In the Wild (1992) s01e08 Episode Script

Come on! (CHUCKLES) Alright, then! Don't be frightened.
What's the matter with you? It's a bandicoot, or quenda, to give it an Aboriginal name.
You see those great, strong claws on his back feet.
Come on.
Oh, dear, dear, dear me.
Oh! The front claws are very long and slender for digging.
I think we'll let this fellow go.
Uh-uh-uh! You're a beautiful man! (THEME MUSIC) Everybody who comes to the south-west corner of WA travels along this road, through this particular eucalyptus forest.
For me, it's a revisit.
Five years ago, I did a biological survey here.
And it's going to be very interesting to see what changes and developments have taken place in that five years.
Tuart is only found in this corner of the continent.
The coastal limestones adjacent to the sea are the key to eucalypt survival, but you've gotta get off the main road, into the bush, to see what I'm looking for.
And then you've gotta get out of the vehicle, because the noise of the vehicle spoils everything.
Once you're out, the living kaleidoscope of sound and smell and sight of life itself makes the experience of just being here quite unique.
This is probably the most important forest on the coastal plain.
This is tuart.
It's not a terribly important timber, but from a conservation and naturalist's point of view, it's important because it's a forest that was won back from the developers.
When this colony was first settled, one of the first areas to be taken up was this Vasse-Busselton area.
It was even called 'cattle-chosen', because cattle escaped from the first settlers and chose their own pastures in this natural grassland under the tuart forest.
It was already cleared.
Just big sticks of tuart, a few little copses of understorey of peppermint, and the rest was grassland.
And so it became very useful - no extra work.
You just put your cattle in and that was it.
At the time of Federation, when Australia first became a nation, one of the first things they decided on as a nation was a forest policy.
And some wise person in those times suddenly realised there was no tuart forest left.
And the then premier of WA, Sir John Forrest, gave back part of his landholdings in this area to form this tuart forest.
And for many years, it was managed as though it was a farm.
They ran cattle through it, grazing it, burnt it every so often.
But because they ran the cattle, they kept the grass down and didn't have to burn nearly as much.
And then it was discovered there were no young tuarts.
The whole forest consisted of big trees.
There were no babies.
And a very intensive research program was set up to find out what makes tuarts grow.
And this is the answer - burning and ash bed.
All of the dead timber and the understorey is scraped up and burnt at the right time.
The seeds come down from the canopy into the ash bed like that, and when the rains come, up comes a stand of tuart.
Over there, you can see the way the tuarts have formed along an old ash bed just like that.
Where the canopy is taken away, the peppermint comes in, and that's a very important understorey too because the peppermint is very dense and thick and it provides a shelter for certain species like the ring-tailed possum and small birds and things like that.
They can't live up in these - they can't get their food - but they can live in the understorey.
In the open spaces, the peppermint forms full-height copses, little forests in themselves.
Peppermint's not a eucalypt.
It's a plant called agonis, and it gets its name from the strong pepperminty smell.
The smell of peppermint and the smell of honey is forever in the air within this forest.
And it's the honey and the blossom under cover which provides all the various places where things can live in the hollows and up in the branches.
Now, that's what I'm talking about.
In this understorey level, very little can be on the ground unless it's in a hollow log.
Most things are up in the trees, nesting.
That nest is not a bird's nest.
That's an animal's nest.
And it's peculiar to this peppermint understorey.
Let's see if I can get him to come out.
Come on.
Come on.
Oh! (TUTS) Oh.
Mum left the nest.
She's gone up higher.
But she left the children home.
Gotta see them.
Twins.
Ahh! Yes, twin ring-tails - a boy and a girl.
Just big enough to be looking after themselves and just enough for mum to go away and leave them.
She's up the top of the tree, watching very anxiously.
Not gonna hurt them.
It's alright.
You see why they're called ring-tails.
This lovely long tail, it's prehensile and curls around.
Twists around when they're up in the trees, hanging on.
Makes an extra leg.
Ohh, yes! Come on, then.
Oh, there.
Don't be so serious.
Goodness gracious me.
Come on, then.
Come on, then.
Come on, the twins.
Oh, come on, you lovely things.
The little girl's got a pouch if we can get to it.
That's the little boy.
We'll put him over there.
Come here, baby.
The girl's got a pouch.
Come on.
There it is.
It's a true mammal, true marsupial.
They eat insects and birds' eggs, frogs - all those sort of things.
And if they can, they build up their diet on eucalyptus leaves and these peppermints.
Eucalyptus is pretty rare, but they will chew a little bit of the young tips.
They'll come into gardens and eat roses, fruit, all that sort of thing.
They become quite a pest in town.
But their pest quality has got nothing when you compare them to the beauty of the animals.
(SOFTLY) Goodness gracious me.
Hey? I think we're gonna put you on the tree where mum is.
Now they'll go up the tree and she'll come down.
Any incident like this, any drama, is watched, because observation is a main method of survival in the bush.
Everything must survive, so every method is used.
These bees can sting, and there's lots of them.
But some animals are quite innocuous - no bite, no sting - so they use other techniques for survival.
Some of these insects are pretty hard to see.
Here's perhaps the best of all the camouflages - perhaps the best-known, anyway.
See him? He's desperately being a piece of dead grass.
He doesn't want to know me, because I might eat him.
Can't see him? Look.
Come on.
The walking-stick insect or stick insect.
Beautiful animal.
Absolutely perfectly camouflaged by shape and colour.
The whole body is attenuated and lengthened out.
Colour is the same as dead vegetation.
And he just goes into any position.
Whatever position he goes in, he freezes and he's very hard to tell.
I'll put him back on there.
As soon as I put him down, he finds a new position.
He rocks his body, like he is now, and that gives the impression of grass moving in the wind - because even when it's very still, grass tends to move a little bit.
So stick insects are perhaps the best of all They're phasmids, really - that's their name.
And they're leaf-eaters.
They're not praying mantises.
Many people think they are.
Protection is the name of the game, and camouflage stops you being eaten.
But it's not the only way to protect yourself from being eaten.
The most common way is to escape.
If anything threatens you, move to a safe place.
For the bird-watchers, these are the most marvellous places - these estuaries and lakes - because waterbirds, of all the birds, have a special charm for man.
They're out in the open, their enemies from land can't reach them, because of the water, and so you can see them.
There's a pelican coming in to land.
Beautiful flight, like a Sunderland flying boat.
Swans, pelicans, and those bobby black-and-white ones are stilts - white-headed stilts.
(STILTS HONK) Probably a couple of hundred of them in that lot.
They eat mosquito larvae.
Lord, look at them all! (CHUCKLES) On the fence post! A superb white egret.
(CROAKS) Once that musk duck goes underwater, he's pretty hard to follow to see what's happening, but out on land, we can use all the technology of the 20th century to see what the story of life is all about.
(BIRD CHIRPS) (SIGHS) Sometimes your nests are too high in very fragile trees.
And the rear-vision mirror off the car and a bush pole are all you need.
Put it up above the nest, look in, see the three eggs, or the young or whatever, and you don't disturb the birds or anything around.
You don't touch the nest.
I've obviously disturbed mum there.
She's very upset.
"Who's that?" You know the reason why? She saw herself in the mirror and she thought, "Goodness gracious, there's another fantail in my territory, at my nest!" And so she's really upset about it.
"Where's that other fantail gone?" She's now working around, looking for the other fantail.
So I think I'll quietly leave before she realises it's me and gives me a hard time.
And here, one of the rarest birds in the world the osprey, nesting.
It's not rare in the sense that you can't see ospreys.
It's rare because the pesticides that have been used for agricultural control all over the world have built up, and they come down a food chain until the predators - the big predators like birds of prey, these ospreys - end up getting enormous loads.
And they either make their eggs sterile or they make the eggshells so thin that they don't hatch - they crush.
By the way they're behaving, they've got eggs.
The fact that the two birds are there and they're both rather anxious about me being here indicates that they've got eggs.
If they had young, they'd just go right away.
The young would crouch down in the bottom of the nest and stay there, and they'd be hunting for food and watching.
Every time they got something, they'd go up in the air and look around, "Oh, he's still there.
" So go back and wait for a while.
Soon as I go, they'd come in and feed the young.
So that behaviour says, pretty well, "Eggs.
" One of the marvellous things about tuart forest is that it contains these very rare things - there's not many of them, and there's not much forest.
But what there is is really worth preserving.
And while you've got the forest, you've got these things too.
In a place that's as rich as this, every area has to have something living in it.
Foxes and cats have cleaned a lot of the ground fauna up.
But this is what I mean.
(CHUCKLES) I wonder, can you see this bloke? No.
Alright.
Prod him out.
(MUTTERS INDISTINCTLY) Come on.
Boy, oh, boy.
Doesn't wanna come out.
Oh, well (SNARLS) Stop it! Now, let's have a look at you.
Give you something to chew on - you can have a go at my hat.
There you are.
And away we go! Come on! Come here! Come outta there.
Oh, boy! (PANTS) These fellows are fast! I was about to say "If you put something down that he can bite, "he'll usually bite that" Ooh, eat, eat, eat, eat! "instead of me.
" And I can get a grip on him while he's getting a grip on that.
Phew! These fellas are really something! One of the most beautiful animals in this entire country.
It's the water rat, or beaver rat.
He's not a marsupial.
He's a native animal - a native rodent.
See his big webbed back feet.
Front feet are still rat-like, for digging.
And little white tip on his tail.
Just get a new grip on you, little man.
That's it.
He eats things like crabs, marron, mussels.
And they swim very, very well in the water swimming around, diving down just like a beaver.
Up they come and float on their back in the water with the muscle on their belly, just holding it, eating it, cracking it, like an otter.
Mostly, though, they'll come up on the bank and feed on little platforms.
They're an animal that came very close to extinction in the ooh, probably between 1910 and 1930.
The fur is exquisite.
And being a water rat, of course, it's waterproof.
And the fur trade of the world had an enormous demand for Australian water rat.
And they were trapped in their thousands - every waterway, trappers working - and the water rats were thinned down and thinned down.
And then, about the '30s, there was a wave of revulsion through the ordinary people's world against the slaughter of animals for the sake of beauty.
And the conservation movement really began then.
So this animal has been able to survive through the beginning of that movement.
Look at him go.
Straight down the bank, into the water.
A quick nose around and then off across the lake.
Effortless movement.
Really swimming along.
Because he knows where he's going.
This is his territory.
And because I happen to have disturbed last night's home, he's heading across the bank to another house that he's got on that side.
The tuart forest is really associated with the sea, with the coastal limestones that are formed by the hardening effect of rain on the coastal dunes.
This is the top of the limestone.
The lime and the sea winds and the salt all combine to change this area.
Enormous pressures on the plants.
Each one of these flowers - and there are hundreds here, all different sorts and shapes and colours that go right through the year - each one of them has evolved into this environment, this particular coastal heath, wind-pruned, limestone, sand-blasted, everything.
These plants have evolved to it.
And with the plants have evolved the insects.
And the two things have come up together - Australian wildflowers and Australian insects.
And when you look around at any of these bushes, there's a constant movement of insects coming and going.
And if you watch very closely, you'll see certain ones go to certain plants.
But overriding it all are the bees - just a common, ordinary garden bee.
See, the bees short-circuit these specialised pollination methods - the relationship between the Australian insects and the plants.
Now, these flowers, for example - tube flowers, like this one - they're really little clusters of flowers.
We'll just have a look at one.
The moths that pollinate these under normal conditions land on the top and their furry bodies pick up the pollen and they transfer it from one flower to another.
But the bees have found a very cunning way of doing it.
They burrow in under the side of the flower, bite through the base of the tube, and take the nectar out.
So they don't touch the pollinating part at all.
And as a result, long-tubed flowers have virtually disappeared from this landscape purely because of the bee selection.
And the flowers that bees can pollinate remain.
And, of course, that must change the environment.
But there's other ways bees do it too.
When the bees run wild - swarm from the hives of the apiarists - they go and nest in hollows.
And that's where native animals live.
And there's another, positive, way in which they affect the environment.
If a bird or animal learns to eat bees, learns to handle them, like the rainbow bird, which beats them in its beak and takes the sting out before it eats them, then that bird has got a big supply of food, and so it's advantaged and it builds up in numbers.
And whenever anything goes out of balance in an ecosystem, the whole ecosystem goes out of balance.
Bees have got a very important role in our agricultural scene.
They pollinate clovers and pastures and fruit trees because they come from the same country.
The bees and the introduced plants that we eat from come from the same areas - Europe and America.
But in these areas, which are reserved for the preservation of the Australian heritage, bees have no place, they have no part.
They're alien to this environment and by their very presence, they're changing it.
And we can't afford to have it changed in the slightest bit.
There is sufficient dynamics of the pressures of nature and climate, the pressures of the whole ecosystem itself, without throwing in these extra factors of bees and all the other introduced beasts, like foxes and rabbits and cats.
They all change, and we can't have it changed.