Dragons in Paradise: Part 2

[A model sandfly at Milford Sound, NZ. Be thankful they don't come this big in real life!]

[more musings on things that sting and bite in several different countries]

At the other end of the size scale of "dragons" is the humble New Zealand sandfly. Actually sandfly singular is an oxymoron in two senses. Firstly you never see just one: clouds seems to be the preferred collective. And secondly there are about 13 different species of sandflies. The slightly good news is that only two of those species – and then only the females – actually bite humans. However species and gender identification of sandflies is an arcane business, and few trampers have mastered it. Another possible comfort is that if you climb to 1500 metres, and stay there, you will not be troubled by sandflies.

If lack of altitude or entomological expertise means you do come into contact with these little beasts, locals will assure you that sandflies are not generally lethal. Despite such reassurances, experience will teach you a “once bitten twice shy” kind of lesson. Despite being visible, sandflies are very small, and usually silent, unless one happens to fly right into your ear. If they evade your attention they will typically land on a nice piece of exposed skin, say around your wrist, ankles, neck or face.

Their bite is scarcely noticeable – at first – and they are usually long gone with their load of blood before you know about it. But they will have left their little chemical calling card: an anti-coagulant that helps your blood to flow. That in turn will set up an irritation that means the bite swells slightly, your immune system’s automatic response to the chemical invasion. Your slightly more conscious reaction will be to scratch the itch: not a good move, but one that is hard to resist. In my case the tiniest of bites on my wrist became so itchy that I scratched it in my sleep.

The bite then became infected, probably from bacteria that were already present on my skin. The infected bite then swelled more, reddened further, then darkened to an ugly blotch. Over the next few days it became even more maddeningly itchy. Eventually – maybe two weeks later – my (mere Aussie) immune system got the better of the bite. The fearful thing is that this was ONE bite. It is far more usual to receive multiple bites. In the poor German tramper’s case (see "Dragons in Paradise: Part 1"), his immune system had a long and hard struggle to overcome the dozens of bites, and permanent skin scars may well result.

 By now you may well be wondering how you can avoid this hell-on-wings. For instance have the ever-inventive Kiwis come up with a bear bell equivalent: perhaps a sandfly siren? Well no, so far they’ve not, although they do offer a plethora of sage advice. A good start is to starve the buggers of exposed skin by wearing long sleeved shirts and trousers and a hat. Next you can put insect repellent on any exposed skin and on your hat. One I didn’t try, but which locals swear by, is to take vitamin B tablets. Apparently sandflies don’t like this, and as those great Australasian delicacies Marmite or Vegemite are full of it, some recommend large doses of this. If sandflies don’t like vitamin B, they DO like dark colours, so it’s best to avoid wearing black, navy and similar coloured clothing.

There’s a kind of “my father’s tougher than your father” debate between New Zealand’s sandfly fanciers and Scotland’s midge admirers. In Scotland there are around 30 different species of midge, but only one that is a real bother to humans. Culicoides impunctatus failed to make an impact during my couple of weeks in the Scottish highlands a few summers back. I was almost disappointed, given that I’d purchased some special insect repellent and a rather fetching khaki midge net that looked like an oversized gauze condom.

Scots tried to soothe me by saying things like “och, if ye’d only come last week …”, a phrase they usually saved for the weather. As with weather, you can now get a summer midge forecast in Scotland. It’s totally serious, and is based on a combination of counts from midge traps and expected weather conditions. You’d have to imagine that’s one up on the Kiwis.
I imagine a play-off between these two fearsome critters. The sandflies would do a haka, of course, and the midges would be piped onto the field by a band playing “Flyers of Scotland” (a special Diptera version of that Scottish national song).

If it wasn’t for our leeches, jack jumpers, march flies and mosquitoes, I might almost feel as though Tasmania was left out of this invertebrate face-off.

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.

Another Side of ANZAC

[Pandani surrounded by fagus that's begun to turn: Crater Lake, Tasmania]

[Some sideways thoughts on ANZAC Day, with a natural twist, of course]

It last happened in the year 2000, and it’s going to happen again next year: two “sacred” times for Australians will coalesce. I’m talking about Easter occurring around the same date as ANZAC Day.

While both occasions mean many different things to different people, for obsessive bushwalkers it’s a ripe time for extended bushwalking. So back in autumn 2000 I grabbed the chance for a long ramble in Tasmania’s Central Plateau. The area has been dubbed, without exaggeration, the land of a thousand lakes. I have written before about this part of Tassie at http://auntyscuttle.blogspot.com/2010/01/walking-with-ada-pt-1-not-lacking-in.html

What is less well-known about the Central Plateau is that it also contains vast stands of Tasmania’s only winter-deciduous tree, Nothofagus gunnii, better known as fagus. On that April walk we found this wonderland at the peak of the fagus’s autumn colouring. We were in a heaven of gently undulating rocky slopes dotted with lakes and covered with golden fagus. It was like a vast deciduous forest in bonsai form.

I couldn’t help wondering how many Tasmanians, let alone other Australians, knew we’d had this marvel on display here for the last 50 million autumns. Here in Dorothea Mackellar’s  wide brown land, clothed mostly in evergreen eucalypts, Tasmania had hidden this lingering connection with old Gondwana. On that long dismembered super-continent, deciduousness once ruled. Now only this faint seldom-seen echo remains.

It felt like finding a fragment of our connectedness with the northern hemisphere “main stream”. Had a lifetime of enculturation into the beauty myth of fall/autumn in that hemisphere led me to seek out a worthy expression of it here in the highlands of Tasmania? I wondered whether it was the same kind of desire to be recognised as part of the “club” that took young Australians and New Zealanders to Gallipoli in 1915. A disastrous battle on a Turkish Peninsula, as far from home as most Aussies and Kiwis had ever been, was to become a symbol of adulthood for the two young nations. And ANZAC Day – April 25^th – has been celebrated by Australians and New Zealanders ever since.

As I thought about this desire to be part of the northern hemisphere action, it occurred to me that Gondwana and its forerunner, Pangaea, actually turned some of that thinking on its head. There was a time when all of the world’s now-most-populous continents were together here in the southern hemisphere. It is Europe and North America who have moved northwards, not we who have drifted south.

But regardless of the origins of my response to it, no amount of peak-bagging could compare with that Easter’s transcendent tramp through the fagus. And an ANZAC Day will rarely go by without me wanting to visit and pay homage to a botanical marvel that long pre-dates our recent attempts to show our worth to the world.