In the Wild (1992) s01e16 Episode Script

These lizards are different species.
They're all about the same size, they eat the same sorts of food.
But animals need more than food.
They need cover, a place to live.
(THEME MUSIC) When most people think of Queensland, they think of the Barrier Reef and the rich, lush rainforest and jungle and the coastal country.
But most of Queensland's out here.
An open wooded savannah.
Sparse grassland, lots of cattle, a few rugged ranges with little bits of jungly sort of country in the gullies and long winding rivers, billabongs and vast plains.
My scientific friend said it was a dead area, and I suppose to a Queenslander who has all the wealth of that jungle country, it is dead.
But that attracted me because if an area is biologically dead, there has to be a reason.
So I went to what was said to be the deadest region of all - the central savannah area of tropical Queensland.
(CHUCKLES) It looks pretty dead.
This is it.
Fairly low, even sort of trees.
There are different species.
There's wild cotton and there's gum trees and there's paperbarks.
There's all different sorts, but they all have one thing in common - a long narrow trunk that goes up to a canopy.
In the treetops, there's blossom and nectar so there's plenty of food for birds like these lorikeets and honeyeaters.
The ground's a different story.
As these trees die, they're either destroyed by the fires that go through or alternatively the termites get them.
Now, termites are a major feature of this landscape.
Here's one of the common sorts - a long, flat, thin termite mound with turrets and you can see the new part from this season's wet with the new mud brought up.
There's a completely different one - a great, big, nobby buttress like a piece of sculpture.
In this case, each of these nobby flanges contains the food.
These two sorts of termites gather grass, but this one is the true wood-eater.
He's hollowing this stump out and destroying the stump.
There's one that eats leaves.
He builds a track along the ground and just wanders and as he finds the leaves, he eats them.
There's one that eats bark.
He puts a sheath up the outside of the tree trunk and eats the bark.
So here we've got a situation where all dead vegetation is either eaten by termites and turned back into nutrient or burned so the ground becomes totally bare.
That's one reason for lack of wildlife - no place to live.
These galleries which are all over Australia indicate that this area, like many others, was a home for thousands of Aboriginals in the past.
These paintings are food animals.
Fish, crocodiles, jabirus and you follow him down and there's an echidna - all good food animals.
You'll notice I don't touch the paintings.
If ever you find paintings like this, look at them but don't touch them because that destroys them.
Here's the hearth where the Aboriginal people lived - the charcoal from their fires for century after century.
Family after family owned this place, came here, lived here off this land, passed on - father to son, mother to daughter.
Back up in there is a sandy wash coming down the hillside, over the charcoal and floating it out, and in that sandy wash there are no tracks.
If these people could find the wildlife here, so much they made 'em paintings, why aren't they here now in this deserted, alone place? Well, there's one answer right there - pig diggings.
Pigs released here by Captain Cook and the early settlers spread right across this country.
This one's been this one's been gouging.
But there's something in there.
Yeah, another invader.
Have a good look at you.
Beautiful animal, isn't he? Really, I mean, frogs are Iovely beasts.
But I don't think there's a more dangerous animal in Australia at this moment than this animal - the cane toad.
It's a killer.
It kills lizards and snakes Even deadly poisonous snakes like the taipan have died from eating this animal.
It even kills people.
A family of people have died from eating this animal.
It doesn't bite them or anything like that.
It is a totally poisonous animal.
These two great big lumps are poison glands, but from what we know of the animal, the whole skin is poisonous and the records of the people who've worked on this show that almost every animal that eats this frog dies.
Now, there are some exceptions.
There's one that's been eaten.
At the moment, the green tree ants are eating the remnants of the carcass.
They don't seem to be affected.
But the animal that ate this just ate out the only non-poisonous part, which is here.
Any more and he would have died.
There are things like water rats that eat the tongue and a bit of the back leg.
That's not poisonous.
Crows and silver gulls But the most important predator And quite by chance I picked one up a little while ago so I can show you one.
I couldn't put them together right now, but when he gets a bit bigger, this little fellow - the freshwater snake - he eats toads and he's the only animal we know that eats toads and tadpoles and eggs without any ill effect.
Now, that's a native Australian snake.
The reason why this toad is so deadly on the Australians? I think he was introduced into Queensland in about the 1930s to control, oh, two or three insects that were seriously affecting the sugar cane.
Unfortunately, the toad didn't ever manage to control them, but it did manage to control everything else.
Native cats, bandicoots, all the predatory birds, all the predatory reptiles have grabbed that to eat it, they've died and they die within three minutes of biting the thing, it's that quick, the poison.
And so one of the reasons why all of this country is diminished in animal numbers is that the predators, the things that eat other things, have been poisoned by animals like that.
And so this animal, which on the face of it looks very friendly, very beautiful, is in fact the most dangerous and if ever I had to say it, I would say, "Go out and kill a cane toad now," because that seems to be the only way we can control these.
The real invaders, though, are these and these - the Aboriginals who came from the north and moved south and the white man who came from the south and moved north and all of these invaders changed it to what it is now and it's still undergoing the impact of the old ones and the new ones.
They're all fighting each other.
It's our heritage, and we protect our heritage.
We have legislation, but, more important, we have people who think about it.
I don't think there's an Australian alive except some of those half-witted drongos who draw on walls and rocks who wouldn't take notice of that sign.
We've got that sort of legislation in Queensland for wildlife.
They even protect butterflies.
It's superb legislation.
But we don't have the same feeling, we don't have the same public awareness.
It's up to you to back the wildlife protection and make that work for wildlife.
But even with protective legislation, there's still the problem of managing the land to get a return.
The prime product of this country is cattle and cattle management hasn't changed very much since the first pioneers came here in the early 1870s.
The free-running range cattle are mustered yearly.
And to keep the grass sweet the musterers burn right across the country.
Australian bush is what's called fire-climax.
That means it regenerates after a burn.
But if you burn every year, the suckers and the seedlings don't get a chance.
Those that survive grazing are burnt off before they seed and so certain species disappear forever.
And then overuse and overgrazing and thoughtless clearing all cause erosion and once that starts in these soils, it doesn't stop.
Before the white man came, there was natural balance, but with the stock overload, the waterholes were the first to suffer.
This was once a beautiful lily lagoon.
Now it's a trodden muddy mess.
Up here in the rocks, where the cattle can't reach, there's an untouched lagoon.
A magnificent place, still with its full wealth of wildlife.
So this country, with its scars of man, is pretty unproductive in the daytime.
But the other way of verifying and checking just what's left here is to go out at night with a spotlight because even at the best of times, most of our animals are nocturnal and the spotlight shows up beautifully anything that moves.
MAN: There's one! HARRY BUTLER: See, behind that branch.
I can't see what he is.
He's gone right up.
It's a possum.
I'll give the tree a shake.
There we go.
Come on, come on.
(CHITTERS) Come on.
Hey.
Come on.
There you are.
Yes.
There you are.
Oh, goodness gracious.
What excitement.
(CONTINUES CHITTERING) What an adventure! Come on.
Come across.
Let's go back to the light and have a look at you.
Yeah.
Oh, goodness me.
Look at it! Just look at that.
At the moment, he's not very happy.
Being shaken out of a tree is not the very best of life.
It's a sugar possum, or glider.
Here's the wings.
They're not really wings.
They're just membranes between the legs and when the animal is loose or wants to move from tree to tree, he jumps out and spreads them out and actually parachutes or glides.
The tail - that beautiful long tail - that's his rudder and he flaps it or moves it to twist himself in the air.
You might have seen him when he jumped or was shaken from that tree, desperately trying to get around to the next tree.
Just couldn't make it 'cause he came off on the wrong angle.
Superb claws, very strong.
A bit ticklish.
No claw on the inner toe, the thumb, but the rest are very sharp hook claws and he can really grip and hang on.
The front paws are the same, just as sharp.
And it's a beautiful sight to see one of these things up in the bush (MUNCHES) eating away at some little bug that he's caught up in the treetops.
Beautiful things, and that face I mean, how could you hurt an animal like that? A beautiful little thing.
In the daytime, he's in a hollow log, fast asleep, rolled up in a tight little ball.
Well, you can just imagine how tight that ball is.
He fits into my hand beautifully.
And if we wrap his tail around there, that's the way he'd be sleeping during the day.
There should be lots of these animals in this particular sort of forest.
It's made for them.
And yet this is the only one we've seen tonight.
In fact, that's the whole story of night-time here - there's been very little about, not even the birds, the owls and things, which would normally prey on these.
Ow! Ooh, my thumb.
(CHITTERS) Come on, little one.
Simmer down.
That's it.
Well, this might be the survivor to carry on the new race.
Perhaps we'll get a good look at him as he goes up the tree.
You can go on this one.
Here we are.
Now, now, now, now, now.
Just let's have another look at that wing - it's just so beautiful - so everybody can see it.
There it is.
Oh, you lovely little man.
Alright, you ready? Off you go, then.
(CHUCKLES) That's what he thinks of us! (BIRDS TWITTER AND CHIRP) The whole of this savannah country is bisected by these glorious rivers - lots of lush, thick vegetation and you'd think it'd be a refuge for all sorts of wildlife, but it's not.
Because when the wet comes every year, the floods come down And you can see the debris.
That's reasonable.
But as you go up, you can see just how high the floods reach.
The whole valley becomes a drowned area of water.
Every living thing is driven out or drowned out, forced out of these lush areas.
When the floods go away and the rivers retreat back to their pools, then the active mobile animals move in - the wallabies There's one up there.
A brown tree snake.
You can see his bands.
Beautiful movement.
Now, he's hunting for the birds that have moved in to take up this abandoned area.
But the ground fauna, the real basis of an ecosystem, they're wiped out, they don't get back here, and so these apparent oases and lush places are really only seasonal refuges - the dry season.
In the wet season, they're completely unliveable.
If you come here at the right time when the rest of the country is dry all of the birds that have moved back in after the wet or survived during the wet will be clustered around the waterholes.
You can sit down quietly and there's this tremendous medley and mass of birds and there's singing and darting movement.
There's birds everywhere.
But if you're a biologist, if you're a naturalist and you look, you realise that that tremendous profusion is in fact restricted to a few species and that the species number has declined.
There are less birds.
Even though there are more in numbers of certain sorts, there are less birds here than there would be in an untouched area.
Did you see that? It's a red-browed pardalote with a beak full of food for a family down in that burrow.
But she's pretty nervous with me here.
Ahh, there she goes, back to feed the family.
There's one hole that's well-occupied.
Let's have a look at it.
It goes back under this log.
That raised mound of mud and the web tells that it's a spider of some sort.
I have a fair idea what it is, but let's find out.
Yeah, that's a big hole.
It goes right down into the bottom of this termite mound.
Whatever it is, it's a pretty big animal.
It's alright for you lot.
I'm the one who's gotta do the digging.
Hello.
Here we are.
Come on.
Ooh, look at those fangs.
This fella's dinkum.
Come on.
That that's the bird-eating spider, one of the big hunting spiders in this country.
That probably turns a lot of you off.
This feels like a kiwifruit - a little bit prickly, furry, but soft and yet very firm.
It's a nice feel, really.
Those fangs - just as dangerous and lethal as snakebite.
Very closely related to the funnel-web spider - a very common poisonous beast in the Sydney area.
They live in these long tunnels and they catch and eat birds.
Those great jaws, those great powerful jaws there can actually crush a bird.
He'll leap on a small bird like a finch, or a lizard or a frog, and crush it and there he goes.
Now see he's rearing up, warning me to leave him alone.
Got that rearing situation, but he's still half bluffing because if he was real, the fangs would be extended.
Those fangs are mobile.
They can come out of the jaw and protrude forward.
That's when you know when they're really stirred up.
I'll just flip this fellow over.
He doesn't want to go over.
If he'd bite me now, I'd be quite sick.
Yeah, he's getting angry now.
You can see the fangs coming out and biting at the ground.
Very strong indeed.
They're used for digging these holes in the ground too.
This ground's quite hard.
It took my steel knife all its time to get through and yet his fangs are able to dig and bite and make that tunnel.
When he's in there, he covers the mouth with a web and anything that's bold enough to go down meets the spider in the tunnel.
So he's a survivor because there's enough food for him still despite these conditions and there's also enough protection for him.
Well, we'll cover him up.
Give him a chance to survive.
Alright.
This is how it ends up.
Burnt, bare, a few ant-eaten logs on the ground termites riddled through them.
A few ant nests.
A few spiders.
A few snails, all dead from the burning.
It's funny - you know, people think that whenever you turn over a log there's something gonna be there.
In this case, there's nothing.
The ground is dead except for some of the microfauna which only leaves one refuge.
If an animal can climb, there may still be some things in the tops of the trees.
Ahh, some tracks.
(CHUCKLES) He's pretending he's not there, desperately trying to be a piece of tree.
(WOOD CREAKS) Come on! I don't want to hurt him.
Poor fella.
What a shock.
A little black-tailed goanna.
He's probably the symptom of the survivors of this country.
He's too small to be a threat to man or his animals, so man doesn't kill him.
He's too small to be tucker for the Aborigines so they don't hunt him.
He's fast enough to go up a big tree and escape most of the predators that are here like pigs and cats and foxes and things like that.
He's too small to tackle a cane toad so he doesn't get poisoned.
And he can survive in the treetops so that when the wet comes, he can escape.
And unless you can do all of those things you're not a survivor in this savannah country.
This is indeed a barrier area.
It's a barrier between two sets of ranges.
All of the invaders have come across it, it's offered no resistance and it's now reshaping and remoulding.
Now, unless we care about places like this - the ugly, the unattractive, the unaware places - we end up with nothing.
Because it's from these places that the wellspring, the source of the whole Australian heritage arises.
We'll let you go back up on a tree again.
(THEME MUSIC)