Billabongs

bil·la·bong  (bl-bông, -bng)

n. Australian

1. A dead-end channel extending from the main stream of a river. 2. A streambed filled with water only in the rainy season. 

3. A stagnant pool or backwater.

From Wiradhuri (Aboriginal language of southeast Australia) bilaba, watercourse filled only after rain.

I was about six years old when I first heard of a billabong. It was in 'Dot and the Kangaroo', a story about a little girl lost in the outback, who gets adopted by a motley crew of marsupials. It obviously made a strong enough impression on me to trigger a phase of acute Australophilia. 

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18891/18891-h/18891-h.htm

Of course, when you're six, the idea of little lost girls, let alone fabulous beasts, living in a bizarre upside-down land directly under your feet was thoroughly compelling. I spent a whole day excavating the vegetable patch so the kangaroos could escape their improbable existence on the underbelly of the Earth and play with me in the prosaic reality of a muddy north Kent garden. Luckily, the story didn't mention funnelweb spiders, or I might have been more circumspect about creating a such a potentially disastrous portal.

OK, this is a trapdoor spider not a funnelweb. But, of course, you just need to
take one look it to realise it's also going to be found in Australia! 

Anyway, after wandering around for hours in the thorny wilderness, Dot comes across a kindly kangaroo. The maternal marsupial must have been Skippy's great-grandmother, because before you could say didgeridoo, she was chewing Dot's ear off about her little lost joey. 

She promptly pops the frightened foundling in her pouch and hops down to the nearest billabong. As with waterholes the world over, it's party central. The incredulous infant, high on hallucinogenic berries, is introduced to a parade of weird and wonderful creatures, each with a tragic tale to tell about their treatment at the hands of humans. 

If you ignore the antiquated anthropomorphism and the casual peppering of colonial racism, it's actually a great story about the uneasy relationships between humans and other animals. But enough about Dot...   

It was to be nearly thirty years before I saw my own billabong. Or, despite my best excavatory efforts, a kangaroo. Instead of Dot's bouncy chaperone, I had Google Maps to guide me. But it was still a serendipitous discovery - I certainly wasn't expecting to find a billabong sandwiched between a jungle gym and a golf green!

Wilson Reserve is hardly the unforgiving outback. In fact, it's a charming little oasis on the banks of the Yarra not too far from my scruffy suburb of (de)Preston. But it's home to a fair dinkum billabong that, at some point before Melbourne became a metropolis of four million people, would have seemed quite familiar to Dot and her four-legged friends. There were no chattering kookaburras or playful platypuses (-podes? -pi?). But the ripples from a dabbling duck were forming fractal patterns from the reflections of the silver-trunked eucalypts on the inky surface.

Here are some of the photos I took. I made them portrait, to create a sense of falling water or running paint. Earlier that day, I'd been at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, home of Australian Impressionism, so that also had a strong influence on how I responded to my bush-fringed oasis. 

These four are my favourites, but you can check out the rest here.

Aye-aye

According to local legends, the aye-aye is a demon that can kill just by pointing a finger. That fact alone makes it a worthy addition to the Wunderkammer. However, the aye-aye's more prosaic characteristics are equally fascinating...

Close-up of baby Aye-aye
via Factzoo.com

Like much of Madagascar's flora and fauna, it is found nowhere else on Earth. They are the largest nocturnal primate in the world. Although it is classified as a lemur, it has continually-growing incisors like rodents and uses bat-like echolocation to find its prey. It occupies the ecological niche elsewhere filled by woodpeckers (of which there are none in Madagascar) and, most remarkably of all, hangs upside down to have sex!

© Natural History Museum, London

Its fabled "fingers of doom" are actually sophisticated tools which, like some arboreal Gagool, the aye-aye methodically taps tree trunks to seek out grubs. This great video from National Geographic shows the aye-aye in action..  

The thriving folklore around the aye-eye is also one of the main reasons its numbers are in steady decline. In 1933 scientists thought it was extinct, but it was rediscovered in 1957. Unfortunately, many Malagasy still continue to persecute them, not only because of deep-seated superstitions but because they supplement their diet of grubs with farmers' fruit and veg. Also, as is the case in much of the tropics, Madagascar's forests are being felled at an alarming rate.

I have naturalist Gerald Durrell to thank for first introducing me to the aye-aye. During his later life, he was instrumental in aye-aye conservation, setting up an important captive breeding population and working with the Malagasy government and people to  ensure a future for this most curious creature of the night.

Find out more about the aye-aye and how you can help:

• Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
• Madagascar Fauna Group/Save The Lemur
• Edge Of Existence
• Conservation International

Passenger pigeon

In the 1870s, the passenger pigeon was one of the commonest birds in the world. By 1 September 1914, it was extinct.

J.G. Hubbard, 1898 via Wisconsin Historical Society

You might well ask how could this happen. The answer, as it so often is with these things, is us. In very simple terms, we killed and ate them into extinction. Of course, there is usually more than one contributing factor to an extinction. In the passenger pigeon's case, habitat loss also played its part. But it would be fair to say that human greed in one form or another was entirely responsible for the complete annihilation of a most extraordinary bird.

John Audubon, 1824

Extraordinary, you say? But it's just a pigeon. A rather pretty pigeon, if Audubon's illustration is anything to go by (which, of course it is), but still a pigeon.

In fact, the incredible thing about the passenger pigeon was not its appearance. It was the mind-boggling numbers it flocked in. One report from Canada in 1866 described a flock of pigeons one mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point. The estimated number of birds in this one flock was 3.5 BILLION!

A shooting party

With numbers like that, you can excuse a hungry pioneer bagging a few birds for the pot. But humans don't like to do things by halves. We have a singular inability to take just what we need. By the mid-1800s, there was a lucrative commercial pigeon meat industry up and running, with millions of birds being killed and processed every year. According to Wikipedia, slaves and servants in 18th and 19th century America often saw no other meat. In 1878 at Petoskey, Michigan, 50,000 birds were killed each day for nearly five months.

H. T. Phillips' Store, a typical game store of the 1870s
by William Butts Mershon

This grotesque industry continued until the mid 1890s, by which time the passenger pigeon had all but disappeared. Various conservation attempts and closed seasons failed. Too late, zoologists realised the birds could not breed successfully in smaller groups - they were so gregarious that they needed to be in huge flocks to initiate courtship and mating.

Martha, the last ever passenger pigeon
via http://godwin.bobanna.com

On this day, 98 years ago, the last known Passenger Pigeon, died in Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha (after America's first First Lady). Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned, dissected, photographed and mounted. An inglorious end to a species that once dominated the skies of the eastern USA.

Of course, the story of the passenger pigeon is a very familiar one, not least here in New Zealand where over 50% of native bird species have gone extinct since human settlement. Whether it was the giant, flightless moa, eaten into extinction by Polynesian settlers, or the hauntingly-voiced huia hunted out of existence because an English king 20,000 miles away once wore its tail feather in his hat, humans have had an unbelievably devastating impact on our fellow creatures and the places they live.

What is, perhaps, most remarkable about all this is that we have hunted a five billion-strong species into oblivion in a matter of decades and still haven't learned from our mistake! Ever ashamed to be human?

Find out more about the passenger pigeon here:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon
• www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm
• www.eco-action.org/dt/pigeon.html
• www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/passpigeon.htm

Help to make sure this doesn't happen again here:

• www.nature.org
• www.conservationfund.org/
• www.wwf.org
• www.forestandbird.orgnz
• www.rspb.org.uk

Arum lily

While it is entirely possible to have a fondness for rambling roses and hollyhocks or a soft spot for pansies and primulas, for a flower as singularly imposing as Zantedeschia aethiopica, one can surely only have admiration. In the world of plants, the arum lily is the Grace Jones. Handsome rather than pretty, but still very feminine. Aloof. Architectural. Commanding.

Arum lilies picked in Melrose
©Alan Dicks 2012

Their cold, otherworldly purity makes them the funeral flower of choice for many European cultures, and they have a long association with the Christian tradition of bereavement. But their serpentine structure and natural predisposition to stylisation also made them a favourite of the Art Nouveau movement.

Gates to the Villa O. Schützenberger
http://artnouveau.pagesperso-orange.fr/en/villes/strasbourg/batiments/robertsau76.htm

When I first moved to Wellington, I was delighted to find arum lilies growing wild all around the Town Belt. There is (still, I hope) a particularly spectacular early spring display in what I call the Valley of the Lilies directly above Oriental Bay. Unfortunately, Zantedeschia are classified as pest plants in New Zealand. So by taking an armful of stems for the vase occasionally, I feel like I'm making a small contribution to Wellington's hard-working weedbusters. 

To be honest, where arum lilies are concerned, I find the Council's zero tolerance approach somewhat heavy-handed. To my absolute horror, today I found my favourite local patch - a steep-sided gully half way down Sutherland Road - had been savagely blitzed with Roundup. Where there should have been a stately stand of lilies floating on a peppery green sea of nasturtium leaves, there was just a barren brown wasteland. Given that the Council is unlikely to plant an equally appealing landscape of natives in this gully, I see neither a civic nor an ecological benefit for their actions. The nasturtiums are already coming back, and the arums won't lie dormant for long. But there'll be no harvest from there this spring - I'll have to risk life and limb plundering the more precarious slopes further along, where even the weedbusters fear to tread!