The “Respect the Mountain” forum ( here, here, and here ) at the Hobart Town Hall earlier this year prompted Don Knowler to return to a diary he compiled after daily rambles on Mt Wellington during the previous year. In what promises to be a momentous year in the modern history of Kunanyi, the weekly diary gives the mountain and its wildlife its own voice. All Don’s Mother Mountain columns – and much more by this superb writer – can be found under the Category, Don Knowler, here
The piece of art work was stunning, if a little confronting. The Tasmanian Times carried a picture of hand prints, the palms filling a whole frame. It shouted “stop” at first, though that was not the message, if any message was intended. The hand was just one of a series, created by coating palms with blood, dirt and ash and then pressing hands against a wall. The work was inspired by ancient Aboriginal art found in caves and in this 21st century edition the artist had scrawled “I was there”.
I thought about the artwork all day, thinking of not so much the artists of old – some thousands of years in the past – who had literally left their mark, not only in their own time but the times to follow. And as I trod the Lenah Valley Trail I gave thought to my project to record the mountain over the course of a year. I had wanted to speak for nature, to give the birds and animals their voice, but I too was saying, “I was there” . Not with a handprint but a notebook and pen.
All along the trail to Sphinx Rock from the Springs I pondered this thought and then I came across the giant rock of sandstone jutting into the trail which walkers either avoid or sit on to contemplate the view over the adjacent woodland and a gap between the trees revealing the city down below. And someone had painted a statement of their view on the rock. It said “Elvis RIP.”
The flame robins which had started a second nest were busy again, feeding young. The male and female came and went with insects, and they had extra eyes to guard the nest site and let out an alarm call if danger threatened. The three young from the previous brood were still about, hanging out with their parents, the five birds forming a merry clan. Two juvenile females, and a young male, now with plumage approaching the flaming colours, stunning, of his father.
My flame robin family had escaped the attention of the cuckoos. Another was not so lucky. A little further along the Lenah Valley Track I came across a pair of flame robins frantically flying back and forth to feed an outsized pallid cuckoo chick.
As with the black-headed honeyeater surrogate parents I had seen in the previous month, the greedy and demanding cuckoo did not show any appreciation for the efforts of the birds. He lunged at them if they got too close, after they had delivered a beakful of insects. A few days later I saw another juvenile cuckoo, this time a fan-tailed but this youngster was feeding itself, dropping from a low branch to spear flying insects. The “parents”, whatever the species, were nowhere to be seen. They had been relieved of their duties, relieved no doubt that the torrid events of the previous month or so where behind them.
Ignorance is perhaps bliss …
What do honeyeaters and other species falling prey to cuckoos make of the process? Does the penny drop after a time, or do they just believe that the cuckoo is really their own, and this is what parenting is all about. Ignorance is perhaps bliss, but during the year I read of research into superb fairy-wren breeding which had revealed that many parents of this species had learned to spot, if not eggs, a single cuckoo chick in their nests. How they determined it was a cuckoo had not been established. Perhaps the fairy-wrens could count and had seen that eggs or young initially in the nest had diminished in number, while the single chick grew in size, and appetite. The fairy-wren solution was straightforward: they simply deserted the nest to start again somewhere else, and the cuckoo chick staved to death.
I had spent hours searching for woodswallows during the spring and first part of summer and now they were two a penny.
Most days I’d see them hawking insects high in the sky, travelling with tree martins. My first impression of the woodswallows was that their aerial skills were not as well developed as those of the family of true swallows, of which the martins are members.
The woodswallows – members of the magpie and currawong family who have evolved to hunt insects on the wing – tended during my observations to make short flights, usually from a high perch, snapping at their quarry, before returning to the same perch to crunch their prey. Now the woodswallows engaged in longer flights, rising to great heights and clearly were eating on the wing and not needing to return to perches to feed.
Perhaps earlier in the season, insects were more common at tree height and the woodswallows did not have to expend precious energy needed for breeding to go in pursuit of them. Now they happily criss-crossed the skies and when they did descend to high perches I could see young birds among them. Somewhere in the scattered trees along the Lenah Valley Track they had nested, but I never discovered where.
Christmas bush fading fast …
Mountain berry in full flower, Christmas bush fading fast. And on several days at the start of the last month of summer grey clouds carrying rain swirled around the higher elevations of the mountain, obscuring the summit. There was a definite chill in the air after the heat and humidity of summer, however the folk of Fern Tree were not to be fooled that the fire season was coming to an end, and its danger.
Fading Christmas berry or not, the summer had still to run.
Down in the city that week the Chinese community celebrated its new year. I didn’t need to be told it was the year of the snake, a tiger snake of considerable size crossed my path on the Ice House Track, giving me a side-ways glance as it went.
The searing heat was soon to return, with a total fire ban across southern Tasmania on February 6. I was surprised to find the Pinnacle Road open and I drove to the summit on yet another search for two mountain-top birds that had escaped my attention, the Japanese snipe and the Australasian pipit.
The snipe inhabits swampy ground and so I headed inland, across the undulating, tarn-dotted plateau behind the Organ Pipes to find suitable habit. Pools and swampy ground abounded, but no snipes. Finally, tired after two hours of searching, I resorted to crashing through buttongrass and reed in the hope of at least putting a snipe to flight. Before that, I had gone about the hunt meticulously, pausing every few paces to scan the terrain through binoculars and I soon realised how ridiculous it was to change my tactics. A quick view of a fast-flying, zig-zagging snipe would hardly count as a credible, or even satisfying, sighting.
I retreated from the plateau, with wet feet and a feeling of disappointment. I realised this would probably be the last opportunity to see the species before the close of summer, and their return to Japanese wintering grounds. Likewise, the pipit also failed to show itself, although chances of seeing this species were greater than seeing the snipe.
As old as the mountain itself …
There was another reason to explore the swampy ground of the plateau, which from the Organ Pipes car park appears to stretch forever, before colliding with the rising mountains of the west. Along with checking for snipe, I checked the tarns for mountain shrimp.
The endemic shrimp was discovered near the summit of the mountain in 1893. They were previously only known from other parts of the world in fossils 230-330 million years old, which makes them as old as the mountain itself, give or take a few million years. Like the mountain, the shrimp have a Gondwanan connection.
The shrimp may be only about five centimetres in length but all the guide books say they are easy to see in tarn and stream. I peered into still waters, either washed brown with tannin or reflecting blue sky, but could not find any shrimp. Trudging back to my car I was consoled by the thought that perhaps the snipe had eaten them to fuel their long journey back to Japan.
The heat returned with a vengeance. A burning heat from a fierce sun, and then humidity after brief showers, usually in the afternoon. With steam rising from the dolerite and sandstone washed with rain, I made my way down the Lenah Valley Trail yet again, soaking up summer because I knew it would not last. In the hot and clinging air, columns of midges rise in spirals, forming black corkscrew clouds in places. They were hunted mercilessly by fantails, swooping in and out of the clouds, young and old in a merry feast.
Mid-afternoon the low sun fought to penetrate the wet closed forest at the start of the trail. It painted the closely-packed young, straight gums in lines of bright light, stark black and white like the stripes of a zebra.
It got hotter as the week progressed. The Tasmanian Wooden Boat Festival was taking place during the weekend and all week sailing boats had been arriving. Some days the Derwent was dotted with the white and cream sails of many of the 300 boats, barques and brigantines among them, and a replica of a 15th century Portuguese caraval.
By week’s end smoke from the Molesworth fire, threatening to creep around the north-east face of the mountain in the scrub belt before the start of the marshy plateau, painted the sky with an orange light, the smoke so thick at times it blotted out the shape of the sun.
I crossed the plateau again, in another hunt for the shrimps. It was not the shrimp that held my attention that day, however. I was drawn to the smoke rising from the Molesworth fire, and feeling the same sense of fear and foreboding being experience by the folk down in Fern Tree.
Thin columns of smoke rose from five or six fires close together. The sun hid behind them, defining the edges of the brown-grey columns in amber and gold. The fingers pointed skywards, as though attached to a giant hand trying to grip the mountain, which I suppose it was.
From the docks in the city where the Wooden Boat Festival was in full swing, Mount Wellington presented a hazy outline. Smoke from the fires stung the eyes and burned the throat. Out on the streets motor vehicles were coated with fine ash, and the road to the summit was closed again because of the extreme fire risk.
My quarry this time was the mountain blue …
My hunt for butterflies was delayed, but when the smoke cleared – or at least the immediate fire danger – I was on the summit again.
My quarry this time was the mountain blue. It’s not much to look at really, the mountain blue. A tiny butterfly about two centimetres across at the wings, a dull brown colour possibly tinged with blue. It’s important in the alpine ecosystem, though, and any study of Mount Wellington would be poorer without it.
I had searched the ultimate uplands, the plateau behind the peak principally for birds but I also had the butterfly in my sights. On a sunny afternoon walking the Big Bend Trail towards a rocky outcrop called Tom’s Thumb I spotted a mountain blue skipping ahead of me, rising and falling in brief flutters on paper wings, using the hot air rising from the sand track for lift. It then deviated from the track and settled on the pure-white, star flowers of a clump of alpine heath. The tiny butterfly may appear brown instead of blue but in the Lycaenidae family many of the butterflies are commonly referred to as “blues”, in the same way many members of the Nymphalidae family are referred to as “browns”.
The mountain blue is believed to be the most alpine-adapted butterfly in Australia. Only a few species occur in the alpine zone across the country, and these butterflies have evolved special adaptations to cope with extreme cold, which include hibernating under snow in the larval or pupal stages, basking behaviour that takes full advantage of sun and physical modifications such as dark colouration and hairiness to conserve heat.
In the case of the mountain blue, it only takes to the wing from January. I timed my pursuit of it until the mid-summer, choosing particularly hot and sunny days.
My checklist of mountain butterflies now comprised the two species I had positively identified: the blue and the ubiquitous common brown, the later on a trail on the lower, drier slopes bordering Lenah Valley a few days previously. A King’s xenia – similar to the common brown – might also have entered the frame, but I couldn’t be sure its brightness and tone of wing colour, in richer chestnuts and yellows, fitted the bill of this species from the now more familiar common brown. Three species might not seem a great deal from a summer’s work, but in the context of less than 40 species inhabiting Tasmania (many of these blow-ins from the mainland) I was not doing too bad in an environment hostile to butterflies.
