Dragons in Paradise: Part 1

[A stuffed Alaskan Brown Bear in the Juneau Museum. In the rest of the USA they're known as Grizzly Bears. You'd be grizzly too if you'd been stuffed!]

[I'm amazed and intrigued by our perceptions of things that bite, sting and sometimes devour ...]

Every Garden of Eden has its serpent, every paradise its dragons. So there will always be hazards in the wild. Few walkers on their home patch give these more than a respectful thought or two. They’re like the local road rules: you’re so accustomed to following them you do it almost automatically. In contrast the first time I drove in North America, there was nothing automatic about driving on the right side of the road.

So too when I first walk in a new area, I tend to pay the unfamiliar hazards a lot more heed. If you wanted to be heavily analytical about it, or if OH&S training was deeply ingrained, you could create a score-card of such hazards for your walking destinations, and assiduously eschew all hazards. In practice such an approach is a little more anal than most of us tend to be. Rather we listen to locals – sometimes filtering their words for blarney – and/or we read the guidebooks. We then take appropriate precautions.

But common sense doesn’t always prevail. I’ve found a certain tabloid-fuelled fear, especially among Europeans, of all biting and stinging things in Australia. Sometimes this fearfulness can not only rob you of enjoyment, it can even backfire. One poor German we heard about in New Zealand had avoided walking in Australia for fear of poisonous spiders (something I’ve never encountered while walking). He chose to tramp in New Zealand, because it had no snakes and few spiders. But on his first day in Fiordland he was besieged by sandflies. The bites, many on his face, became infected and he ended up almost incapacitated.

Of course even the most rigorous hazard chart will never tell the full story. As much as I like to think of Tasmania as a “green and pleasant land”, there are times when I’ve paused to wonder why the scrub has to be quite so spiteful. One Easter we came off the Traveller Range near Lake St Clair by means of a traditional off-track “scrub bash”. The term is the same in New Zealand, even if, in my opinion, the scrub is marginally less fearsome. In Alaska, where the bush has the added seasonal bonus of bearing deliciously edible fruit, they call it bushwhacking. Despite its apparent meaning, the phrase actually means getting from point A to point B without a track, and hopefully with the least possible damage from or to the vegetation.

As we dropped from the Travellers through thick scrub, the theory was that descending would be so much easier than ascending, whatever amount of knee wobbling it may induce. But knees proved to be the least of our worries. At regular intervals our progress was blocked by cutting grass (Gahnia grandis) ready to slice our grasping hands if we sought to use it to slow our inelegant stumbling. As we spiralled off that hazard we plummeted into a wall of scoparia. This stuff alone is enough to keep me from wearing shorts in the Tasmanian bush. That it bears flowers of great beauty and with an edible nectar every summer is, at the time, small compensation for the shredded skin and clothes that a serious exposure to its teak-tough, razor-sharp foliage produces. Add encounters with hakea (needle bush), banksia, and bauera and the theme of tough inflexibility is seared into your brain.

Yet as you level out this resistance army gives way to a smiling guard of honour, as a beautifully benign myrtle beech forest welcomes you back to the Overland Track near the so-called Bowling Green. It was probably named for its lawn-like appearance, at least from afar. It’s kept that way by a combination of browsing wombats and waterlogging.

… While the natural instinct might be to do a St George, most of these dragons actually have a rightful and useful place in the ecology of the areas we choose to visit. Rather than slaying them willy-nilly, we can learn to live with dragons, and can even develop a grudging admiration for their biting, stinging or blood-sucking genius. Failing that we can at least adapt our walking styles to their presence.

Walking with an awareness of “dragons” doesn’t always have to be as extreme as when we hiked in bear country in Alaska. There we took some early advice to wear bear bells on the trail. We felt more than slightly crazy wearing these “jingle bells” and clapping and singing to forewarn bears that we were around. But given that we did see our statutory 3 bears (a mother and her two cubs) we felt justified in our lunacy.

Afterwards some more savvy locals told us that bears refer to the bells as dinner bells. They then shared lots of not-very comforting bear mauling stories. They topped it off with the standard bear bell joke, which goes. Q: How do you know when a bear has eaten a tourist? A: From the bells in their droppings. When we went bushwhacking with locals on Baranof Island, and they saw our bells, they quietly offered us cans of pepper spray instead. They prefer to carry it as a last ditch weapon against an attacking bear. Some dragons have to be taken pretty seriously, especially 3 metre tall carnivorous ones.

Armitage Shanks: Chapter 1

[this is NOT a huntsman spider ... but I had to start on you arachnophobiacs somewhere!]

[here begins the unfinished tale of Armitage Shanks - a story for all ages, but mostly for me ... In this episode we are introduced to Armitage Shanks and his friend Peg, and also discover the origins of the name Aunty Scuttle.]

Armitage Shanks was spitting mad. He squeezed up under the rough wooden join between the wall and the ceiling. It was not the squeezing that riled him. He loved nothing better. From the flickering gloom below him came a rattle, a thump and a mumble as the two people settled down to tea in front of the T.V. As usual, he too stared at the shimmering screen, but tonight his heart was not in it. He was fuming. "Three hours! Three scudmungling hours!" He rocked rhythmically from side to side, winding up his anger.

As he moved, the man suddenly looked his way. He froze, then squeezed further back into the shadow. He could still feel the man's fear as fresh as when, three hours before, those trembling hands had wrapped Shanks in paper and cast him out into the cold. And the woman's wild shriek that had come moments before. He felt that again too, though right now the woman was too busy stuffing large slabs of sausage into her mouth to notice him.

"Oh spittle! Why is it always me?" With one final glare over his hairy shoulder, he left the lounge-room and clambered through the ceiling towards his bedroom to nurse his anger. His bedroom was actually the toilet of this modest holiday house, but Shanks thought it particularly well appointed. It had an ample supply of insects including some juicy blow flies. It also had fine access through two huntsman-size cracks in the ceiling, not to mention the door and the window.

But all that was nothing compared with its crowning glory - the special shiny white seat from which he had taken his name. Despite his foul mood, he momentarily felt the same warm glow he always felt when he saw his name in black and white. For one thing, not every Huntsman could read as Armitage Shanks could. (He had taught himself by watching television.) But it also reminded him how distinguished his name was compared with any other spider he knew.

Of course he had great respect for the likes of his grandfather, the legendary Grandpa Grapple. And he dearly loved his Aunty Scuttle, who had brought him up almost single-legged after the Mortein Disaster that took his mother and father. Still, seeing such a distinguished name so boldly proclaimed, and knowing it to be your own, does tend to engender a certain pride.

All of this only served to deepen Shanks' anger. He was not just any spider. He was Armitage Shanks, a spider of distinction from a famous line of Benign Huntsmen. More than once he had heard the humans refer to his kind as `benign', and although he didn't actually know what it meant (a television education has its limits), he didn't feel that being shrieked at, wrapped in newspaper and tossed out into the garden, was quite it. So there Shanks sat, benign but brooding, listening to the louder than usual clatter coming from below. At last he flattened himself into an uneasy sleep.

When Shanks woke up he felt good. Surprisingly so, since his bedtime mosquito had tasted noticeably of spray. With a new spring in his step, he scuttled off towards the living room. He always liked to see what was happening down below. The moment he was within earshot of the humans he knew something was different. Squidging himself into the crack above the stove, he saw to his surprise that there were three people in the kitchen. The sight of the older woman was about to return Shanks to the bad mood of the night before, but before he could properly remember why, something far more important happened. The woman was talking to the newcomer. Even from where he was Shanks could see that this person was a child; a girl to be exact. But what made him open all his eyes wide was what he heard the child say. It came in the middle of a chat with the old woman.

"Deary me Peg, how you've grown. Let me look at you. How old are you now?" Then came the surprise. "I'll be nine in July, Nan." BENIGN! Shanks nearly spun a web on the spot. Benign...the very word which described himself, and now here was someone else who was benign. He felt an instant bond with the lumpy little girl at the kitchen bench below. As her grandmother chatted away, Peg looked casually around the unfamiliar room. Shanks was able to see her chubby freckled face, and her crooked gappy teeth. Such beauty! It was love at first sight. He hadn't known that humans could be benign, but as he stared at Peg's wide friendly face he had no more doubts.

Shanks had to try hard not to rush down there and then to greet his new-found friend. It was only the sight and sound of Peg's grandma that kept him still. He decided to give the whole situation a bit of thought. He would have to wait until he could see Peg by herself. That meant finding out which room she was in. Right, he would scuttle off through the ceiling and scout around. He was about to carry out this plan when another strange sound came from below.

Shanks turned to see a large gangly looking boy walking into the kitchen. His arms, his mouth, his hair were all stretched out in an enormous yawn. If it had been meant to scare a Huntsman, the boy couldn't have done a better job. Shanks took a quick step back.

"Morning sleepy head." His grandmother got up from the kitchen table and ruffled his hair. "What a sight!" " 'mornin' Nan," mumbled the boy, ducking away from the tousling hand to sit beside his sister at the breakfast table. In the next few minutes Shanks pieced together some more details about the new arrival. Terrence was Peg's brother, older by nearly four years. He didn't like breakfast, didn't like mornings, and didn't like being called Terrence. Worse still, he didn't seem to like Peg much either. Shanks began to think there wasn't much to like about this Terrence.

Worse news followed. It seemed that Peg and Terrence were sharing the same bedroom. Shanks' plans would have to change. There would be no chance of properly meeting his dream-girl with that brother around. So with his mood becoming gloomier by the minute, he went back to his room to suck on a wasp. Nothing cleared the mind so well.

Within the hour Shanks had a new plan. He knew that every day the humans came to his room at least four or five times. Sometimes they stayed and sat, sometimes they were in and out very quickly. He would wait until Peg came to his room for her long visit. That would be the right time for him to introduce himself.

He did not have long to wait, though it seemed it. After breakfast there was something of a procession into his room. It was often the time for long visits. As each visitor came, he anxiously crept to his usual vantage point. At one stage he felt sure he heard Peg about to enter the room, but there was a commotion at the door which resulted in Terrence pushing his way in first. And his stay seemed to be deliberately prolonged. He sat there reading something called "Woman's Day." Shanks' anger rose again. He muttered all kinds of dark threats and expletives to himself. "Sale of the Century! He'll feel my fangs on his butt if he doesn't take the money and run!"

But Terrence soon finished reading the latest about some long past royal event. With a touch of the button on Shanks' own royal throne, the thunder of water signalled the boy's departure. His odious presence was rapidly replaced by that of the beloved Peg. She came rushing into the room, bent over and cross-legged, her pants falling towards her ankles. Shanks' throat suddenly caught, overwhelmed again by the beauteous sight of the Benign Miss Peg. He cleared his throat, smoothed down his scopulae, and stepped into full view.

***

Messiness Works

[extract from a short story about a Dutchman in the Tasmanian bush]

A weak sun lit the campsite. Fresh animal droppings were the only obvious sign of visitors. Henk leaned out of his tent to look beyond the patch of forest and into the scrub. The dewy bushes were draped in careless strands of web. To call them spider webs would be to make a silk purse of them. There seemed no pattern to them, let alone the perfect spiral symmetry spiders were supposed to have embedded in what passed for their brains. Instead every branch or stem seemed to be connected to the next by this random optimism of a million spiders. And it worked! The webs obviously worked, because every path Henk had taken to get there was criss-crossed with spider strands.

He’d come to realise that in this country, messiness worked. Or at least what he had taken for messiness. Every square yard of the bush was literally crawling with life. It didn’t fit with European notions of beauty, but did that make it ugly? This beholder's eye had come to see its sly beauty. He appreciated its wild fecundity, every prickle, stick or bud with its own grace and purpose. Time and isolation the parents of unique and ingenious survival.

Most of his own people had never seen this. From Abel Tasman on they had really only been visitors. Even those who lived a lifetime here had been tourists not natives. And they had brought up their children in the same way. But the Dutch weren't alone in this. He thought of the English. Hah, the English! Who looked on eucalypt forest as grey, monotonous and fearful. Those early explorers were tourists too, hating the bush for not being park-like, for not having the deciduous beauty of their motherland.

He wondered if they had ever seen, really seen the spring blush of new leaf tips on the gums. Golden on the bluegum, ruddy on the stringybark. Strong, vibrant colours whose only mistake was not to fall to the earth in one season. If they wanted autumn colours, had they never seen the riotous hues of a freshly shed trunk? And what of the sights and sounds of the forest’s multiculture of birds, insects, bats, marsupials and reptiles? Had they seen or heard that? Or had they smelled the heady tang of wattle and sassafras in spring; the clean bite of freshly fallen bluegum leaves; the indescribable pungency of wet earth after a long dry?

Touch Wood: The Ecology of a Woodpile

I cannot drive past a firewood truck without scrutinising the load. It is my winter sport. As the surfer seeks the ultimate wave, so I search for the perfect load of wood. In my mind I see it - grey and dry, smooth-grained and barrel shaped, bearded with the pale lichen of its highland home. It splits with the merest caress of the block-splitter, yet resounds with a decent thwack. And it ignites with blushing haste at the first touch of an ember, then burns clean, lean and slow all night. It is the dream of the wood-gatherer. But with the firewood comes an unseen host, a whole ecosystem of which I am ignorant, until a bird shows me.

The grey shrike-thrush, so ignobly named, is one of our most inquisitive birds. And a peerless singer, as its full name Colluricincla harmonica implies. We know it simply as `Jo Witee', after its most frequent call. To `Jo Witee' two tonnes of firewood is a smorgasbord. The unassuming grey bird lands on the wood heap less than a metre away. It works at the wood, probing, hopping, stopping, tilting its head, then jabbing again. Though I call it grey, it is a grey as varied as clouds. On its back is the olive-grey of a coming storm. The beak is stormier still, but the under parts are the off-white of a gentle cumulus. It shows no fear of me, so I return to the mindless work of stacking the wood, accompanied by Jo Witee's rich whipping flute. It is much later, in splitting the stacked wood that I begin to find the bird's quarry.

Taken from their high-altitude home at near enough to freezing, the denizens of the wood find a ten degree winter's day summer-like. Some are triggered into immediate activity, rising to the surface of their cellulose ocean in search of mate or food: ants, moths, beetles, woodlice. Others remain secreted in impossible places. To my astonishment I split a solid log and find a spider web clamped to the freshly-split surface. Where there was surely no gap, a small jumping spider emerges from a web, or a young huntsman from a crack.

Each type of spider has its own personality, its own capacity to evoke fear or favour. But surely even the most hardened arachnophobe couldn't fear the jumping spider family (Salticidae). Small and harmless, one enthusiast describes them as possessing "charm . . . unbounded vitality . . . confident fearlessness". Their family name comes from the Latin salto, and refers to their ability to dance with pantomimic gestures. It is supposed to be possible to stand at an appropriate distance and wave arms in such a way that these little spiders will signal back.
One particular huntsman - Delena cancerides - is rare among spiders. It is one of only 33 species of spider world-wide that exhibit social behaviour (as against `spider eat spider'.) If a woodpile is disturbed too often, there are plenty of other places to hide a huntsman or twenty. But it is still a shock to move a sheet of board or corrugated iron and find a horde of tiny huntsmen socially scuttling about. The big ones seek out the backs of car sun-visors, but thankfully they are solitary.

Not all of the species in a woodpile arrive alive. Some are killed in the crush, or lose Russian roulette with the chain-saw. Others are dead before the cut, victims of a burn-off. (The merchants call blackened firewood `Chinaman's wood'.) Both cutter and insect look for standing dead wood. It is a race to see which can reduce the tree to nothing first. One cutter tells me that wood needs to stand dead for seven years before it is dry enough to burn. Another says a dead tree can stay green for over ten years, giving the insects a head start.

So if the cutters don't get to a tree, the longicorn beetle might. This beetle seeks out trees that are stressed, damaged or recently dead. It lays eggs on the trunk, preferably in cracks or wounds. The larvae bore long tunnels into the trunk, secreting an enzyme that helps them to directly digest the cellulose. If you press an ear to the trunk you might hear them munching.

They are often mistaken for witchetty grubs, which they resemble except for the marked broadening of the `head and shoulder' region that gives them a body-builder shape. Longicorn grubs spend up to two years in the wood before pupating, leaving the wood filled with dark brown frass. They finally emerge from the pupa as blackish beetles with long antennae, almost wasp-like in appearance. The wood they leave behind is usually less than the highest quality for burning, let alone for timber, though this doesn't stop some wood merchants selling it as good firewood.

My great-grandfather, Alexander Grant, left accounts of his woodcarting in the 1860's. He worked the woodlands to the west of Sydney. Cutters would fell trees with axes and handsaws, drag them out by horse and chain, then carry off the sawn-up logs by horse and dray. It was at least a four hour trip to Oxford Street Sydney, where they would sell the wood. He writes:

"A pump used to be on the triangular piece of ground up Oxford Street for water carts to fill up. At this place would be sometimes 25 to 30 loads of wood, and people used to come there to buy."

These were rough times. Each night these same merchants would travel back along the Parramatta Road in convoy. It was some protection against both robbery and fatigue.

"To think that I was expected to keep awake after staying in Sydney till about 10 o'clock trying to sell out the wood, and then this brute (of a horse) would take 3 hours to walk home as he would not walk one bit quicker with an empty dray than a full one, and to sleep I would go in spite of all I could do."

To add injury to indolence, the `brute' also kicked Alexander in the face, shattering his jaw and disfiguring him for life. The woodcutter later spent a fortnight in gaol for cutting wood on the wrong side of an unmarked boundary. Nearly 50 years later (in 1907) he still rails

"We should not have gone to gaol. The wood was left where cut and we were sentenced for stealing - stealing what then to be tried by a personal friend of the plaintiff, and in his private room after court hours, does it look justice?"

Things were no better around Hobart, where wood and water rights were strongly disputed on the slopes of Mount Wellington. Here the blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus) were prized for cladding the whaleboats that worked southern waters in the mid-19th century. But they, along with stringy barks (Eucalyptus obliqua), were also used to make water races for the many mills that lined the Hobart Rivulet near what is now the Cascade Brewery. More than once the races were sabotaged, or the timbers stolen by woodsmen employed by rival merchants or millers.

The wood carters of today still dance with the law. By dint of their work, they have to fly by night. Short winter days of cutting, stacking, loading, unloading, repairing trucks and chainsaws; twilights and nights of delivering, handling the same wood for the fourth or fifth time, enduring complaints about how wet and cold their pampered clients are - the very clients who write them dud cheques. Suffering the snow, the mud, the impossible driveway, the irate customer, the predictably unpredictable weather. To survive, the species has developed its own canny instincts.

The taxman is the arm of the law most often capered with. My request to pay by cheque is met with a guffaw at the other end of the phone. The deal is strictly cash. And when I ask his name there is an eloquent pause. "Pete . . ." is all I'm told. (Say no more.) A few short years and he'll probably go the way of my last reliable supplier. Pat was as wide as he was tall - lived on ice-cream and coke, and used to complain about his health problems. If they cut him open they'd probably find longicorn grubs. At least he was honest.

The other kind are almost as abundant as the wood-dwellers they inadvertently deliver. I ask one where he gets his wood. "Up the bush" he says with a wry grin. His load is full of wattle and stringy bark. Stringy bark is a favoured food of Swift moth larvae (aenetus species). In turn these witchetties are an irresistible delicacy for the yellow-tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus). These can kill a young stringy bark by stripping and weakening it in search of grubs. In other species of eucalypt it has been seen tearing large panels of live wood down the tree, then using the attached end as a platform on which to stand and munch the grubs exposed by its tear. The rollicking squawking birds can also make a mess of mature stringy barks, leaving mounds of the ropy bark littering the forest. Though the wood burns well enough, the mess made by its bark is nothing in its favour as firewood. When it's hollowed out by grubs it's even less attractive. Still some cutters can't resist finishing what moth larvae and cockatoos have begun.

Swift moths are not the only candidates for the name "witchetty". In different parts of Australia it has been given to the larvae of many different species, both beetle and moth. All have in common a large larva that is part of traditional Aboriginal food. They can be eaten cooked or raw, and are supposed to taste quite nutty.

But not all large moth larvae are edible. One of the largest, the giant wood moth (Xyleutes boisduvali) has a wing span of up to 250 mm. Though its abdomen is the size of a small sausage, its larva is prized as fishing bait rather than human fare. In Tasmania the larva of the wattle goat moth (Xyleutes durvillei) is also prized for fishing. The female moth lays masses of creamy yellow eggs in a blob of sticky fluid, onto the bark of wattle trees - hence its popular name wattle grub. The larvae burrow into the soft sapwood, where they can fatten up for several years. The prized grubs are commonly sold for $1.00 each, which fact is responsible for the mutilation of many young wattles. Between bait hunters, fire, cockatoos and larvae infestations, most wattles are short-lived. Their wood is not totally despised as firewood, but it generally burns too quickly and too hot.

Just as not all wood types are right for burning, so not all wood-dwellers are welcome in the home. One that can't be tolerated is the silverfish. A member of the thysanura order, there are 23 different species of silverfish in Australia. The most successful are the imported ones, whose ancestors existed for millions of years before the advent of paper. As with longicorn larvae, many species of silverfish secrete cellulase, which helps them to digest cellulose. But though they can eat wood the hard way, it can't be doubted that Herr Gutenberg's printing press did thysanura a great favour by encouraging the proliferation of paper made from easily-digestible wood fibre.

Our small black cat has developed a liking for silverfish. Whether indoors or out, she cannot resist chasing these piscatorial pretenders. I can't believe she actually digests the things - but usually the merest touch is enough to end their book-munching career. In the woodshed the assassin is more likely to be a spider.

A frequenter of the woodshed with even fewer friends than the silverfish is the scorpion. Ancient members of the arachnida, scorpions are thus related to spiders and mites. Ancient too is our fear of them, stemming first from their poison, but also from their symbolic power. In the bible scorpions rank with snakes as symbols of pain and desolation. "And their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man." (Revelation 9:5).

The venom of some scorpions has been found to contain toxins that can directly damage heart tissues. But the majority are no more venomous than those in my woodshed, they are simply larger. Cercophonius squama, the only variety in Tasmania, is rarely as big as a pen top; those in Palestine can be bigger than a penknife, and are thus able to inject more of their venom. So although fatal scorpion stings have been recorded, including in Australia, the majority have a sting about as painful as that of a european wasp (which has caused many more fatalities, and is far more aggressive.)

Scorpions are in fact shy of publicity, seeking dark, dry spots to go about their business. They can be found beneath piles of bark and leaves, or under rocks, though a nicely stacked load of firewood will do very well. As their eyesight is only up to distinguishing light from dark, they hunt by feel, using their large front claws, which bristle with sensitive hairs, to provide instant information about their prey. These can then be immobilised with the tail-mounted sting.
I split open a log and find one inside a cavity created by beetle larvae. The scorpion has gone there to hunt, and judging by the pile of shells, legs and other detritus, it has had a successful time. Not a fussy eater, it will consume beetles, spiders, larvae, even other scorpions, with the female often devouring the male after mating. It is said a male will never sting a female - a strange chivalry, if it is true.

The widowed female is a careful mother. She digs a semi-spiral burrow, and eventually gives birth to perhaps forty tiny white scorpions, which she will carry for weeks on her back, while they feed, grow and moult. When they are large enough to fend for themselves, they stay clear of their former home for fear of becoming mother's next meal. In more than 25 years of handling firewood, I have only ever encountered a dozen scorpions. And I have never been stung by one, "touch wood".