In the Wild (1992) s01e25 Episode Script

(BIRDS CHIRP) (COUGHS) That's sulfur - sulfur fumes.
And this area, this Burning Mountain which the Aboriginals call Wingen, was first recorded back in 1829 by Sir Thomas Mitchell.
He thought it might be a volcano but he was wrong.
Deep down under here, there are seams of coal which have been ignited, and they break through to the surface with these vents and fumaroles and crusts.
And where the coal is eaten away, the soil subsides.
You can see behind me the faults, the earth cracking and dropping away.
Some geologists think that it's been burning for 2,000 or 3,000 years because that whole valley that the New England Highway runs through just across there has got the same sort of faults on the other side.
If it was a factory, we'd deplore this ash and smoke and smell.
But because it's a natural phenomena, it's now a part of the National Parks system and is reserved as Australian heritage.
But after he left Wingen, Mitchell did find a volcano.
He came up that valley and he found this place.
And this is Kaputar.
It's now a national park.
And after Mitchell and his reports, the settlers and the pioneers moved in and they cleared all the country and they developed incredibly rich, important farming areas.
But these hills were too rugged, too rugged to farm.
A few cattle ran on them and that was all.
(BIRDS CHIRP) And then a trust took it over because people started to become aware that this was Australia and this was worth saving.
It's now a national park.
What attracts people to it is its geology.
It's got spectacular scenery.
That's typical.
That's an old volcanic cone where the core of a volcano stuck up and the ash and the soil has eroded away and left that solid plug sticking up in the centre.
It's a superb sight.
And scattered right through here, there are more of them.
The only problem with Kaputar is the problem of any reserve in a situation like this - it's become an island.
It's completely surrounded by developed land.
A vast plain of development, of farming and roads and orchards and crops, and one little piece of bush left in the middle.
Oh, it's a big piece, but it's little in terms of what surrounds it.
So it's really an island.
And in these islands is where evolutionary changes take place.
And to a bushwalker, a naturalist, or the straight Australian who's interested in his own country, these are fantastic places to see - not only for their obvious physical beauty, their intrinsic value in geology, but the absolutely marvellous subtle changes that take place everywhere you look.
To walk through the bush here is really exciting.
And that's all you can do, because this is a national park.
And you can only walk through it and see it and enjoy it.
So let's look.
One of the nice things about Kaputar - there's only one road in it.
It was blasted out of the hillside.
And that's one of the things that protects it - people can't get here except on the road.
In the blasting, a new environment was made - a steep cut slope.
And the rock has provided a place for a specialised group of animals, like those.
These red fruit, of course, aren't really fruit at all.
They're giant carnivorous slugs, and they are only found on these mountains in this national park.
And that's a case of this isolation.
Because in the natural situation, this area was isolated by flat land.
These slugs developed into a particular type, redheads, if you like.
In other ranges in New South Wales and New England, the slugs are different coloured.
They're just as big but they're quite different coloured.
You can see the trail of slime where this fellow's gone around, hunting.
And now he's moving up that rock.
There's the eyes poking out.
There's the breathing hole coming under the mantle.
Because, of course, slugs are related to their nearest relative, snails.
And there's a native snail.
He's got a shell instead of having a body like this.
They're both molluscs, belonging to a group of animals called gastropods.
That means they walk on their belly, a great big flat foot.
Scattered all over the rocks, following up on the wet surfaces and grazing over the life that is attracted - the small insects and the larvae of small insects and, most important, other snails and slugs.
Fascinating animals.
But just one example of the way things start to inbreed and form their own type when you have isolation.
These cliff faces provide a trap for a lot of insects and, as a result, insect-eaters live there.
And up here there are some of the really dangerous animals in this country.
That hole is the hole of a funnel-web spider.
And there's a funnel-web.
And that's the dangerous one, that's the male.
You can tell by the palps.
He appears to have 10 legs.
The front two are the feelers, which are palps.
And it's either whether they're long - like this one, which is a male - or short, the female.
Now, this spider is more poisonous than most species of Australian snakes.
To be very much feared.
Do you know, Sydneysiders have this strange idea that you only find funnel-webs in Sydney.
There's one sort that's found in Sydney.
But in fact that group of spiders, which are very closely related to trapdoors, are found all over Australia.
Now, holding him down, hold his legs back.
Yeah, they're the fangs - the great massive jaws with the poison sacs.
And now you can see the fangs on the stick - those little pointy things - and see how long they are.
These animals, when they get aggressive, rear up and point those fangs forward and actually jump and strike.
And they'll reach about 3 foot high.
They're pretty dangerous animals and good things to leave alone.
There's an interesting animal, really common on these rock faces.
They're millipedes.
And what a fantastic way of moving.
All of those legs.
To me it's like the oars in a Roman galley with all the slaves pulling slightly out of order and that wave motion going down.
All those legs moving one after the other.
Fantastic sight to see.
The two in front aren't legs.
They're feelers.
And that little round head feeds around, and the feelers sense what's there.
And they graze on things like plant food, that sort of thing.
Very nice animals, millipedes.
They protect themselves by that hard armour plate but also by a stench.
And some millipedes have a very strong odour, which is a very good thing for protection because nothing wants to eat them.
When you walk along these trails in the park, everywhere there's things to be seen - in the leaves, on the ground, under bark, in the grass.
There's somebody watching - a dragon lizard.
An agamid is the group name of them, scientifically, but dragon is the name that most people call them by.
What a fierce appearance - big bulgy eyes.
But look closely - he's very worried about my presence.
There, he's gone.
This sort of eucalypt bush is burnt turned over, but it's got an enormous number of habitats in it.
Got grassland fallen logs from fires.
It's pretty rough stuff to get around in.
To work in this, you use all your senses - your eyes, your ears, your nose, even - and you find all sorts of things, both the continuum and the isolate.
Now, this little bloke is one of the isolates.
I got him this morning.
This little bloke is not only beautiful but he is one of the most exciting small mammals on the Australian landscape.
He's a marsupial belonging to the group of animals called dasyurids, and they include the native cats, the Tasmanian devil, the Tasmanian wolf.
And this particular one's name is antechinus.
Most people when they see him would imagine, "Oh, he's just another mouse.
" But when you look at him closely - that long, pointy head, the feet are quite different and that big mouth full of very sharp, dog-like teeth.
Now, you see, he's biting my finger there.
They're incredibly bold and brave and courageous.
(LAUGHS) And very sharp with their teeth.
Ooh, ouch.
He's really getting stuck into that finger.
Hey, come on, come on.
That's it, that's enough.
Now, when I said this is an isolate, right across Australia these little animals live, and when the white man first came here, they were found in the south-west, in the desert, in the north, over on the east coast, everywhere.
And as man invaded through and cleared the forests and made the farmland, the habitat of this little animal disappeared, because he's a forest animal.
And here, this one, isolated on this island, may in time become something quite distinctive and quite specialised.
It might be the colour or the size.
It might be the face pattern.
Whatever change takes place will be dictated by the new conditions on Kaputar.
Well, there you go.
And quick as a flash, he's up the tree.
Very sure-footed animals.
One of the nice things about the park is there are walking tracks.
Nice because you don't have to crash through the bush and make a lot of noise.
You can walk fairly quietly and see and hear a lot of things, apart from yourself.
(LAUGHS) Sometimes you even get frightened, because this little fellow looks fierce but he's not.
That's all bluff.
And that bright blue and red abdomen is thrust out and the wings are raised up to scare you away.
But that's a mountain cricket and they're quite harmless.
Not poisonous, no sting - they rely completely on that bluff of colour.
And it must work because there's plenty of mountain crickets around.
And they've even lost their other abilities - they can't fly, their jumping legs are diminished down to almost nothing.
A volcano produces more than lava - it produces ash.
And sometimes you get a bowl of ash contained in the lava flow.
Because it's softer than the hard laval rock, it erodes away and forms these caves.
They're superbly coloured things.
Here you can see where there's a lens of ash who's come into the rest of it.
But the main colours - the reds are the chemicals, the minerals leaching out and oxidising, but the yellow and the greenish colour are algaes.
They're things growing on the rock and changing the rock back into soil.
A cave like this is also the home for many animals.
Go and have a look.
This is a dead cave with no things living in it.
Things come here to die or to eat.
This is a most peculiar thing.
It's the breastbone of a bird.
You can tell by the lightness and the hollowness of the bone.
But it's an enormous bird.
In fact, it's a pelican.
And it's been eaten by a fox.
You can see here the teeth marks where the fox's teeth has gone.
Both the fox and the pelican are out of place up here.
The fox more so than the pelican.
The pelican probably got caught, dying of hunger, and came into land somewhere here, perhaps on a little lake, and the fox grabbed him.
This animal is a different story.
This is a great grey kangaroo who reached his full age, his full prime - you can see he's got his full row of teeth there.
A male, by that width.
And he came in here to die.
And it's interesting that the bones are still fairly intact, meaning that nothing came in to predate on the body, to scavenge on the body, except insects and beetles, which tells that there's not a lot of carnivorous wildlife around this area.
But there's more of this cave yet.
It goes on back this way.
Have a look over here.
Well, there's not much in that cave.
Shelters like this were used by the Aboriginals in the early days.
But they didn't live down there.
They worked up here on this high ridge of dirt that is the eroded soils that build up in a bank.
When you look at the pebbles here, they're the crumbled pieces of this volcanic rock and ash.
But down among them are some which don't belong.
That one, that one, that one.
And that one.
Now, they're very interesting, and I'll show you why.
They're out of place here.
These are sedimentary or metamorphic rocks which have come from somewhere else.
They don't belong here, so they had to be carried.
But more important, they have a sign on them which is called a bulb of percussion.
That means that somebody has hit it.
Where it's hit, you get a fracture which makes a bulb.
It's possible in nature to get natural bulbs of percussion with rocks falling down, smashing into another rock.
But to persistently get this same bulb on a whole bunch of stones, which have been imported here, indicates old Aboriginal tools.
The sharp edges were used for cutting, all sorts of things like that.
If you should find these tools, leave them there because under the law of this country, Aboriginal heritage should stay where it is found.
Report it, by all means, but leave it where it is.
Another fascinating habitat in this country are these rock surfaces.
They're gouged and battered by the elements and they flake off.
And where they flake, all sorts of animals find shelter.
When you're turning them over, make sure you turn them back - that way you leave the shelter.
Well, nothing there.
That one's a bit small.
But here's something.
Now, he's quite dangerous.
He wouldn't kill you but he'd make you pretty sick.
It's a scorpion.
You see the sting? That contains a poison.
And this is the only animal that can control the amount of poison it injects.
His front end is quite harmless - that's the nipper part.
He uses that for chewing up his food and protecting himself.
But the sting is his main protection.
Look at the way he runs.
You can see there the relationship between scorpions and spiders - they've got eight legs.
They both belong to that big family called arachnids.
You don't find something under every rock.
Well, that is, unless you look closely.
(LAUGHS) This bloke's actually hanging on under the rock.
This is a little gecko called a dtella.
Beautiful animal.
They change colours a little bit.
But they're nocturnal - you can see the big eye.
Sunlight and being turned up is stressing him a bit and he's licking his eyeballs as an example of the stress factor.
It's also a way of keeping them clean.
But it's certainly a stress thing, the same as a dog pants or a human sweats under stress.
Let him go again.
Ah, nice, fat, juicy earthworm.
Well, that's what you'd think first up, but it's not.
This thing is a snake.
It's called a blind snake or a worm snake.
Beautiful little animal.
Completely blind.
Eye spots can just be seen inside the head.
Every once in a while you see the forked tongue flicker.
And when you look very, very closely, you'll see the scales.
It's not slimy like a worm.
It's smooth and slippery because it's a true snake.
(BIRDS CHIRP) When you come to a national park, in fact any park, the first place the kids are gonna head for is the creek.
A few jars and collecting the marvellous range of wildlife.
And these isolated mountaintops have got specialised wildlife.
This one is a flat worm, a planarian, related to leeches.
But it doesn't eat you like a leech does.
Here's another worm.
A most peculiar animal.
That's all one worm.
It's called a hair worm, for obvious reasons, but it's also called a Gordonian worm.
The Gordonian name comes from an old Greek who tied a knot that was so enormous that nobody could ever undo it.
It was called a Gordonian knot, just like that.
Until some hero come along, whipped out his sword and went zap - cut it open.
That's called solving the Gordonian knot.
Here's a few more goodies.
Little backswimmers, water beetles, shrimps, all sorts of marvellous things that live in a pond.
But when you're here in the park or the bush, catch 'em, look at 'em, enjoy 'em and let 'em go.
Because that's what conservation is about - leaving it for somebody else.
These sort of cliff walls are yet a further habitat.
And I was up here a bit earlier to have look at this cave, which has got a very interesting group of animals in it.
Whoo! This stuff's bat droppings.
There are probably 3,000 bats in this colony and very likely they live here the whole year around.
And over the centuries this pile of guano has built up.
In some parts of the world, it's very important produce.
People mine bat guano for fertiliser and things like that.
But here it's resource for wonder, not for gardens.
These are the little fellows.
They're a bat called Miniopterus, or a bent-winged bat.
The last joint of the wing comes around and bends up in itself.
Sharp teeth for biting.
Off you go.
A very common cave bat in this part of the world.
This colony of 3,000-odd is probably one male to every 20 females.
It's a real harem situation.
Like most of these small bats, they're insectivorous.
Here and there in the pile, you can see the wings of moths and things that have been carried in for a final feed.
Oh, well, we'll leave them in peace.
That's how most people see national parks.
Birds like those currawongs come in and feed from your hand, and in fact take your barbecue if you're not careful.
Iron barbecues and rubbish bins, the biggest snow gum in the world, signs and notices.
But, really, national parks are more than that.
They're places for the preservation of Australia's heritage, because, really, these parks are pieces of Australia in miniature.
And when you restrict any ecosystem, you have to replace the forces that used to work on it with new forces.
And in this case, it's man management.
And so clearing, controlled burning, cutting out of weeds, eradication of noxious animals like pigs and cats and foxes and rabbits and of course vandals, all count.
It's national parks and rangers and people who care and want them to persist that make things like these birds continue to be here tomorrow.
These currawongs will still be here then if we look after them.