THE ANIMALS AND BIRDS
The kangaroo--The koala--The bulldog ant--Some quaint and
delightful birds--The kookaburra--Cunning crows and cockatoo.
Australia has most curious animals, birds, and flowers. This is due to
the fact that it is such an old, old place, and has been cut off so long
from the rest of the world. The types of animals that lived in Europe
long before Rome was built, before the days, indeed, of the Egyptian
civilization, animals of which we find traces in the fossils of very
remote periods--those are the types living in Australia to-day. They
belong to the same epoch as the mammoth and the great flying lizards and
other creatures of whom you may learn something in museums. Indeed,
Australia, as regards its fauna, may be considered as a museum, with the
animals of old times alive instead of in skeleton form.
The kangaroo is always taken as a type of Australian animal life. When
an Australian cricket team succeeds in vanquishing in a Test Match an
English one (which happens now and again), the comic papers may be
always expected to print a picture of a lion looking sad and sorry, and
a kangaroo proudly elate. The kangaroo, like practically all Australian
animals, is a marsupial, carrying its young about in a pouch after their
birth until they reach maturity. The kangaroo's forelegs are very small;
its hindlegs and its tail are immensely powerful, and these it uses for
progression, rushing with huge hops over the country. There are very
many animals which may be grouped as kangaroos, from the tiny kangaroo
rat, about the size of an English water-rat, to the huge red kangaroo,
which is over six feet high and about the weight of a sucking calf. The
kangaroo is harmless and inoffensive as a rule, but it can inflict a
dangerous kick with its hindlegs, and when pursued by dogs or men and
cornered, the "old man" kangaroo will sometimes fight for its life. Its
method is to take a stand in a water-hole or with its back to a tree,
standing on its hindlegs and balanced on its tail. When a dog approaches
it is seized in the kangaroo's forearms and held under water or torn to
pieces. Occasionally men's lives have been lost through approaching
incautiously an old man kangaroo.
The kangaroo's method of self-defence has been turned to amusing account
by circus-proprietors. The "boxing kangaroo" was at one time quite a
common feature at circuses and music-halls. A tame kangaroo would have
its forefeet fitted with boxing-gloves. Then when lightly punched by its
trainer, it would, quite naturally, imitate the movements of the boxer,
fending off blows and hitting out with its forelegs. One boxing kangaroo
I had a bout with was quite a clever pugilist. It was very difficult to
hit the animal, and its return blows were hard and well directed.
The different sorts of kangaroo you may like to know. There is the
kangaroo rat, very small; the "flying kangaroo," a rare animal of the
squirrel species, but marsupial, which lives in trees; the wallaby, the
wallaroo, the paddy-melon (medium varieties of kangaroo); the grey and
the red kangaroo, the last the biggest and finest of the species.
The kangaroo, as I have said, is not of much use for meat. Its flesh is
very dark and rank, something like that of a horse. However, chopped up
into a fine sausage-meat, with half its weight of fat bacon, kangaroo
flesh is just eatable. The tail makes a very rich soup. The skin of the
kangaroo provides a soft and pliant leather which is excellent for
shoes. Kangaroo furs are also of value for rugs and overcoats.
[Illustration: THE AUSTRALIAN FOREST AT NIGHT "MOONING" OPOSSUMS.
PAGES 49 & 71.]
Of tree-inhabiting animals the chief in Australia is the 'possum (which
is not really an opossum, but is somewhat like that American rodent, and
so got its name), and the koala, or native bear. Why this little animal
was called a "bear" it is hard to say, for it is not in the least like a
bear. It is about the size of a very large and fat cat, is covered with
a very thick, soft fur, and its face is shaped rather like that of an
owl, with big saucer-eyes.
The koala is the quaintest little creature imaginable. It is quite
harmless, and only asks to be let alone and allowed to browse on
gum-leaves. Its flesh is uneatable except by an aboriginal or a victim
to famine. Its fur is difficult to manipulate, as it will not lie flat,
so the koala should have been left in peace. But its confiding and
somewhat stupid nature, and the senseless desire of small boys and
"children of larger growth" to kill something wild just for the sake of
killing, has led to the koala being almost exterminated in many places.
Now it is protected by the law, and may get back in time to its old
numbers. I hope so. There is no more amusing or pretty sight than that
of a mother koala climbing sedately along a gum-tree limb, its young
ones riding on it pick-a-back, their claws dug firmly into its soft fur.
The 'possum is much hunted for its fur. The small black 'possum found in
Tasmania and in the mountainous districts is the most valuable, its fur
being very close and fine. Dealers in skins will sometimes dye the grey
'possum's skin black and trade it off as Tasmanian 'possum. It is a
trick to beware of when buying furs. Bush lads catch the 'possum with
snares. Finding a tree, the scratched bark of which tells that a 'possum
family lives upstairs in one of its hollows, they fix a noose to the
tree. The 'possum, coming down at night to feed or to drink, is caught
in the noose. Another way of getting 'possum skins is to shoot the
little creatures on moonlight nights. (The 'possum is nocturnal in its
habits, and sleeps during the day.) When there is a good moon the
'possums may be seen as they sit on the boughs of the gum-trees, and
brought down with a shot-gun.
Besides its human enemies, the 'possum has the 'goanna (of which more
later) to contend with. The 'goanna--a most loathsome-looking
lizard--can climb trees, and is very fond of raiding the 'possum's home
when the young are there. Between the men who want its coat and the
'goannas who want its young the 'possum is fast being exterminated.
Two other characteristic Australian animals you should know about. The
wombat is like a very large pig; it lives underground, burrowing vast
distances. The wombat is a great nuisance in districts where there are
irrigation canals; its burrows weaken the banks of the water-channels,
and cause collapses. The dugong is a sea mammal found on the north coast
of Australia. It is said to be responsible for the idea of the mermaid.
Rising out of the water, the dugong's figure has some resemblance to
that of a woman.
Then there is the bunyip--or, rather, there isn't the bunyip, so far as
we know as yet. The bunyip is the legendary animal of Australia. It is
supposed to be of great size--as big as a bullock--and of terrible
ferocity. The bunyip is represented as living in lakes and marshes, but
it has never been seen by any trustworthy observer. The blacks believe
profoundly in the bunyip, and white children, when very young, are
scared with bunyip tales. There may have been once an animal answering
to its description in Australia; if so, it does not seem to have
survived.
In Tasmania, however, are found, though very rarely, two savage and
carnivorous marsupials called the Tasmanian tiger and the Tasmanian
devil. The tiger is almost as large as the female Bengal tiger, and has
a few little stripes near its tail, from which fact it gets its name.
The Tasmanian tiger will create fearful havoc if it gets among sheep,
killing for the sheer lust of killing. At one time a price of L100 was
put on the head of the Tasmanian tiger. As settlement progressed it
became rarer and rarer, and I have not heard of one having been seen for
some years. The Tasmanian devil is a marsupial somewhat akin to the wild
cat, and of about the same size. It is very ferocious, and has been
known to attack man, springing on him from a tree branch. The Tasmanian
devil is likewise becoming very rare.
The existence of these two animals in Tasmania and not in Australia
shows that that island has been a very long time separated from the
mainland.
Australia is very well provided with serpents--rather too well
provided--and the Bush child has to be careful in regard to putting his
hand into rabbit burrows or walking barefoot, as there are several
varieties of venomous snake. But the snakes are not at all the great
danger that some imagine. You might live all your life in Australia and
never see one; but in a few country parts it has been found necessary to
enclose the homesteads on the stations with snake-proof wire-fencing, so
as to make some place of safety in which young children may play. The
most venomous of Australian snakes are the death-adder, fortunately a
very sluggish variety; the tiger-snake, a most fierce serpent, which,
unlike other snakes, will actually turn and pursue a man if it is
wounded or angered; the black snake, a handsome creature with a vivid
scarlet belly; and the whip-snake, a long, thin reptile, which may be
easily mistaken for a bit of stick, and is sometimes picked up by
children. But no Australian snake is as deadly as the Indian jungle
snakes, and it is said that the bite of no Australian snake can cause
death if the bite has been given through any cloth. So the only real
danger is in walking through the Bush barefooted, or putting the hand
into holes where snakes may be lurking.
Some of the non-venomous snakes of Australia are very handsome, the
green tree-snake and the carpet-snake (a species of python) for
examples. The carpet-snake is occasionally kept in the house or in the
barn to destroy mice and other small vermin.
Lizards in great variety are found in Australia, the chief being one
incorrectly called an iguana, which colloquial slang has changed to
'goanna. The 'goanna is an altogether repulsive creature. It feasts on
carrion, on the eggs of birds, on birds themselves, on the young of any
creature. Growing to a great size--I have seen one 9 feet long and as
thick in the body as a small dog--the 'goanna looks very dangerous, and
it will bite a man when cornered. Though not venomous in the strict
sense of the word, the 'goanna's bite generally causes a festering wound
on account of the loathsome habits of the creature. The Jew-lizard and
the devil-lizard are two other horrid-looking denizens of the Australian
forest, but in their cases an evil character does not match an evil
face, for they are quite harmless.
Spiders are common, but there is, so far as I know, only one dangerous
one--a little black spider with a red spot on its back. Large spiders,
called (incorrectly) tarantulas, credited by some with being poisonous,
come into the houses. But they are really not in any way dangerous. I
knew a man who used to keep tarantulas under his mosquito-nets so that
they might devour any stray mosquitoes that got in. The example is
hardly worth following. The Australian tarantula, though innocent of
poison, is a horrible object, and would, I think, give you a bad fright
if it flopped on to your face.
Australia is rich in ants. There is one specially vicious ant called the
bulldog ant, because of its pluck. Try to kill the bulldog ant with a
stick, and it will face you and try to bite back until the very last
gasp, never thinking of running away. The bulldog ant has a liking for
the careless picnicker, whom she--the male ant, like the male bee, is
not a worker--bites with a fierce energy that suggests to the victim
that his flesh is being torn with red-hot pincers. I have heard it said
that but for the fact that Australia is so large an island, a great
proportion of its population would by this time have been lost through
bounding into the surrounding sea when bitten by bulldog ants. It is
wise when out for a picnic in Australia to camp in some spot away from
ant-beds, for the ant, being such an industrious creature, seems to take
a malicious delight in spoiling the day for pleasure-seekers.
In one respect, the ant, unwillingly enough, contributes to the pleasure
and amusement of the Australian people. In the dry country it would not
be possible to keep grass lawns for tennis. But an excellent substitute
has been found in the earth taken from ant-beds. This earth, which has
been ground fine by the industrious little insects, makes a beautifully
firm tennis-court.
It is not possible to leave the ant without mention of the termite, or
white ant, which is very common and very mischievous in most parts of
Australia. A colony of termites keeps its headquarters underground, and
from these headquarters it sends out foraging expeditions to eat up all
the wood in the neighbourhood. If you build a house in Australia, you
must be very careful indeed that there is no possibility of the termites
being able to get to its timbers. Otherwise the joists will be eaten,
the floors eaten, even the furniture eaten, and one day everything that
is made of wood in the house will collapse. All the mischief, too, will
have been concealed until the last moment. A wooden beam will look to be
quite sound when really its whole heart has been eaten out by the
termites. Nowadays the whole area on which a house is to be raised is
covered with cement or with asphalt, and care taken that no timber
joists are allowed to touch the earth and thus give entry to the
termites. Fortunately, these destructive insects cannot burrow through
brick or stone.
In the Northern Territory there are everywhere gigantic mounds raised by
these termites, long, narrow, high, and always pointing due north and
south. You can tell infallibly the points of the compass from the mounds
of this white ant, which has been called the "meridian termite."
Australia has a wild bee of her own (of course, too, there are European
bees introduced by apiarists, distilling splendid honey from the wild
flowers of the continent). The aborigines had an ingenious way of
finding the nests of the wild bee. They would catch a bee, preferably at
some water-hole where the bees went to drink, and fix to its body a
little bit of white down. The bee would be then released, and would fly
straight for home, and the keen-eyed black would be able to follow its
flight and discover the whereabouts of its hive--generally in the hollow
of a tree. The Australian black, having found a hive, would kill the
bees with smoke and then devour the whole nest, bees, honeycomb, and
honey.
Australian birds are very numerous and very beautiful. The famous
bird-of-paradise is found in several varieties in Papua and other
islands along Australia's northern coast. The bird-of-paradise was
threatened with extinction on account of the demand for its plumes for
women's hats. So the Australian Government has recently passed
legislation to protect this most beautiful of all birds, which on the
tiniest of bodies carries such wonderful cascades of plumage, silver
white in some cases, golden brown in others.
[Illustration: A SHEEP DROVER. PAGE 26.]
Some very beautiful parrots flash through the Australian forest. It
would not be possible to tell of all of them. The smallest, which is
known as the grass parrakeet, or "the love-bird," is about the size of a
sparrow. I notice it in England carried around by gipsies and trained to
pick out a card which "tells you your fortune." From that tiny little
green bird the range of parrots runs up to huge fowl with feathers of
all the colours of the rainbow. There are two fine cockatoos also in
Australia--the white with a yellow crest, and the black, which has a
beautiful red lining to its sable wings. A flock of black cockatoos in
flight gives an impression of a sunset cloud, its under surface shot
with crimson.
Cockatoos can be very destructive to crops, especially to maize, so the
farmers have declared war upon them. The birds seem to be able to hold
their own pretty well in this campaign, for they are of wonderful
cunning. When a crowd of cockatoos has designs on a farmer's
maize-patch, the leader seems to prospect the place thoroughly; he acts
as though he were a general, providing a safe bivouac for an army; he
sets sentinels on high trees commanding a view of all points of danger.
Then the flock of cockatoos settles on the maize and gorges as fast as
it can. If the farmer or his son tries to approach with a gun, a
sentinel cockatoo gives warning and the whole flock clears out to a
place of safety. As soon as the danger is over they come back to the
feast.
Even more cunning is the Australian crow. It is a bird of prey and
perhaps the best-hated bird in the world. An Australian bushman will
travel a whole day to kill a crow. For he has, at the time when the
sheep were lambing, or when, owing to drought, they were weak, seen the
horrible cruelties of the crow. This evil bird will attack weak sheep
and young lambs, tearing out their eyes and leaving them to perish
miserably. There have even been terrible cases where men lost in the
Bush and perishing of thirst have been attacked by crows and have been
found still alive, but with their eyes gone.
It is no wonder that there is a deadly feud between man and crow. But
the crow is so cunning as to be able to overmatch man's superior
strength. A crow knows when a man is carrying a gun, and will keep out
of range then; if a man is without a gun the crow will let him approach
quite near. One can never catch many crows in the same district with the
same device; they seem to learn to avoid what is dangerous. Very rarely
can they be poisoned, no matter how carefully the bait is prepared.
Bushmen tell all sorts of stories of the cunning of the crow. One is
that of a man who suffered severely from a crow's depredations on his
chickens. He prepared a poisoned bait and noticed the bird take it, but
not devour it; that crow carefully took the poisoned tit-bit and put it
in front of the man's favourite dog, which ate it, and was with
difficulty saved from death! Another story is that of a man who thought
to get within reach of a crow by taking out a gun, lying down under a
tree, and pretending to be dead. True enough, the crow came up and
hopped around, as if waiting for the man to move, and so to see if he
were really dead. After awhile, the crow, to make quite sure, perched
on a branch above the man's head and dropped a piece of twig on to his
face! It was at this stage that the man decided to be alive, and, taking
up his gun, shot the crow.
There may be some exaggeration in the bushmen's tales of the crow's
cunning, but there is quite enough of ascertained fact to show that the
bird is as devilish in its ingenuity as in its cruelty. In most parts of
Australia there is a reward paid for every dead crow brought into the
police offices. Still, in spite of constant warfare, the bird holds its
own, and very rarely indeed is its nest discovered--a signal proof of
its precautions against the enmity of man.
To turn to a more pleasant type of feathered animal. On the whole, the
most distinctly Australian bird is the kookaburra, or "laughing
jackass." (A picture of two kookaburras faces page 1 of this volume.
They were drawn for me by a very clever Australian black-and-white
artist, Mr. Norman Lindsay.) The kookaburra is about the size of an owl,
of a mottled grey colour. Its sly, mocking eye prepares you for its
note, which is like a laugh, partly sardonic, partly rollicking. The
kookaburra seems to find much grim fun in this world, and is always
disturbing the Bush quiet with its curious "laughter." So near in sound
to a harsh human laugh is the kookaburra's call that there is no
difficulty in persuading new chums that the bird is deliberately mocking
them. The kookaburra has the reputation of killing snakes; it certainly
is destructive to small vermin, so its life is held sacred in the Bush.
And very well our kookaburra knows the fact. As he sits on a fence and
watches you go past with a gun, he will now and again break out into his
discordant "laugh" right in your face.
The Australian magpie, a black-and-white bird of the crow family, is
also "protected," as it feeds mainly on grubs and insects, which are
nuisances to the farmer. The magpie has a very clear, well-sustained
note, and to hear a group of them singing together in the early morning
suggests a fine choir of boys' voices. They will tell you in Australia
that the young magpie is taught by its parents to "sing in tune" in
these bird choirs, and is knocked off the fence at choir practice if it
makes a mistake. You may believe this if you wish to. I don't. But it
certainly is a fact that a group of magpies will sing together very
sweetly and harmoniously.
One could not exhaust the list of Australian birds in even a big book.
But a few more call for mention. There is the emu, like an ostrich, but
with coarse wiry hair. The emu does damage on the sheep-runs by breaking
down the wire fences. (Some say the emu likes fencing wire as an article
of diet; but that is an exaggeration founded on the fact that, like all
great birds, it can and does eat nails, pebbles, and other hard
substances, which lodge in its gizzard and help it to digest its food.)
On account of its mischievous habit of breaking fences the emu is
hunted down, and is now fast dwindling. In Tasmania it is altogether
extinct. Another danger to its existence is that it lays a very handsome
egg of a dark green colour. These eggs are sought out for ornaments, and
the emu's nest, built in the grass of the plain (for the emu cannot fly
nor climb trees), is robbed wherever found.
The brush turkey of Australia is strange in that it does not take its
family duties at all seriously. The bird does not hatch out its eggs by
sitting on them, but builds a mound of decaying vegetation over the
eggs, and leaves them to come out with the sun's heat.
The brolga, or native companion, is a handsome Australian bird of the
crane family. It is of a pretty grey colour, with red bill and red legs.
The brolga has a taste for dancing; flocks of this bird may be seen
solemnly going through quadrilles and lancers--of their own
invention--on the plains.
Another strange Australian bird is called the bower-bird, because when a
bower-bird wishes to go courting he builds in the Bush a little
pavilion, and adorns it with all the gay, bright objects he can--bits of
rag or metal, feathers from other birds, coloured stones and flowers. In
this he sets himself to dancing until some lady bower-bird is attracted,
and they set up housekeeping together. The bower-bird is credited with
being responsible for the discovery of a couple of goldfields, the birds
having picked up nuggets for their bowers, these, discovered by
prospectors, telling that gold was near.
If the bower-bird wishes for wedding chimes to grace his picturesque
mating, another bird will be able to gratify the wish--the bell-bird
which haunts quiet, cool glens, and has a note like a bell, and yet more
like the note of one of those strange hallowed gongs you hear from the
groves of Eastern temples. Often riding through the wild Australian Bush
you hear the chimes of distant bells, hear and wonder until you learn
that the bell-bird makes the clear, sweet music.
One more note about Australian nature life. In the summer the woods are
full of locusts (cicadae), which jar the air with their harsh note. The
locust season is always a busy one for the doctors. The Australian small
boy loves to get a locust to carry in his pocket, and he has learned, by
a little squeezing, to induce the unhappy insect to "strike up," to the
amusing interruption of school or home hours. Now, to get a locust it is
necessary to climb a tree, and Australian trees are hard to climb and
easy to fall out of. So there are many broken limbs during the locust
season. They represent a quite proper penalty for a cruel and unpleasant
habit.