In the Wild (1992) s01e09 Episode Script

Some of these things which the animals look for, for eating are also good for eating for people.
This is one of them.
That's a witchetty grub.
They're edible.
Now, the art in eating them is very simple.
You just pinch the head between your thumb and your finger like that tap them on your other thumbnail to get the last of the black boy dust off.
Mmm.
They're really delicious - um, like a cross between sweet almonds, sweet blanched almonds, and, um, perhaps a very delicate frog's leg.
Very, very tasty indeed.
They are really good doogs.
Now, these these are first class.
They'd never go on the gourmet menu because they're just so hard to get.
(FOOTSTEPS APPROACH) This is jarrah forest.
Completely typical and very much associated with the history of Western Australia.
150 years ago, the first settlers came to the Swan River Colony.
They'd crossed the coastal plain country and they came into this sort of forest.
And it broke their hearts.
A vast, grey mass - that's the only way I can describe it.
Rolling hills, dense trees, thick timber, no features.
The forest extends from just north of Perth to east of Albany.
The settlers persisted and hacked out their farms and even today the same pattern is there - little pockets of farmland in the great forest.
But it wasn't really the farms that mattered, it was the forest itself and the timber that came from it that opened the land up.
And when modern technology came, the little mill towns disappeared.
And now, these places are battlefields - a battle between the native plants trying to take back the land and the plants that the settlers brought in which are spreading and desperately trying to establish themselves and hold their own.
These places, with their blend of parkland and bush are automatically places where people come for picnics.
And they bring their children out.
It's such a lovely place.
And yet this beauty contains all sorts of danger - old rusty iron and broken glass can harbour anything.
Inside there you get all sorts of biteys and nasties.
There's one now.
In fact, there's two there.
But one of them is particularly bitey and nasty for children.
Yes.
Wait till I catch him.
We need this bloke for a little talking point.
Come on, little man.
Down you go.
That's it.
Yes, this is a dugite, or brown snake - one of the very dangerous animals in the area.
It looks like any other of the common brown snakes in Australia and, in fact, is one of the brown snake family.
This particular sort of dugite is called a kabarda because of these odd black spots scattered along, like that one there.
The other odd black spots are ticks.
Quite a friendly looking snake, but he is one of Australia's killers.
The fangs, if I can get him to open his mouth are very, very short.
They're in the upper jaw.
You see them there? These are quiet, non-aggressive snakes, but if they do get annoyed, they stand up and fight.
And at this time of the year - he's just come out Listen to him hiss.
Oh, dear me.
He's upset with his mouth open.
He's just come out from his winter sleep and he's been brewing his poison for a whole winter.
And so now he is really strong.
Now, you might ask, "How do you tell a dugite or a brown snake "from any other sort of snake?" It's under the tail that matters.
You see this belly scale pattern, which is single scales all the way up until you get to the vent, and then from there on there's a zigzag line goes right up the middle of the tail.
They're called sub-caudals and that zigzag line differentiates this snake from most of the others.
As I say, he's he's pretty harmless - except if he bites you.
But he gets out of your way.
He doesn't bother to chase you and attack you.
Most of these snakes are very quiet and very peaceful.
Let him go, and we'll just see what he does.
Now, he's going into his defence position.
And now all he wants to do is get away.
He's not really interested in biting me.
The other thing is the redback.
Just as dangerous, but doesn't move as far.
Very lethal animals, these.
This is a female, loaded with eggs, and she's particularly aggressive at this time.
Broken tin, broken bottles, snakes, killer spiders - all things that make this particular battleground a very dangerous place to be.
Just across the way is the forest pure, untouched, with its original inhabitants, and it includes some very remarkable things.
This is a zamia, genus Macrozamia, and this is the male plant.
Right alongside is his wife, the female plant.
The only difference is their fruits.
Not the number, but the actual type of fruit.
The male, this fellow, produces spores.
I've broken one so you can see.
And each leaf, each frond has got thousands of spore cups on the back.
And as these ripen, they just spill out on the ground like flour, great masses of white flour spilling out.
You can see it spilling, all around.
The female, on the other hand has got each leaf has two little fruits attached.
Like so.
And these fruits, as they ripen, become pollinated either by animals or by wind-carried spores from the male and turn into red fruits which are very readily eaten.
In the middle of each red fruit is a nut.
This one was eaten by a wallaby.
And you can still see the teeth marks of the wallaby on it.
Sometimes they're eaten completely.
Once they're dry nuts like this, then the bush rats come to them, and they eat them right out and hollow them completely.
But they're still not wasted because they then become the home for other animals.
This one has an animal living inside it.
Quite a large animal.
And it's a very safe place, unless it happens to be an emu or something that can swallow the nut whole.
And he'd digest the animal and pass the nut away.
These zamia fruits are a very important understorey food source.
They are edible to people, but they contain quite a nasty poison called ricin which has to be leached out with water.
And the Aboriginals used to eat them by soaking the fruits in a stream and then baking them and pounding the red flesh and getting it off.
But it gives cattle rickets and so cattle don't come in to zamia palm country a great deal.
That helps to preserve this oasis area, this area of wildlife refuge in the centre of a country that is developed.
It's become an island, which is really what an oasis is all about.
Another fascinating plant is this one, a black boy - really a sort of lily.
Its dead trunk is a good home for many sorts of animals.
Mmm.
Now, that's something that's rather difficult to believe.
What sort of animals are these? They are animals.
They're insects, very special insects.
But they're more than that.
They're also a cradle and a cocoon.
This is the bird of paradise fly and the male looks like a fly - a little tiny thing like a mosquito with a bunch of gauzy feathers in his tail or little hairs and he flies through the forest.
And the female waits in a hollow log.
Great big lubberly lumbering thing, she is.
He comes along and visits her and flies off again.
And she gets pregnant and then she settles down to a big, shapeless mass.
Then a remarkable thing happens.
She turns her body inside out and lays the eggs actually in a reverse cavity inside her own body.
And the eggs hatch out and this one is the shell from last year's hatching out.
And this one is the one that's now out.
Now, I'll just put that up there and we'll just give it a bit of a squeeze.
That's enough.
You can just see you can just see the eggs coming out.
The body cavity is starting to reverse outwards and the eggs are coming out.
Won't squeeze it too much.
Put it back, and you can see from the print on my hand where she gets her common name from - mealy bug.
They're related to the cossids and the laq bugs that produce cochineal and lacquer, the galls that you find on trees, they're the same group of animals.
Now, that bark's still stuck to the tree.
That's not.
It's loose.
Aha! You beauties.
Scared of snakes? Don't be scared of these.
They're poisonous, but they won't really worry you.
They're little whip snakes.
Denisonias.
Denisonia gouldii.
That little bloke's a wee bit jumpy, so we'll let him go back into his nice, moist bit of cover.
It's easy to see why they like this bark - nice and wet and cool.
That's a good-size specimen.
This is probably a mated pair, a male and a female.
Short, broad head.
Typical poisonous-snake head.
Very small neck.
Hard to tell.
Tongue flickering.
She's checking me out.
Decides I'm not really dangerous and so just let's have a look around, see what's going on.
You do these things again and again and again - every day you go and turn over a log and lift up a piece of bark and it never gets boring, because every time, it's something new and something different.
But even if it's the same animal it's just a delight to find them, all the time.
Come on, we've destroyed your home, so we'll put you back in again.
Come on.
There you go.
Come here.
We'll crawl on top there.
Yeah.
People amaze me, you know? They they say, "Oh, the beauty of the bush.
" And they're talking about wildflowers and static things like this, and you've got lovely animals like this, which are completely beautiful, and always And yet the immediate reaction is "Chop, chop, chop! "Kill them as quick as you can.
" These things are far more beautiful and they have the added attraction of being mobile beauty.
Flowers are delightful, but they're static, apparently dead.
These are marvellous.
We don't want you out there because a kookaburra might get you, so we'll put you back in underneath - underneath.
And although I've destroyed their home, we'll at least replace it enough to give you a bit of cover.
There.
That's a bit better.
(BIRD CALLS) Kookaburra.
Probably the best-known of all the Australian birds.
It's used as our real symbol.
And yet in this forest it's a killer.
It was introduced to Western Australia and it's just another exotic animal in the jarrah forest that destroys the fauna.
In that nest are three baby birds, just hatched out.
We won't disturb them, but what I have done is taken a handful of the stuff that's on the bottom of the nest.
And if we have a good look at it, you can see the sort of things that kookaburras eat.
There's beetles, birds, frogs, native mammals - all the things that live in the forest.
In the country where this bird belongs, NSW and Victoria, its natural habitat, there's a big tree-climbing goanna, the lace goanna.
And it walks around the forest there, it hears this sort of thing, this very faint "Peep, peep, peep" of the young birds, up the tree it goes, and uses kookaburras for dinner.
So there's a natural balance.
But in the west Australian forest, those lizards don't occur.
And so we have a case where kookaburras just build up and proliferate and because they were never here before, the native animals haven't got any protection against them.
They have established a place within the forest range and they've spread right over the jarrah forest country.
Where it cuts out, the kookaburra seem to disappear.
Very interesting animals.
Most amusing.
But, oh, dear, what they do to small birds, small animals And, you know, you talk about them killing snakes.
Most of the snakes that you see kookaburras with are either legless lizards, or because people think they kill snakes, they say, "Ah! There goes a kookaburra, "something in its beak - it must be a snake.
" And so the story is perpetuated.
It's the same with all these animals.
You're conditioned to believe that snakes are bad, therefore kookaburras are good.
But they don't kill many snakes.
They get little baby ones or they get dead ones off the road.
They're sort of scavengers.
(KOOKABURRA CRIES) A lot of people have the impression that birds will abandon the nest if the nest is touched.
That's only some types of birds.
If you don't leave a fear scent and a strong man scent in the area, birds will come back to their nests quite well.
Because of the nature of jarrah, there's quite an amount of open, fairly bare ground, which is the home for a number of different sorts of animals frogs, which burrow and feed at night, and, of course, reptiles, particularly lizards.
These little skinks are the most common of all the animals that live on the forest floor.
Very voracious and hungry animals in a number of species.
This is a common little grey one that runs up and down on the wood.
This is called the rufous-throated skink, for obvious reasons.
Beautiful little animal.
They really are a lovely, dull, coppery-bronzy sheen on the back.
And this very attractive ruby throat.
Get underneath there.
This one is the big hunter of the forest floor.
The orange-bellied skink.
Or red-legged skink is another name for him.
A most attractive animal.
Very brilliantly coloured.
And he's lost the tip of his tail.
See that new tip growing? Just lost the very end.
He's growing a new one.
Because that's his problem.
He uses his tail as, um, bait.
He lurks under a piece of wood and just the tip of the tail sticks out and he twitches it, and a fly or something like that comes down, he grabs it.
That's the way he gets his food.
But apparently, this time a bird came down and grabbed it and he lost the tip of his tail.
Never mind, he grows a new one.
To people who love these forests, it seems as though the jarrah has got all the enemies there are - beetles and bugs that eat the trees, fires that sweep through, forestry itself, with tree cutting, but one you wouldn't really expect - sandhills.
This began perhaps 100 years ago when the first settler came in and took a flat, cleared it, and put stock on it.
But it was a sand flat.
And the winds caught it, blew the sand up, and the next thing, rolling dunes.
This was the road running out to his property - completely covered by 100ft of sandhill, which is rolling in, drowning the forest out.
Even these dune areas have a very valuable use in a managed situation.
One of the biggest problems facing the jarrah forest is a disease called dieback, a fungus disease which is transported mainly on the wheels of vehicles.
And one of the ever-growing sports in this country is the use of off-road vehicles and dune buggies.
This area is a controlled area for the use of these things, so disease transmission is contained in this one area.
Everybody enjoys their sport, and the forest isn't threatened.
Over there behind me is where the plants have been successful and the regeneration has been successful.
You can still see little bits of sand but they're so broken up now, they'll quickly grow over.
This is the last big dune, but it's being held by this marram grass, it's called.
It works in two ways at least - firstly, very fibrous root mat runs along just under the surface of the dune and stops the wind picking the sand up, you can see here.
The leaves themselves are rolled to preserve and conserve their own moisture.
And this actual plant's structure catches blowing sand and lets it drop down at the base, so you get these little hillocks formed up.
And, of course, by catching the sand, it also catches the seeds for native plants that are blowing over.
And the whole thing builds up until it starts to be taken over by the native plants.
And you get little hillocks all around and animals manage to live.
About 100 years, and this is the result.
Stock, burning, introduced animals, and management - and it's still blowing.
The whole forest could become like this, if it wasn't for care and consideration, care and conservation.
Forestry works towards those ends.
They help the whole relationship of animals, plants and the land.
(CHUCKLES) Oh.
Oh, you lovely thing.
This is the sort of thing you get when you get up early.
You get out first light, and there's still tracks and there's still things just going away for the night, particularly if there's a heavy cloud cover.
This is a rat kangaroo, or woylie.
And it's what this oasis is really about.
It's one of the many rewards for getting up early.
This poor little lady's been in a fight.
Quite a bad one, by the look of it.
Maybe a fox or a cat, but I don't think so, because there's no actual teeth or scratch marks.
Much more likely one of her own clan.
A male, probably.
And she's been kicked out of her own area.
And she's been looking for somewhere to go and got caught by the light and ended up in a not very good sheltering log.
Today she'd work her way into that, digging and scratching with these very strong front digging claws.
Rat kangaroos are beautiful animals, but very nervous, of course.
And she's very unhappy about being caught.
These feet are very special.
All the marsupials, the kangaroo family, have got this split toe, which is their combing toe.
It's what they comb their fur with.
And this superb tail, which rolls up in such a nice little ball, like that is used to carry bundles of sticks and make nests, where the black boys hang down, for example, form a frond, that makes Alright.
I know.
In the early days they were very, very common, very frequent in this country.
And then they disappeared about 1930.
They used to be all over the south-west corner, right up, well, even as far north as Broome.
That's hardly south-west, that's the Kimberleys.
And they suddenly vanished.
Now, in a few isolated pockets, a few oases, in this forest country, where forestry has been practised for 100 years, like here, these are starting to be, starting to re-emerge and re-establish.
They've fought the problem of the introduced animals.
They've fought the problem of man and his regular burning and his incursions, and now they're coming back.
This Now, now, now, now.
No sudden movements.
That's my problem.
This whole area, which is forestry, is being worked by a special group of foresters who are studying the wildlife here.
It's a wildlife refuge area.
And so this fellow, I'll take back to their headquarters.
She'll get a tag in her ear and then we'll bring her back and put her in this same place so she can re-establish her territory.
That way, the foresters are able to keep track of each animal.
The tag lets us know exactly what the population is - what they eat, how far they move, how big a territory they need, and, most important, what sort of places they need to live.
And all of that put together makes up wildlife management.
And by management is the only way we can keep these animals alive.