Hare Style
You will never feel the same about the Hare (Lepus europaeus) if you read the book Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. The author, who is a political adviser in the UK happened to find a leveret (baby hare from the French for ‘little hare’, lievre) a few days old which she took home and raised. Her account of the extraordinary relationship she develops with it while preparing to return it to the wild is awe-inspiring.
I only have one photo of a hare but it is enough to see some of its features: its eyes are on the side of its narrow head and each one can see 180 degrees, so that even though this hare has its back to me, it can see me. How the brain handles eyes that are not always looking at the same thing, I cannot imagine.
The ears are very long, which is one way to quickly distinguish it from its cousin the rabbit, and it keeps its longish tail pointing down not up like the cottontail of a rabbit. Its feet are very long and its speed is incredible – up to 50 kmh – while its capacity to leap and turn and dodge is unmatched.
Pliny in the 77AD book Natural History said the hare is designed to be the prey of every creature. There is far more written about how to cook a hare than how to raise one. Perhaps that is because they have never been domesticated, unlike rabbits. They were introduced by Europeans to Australia for the purpose of hunting and coursing (a once-popular but now banned sport involving dogs chasing hares).
Hares are a pest to revegetation projects, nibbling off tree seedlings and gnawing the bark of saplings, and for this reason are often shot – I have done it myself. They are a pest to agriculture also. However, they have never become a plague of rabbit or cane-toad proportions and are restricted to South-eastern states.
Hares make a nest in grass called a ‘form’ to which they return every night. Their instinct when threatened is to freeze and trust their remarkable camouflage, meaning they often get killed by agricultural machinery. Rabbits give birth underground to blind, hairless, helpless kittens. The leveret is ready to run from the moment of birth. Mother hare places it in a nest where it waits motionless for her regular return to feed it milk. After 8 weeks, it is weaned and on its own.
If you get a chance to get up close to a hare, they are exceptionally beautiful with their many different colours, their furry feet and ears, and enormous eyes. I recommend Chloe Dalton’s book; a deep look at any part of nature increases one’s awe and reverence for all of it.
Live and let die
My house is a no-kill zone for fauna…and they know it. As much as I try to prevent them from entering, I share the space with the odd gecko or two, spiders of all kinds, flies, even mosquitoes. They are free to exist on a live and let live basis. However….
It has been a cold winter and the stockpile of wood stacked up against the outside wall is ever decreasing. I have discovered that a range of fauna inhabit this temporary haven – cockroaches, silverfish, beetles and unfortunately many queen European Wasps (Vespula germanica), pictured.
European Wasps (Vespula germanica) are a highly invasive wasp species known to drive native insect species out of an area and create havoc with outdoor human activities over the summer period. In their native Europe and the Middle East populations of European Wasps are controlled by the climate with very cold weather killing many nests. However in the more temperate Australia, nests survive the winter and continue to grow. Many of the new queens find places to hibernate over the winter i.e. my woodpile, only to become active when the weather warms up. A single queen can lay up to 10,000 eggs in a season and this has forced an amendment to my live and let live policy.
For European Wasp it is live and let die.
Swamp birds 2: Dusky Moorhen
Like the coot and the swamphen, the Dusky Moorhen (Gallinula tenebrosa) is a common bird found on water, in the reeds or browsing on grass around the edge of water. These are the Gallinules, which is Latin for ‘little hen”. They all are black with various other shades of blue or brown and have a showy frontal-shield and beak of bright colours – the coot has white, the Purple Swamphen and Dusky Moorhen both have bright red . Because the latter two are both red-beaked it is easy to confuse them. The Purple Swamphen (Porphyria melanotus) is a bigger bird with a definite blue wash on the neck and breast. It is bolder, and the head is quite a different, more bulky shape. The smaller, more timid moorhen has a yellow tip on the red beak. Here’s a comparison in photos:
Another curious character trait of Dusky Moorhens is the way they flash white patches on their tail as they walk or swim. Swamphens have a single white patch and they don’t flash it like moorhens do.
In the latter photo showing a swamphen and moorhen together, I point out that the swamphen is bigger; the moorhen is running away as I approach while the swamphen is boldly unconcerned, and one can make out the blue is more prominent on the swamphen.
A few years ago, when volunteers had constructed a nice pile of sticks in the lagoon at Yea Wetlands, a pair of moorhens built a nest right on top. The big floods have washed the sticks away now but when the lagoon is dry, rebuilding it for habitat would be a good idea.
So that’s cleared that up, then? Little hens with red beaks are not all the same. And I hope you can tell the difference.
Swamp birds 1: Coot
There is a set of birds found around reedbeds, dams and lakes about the size of a domestic hen with distinctive colours on the frontal-shield above the beak. They are often called the gallinules, and they are so widespread they can appear a little pedestrian. The most common is undoubtedly the Swamphen a large blue-purple bird with a red beak and frontal-shield whose Latin name catches its purple front and black rear: Porphyrio melanotus. All gallinules forage on aquatic vegetation, or adjoining reeds and grass, looking for worms, molluscs and succulent vegetation. The other common gallinules are the Dusky Moorhen (Gallinula tenebrosa) and the Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra). Keen observers will note that the moorhen is more likely in small wetlands and swamps while the coot prefers larger stretches of water (every town’s sewerage pond is sure to have a flock).
The Eurasian Coot has a distinctive white frontal-shield. It takes to flight with a pattering run across the water. It is often seen bottom up as it searches for food under the water.
Their nest usually built on the water concealed among the reeds, may contain as may as fourteen eggs though usually 6-9. The chicks have reddish heads. For the first year the young birds are plain black without the white frontal-shield.
Eurasian coots, as the name suggests are found throughout Europe and Asia and recently arrived in New Zealand. The white frontal-shield may be the reason why the phrase arose ‘bald as a coot’. The Oxford dictionary says this phrase arose in the 1400s. but I haven’t heard it much lately though complete bald heads seem to be more fashionable than male-pattern baldness. We need to revive the phrase, bald as a coot!
A different squadron
The sight of a ‘squadron’ of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos overhead is a sight to behold but recently large flocks of Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) have proved to be equally impressive if not as noisy and at a higher altitute, pictured left. Pelicans are one of Australia’s heaviest flying birds. They can be found Australia wide around large bodies of water – salt, brackish or fresh.
Pelicans move across the landscape following their food source. Australian Pelicans are primarily fish eaters although they have been known to eat birds as well – ibis, ducks, etc.
The uncommon sight of large flocks of pelicans in our district recently may been due to the drought in other parts of the country. They usually settle on large bodies of water but have been noticed swimming (pictured above) and feeding (pictured below) on some of our local farm dams.
I wonder what the fish think.
The Mutants of Flowerdale
Almost ten years ago this blog featured a leucistic magpie (click HERE). Leucism, derived from the Latin word leuco meaning white, is a genetic mutation resulting in the partial loss of pigmentation in an animal. In the case of birds it means the excessive white colouration of the feathers.
Last week whilst driving through Flowerdale I noticed (with my aged eyesight) on the hill in the distance a solitary bird that looked like an Australian Ibis (Threskiornis moluccus) – but with short legs. Telephoto pictures revealed it to be another leucistic Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), pictured left, with more white feathers than normal. Interestingly it was photographed in the same field as the bird in the previous blog eight years ago. This bird and the one in the previous blog look very similar and given magpies can live to 30 years old in the wild it could be the same bird. If it is, this bird has been living in the same location for a long time, something that I had never considered before.
In a neighbouring paddock was another leucistic magpie, pictured right. This bird had an almost exclusively white back and white pants (all the recognised magpie forms have black ‘pants’). Maybe the mutation is being propagated through the offspring. In smaller birds this propagation is not likely to persist as white birds tend to stand out more and therefore are more easily targeted by predators. Magpies however are probably big enough to look after themselves.
Regularly patterned magpies like the Black-backed Magpie below did not seems to be fazed by its differently patterned companion. We can all learn something from that!
A Mother of a Spider
Spiders lay their eggs in silken sacs the shapes of which differ markedly depending on the species of spider. Where the sacs are kept is also species dependent. Some spiders suspend their egg sacs to vegetation, on their webs or on surfaces. Ground Spiders (pictured left) live in crevices in wood or rocks and attach their very thin egg sacs to those surfaces.
Wolf Spiders are one of only a couple of types of spider where the female carries the egg sac with them, pictured right. Female Wolf Spiders attach the spherical sac with a silk line to the spinnerets at the end of the abdomen. The egg sac is carried under the abdomen until the spiderlings are born. When the spiderlings are ready to hatch the spider opens the sac to release them.
The spiderlings are carried around on the mother’s back for the first few weeks of their lives (pictured above). If they become detached the mother will wait for them to climb back on board. During this time the spiderlings do not eat but instead rely on fat reserves within their bodies for sustenance. When those fat reserves are exhausted the young spiders leave to hunt their own food. Unfortunately, some of the first foods are their siblings.
Brings a new meaning to ‘Love your brothers and sisters’.
The Flame of Life
In July, a couple of years ago, I was in Yea’s old Cemetery. In this sombre place of weathered stone and wrought iron, hard soil and lichen, the cemetery’s oldest headstones are in poor condition, contributing to the awareness of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death and decay.
In the brooding heaviness of a grey day in this place, a party of flame robins (Petroica phoenicia) was on the move. Perhaps half a dozen birds, of which 4 at least were males.
The contrast was heart-changing. The mood lifted, the beauty shone, it was like poetry.
To invert the solemn words from the Funeral liturgy, In the midst of death, we find the flame of life.
Handy camping tool – or not?
On our last camping trip the sandy tent area we pulled up at was pitted with unusual crescent shaped holes in the ground – cause UNKNOWN.
Included in our camping kit for the first time was a new gadget, a ‘black light’ (ultraviolet) torch. Why? Because some minerals such as calcite and hyalite (a form of opal) fluoresce under ultraviolet light. And what better way to entertain yourself after the sun goes down than doing a bit of UV fossicking.
Walking around in the dark with the new gizmo we found no fluorescent rocks but noticed that in those crescent shaped holes were creatures that did fluoresce. But they quickly ducked back into their holes before we could make out what they were.
We eventually found a creature out in the open glowing bright blue in the UV light (pictured above). We did not really have to use our white-light torch (pictured right) to identify it as a scorpion.
Scorpions are arachnids (just like spiders). They have eight legs, two large pincers and a tail equip with a sting. No one understands what chemical in the scorpion exoskeleton causes it to fluoresce under UV light. Nor do they understand the reason why scorpions fluoresce at all.
Suffices to say that the UV torch will remain in our camping kit so we can hunt down fluorescent minerals and invertebrates. That is, if we really want to know.
Chicken, duck or goose
One of the best ways to view Australian raptors is simply by driving your car through the countryside. They are invariably hovering stationary above a field, perched on fence posts and powerlines keeping an eye out for unwary prey, or they are on the side of the road feasting on the roadkill.
Unfortunately the latter is why many raptors are killed, also being hit by cars. This is particularly true for Wedge-tailed Eagles that cannot get out of the way quick enough as a car approaches.
I recently encountered a Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), pictured left in the middle of the road feasting on what I assumed was a dead native animal. Upon stopping the Kite flew into a nearby tree. The carrion turned out to be an extremely large form of poultry, pictured below.
Whistling Kites are found in Australia, New Guinea and New Caledonia. They feed on a large range of animals, birds and insects. In summer they hunt live prey but as the weather cools down and there is less food around their diet turns to carrion. People more expert at poultry than I identified the dead bird as a rooster. In this case the carrion was as large as the kite itself. I can only assume that the dead rooster was dropped on the road by a fox.
The dead bird was removed from the road and thrown into a nearby field to avoid a further accident.
One dead bird is enough.
Focus On Fauna 