Essays on Nature: January 2019

Wallaroos (Hill Kangaroo) Male and female

Wallaroo - male

As you may have guessed from the picture accompanying this column, I am writing this from Australia where I suspect it is a bit warmer than it is in Pett right now. In Australia, my daughter-in-law puts out seeds for the birds just like we do in the UK, but the range of species that are attracted to the garden are very different. In the UK we expect to see bluetits, great tits, goldfinches, etc., in other words the commonplace birds. In Australia we get the commonplace birds as well, but commonplace in Australia means sulphur-crested cockatoo, king parrot and rainbow lorikeets. The feeders are different as well – parrots’ beaks would make short work of our plastic and metal feeders, so in Australia they use small metal dishes firmly screwed to the balcony rails. It is, of course, the commonplace that defines the country or region. There are exotic rarities here, just as there are in the UK, it’s just that they are different rarities, but to get the character of a place you need to concentrate on the everyday common species. When William Smith compiled his geological map of Britain in 1815, one of the clues he used to determine the underlying rock types was the type of common plants growing above, because plants are determined by the soil type and the soil type is determined by the rocks beneath. Common plants are common because they are successful, and they are successful because they suit that particular ecological niche, in this case, the soil.

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo

..and a bit closer

Another difference in the birds here is that they are nowhere near as nervous as our UK birds. I can sit on the balcony typing this with a sulphur-crested cockatoo literally within reach. This allows me to study them easily and the most striking thing about the cockatoo (apart from its showy crest) is its feet. It has quite short legs and walks with its ‘heel’ on the ground. (Birds don’t really have heels. The joint equivalent to our ankle is normally halfway up the bird’s leg which is why flamingos look as though they have got their knees on back to front.) This gives them a curious waddling gait but also a stable platform when stood on one leg. Give a cockatoo a piece of bread and it will hold it in one claw and take bites just as we would eat a sandwich. Also, when the bird has taken a large seed or a nut it will wrap its claw round the end of its beak so that nothing escapes when the seed cracks open. For such a big bird (they are about the same size as a buzzard!) this gives them a certain gentleness that you wouldn’t imagine from hearing their almost deafening raucous calls.

King Parrot Male

I visited the Australia Botanical Gardens yesterday and despite the rain, I managed to get some photos of wallaroos that live in the gardens.

King Parrot (female) - Queen?

(The gardens cover 416 hectares which is over a thousand acres so there are plenty of wild areas for them.) This involved wading through some long grass to get close enough to the wallaroos. When I got home, I noticed that my socks had sprouted long wiry hairs and something was pricking my ankles. On investigation they turned out to be grass seeds, but pulling on the wiry bristle didn’t work, I had to push the seeds through the sock to get them out. This was because at the base of each seed there was a number of stiff backward pointing spikes that acted like barbs. I assume that this was an adaptation whereby the seeds, which presumably evolved before socks did, worked deeper into the fur of animals so that they were dispersed further.