White Beech: The Rainforest Years (48 page)

Frogs are stupendous creatures because, even when they are metamorphs no bigger than a fly, they can hear and see, and catch prey, and leap forty times their own length. It is tempting to think they are smart. An old Green Treefrog who turned up on the bedroom windowsill one evening sat there through the night and the whole of the following day, apparently dozing, but every time I turned to look at him, I’d find his horizontal pupil trained on me. He was as big as a half-kilo bag of sugar and much the same shape. To get to such a size he must have outwitted a long line of predators, for frogs are food for most rainforest creatures, including other frogs. I didn’t try to pat him for fear that my hand on his silky green skin would have felt scalding hot. He was still there when I fell asleep the next night; in the morning he was gone as quietly as he came. His scientific name is
Litoria caerulea
; the species name, which means ‘blue’, came about because the spirit in which the specimen sent to Banks had been preserved had dissolved the yellow glaze over its blue underskin. The genus name has changed several times, but the misleading epithet hangs on.

Tree frogs are the insignia of rainforests the world over. Of the dozen or more species that make their home at Cave Creek my favourite is the Cascade Treefrog (
Litoria pearsoniana
). The scientific name given to the species by Stephen J. Copland in 1960 commemorates Oliver Pearson, Professor of Zoology at Berkeley. Copland had two gos at the name, which he rendered first as
Hyla pearsoni
(1960) and then
Hyla pearsoniana
; in 1970, after the
Litoria
genus had been separated from the genus
Hyla
, Michael Tyler renamed the frog
Litoria pearsoni
; that name was corrected to
Litoria pearsoniana
by John Barker and Gordon Grigg in 1977. The confusion has not quite dissipated; the genus
Litoria
is once more under revision. There is considerable variation in the colouring of Cascade Treefrogs. The ones at Cave Creek are pale green with pearl-white bellies, and their skin is shagreened, so that it looks like frosted glass. To my eye they are the most beautiful tree frogs of all.

Under the Queensland Nature Conservation Act of 1992 the species is listed as endangered, but you can hear Cascade Treefrogs calling any warm evening along Cave Creek. There is nevertheless a good deal that we don’t understand about these little creatures. Immature frogs are very seldom found, so the current thinking is that this is one tree frog that ascends to the canopy as a juvenile and doesn’t come down again for two or three years, until it is mature and ready to mate. Until we have ways of observing canopy life without disrupting it, this hypothesis cannot be verified. In the winter Cascade Treefrogs are supposed to group together in large mixed-sex aggregations, squeezed tightly into narrow rock crevices, in lethargy, with their eyes closed.

Even smaller although less vulnerable is the Dainty Treefrog (
Litoria gracilenta
), which overwinters in the canopy. We often find this frog, with its limbs drawn under it and its eyes closed, at the base of the spadix of the Cunjevoi Flower, sleeping off a meal of pollen weevils. I was once scanning the forest edge for birds when the glasses picked up a fringed flower of
Trichosanthes subvelutina
. Inside it, glowing in the early morning sunlight like a chip of polished jade, I could clearly see a Dainty Treefrog. We have many more frogs, tusked frogs, pouched frogs, rocket frogs, froglets, toadlets, thousands of frogs. We also have the odd cane toad. The workforce kill them outright, by cutting them up the middle and turning them inside out, which means the birds can make a meal of them, a technique we learnt from the birds in question. I, being more squeamish, euthanase any toad I find by putting it in the refrigerator and then in the freezer.

The rainforest has fewer lizard species than you will find in other types of habitat, but that’s not to say that we don’t have at least as many lizards as we have frogs. I have never found our most famous lizard, the Leaf-tailed Gecko (
Saltuarius swaini
), though everyone else seems to have. Herpetologists appear to have decided that the ‘ii’ ending for the honorific epithet was otiose, and removed the second ‘i’, otherwise the skink named for Tasmanian herpetologist Roy Swain would be called
Saltuarius swainii
. Some authorities insist on the correct Latin; others don’t. If I think botany is a mare’s nest, herpetology is worse.

At Cave Creek there are lots of tiny skinks; one,
Calyptotis scutirostrum
, five centimetres from snout to vent, which rejoices in the common name of ‘Scute-snouted Skink’, referring to the bony plate between its eyes, lays eggs. All our other lizard species, except the monitors, are live-bearing.
Eulamprus martini
grows to 7.5 centimetres or so, if it’s lucky;
E. tenuis
grows bigger still,
E.
murrayi
bigger than that and
E. quoyii
and
E. tryoni
about the same. I am sorry to have to admit that I can’t always tell them apart, all of them being spangled and speckled in similar ways. Moreover they are nearly always running away, and I don’t like to grab at them in case they shed their tails. One skink I can tell from the others because it is bigger and less patterned is the Eastern Crevice Skink,
Egernia mcpheei
. Another is the shiny black Land Mullet, largest of our skinks, thirty centimetres from snout to vent when full-grown. Most people know it as
Egernia major
; it recently underwent a long overdue name change to
Bellatorias major
. That name was first published in 1984 by Wells and Wellington, but it was not used until it was ‘resurrected’ in 2008. Thereby hangs an astonishing tale.

In the mid-1980s Richard Wells, who had been working as a collector for several Australian museums, decided ‘that many of the specimens he had provided had simply been ignored by qualified professionals who were comfortably polishing their chairs while producing little if anything of scientific value’ (Williams, D.,
et al.
, 926). It seemed to Wells that the Australian herpetological establishment was dragging its heels when it came to rationalising reptile and amphibian taxa. He joined forces with Cliff Ross Wellington and together they analysed all the available data and came to their own conclusions, which involved renaming scores of species. To publish the new names they set up a journal which they called
The Australian Journal of Herpetology
, in the first and only number of which they published ‘A Synopsis of the Class Reptilia’, and its Supplement, ‘A Classification of the Amphibia and Reptilia of Australia’. The result was uproar. Wells and Wellington were accused of having broken the rules; their descriptions were too brief, and there was no way they could have examined the type material for so many species. A serious attempt – recorded as Case 2531 in the
Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
for 1987 – was made to ban their articles and jettison their names.

Not all the species named by Wells and Wellington were good, but even those that were were not adopted. For years there was resistance; herpetologists frequently referred to species named by Wells and Wellington as undescribed, and continued to use names which they knew were invalid rather than recognise the authority of Wells and Wellington. Eventually, and patchily, common sense has begun to prevail (e.g., Hoser). Wells is still around, still working with reptiles, and profoundly uninterested in public – or academic – recognition. As he is apt to say: ‘Universities are not really places where you learn about animals.’ Wellington now works for the Central Directorate Threatened Species Unit of the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service.

My favourites among the Cave Creek lizardry are the Eastern Water Dragons (
Physignathus lesueuri lesueuri
) that have come into their own since we reforested the headland above the creek. In warmer weather they can be found basking on the causeway and all the way up the steep track to the gate. As the car creeps by they lift their heads and look directly into my eyes, holding my gaze for a second or two before leaping down the rocks. They are the more remarkable because a fossil dragon from the Miocene recently found at Riversleigh is almost identical. The dragons are another reason for keeping the CCRRS gate locked. If deliveries are on the way we have to scare the dragons off before the truck comes in, because not everybody drives as slowly as I do. (Every day, on the main road, you will see dead and dying dragons.) Another dragon, the Angle-headed Dragon (
Hypsilurus spinipes
) forages in the canopy, where it feeds on the invertebrates that defoliate the big stingers.

Most people would be more impressed by the CCRRS Lace Monitors (
Varanus varius
) of which there are many. These are largely diurnal, so we see them quite often but they almost always run off, except when they are in courtship mode, when nothing seems to faze them. One warm afternoon in an otherwise very wet spring I was weeding a patch of Aneilema when I realised that I was not alone. A full-grown Lace Monitor, a good seven feet long, had moved up close beside me. At first I thought he was just basking in the sun, and then I saw the head of the female, less than half his size, emerging under his foreleg. By inserting his tail under hers, the male was manoeuvring one of his hemipenes into her vagina. He would thrust rhythmically for five minutes or so, and then she would slip out from under him. I expected her to run away but she stayed still as he rested, waiting for him to move towards her again. As he slid his body over hers, he would touch her gently all over the head and neck with his forked tongue, almost as if kissing her, before beginning to slide his tail under hers. I removed myself discreetly and ran to set up the video camera, not knowing how often this behaviour had been observed in the wild. (The video can be seen on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.) The lizards continued to perform for a very long time, until the sun slipped behind the trees and the ground began to cool. The truly disturbing thing about the video is that the female is so very much smaller than the male that the whole process looks unnatural, but every time I have seen these big goannas in mating mode, when they usually open their mouths, which are upholstered in knicker-pink satin, and roar hoarsely at me to make me go away, the female has been very, very much smaller. This extreme sexual dimorphism has not been described, let alone explained, as far as I know. (My own attempt can be found in the Prologue, above.)

A few days later I was walking in a five-year-old planting, marvelling at how soon equilibrium had been established in it, when I heard a large Lace Monitor moving close by and then another, and another. Altogether I counted five. They could not have been less concerned at my presence. They appeared to be following each other’s pheromonal trails, tasting the air with their tongues. I walked at a slow but steady pace, as they circled round me. I was hoping I might see their ritual fighting, for they seemed to be all males, but dusk threw its blanket over us, and I had to make my way back to the house too soon to witness the outcome. As usual I was left marvelling at how little we know of the behaviour of our rainforest species. Those same Lace Monitors eat the corpses of all the animals that meet their death in the forest, bones, hair, eyes, teeth and all. Because they are egg eaters they are the great enemies of the Brush-turkeys, and many carry scars where the turkeys have defended their mounds with beak and claw.

The snakes we see most often, that is to say almost every day, are pythons, commonly called Carpet Snakes. I can still remember the first time I met one. I was walking the forest edge track with Garry, when he gently touched my arm. In front of me a big beautiful bronze and gold serpent was moving almost imperceptibly up the bank and out of our way. I had the distinct feeling that Garry expected me to shriek and flee. I was more likely to fall on my knees before such a beautiful creature. Since then I have seen hundreds of pythons at Cave Creek, greeny-goldy ones, black and grey ones, mahogany and ivory ones, some patterned with black and blood red, a dozen different colourways at least, fat ones, thin ones, torpid ones, wounded ones, dead ones. I was prowling another part of the forest track one afternoon when I became aware that in the forest ahead of me a python had reared up six feet or so off the ground, propping itself on its huge body as it felt for a branch. A stout branch found, it wrapped its neck around it and then hauled the supporting body up loop by loop, from one branch to another and then another, until it had disappeared into the canopy.

Pythons are ambush feeders; they coil themselves up at the side of a track used by warm-blooded creatures and lie there for days at a time, only moving to have a bit of a stretch or to soak up the odd ray if sunlight touches the forest floor. I have had four at a time within feet of the house for weeks on end. One very wet day I was squelching through a planting when I almost trod on the head of a big python that was hiding in a flooded tractor wheel-rut with just its nostrils above the surface of the water. Charlie Booth, who used to grow plants for us, told me he had never seen so many pythons anywhere. Python skins hang like pennants all around the house. I have had a python sliding through the louvres of the bedroom, feeling towards the warmth of my body, his neck concertinaed for the strike. I have seen another python hunting for a way of getting into the house, sliding along the windowsills, following the heat of the marsupial mice snoring in the wall cavity.