Mountain Tails Read Online Free PDF

a second, tinkling away to each other. There are so many that even if they stopped for a minute I doubt if I could tell whether they were in pairs or harems. They’re more like a handful of yellow-turning leaves being perpetually tossed up in the air to flutter quickly down. However, while they live in groups, apparently couples do peel off for a bit of privacy to reproduce and raise their young—a sort of compromise between communal and nuclear lifestyles.
    In others, like the Grey Fantails, the sexes are totally indistinguishable to my eyes. I watch them as they dart about, turning, turning, looking, looking in every direction from under their white eyebrow stripes. They land here and there for a quick proud spin-on-the-spot to spread and display their pretty grey and white tails, and then they’re off again. These restless fantails have equality in more than appearance, as they share all the work of parenting and building their interesting nests from spiderwebs and grass, easily identified because the structures are shaped like long-stemmed wine glasses.
    With birds, the fancy plumage and the showing off are usually about love or war. Sound familiar?

OUT OF THE FIRE...

    Often we only get to know our neighbours in times of adversity. When disaster befalls us all, we emerge from our individual TV caves or backyard cloisters and pitch in to help each other get through it. Bushfires have long been one such event in Australia, and they are now becoming bigger, hotter and more unseasonal under global warming.
    In 1980, when my whole mountain range burnt so thoroughly that there was no green in the landscape as far as the eye could see, just the black—tree trunks, fallen logs and the crunch and powder that once was undergrowth—criss-crossed by the whites and greys of ash and exposed tracks, you can imagine what happened to many of my animalneighbours. As our little family was still living in the tent, which we did for fifteen months, maybe you can also imagine how scary that whole event was.
    For weeks after the fires were extinguished by rain, we would hear mighty burnt-out trees give up their last hold and crash to the ground, often in the still of the night, so their falls echoed along the ridges and across the valleys like continuing death knells. As indeed they were for the many tree-dwelling creatures caught by a fast-moving and tree-crowning fire. Koalas, for example, do not cope with such an inferno.
    When one big tree, burnt hollow and fragile, fell beside the track a few days after the fire, half-burying itself in the dirt and ash, it ejected a tiny creature that had apparently survived the fire, the loss of its mother, and thus sustenance since, and the fall.
    Like Tom Thumb, it was no bigger than the adult human digit to which it clung with surprising strength. It was amazing that we had even noticed this mini-marsupial on the ground. A friend tried to feed it with an eyedropper and honeyed water, but it only lasted a few days.
    By the way its little tail curved to hold the thumb, we thought it might have been an Eastern Pygmy Possum, young, but fully furred. This was not an animal I’d normally see, because of its small size and nocturnal habits. Now I don’t think it was, as the tail was too short, but have no better idea what it might have grown up to be. We didn’t find its family: they may have fallen out earlier, in the panic of the heat and smoke, and been incinerated to nothingness.
    The charred ground soon became eerily strewn with the white bones of wallabies and smaller animals as their burnt-black hides fell away. Perhaps the surviving birds of prey, able to fly higher and escape, benefited from this mass barbecue, as well as helping to clean up, removing the smell of death that was very strong for a time.
    One other animal that I have never seen before or after that fire was a wombat, although an old fellow had told me he’d seen a wombat or two, decades ago, way out