Kanga, Roo, and small relatives

With my brain reprogrammed by the bright Australian spring sunshine, I felt ready to tackle driving a hire car - but the brain has a mind of its own, and it turned out that as far as my brain was concerned Australia was furrin', and in furrin' you drive on the right. I did manage to avoid going the wrong way or hitting anything, but considering how easy driving a right-hand drive car in UK is for me, driving a right-hand drive car in Australia is surprisingly difficult.

The lady in Budget wanted to know was I going to drive off the tarmac? - Yes, the entrance roads to national parks are unsurfaced. - If so, I would be uninsured for damage sustained on those roads.
The lady in Budget wanted to know was I going to drive at night out of town? - Yes, I was going on a night tour at a wildlife sanctuary and needed to get back to Perth afterwards. - If so, I would be uninsured if I hit a kangaroo. I asked how the Australians managed in their own cars. "We don't drive at night."

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From the ocean, the coastal plain stretches inland for about 50 km, where it reaches the abrupt scarp of the Darling Range running north-south. The scarp was formed by a fault, but is not the fault itself: the scarp has eroded back 15 km to the east from the original fault line. The hilly country and uncompromising geology including granites and gneisses has protected the area from clearance for agriculture. The forests growing on the range now comprise various national parks and protected areas. Today I was visiting Walyunga National Park, an area where the Avon river flowing in from the north has cut a steep sided valley parallel with the scarp slope a little more to the west.

As I arrived at Walyunga I was reminded of the problems faced in conserving Australian wildlife. Homesick settlers brought reminders of Britain with them and released them without thought of the devastation that they would wreak on the native fauna. Cats, foxes and rabbits have eaten the smaller marsupials - or eaten their food. The Australian conservation agencies now have their hands full attempting to redress the balance.

My second reminder that this wasn't Europe was when I got to the gate to pay - I was planning to ask about the walking routes in the park, but there was noone there to ask - payment works on a trust system with specially designed envelopes for the entrance fee that allow you to fill in your details and remove a completed ticket for the park and leaves a carbon copy of your details on the envelope.

 In the car park I caught up with the relief warden. He knew only the basics of the route, but quizzed me on my preparation. Had I got water with me? A hat? Food? Suitable walking shoes? Did I know that it was quite a long way, with some steep climbs? I passed muster.

The walk started in the next car park. Down the slope and over the foot bridge, I turned the corner and the path started climbing. I was just thinking that I would stop and take a photo when a kangaroo came out of the bush 10 meters or so ahead of me, turned up the path and effortlessly motored up the hill. It wasn't even trying. I wondered why our ancestors thought putting one foot in front of the other and giving up tails was such a great idea ...

I admit to arboreal prejudice: Eucalyptus are those sad trees with peeling bark and drooping branches, that are grown in serried ranks in various parts of the world to provide quick growing poor quality timber. Worse still, their dead leaves supress any kind of undergrowth, and having left the herbivorous insects that normally munch on them behind in their native habitat, they are almost devoid of insect life: as a result they support little in the way of birds and other larger beasts. I now have to admit that I was wrong: Eucalyptus are beautiful:

Like any other trees that have grown by themselves, they are scattered through the landscape, and even trees of the same species come in diverse shapes and sizes. The white barks of the common species in this woodland are eerily beautiful.

I had a problem, though. I didn't have names for anything. Until I could find out their proper names, I had to create mental reminders. There was the bird that sounds like a 1970's production of the BBC radiophonic workshop, and the trunk of this tree looks like one leg of a pair of baggy old-fashioned stripey pyjamas:

This plant got the mental sobriquet of "burnt pineapple":

A bit later I found some with knee-length skirts and flower spikes:

In the evening, I would learn that the burning is done to manage fire risk, and that the skirt hem reaches the ground if not burnt; that their more usual name is, not surprisingly, grass tree - or Xanthorrea preissii; and most impressive of all, that they grow at the rate of about a centimeter a year - so the 3-4 meter high plants that I saw occasionally are 300-400 years old.

The path I was walking on was broad and easy to follow. The problem came at junctions. At one point I realised that I was redescending into the river valley, when I should have been staying high on the ridge, and had to backtrack a kilometer to the last junction. After a while, I began to worry that I was still not on the right path, and that I would end up not being able to loop back. I decided that if it wasn't clear by 1pm that the path did this, I would turn around and retrace my steps. At 10 to 1 I finally joined up with the Echidna path - the one I was looking for. After that, there were markers at regular intervals:

Good things come in bunches and a few minutes after finding my way again, I heard a rustle in the bushes. I'd heard these before, and scoured the bush for some small fleeing creature. This time I did the same and realised that it's a rather larger beast that's making the noise:

It's a western grey kangaroo, and its friends weren't quite so keen to be photographed:

The route of the path is well-designed, with the early part climbing up and down sun-exposed hillsides, but curling back down to a relaxed shady walk along the river.

There are some birds new to me on the river, including Pacific black duck:

and Australian wood duck:

- as well as the ubiquitous galah:

Alongside the path are lawn-like grassy slopes. After a while I came across the lawn-maker and lawn-mower:

Despite having a joey in her pouch, she seemed much less fearful than the others I saw - perhaps because there are more walkers on this path, or because the grazing is particularly succulent - and let me get quite close without seeming unduly disturbed. In the end it was her that stayed, and me that left to visit another reserve. My destination was a reserve called Karakamia - pronounced Cracker-my-a (my as in 'belonging to me'). This is a relatively small area, of about two and a half square kilometers, that has been protected with a predator-proof fence, and subjected to intensive poison-baiting. There are still regular checks, but no signs of foxes or cats have been found inside the reserve for over a year.

There are 294 species of mammals living in Australia, and apart from the bats, the species introduced by man - from the dingo 40,000 years ago, onwards -, and the duck billed platypus and echidna, they are all marsupials. They range in size from the red kangaroo down to rabbit and mouse-sized species, and it is the smaller ones that have been particularly hard-hit, largely through fox and cat predation, and have now been excluded from large areas of mainland Australia. Krakamaia is one of the few sanctuaries where they can thrive. Indeed some of the species breed sufficiently well that individuals bred at Krakamia are used to repopulate other areas.

Many of these small mammals are nocturnal, and the two hour tour starts as night falls, and is led by a guide armed with a powerful spotlight. We saw five species of marsupial: western grey kangaroo, tammar wallaby, woylies, brush-tailed possums and bandicoots. The tammar wallabies are only a little larger than quokkas (up to about 60 cm):

The real speciality of Krakamia is the woylie:

The Krakamia population is by far and away the healthiest in Australia. Although they produce one offspring at a time, they can produce one every ten weeks in good conditions, and this means that many individuals can be released elsewhere. The worrying development is that, while the Krakamia population is still doing well, nearly all of the wild populations have crashed in the last few years. It seems that there may be two diseases involved, and all releases from Krakamia have stopped (there's no sign of disease there, and the released animals don't seem to be the source of the problem. This last photo of a mother woylie with a youngster at foot is a terribly poignant reminder of just how near the brink many of these species are.