Hanging out with 'roos

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After a week of uncharacteristic luxury in Fiji for a cousin’s wedding in mid-January - what I do in the name of representing my branch of the family! - I headed off to the distant reaches of western New South Wales to see how an erstwhile elephant scientist was adapting to life with marsupials for company. Sadly the elephants of Namibia’s Kaokoland had not weathered the global financial crisis well, and a lack of funding had driven the principal scientist to look for a “real job” back in his native Australia. Mind you, the “real job” he found involves running a research station in the middle of serious amounts of nowhere north of Broken Hill for the University of New South Wales - not exactly a nine-to-five desk job, and one in a landscape not dissimilar to that of northwest Namibia. Going for a drive round the station with a visiting scientist my first afternoon, I felt quite at home - red gravel plains, scrubby vegetation, dry riverbeds… just a case of swapping the eucalypts for acacia and the ’roos for springbok, and importing a few great grey ghosts…

Sorting out the wildlife here was not going to be straightforward. The birds were largely unknown to me, apart from the noisy white’n’pink parrot-like galas which I’d seen around the Sydney area, and the large flightless generators of distant dust-clouds - flocks of emus inevitably on the run at the very thought of humans on the horizon. Apostle birds are here in noisy number: they had been described to me as “oversized babblers”, and I watched them happily vacuum up some of the output of one morning’s locust-trap catch, a micro-percentage of a passing locust swarm. The bright colours of the mulga parrots caught my eye on one of my early morning walks, their rainbow plumage a dramatic contrast to the red and grey landscape. After the rains began, I was enchanted to see a kingfisher near the house. On and around the farm’s biggest dam, there were ducks and herons. Geckos - that easy generic term for the small lizards that help keep the mosquito population under control - haunted the house, inside and out: I was amused to watch them for once from the underside, their pale bellies and distinctive sucker-like toes illuminated by the electric light as they skated up the outside of the window in pursuit of their prey. A much larger lizard greeted me on the stoep one day - or at least its movement caught my eye. This was a goanna, Australia’s answer to the monitor lizard - a small one, I later learnt - despite its seemingly impressive two feet of length. It seemed to have a couple of mates in the garden: all good news for keeping the local insect population under control; less good news for small lizards and any breeding birds. And on the road back from Broken Hill one day, we found a bearded dragon, another Australian icon, out sunning itself on the Tarmac.

But of course, it is the kangaroos that are the most distinctive creatures round here. There are four varieties of macropod found on station: red, Western grey and Eastern grey kangaroos, and euros - no, not a dodgy form of northern hemisphere currency, but a type of “walleroo”, a group of macropods halfway in size between ’roos and wallabies. (Imagine, if you will, a macropod first XV: if the elegant reds are out on the wing, nippy wallabies at fly- and scrum-half, and the chunkier Eastern greys forming the backs and second row, walleroos would be the front row - all pre-squashed faces and big shoulders.) And it is surprisingly tricky to tell one species from another, even by colour: “reds” can be pretty grey here, even a gorgeous shade of pale blue/grey, and greys often have a tinge of reddish-brown. A more reliable diagnostic is the colour of the underside of their tails (white for the red kangaroos, and black for the two species of grey and the euro), and the habitat in which they’re found can be indicative (euros tend to like rocky hillsides, for example), but I can’t say I’ve yet sorted them all out. The other large wild mammals on station are, sadly, invasive - feral goats and rabbits, both of which are present in large numbers and badly need eradicating. (Colonising Brits have an awful lot to answer for in terms of their impact on native fauna in this country.) There will be smaller marsupials around, but they’re nocturnal and shy and, other than by using some form of humane trapping, very hard to find.

I had been warned that there was NOTHING to do on station, unless one is working there, but, resourceful as ever, I filled my days happily. It being January, daytime temperatures were regularly heading into the forties by the late afternoon, so any outdoor activities were best done early in the day and I stomped off for a couple of lengthy hikes around the station at the kind of hour when I would normally be contemplating my first caffeine injection. Later in the day, my laptop would emerge and I’d catch up with my ongoing project of copy-typing my travel journals, as well as email, sorting photographs, writing blogs… and generally Doing Stuff. Afternoon siestas were almost obligatory, particularly in the heat, and I devoured a good few books in between times. However, halfway through my sojourn, an unexpectedly long wet spell began which thankfully cooled things down a bit, but also hampered our movements. With the creeks suddenly in spate, we were cut off from town and my peregrinations around the station were more limited. But I wasn’t complaining: it was incredible to see the speed with which the vegetation began to recover. Within less than 48 hours of the first rains, I could see tiny shoots emerging and you could almost watch the grass grow. The ’roos began to wander further afield, no longer constrained in their source of food.

There was a cheerful camaraderie around station, with several scientists, post-docs, Masters and undergrads, on site, continuing their studies of kangaroos, lizards, birds and small marsupials as far as the weather would allow. Permanently on station are the farm manager and his wife and daughters, and their increasing family of orphaned joeys. It hadn’t occurred to me that rearing a joey would be quite so complex (not, I confess, that I’d given it too much thought before this), but Vicky has become adept at replicating the pouch environment with the use of a large, blanket-lined, canvas bag which she hangs on a hook in the kitchen doorway, bouncing it gently from time to time. At about six months old, the joey will start to leave the pouch, but only for short spells, before returning to its comfortable confines. Clearly the older joeys that she has reared, now fully “at foot” and no longer returning to the pouch, know that they are onto a good thing. A couple of reds and greys loiter hopefully around Gary’s immaculately-kept and improbably green lawn. We spent a delightful Australia Day playing cricket under the watchful (if only out of self-preservation) eyes of the two “teenage” grey kangaroos. With a “barbie” and a pavlova to follow, and red wine and beer flowing throughout, it was a deliciously cliché-ed, if slightly surreal, way to spend an afternoon/evening in outback Australia.

My first week coincided with a visit from Professor Terry Dawson, a now-retired academic but one of the founders of the research station when the land was originally donated to the University. Although he is widely regarded as “god” on kangaroos, what he doesn’t know about the natural world in general, and Australian flora and fauna in particular, could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp. To my huge delight, he was very happy to share as much of that knowledge as he could be prompted - with or without a wee glass of red wine or two - to produce in the few days he was there. For Keith, it was shop-talk: Terry is an invaluable source of information about the station and its history, but I was happy to play the dumb ex-City Pom and ask the most basic questions about kangaroos and other Australian wildlife. Occasionally Terry would overestimate quite how basic my pre-‘O’ level biology had been, and I’d find myself mentally reaching for a dictionary to catch up with his terminology, but most of the time Terry talked good, straightforward, comprehensible English.

At weekends, we continued to be confined to the station because Keith’s own vehicle was still en route from Namibia. For a change of scene and focus, he offered to teach me to shoot. I was keen to try: both my father and grandfather had been good shots, though I wasn’t sure I’d conquer my dodgy eyesight and caffeine shakes successfully. With inked target lines on paper plates stapled to uprights set meticulously at 50m and 75m distance - a welcome change from the randomness of Coke cans in a Karoo bush, my only previous shooting experience - I learnt to relax into the pull of the trigger, and clocked up half decent “spreads” at both distances over a couple of weeks. I came back to the UK determined to find myself a shooting club…

But the greatest source of entertainment I found on station was the local population of habituated Western grey kangaroos. I could have watched them for hours; in fact, I probably did watch them for hours. The old doe had, herself, been raised by humans, so she’s as gentle and relaxed as you could really hope an essentially wild animal to be. Despite the “learned” books saying there is “no documented evidence” of kangaroos adopting orphaned animals, she seems to act as foster mother to the three older joeys who are certainly not her own. Not only is this evident in the way the macropod quintet hang out together, but she even lets the unrelated joeys suckle her occasionally, with no obvious jealousy from her own joey. Sometimes, the usual quintet is augmented by a young buck. For the most part, people only raise female orphaned joeys; as they grow up, young males can become unmanageably aggressive. In fact, a small girl on the farm had been badly scratched by an older buck kicking her the week before I got there. This older buck had already had a territorial dispute with Keith. Raised by the preceding station director, he managed to get into Keith’s house one day, and wrecked the place, raiding drawers, pulling things off shelves, ripping apart bedding and defecating everywhere. To show him who was boss, Keith took him in hand… and found himself with a docile and devoted ’roo glued to his side, following him everywhere he went. Fascinating to see such classic animal behaviour operating inter-species.

Where food is concerned, these ’roos are not stupid. They know that one of the outside rooms contains a sack of ’roo feed, and the door’s paintwork is scratched to shreds with their attempts to get in. On one occasion when Keith left the side gate open for a couple of minutes, they nimbly hopped through to the back yard, and were happily ensconced in their lawnmower routine before he realised what he’d done. The only thing that seemed to put them off was the locusts. Walking across the rain-fresh growth of grass one morning, I noticed locusts jumping with each step I took. It looked as if the ’roos didn’t like these things that leapt up unpredictably into their faces, and had gone off to forage somewhere less lively. However, given half a chance and no locusts, they would nibble at Keith’s lawn, their surprisingly tiny mouths making their feeding a very delicate affair, or patiently pick through scrubby bushes to find succulent shoots. Once I watched the old doe feeding on gloriously verdant grass. She barely seemed to chew her mouthfuls in her excitement at being let back into the yard, but would then be punished for her greed by brief fits of coughing. Mostly, they seem to eat in a standing position, rocking back on their heavy tails as a prelude to hop-shuffling on to the next tuft, but one afternoon I watched the prone young buck lazily raise only his head to nibble while the rest of his body continued lying down: no point over-exerting oneself in the heat of the day, clearly.

The interaction between ’roos and humans was not entirely one way. If I was in the back room and the ’roos were in the yard, the old doe would straighten up occasionally to look in through the window, as if curious as to what I might be doing. If I hunkered down to scratch her, she’d gaze into my eyes as if trying to engage in conversation… or at least to will me into producing an apple or carrot for her. The unrelated joeys were more nervy, and occasionally paid the price. Disturbed by Keith’s reappearance on the track down to the house one lunchtime, Skitter, as I’d nicknamed the most timid one, was so disconcerted that, even after Keith had gone inside the house, she didn’t return to the shelter of the car-port, remaining damply in the insufficient shelter of a salt bush. Takes a lot to look more pathetic than a soggy kangaroo!

And so passed a very happy three weeks in the Outback…

Gloomily, I set off for the airport at Broken Hill. Not only was I leaving a new-found collection of friends, both human and macropodal, and a truly beautiful and fascinating place, but my flight back to Sydney would, effectively, be the first leg of my return journey. After three and a half months of excitement in Africa and a couple more months of fun in Australia, I had to return my own version of planet Earth… at least for a little while…

I’d be back.

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Photos

serious amounts of nowhere
as close to NW Namibia in terms of landscape as might be possible in another country