say they like animals, but they really only mean domesti-
cated animals, or the cute and cuddly semi-tame native ones kept in
tourist parks. Being genuinely wild creatures, none of my neighbours is
cuddly; they wouldn’t allow such liberties even if I wanted to. But many
are very cute, like the joeys — the baby wallabies and kangaroos and
wallaroos.
Beauty is another matter. While I acknowledge snakes can be
beautiful, there is always a big ‘BUT’ clouding my attempts at objective
judgement. They do provide a few scary tales, because I’m alone, and not
the calmest where creatures like snakes or spiders or leeches are
concerned. Other people may even laugh at these tales, but it’s a
nervous, skittery kind of laughter, usually accompanied by a shiver and
a ‘Rather you than me!’
If ‘cute’ and ‘beautiful’ and even ‘scary’ sometimes apply, ‘amazing’
often does.
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welcome to my mountain
I am astonished at the diversity of ways in which these creatures
have adapted to their environment, evolved over thousands of years,
and are still evolving. They have truly earned their places here; they
belong.
When I studied biology in high school and learnt about the internal
processes of the human body, I was struck with wonder at the intricate
design of it all. My wonder was no less when we looked into the pinned-
back frog or rat we had dissected — that is, a less squeamish classmate
had — and it was enhanced by the fact that their insides looked just like
the diagrams in our textbooks!
But we didn’t even consider our native animals then, let alone their
unique and clever features: how a kangaroo can delay the growth of a
foetus; how a koala can survive on a diet of gum leaves that would be
toxic to other animals; how a wombat’s pouch opens backwards so the
baby doesn’t get buried in dirt when the mother digs; how an echidna
has one extra-long claw for scratching amongst its spines ... the list of
things to wonder at is endless.
In any association with living creatures, there will also be sad or painful
tales. Many readers of my first book, The Woman on the Mountain, say
they found the animal stories some of the most moving. Over the 30
years since I found this place, and came to belong to it, many incidents
were experienced and creatures met that didn’t find their way into that
book. And of course our wild life together has continued since.
So that new readers will be able to follow me and my animal
encounters over those decades, here’s a potted history. I first moved here
in 1978 with my husband and our two children, Sam, five, and Lucy,
three. That early bush life — living in a tent while we built a little mud-
brick cabin, fencing, setting up watering systems, planting fruit trees and
vegetable gardens — was idyllic, but the marriage splintered into very
nasty shards after too few years. Then came too many years in Sydney
as a sole parent, working and renting and always broke, returning to our
Mountain home whenever we could.
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