Photo by Opher
This is another extract from my book Anthropocene Apocalypse. It is concerned with the impact of mankind on the wild-life and wilderness areas.
This book documents the attrition I have witnessed and points a way forward.
There’s not a lot of time left.
Road kill in Australia
Road kill in America and Australia is quite a different connotation to that of a squashed hedgehog in Britain.
In Australia you could be unlucky enough to have a full grown male grey kangaroo leap out of the gloom straight into the front of your vehicle. That would make mincemeat of you as well as the Kangaroo.
Long distance lorries were fitted with special bull-bars to take the impact of kangaroos and other wild animals. They were just a hazard of driving. Nobody considered the effect on animal populations or the animals themselves. The toll was immense. Indeed some people even went out deliberately running them down as a sport. The local fauna was considered vermin.
The toll on local populations is formidable. Fast moving animals like wallaby, kangaroo, pademelon, and wombats might jump out at you unexpectedly but other species that were slower moving, like Tasmanian devils, koalas, snakes, lizards, echidnas and the like just got squashed crossing the road to get to a fresh habitat. Every day the roads are littered.
In the early days nobody cared. There were millions of them and they were a nuisance. Fortunately now people do care and signs are put up, drivers take more care.
Coming back from a music festival with Pete and Trudy we went through the back roads and travelled long distances on untarmaced roads. There were regular warnings including reports of how many koalas had been killed on that stretch alone in the past month. It was 28.
Koalas are getting rare. I was desperate to see one in the wild. Everywhere we went we all scanned the trees hoping to spot one. Pete and Trudy took us back down the coast from Melbourne camping in the bush for two weeks. We saw lots of other wild-life but even though we went out of our way to look for the elusive bears we never had a sighting.
At one point we stopped at a fresh oyster farm and were talking to one of the old-timers there who had lived in the areas for decades. There were signs all over telling people it was Koala country. He said they used to be common but he hadn’t seen one for years.
I was beginning to give up hope particularly when, after two months, it was time to move on from Pete and Trudy’s delightful place. Pete and Trudy were experts in the outback and if they could not find one then I figured we had no chance.
We flew up to Brisbane to stay with long lost relatives and they kindly hired a place out on Stradbrooke Island which was an idyllic place packed with wild-life, one of the high-lights for me was having a colony of fruit bats living right next door to where we were staying. In the day time it was amazing to see them all hanging from the trees in such great numbers with their little foxy faces, sparkling beady eyes and reddish brown coat. They were huge. At dusk and dawn they would take off in great swarms and they would fly all around with individual alighting in our back garden to suck nectar out of the profusion of yellow blossom on our bushes. I was able to sit on our verandah and see them right up close as they gripped the stems with their claws and clambered around greedily lapping up the nectar with their long tongues. I was amazed. People in Australia take it for granted to see great fruit bats in the skies above their cities. Nobody should take it for granted. They are wondrous. There was a huge colony of them in the city in Cairns and I was fascinated by them. Lately people have been getting concerned about the bats spreading disease. The lyssavirus is the latest scare. Some people have been killing the bats or driving them away. It’s a tragedy.
On the very last day of our stay we were driving round the island when Debbie pulled the car up sharp. She grinned at us and told us she had spotted something. Reversing back up the road she stopped by this great eucalyptus tree and pointed up triumphantly. There at the top, wedged in a suitable fork, was a beautiful koala. He peered down at us inquisitively as we grinned up at him.
Not quite all the koalas had been run over yet then?