White Beech: The Rainforest Years (51 page)

The pest cockatoos were mainly white. Far rarer were the black, which were greatly prized as novelties. The newspapers of 1866 carried reports of ‘a handsome black cockatoo from Port Denison’, rejoicing that ‘. . . as this bird is extremely rare, it will form an admirable item for export . . .’
(
BC
, 11 October) Black cockatoos were said to be selling in England ‘for as much as sixty guineas per pair’
(
BC
, 30 October).

At Cave Creek we usually see Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos (
Calyptorhynchus funereus funereus
). They were first described by George Shaw, head keeper of the British Museum, who was working from a specimen from the collection of Sir Hans Sloane. He named it
Psittacus funereus
; French zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest renamed the genus in 1826
Calyptorhynchus
, meaning ‘covered beak’ (39:21). John Gould called it the Funereal Cockatoo. Its range extends along the Dividing Range from Wilson’s Promontory to Cape York.

In most years Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos have nested in the eucalypts on the top of the ridge to the west of Cave Creek. We generally see them in winter when they come to dig out the larvae of cossid moths and longhorn beetles from their tunnels under the bark of old trees, bringing their newly fledged offspring with them. You hear these family groups before you see them, chuckling and chattering to each other, all the while cracking and crunching through bark and wood. As you peer up into the branches you will see a bright black or brown eye peering down quizzically. They will let you get quite close, as they keep up what seems to be a commentary on who and what you are, for the benefit of the younger generation. As they live for maybe forty years the littl’uns have time to learn. We most often see them flying high through the mountains in formation, screaming ‘Yeee-ow!’, usually before rain.

The genus
Calyptorhynchus
has now been divided into two subgenera,
Calyptorhynchus Calyptorhynchus
, and
C.
Zanda
, to which the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos belong. Our Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos used to be simply
Cacatua sulphurea
, and are now
Cacatua cacatua sulphurea
. These are all in the family Cacatuidae in the order Psittaciformes, which includes as well the Strigopidae of New Zealand, and the parrots. Parrots have besides the obvious parrot face, two claws facing frontwards and two back, a feature called zygodactyly.

Altogether more than a hundred bird species have been observed at Cave Creek. I would happily write about all of them but this book has to end somewhere. You may be wondering if, now that the canopy is closing, I still see the Regent Bowerbird who persuaded me to buy the land at Cave Creek. During the big rains of December 2010, Regent Bowerbirds came every day to the top of the biggest quandong I can see from the verandah. I have seen an extraordinary variety of birds playing in that tree, but the Regent is the one that, when we have big rain, comes every day to groom himself, combing the rainwater through every dazzling feather, as I eat breakfast on the verandah a hundred yards away. His wives and juveniles come with him, and sometimes other males, till there are five or six in the tree together. What can they be doing? What explanation can there be for this socialising? All I can hope is that I will live long enough to find out.

The Inhabitants: Furry

There is no superstar apex predator roaming Cave Creek, no snow leopard, no panther. We just might have a tiger, a marsupial tiger. The last live specimens of the Australian thylacine, now presumed to be extinct, were found in Tasmania, but its image recurs in Aboriginal cave painting from widely separated parts of mainland Australia. It prefers woodland, makes itself a nest in dense undergrowth, hunts by night and avoids extremes of temperature. If the marsupial tiger survives anywhere, the Border Ranges would be the place. Stories of sightings abound.

In 1894 Carl Lentz was hunting with his brother on Tallai Mountain, when his dogs ran into a thicket. Lentz, expecting some bigger game than usual, loaded his gun with ‘swoon drops’ and waited.

All at once a limb bent down with the weight of something heavy on my side of the tree. Then I saw a big strange animal’s head appear out of the thick foliage. It was about to jump towards me, so I quickly fired and it fell with a hard bump only two yards off. It had just killed and half devoured a native bear. We tied its legs together with tough vines and stuck a long pole through them, by which we carried it home about half a mile. It was heavy. I intended taking it to Nerang, ten miles away, by pack horse the next day, but owing to heavy rain that night I could not cross the creek. I intended sending it by train to Brisbane for the Museum so we measured and skinned it. From tip of nose to end of tail, it was 6 ft, height of shoulder 25 inches, around chest 23 inches. It was strongly developed on the front quarters, and it had two extra long and sharp fang teeth, besides the four ordinary incisor teeth, puce coloured eyes with five very short, bright, orange coloured haired rings around them. Its whole forehead was the colour of sulphur, which made its whole dial luminous when it looked towards you in the dark. I saw one close at night since, that’s how I know. It had round ears of pale fleshy colour, a long thin coat of dark brown hair, under that he had a short thick coat of light pale blue-grey, and white stripes downwards, also bright yellow spots which all shone through the long thin coat, this made it appear a brindle colour at a distance. It looked very pretty close by. Its tail was covered with long black hair underneath that, [a] white and blue-grey ring, an inch wide. It was a magnificent specimen, a male, the size of an Alsatian dog.

If the animal was some kind of thylacine, it is slightly odd that Lentz while noticing that it was male, didn’t notice that it had a pouch drawn up over its genitals. The skin never made it to the museum in Brisbane, possibly because in the humid conditions Lentz was not able to prevent its deterioration.

William Duncan told Lentz that he had had a similar experience when he was timber-getting on the Little Nerang.

One mid-day when he got to the camp to boil up his meat was gone. He had hung it on the ridge pole out of reach of the dingoes. He had two natives along on that occasion . . . [they] searched and found the bag all ripped up. They said it was punchum, a very big cat-like animal.

The word ‘punchum’ can be found in Gresty’s word list for Numinbah as ‘punchimgun’ interpreted by Gresty to mean ‘Dasyurus’, that is, the ‘Tiger Quoll’, nowadays the Spotted-tailed Quoll (
Dasyurus maculatus maculatus
). The Geytenbeeks’ Gidabal dictionary (1971) records the same word as ‘banjdjim’. Lentz’s account continues:

They advised him not to stay there by himself, as that fella would sneak onto him while he was asleep, tear out his throat and suck his blood. A black would never camp by himself, when they were known to be in the vicinity. He went straight home and bought a bloodhound and a double barrel shotgun . . . On arrival back at the camp by moonlight, the dog treed a big animal right away. It sat in the fork of a red oak, out of reach, its eyes glowed like red hot fire coals. He fired both charges into it. It jumped down onto the dog and was worrying it, so he bashed it over the head with the gunstock, killing it . . . He said the animal was the size of a massive dog.

Bushmen specialise in tall stories. It is difficult to imagine a bloodhound treeing anything, let alone a thylacine. It should not be forgotten however that both these accounts pre-date any suggestion that the thylacine was on the verge of extinction. In 1923 the assistant government geologist Sydney Skertchly contributed an article to the
Brisbane Courier
in response to the news of Wilkins’s Australia and Islands Expedition.

I am glad somebody is in earnest going to probe the truth of the belief in the existence of a larger tiger cat in Queensland than has yet gladdened scientific eyes . . .

As my contribution, here is an extract from one of my 1913 note-books: ‘Near Mt. Nimmel, there is a gorge; just below a precipice in Springbrook, which the blacks would not enter as there was a big “tiger cat”, large as a big dog, that would kill man or dog. No living black had seen it; but their fathers had told them of it. Can this be a reminiscence of Thylacoleo, or more probably of the Tasmanian Devil?’ (Skertchly)

‘Thylacoleo’ was the name given by Sir Richard Owen to the marsupial carnivore species of which fossils had been discovered at Lake Colongulac and on the Darling Downs. Skertchly goes on:

It is described as having great teeth. The blacks used to try and kill it by enticing it out, by taking a dog, and making it howl; but it always got away; anyhow, they were never successful. James Ferguson, timber getter, reported this to the late Mr. E. Cooper,who told me.

Here is another extract from the same book: ‘About the year 1906 a big “tiger cat” took a lot of fowls from Mrs. Richter’s, at Nerang. It was as big as a terrier dog, and her dog would not tackle it. It was shot, and was yellow with black spots. What became of the skin Mr. E. J. Cooper, my informant, does not know.’ I have just asked him about it, and he said, ‘If these good people like to go to Springbrook, they may get one.’ When I was up there two years ago Ben Gillespie (a fine bushman) pointed out to me a log on which he saw one sitting a few days previously. He saw it several times. My wonderful timber-getting friend, Jack Duncan, who pretty well lived with the blacks as a boy, has told me much of the beast, though even he, who has spent all his life in our mountain scrub, never saw one.

Jack Duncan was a son of the aforementioned William Duncan, and a brother of Sandy Duncan, the discoverer of the Natural Bridge.

The Spotted-tailed Quoll, largest of the marsupial carnivores known to survive at Cave Creek, might be marked like the mythical ‘tiger’, but it is very much smaller. In 1965, Elspeth Huxley described the quoll for the English readers of her book,
Their Shining Eldorado
:

Attractive little sharp-nosed brown-and-cream spotted creatures, smaller than an average cat, to which they are no relation, they are among the few real killers in Australia. They are marsupials and will carry as many as eight tiny joeys in the pouch. Now they are becoming very rare, because of the destruction of the forests in which they dwell. (357)

I have not seen a quoll at Cave Creek but I have come across its scats, which are unmistakeable. Quolls use communal latrine sites, usually in rocky country, where they leave twisted turds held together by fur and feathers. Unfortunately I have seen the quoll’s principal predator, the introduced fox, quite often. Because of the presence of the quolls, we can’t bait the foxes. When the quoll is threatened it opens its mouth and utters a piercing scream. It tends to vocalise as well when it encounters other quolls. At night the Cave Creek Forest resounds with shrieks and howls, of owls, of prey animals and of quolls. Awareness of the quolls and of the threats to their survival is growing. In July 2009 eighty people responded to an invitation from the Gold Coast City Council to attend a Quoll Discovery Day arranged by Wildlife Queensland at the Numinbah Valley School of Arts.

The Cave Creek version of the Long-Nosed Bandicoot (
Perameles nasuta
) is silver-grey; we find signs of its activities on every square metre of the property, and sometimes we find it, dead, with a three-cornered tear in its side, or with signs of owl or quoll predation at throat or anus. One evening I surprised two juveniles who fled at my approach, revealing hinder parts that were very clearly barred, which is not supposed to be the case with
Perameles nasuta
, which is not supposed to be silver-grey either. We have seen the Northern Brown Bandicoot (
Isoodon macrourus
) alive but never found a corpse, which suggests that it is doing something to outwit the local predators, all except the python, which swallows it whole. We watch every day for other members of old Gondwanan families, without success. The vulnerable Long-nosed Potoroo (
Potorous tridactylus
), which digs down like a bandicoot to find fungi, roots, tubers and larvae, is known from Murwillumbah and the Scenic Rim, as is the equally vulnerable Rufous Rat-kangaroo (
Aepyprymnus rufescens
), but none of us has yet seen either of them at Cave Creek. I live in hope.

The marsupial I know best is the Yellow-footed Antechinus (
Antechinus flavipes
). This little creature has excreted in every drawer, every box, every bag, every pocket, in the house. (I use the word excrete because it pisses and shits in the one wet package.) One excreted particularly copiously in my Sydney University D.Litt. hood even though it was hidden away in a dress bag. As I sit reading in the evening, antechinuses venture into the room to wolf the moths that ricochet off the light battens and skitter round the floor on their backs. Antechinuses are curiously constructed in that they can unhinge their various limbs and make themselves rectangular; when it comes to limbo-dancing under a door they can flatten themselves until they are no thicker than a credit card with a minute paw at each corner. They dance over me as I lie in bed, fight battles in my slippers, all the time vocalising, zzzzt, zzzzt like fizzing electric cables. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened a drawer to have an antechinus leap out and run up my arm. One day I was so put out to find an antechinus in a filing cabinet that I slammed the drawer shut with a deafening clang. When I opened the drawer an hour or two later the tiny creature was lying in it, quite dead. I hope it wasn’t felled by a lethal level of noise. It may just have been a male.