Pygmy possums caught on camera

I usually write about the plants and animals that we are likely to encounter in the backyard, or while walking through local forests, or walking the dog around our lakes. But this month, I wanted to introduce you to a very endearing little marsupial that lives in the Wombat Forest but is rarely ever seen.

The Eastern Pygmy possum has been photographed recently in a beautiful patch of forest south of Blackwood.  The tiny possums were captured by an infra-red camera, one of several cameras stationed around thirty sites across  the Wombat Forest by Wombat Forestcare team, as part of the Caught on Camera project. To the untrained eye, the little creature inspecting the bait in a tea strainer could be a bush rat, or an Agile Antechinus, one of the most common marsupials of the forest. But the Pygmy Possum has a quite different body shape to these animals, more stout and cuddly,  bigger rounder ears, with a fat prehensile tail.

Eastern Pygmy Possums have a brush-tipped tongue; used to gather pollen and nectar from flowers such as banksia and tea-tree. When the banksias and other flowers are not in flower,  the possums will eat invertebrates such moths, spiders, grasshoppers and beetles.  The possums shelter in tree hollows, but they also make little spherical nest balls, woven from short, shredded bark and hidden in eucalypt tree bark, old bird nests and in shrubs such as tea trees… One pygmy possum may regularly use ten of these little dens!

This little guy was photographed during a reintroduction of Eastern Pygmy Possums to a reserve in Sydney called North Head, managed by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy – see here for more

The old names listed for the Eastern Pygmy Possum are so quaint: Common Dormouse-phalanger, Dormouse Opossum and Possum Mouse!  The Dormouse name probably refers to the ability that pygmy possums have to go into torpor – a light hibernation.  The possums roll into a tight little ball, with their ears folded down and their body’s internal temperature similar to that of the surroundings. They may spend large periods in winter conserving energy in this way, until the banksias come into flower again, or insect activity ramps up in warmer months.

There are several pygmy possum species around Australia, and surprisingly, the Eastern Pygmy Possum at 24 grams in weight is by no means the smallest of the group – the Little Pygmy Possum  weighs only 7 grams! These little cuties are much more carnivorous than the Eastern Pygmy Possum – their favourite food is very small lizards. The most famous of the pygmy possums,  the endangered Mountain Pygmy Possum uses this ability to go into torpor as a crucial survival tool in its alpine habitat, for up to seven months in the year.  They are regarded as the only true hibernating mammal in Australia. And they are the biggest of the lot – at 41 grams.

The  Eastern Pygmy Possum has a prehensile tail used for help when clambering about the flowers and branches. At this time of year, the base of the tail gets much thicker and is used as a fat storage area for the lean months.

Ellie the baby Eastern Pygmy Possum enjoys a mealworm, cared for by WIRES volunteers in NSW – Daily Telegraph

The Wombat Forestcare Caught on Camera project coordinators Ivan Carter and Gayle Osborne are delighted to have photographic records of the Eastern Pygmy Possum in the Wombat Forest. They are classified as Near Threatened, and are considered to be very sensitive to threats such as logging, cats and foxes, and planned burn operations. In five years of placing cameras in various parts of the forest, the pygmy possums have been spotted at just three sites. The possums have been found in Blackwood south, in a beautiful patch of forest which is shrubby foothill forest, and heathy dry forest with towering peppermints, mountain grey gums and candlebarks, and a diverse understory of banksias, hakeas and prickly tea-tree. Crucially, this area has not been burnt for at least a decade!!!

The pygmy possums have tiny home ranges, less than a hectare. One can imagine that a planned burn that covers hundreds of hectares has a devastating effect, as the removal of the shrub layer wipes out the food and shelter of any surviving pygmy possums.

I think it’s an absolute wonder there are any surviving locally at all! The Caught on Camera project is incredibly important – as some regard the Wombat Forest as not very good habitat compared to the Otways or the forests east of Melbourne. But Wombat Forestcare’s work has shown that there is a lot of life in our beloved forest – their cameras reveal populations of Mountain Brushtail possum or Bobuck, and of course the Threatened Brush-tailed Phascogale, previously unrecorded in the Wombat Forest south of Daylesford.

For exciting photos of all the Caught on Camera animals, “like” Wombat Forestcare on Facebook, or go to www.wombatforestcare.org.au

Nice to see Needletails

Beautiful painting by an English ornithologist of the early 20th century: Henry E Dresser

As thunder rumbled in gathering clouds, with patches of blue sky and impossibly white cumulus clouds edged with sunshine I thought to myself ‘ooh, I might see some swifts today’, And lo! Within minutes an incredibly athletic looking bird flew low over the property, closely followed by a second bird. White-throated Needletail! These birds are a large species of swift, somewhat like a swallow, superbly aerodynamic with a cigar-shaped body and long curved wings like a scythe.

White-throated Needletails are one of our summer visitors from overseas – in this case, from Siberia and Japan. The swifts visit Australia each summer to spend their winter non-breeding period – then when spring returns in the Northern Hemisphere they fly back.

In warm, humid weather,  the wind movements at storm fronts provide perfect conditions for the swifts to hunt masses of insects that may be caught up in the gathering winds. The way that the swifts forage for insects is interesting. Rather than pursuing individual insects, the birds simply plunge through a patch of swarming insects with their bills wide open – a bit like a baleen whale through krill. Special bristles around their bills help guide the insects in. The swifts then dive and weave and repeat through the same prey-rich area.

Don’t bother trying to find the swifts – they had already zoomed by – this pic is to capture the clouds and the time of day – classic swift foraging conditions!

After spotting the two swifts, I gathered my binoculars and went for a walk down the dirt road, hoping to see more swifts – and about half an hour later I saw a flock wheeling and zooming in the skies, high up but still close enough for good views. Much of their foraging is done at great heights where they cannot be seen with naked eye or binoculars. I counted about twelve of the birds – and was thrilled to bits as I have not seen them in recent summers. For a few years a while back I used to have a flock of fifteen or so regularly patrolling the area at this time of year.

Sadly, a 2014 study by Mike Tarbuton revealed that numbers of these lovely birds have plummeted in recent years. There are still flocks of hundreds or even thousands to be seen but overall when the data was ‘crunched’ Mike noted a decline in the order of three quarters of the population. The species conservation status was subsequently upgraded to Vulnerable by the BirdLife Australia Research and Conservation Committee. Unfortunately the government ( state and federal) have yet to act upon this recommendation, and the species is still classified as ‘secure’.

It’s a perilous world for a long distance migrant. Legal and illegal logging in prime breeding habitat in Siberia is removing the old poplars, larch, spruce and oak trees that the swifts nest in at an alarming rate. Like many Australian birds,  the needletails require hollows to nest in. This must be having a devastating impact on their numbers. And then here in Australia,  while the threats are much less, I would think that our strange climate change weather may be affecting the swifts.

In the past it was considered that the White-throated Needletail never landed on tree or cliff while in Australia – and spent months on the wing. While they can remain aloft for weeks and months at a time, sleeping even, radio-tracking and some more recent observations reveal that they do alight in Australia. The swifts have been observed sheltering in rock crevices and hollows in very bad weather, and even clinging to trees during a bushfire. Which seems strange – the swifts use the updrafts and wild winds that come from fires to forage for insects, and one would think that they would simply fly up and away to get away from a fire!

Looking at their body shape and aerodynamic flight, you could easily think they were closely related to swallows. But swifts are in a completely different group and may be more closely related to hummingbirds. The attractive and large eyes of both groups are certainly similar, as is their tiny feet, and incredibly shaped wings.

I was most fortunate to see White-throated Needletails while I was in Japan in 2015. I was there for the summer, on the big northern island of Hokkaido, on the side of a large mountain. I was in an onsen, a Japanese bath which was outside, and filled with hot volcanic spring water. I looked up,  and there were a few needletails flying above, high in the blue sky. It gave me such a thrill to think that I could have seen these very individuals all the way back home in Porcupine Ridge!

To read Mike Tarburton’s article in Australian Field Ornithology 2014, 31, 122–140- download it here  tarburton2014

 

Messmates in flower!

The Messmates are in flower! This year’s flowering event is a rich fulsome flowering, each tree covered in masses of small white flowers, and the surrounding air alive with insects and honeyeaters.  This is wonderful to see after the sad, impotent flowering of drought years that produced dry brittle blossoms that soon died. This year’s blossoms began around Christmas, and will keep flowering for up to six weeks. That is a lot of pollen and nectar!

A Messmate is a type of Eucalyptus tree, colloquially known as a stringybark due to its fibrous stringy bark. Some people call them Messmate Stringybarks to distinguish them from other stringybarks such as Red Stringybark, another local tree. Messmates love high rainfall, fertile soils and seem to thrive in the cold. I find the Messmate, Manna Gum, Blackwood, and Silver Wattle combination of the Wombat Forest beautiful to behold.

A couple of beloved Messmates at home at Porcupine Ridge

The Messmate was the first Eucalyptus to be described by Europeans, described by a botanist by the name of L’Heritier from specimens collected from Bruny Island  in 1777, during Captain James Cook’s third Pacific expedition. It was named Eucalyptus obliqua after the Latin obliquus, meaning oblique. This refers to the distinctive uneven join of the leaf margins to the leaf stalk. I used to think this was an identifying feature – but there are actually many Eucalypts with this leaf pattern.

So how does one identify the Messmate? If it is a rough barked tree, with rough bark all the way to the ends of the branches, find some of the fruit, or the gum nuts. If they are smooth and shaped like a wine glass, or wine barrel, it is a messmate. If the gum nuts have three pointed bits sticking up from inside the “barrel” it is likely to be a Red Stringybark, a stringybark gum which is common in Hepburn and drier areas of the shire.

Messmates have a wide distribution, occupying most of Tasmania, and the wetter cooler regions of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and westwards as far as Kangaroo Island. Their size and shape depends greatly on their habitat – from a twisted 2 metre high tree on an exposed coastal bluff, to a massive tree of almost 90 metres in a sheltered situation in Tasmania.

In the Daylesford region, you can see this variation in form in the Messmates. However I would add that it is not only habitat (soil and rainfall) but also management of the surrounding area that determines tree form. Out in Porcupine Ridge, our old Messmates have massive branches coming out from the main trunk just a few metres off the ground. This gives the trees an all over bushy shape, with ample branches exposed to sunlight for maximum blossom production, beautiful habitat within all the intersecting branches and plenty of opportunities for tree hollows.

Messamte blossoms by Linley McGlashan – via natureshare.org

In Wheatsheaf or Trentham, the Messmates seem to be twice as tall, and they branch at 10 metres above the ground.  The canopy is smaller and tighter. I used to think this more vigorous growth habit was due to the more fertile soils and higher rainfall of these areas.

The Porcupine Ridge Messmates have been left as shade for stock such as sheep, and as such could be very old. The Messmates in the wetter areas of the shire live in a forest that has been logged and mined and logged and then logged again almost beyond recognition. The regrowth trees, of 50 – 120 years old that I am seeing in Wheatsheaf, while taller than the Porky Ridge trees, are much younger, and they are part of an even-aged stand of forest. They grow side by side, competing for the light, and crowding each other’s form.

What I wouldn’t give for a time machine to go back to see the Messmates of the Wombat Forest before the first one was cut down. I imagine huge towering trees, with massive branches each the size of a tree itself, side by side with Blackwoods with trunk diameters of several metres.  I imagine Greater Gliders and Koalas feasting on the leaves, and Sugar Gliders and Mountain Brushtails enjoying the masses of blossoms, all the while their apex predators Mr and Mrs Powerful Owl hoot in the distance. We still have this story happening in the Wombat Forest, but in much reduced glory – bless these plants and animals for holding on despite repeated onslaughts.

I would like to acknowledge the work of Wombat Forestcare, for they campaign tirelessly for the Messmates and their fauna. Please check out their website www.wombatforestcare.org.au

The Greater Glider – Wombat Forestcare’s mascot

Photo credit: fleayswildlife.com.au, Grant Fraser

Blotched Blue-tongues mating

This year we have discovered to our joy that our kitchen porch is a love nest for blue-tongue lizards. The photo was taken by my husband Chris – he spotted them in close contact which may have been mating, and went to grab the camera, stepping over them as he did so! When he returned, the blue-tongues were on the door mat, with one gripping the other in a very firm bite on the side of the body.

Blotched Blue-tongue lizards Tiliqua nigrolutea.      Pic by Chris McLean

I posted the photo online to the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and someone referred to the grip pictured as a “classic love bite”. A study of blue-tongue mating habits in Tasmania a few years ago recorded this grip as occurring before, during and sometimes after mating for over an hour! After mating, the blue-tongues return to their solitary habits, and the female gives birth three to five months later.

Blue-tongues do not lay eggs, they give birth to two or three live young that are ready to live independently as soon as they born. Blue-tongue lizards are actually a type of large skink; a member of the big lizard family called Scincidae which has hundreds of species ranging from the big blue-tongues down to the tiny little garden skinks. Some skinks are even legless! The Blue-tongues are distinguished from other skinks by their large size, large heads, short legs and tails and short fleshy tongues. The exception are the Pygmy Blue-tongues, which are fascinating story in their own right! Presumed extinct, a population of these tiny blue-tongues was discovered living in old spider burrows in unploughed grasslands in 1992. For more on their captive breeding program and ecology see here

A tiny relative – less than 20cm in length. Photo by Phil Ainsley SA Zoos.

The species on our grassy dry forest block  is a Blotched Blue-tongue, a large blue-tongue that is looks very much like its close relative the Eastern Blue-tongue, although the eastern is more distinctively striped in pattern. Their behaviour and ecology is similar, except the Blotched Blue-tongue is a cool climate specialist, and can move about and forage at much lower temperatures than the Eastern.

We have only seen Blotched Blue-tongues on our block, but I have seen an Eastern Blue-tongue just a couple of kilometres away on Richardsons lane and on the Midland Highway near the Chocolate Mill.

This pic shows that the male is gripping so tightly some of the scales are coming off!

The recent warm weather has seen many blue-tongues on the move – my heart goes to my mouth when I see one crossing the road and it manages to cross safely. Many others are not so lucky and maimed blue-tongues are a common sight on our roads.  The mating study I mentioned before said that in the spring breeding season approximately 95% of the road kill they examined was males – it seems they go out actively searching for the more sedentary females. Poor fellas!!

If it is safe to do so, you can pull over and assist a blue-tongue trying to make a crossing. Simply grasp the blue-tongue behind its armpits and pick it up with both hands, and deposit it on the side of the road it was heading for. Interestingly, I have never been hissed at or shown the blue tongue in the threat display. It is obviously stressful, as once a lizard urinated copiously all over my hands and sandals! As blue-tongues can live for twenty years or so, I figure this was a small price to pay to save a lizard from a senseless road death.

Besides roads, the other dangers faced by blue-tongues include snail baits, dogs and cats, lawn mowers, and fences. As blue-tongues love to eat slugs and snails, forget the use of snail baits in the garden! Luckily my dogs think blue-tongues are weird sort of snake so they say well away. Before you mow or use a brush cutter, it’s a good idea to walk the area you are going to treat, as once the machine starts the blue-tongues crouch, hiding still in the grass instead of running away.

We have an area of the garden surrounded by chicken wire. One summer,  the dogs found a decomposed blue-tongue that had tried to squeeze through the wire and been trapped halfway. We found another blue-tongue just in time, and managed to cut it free with wire cutters. I can’t believe we still have the fence up – a festive Christmas holiday project will be to replace the fencing wire with something more wildlife-friendly.

On that note, I would like to wish my readers a safe and happy holiday season, filled with kindness and nature.

Edwards, A and Jones, SM (2003) Mating behaviour in the blotched blue-tongued lizard, Tiliqua nigrolutea, in captivity. Herpetofauna, 33 (2). pp. 60-64.

http://www.backyardbuddies.net.au/reptiles/lizards/blue-tongued-lizard

Eastern Blue-tongue lizard Tiliqua scincoides, pic by Mark Hutchinson

Antechinus or rat?

I was standing at my window looking out at the gathering dusk when a small mammal popped out of the shrubs and darted down the rock wall, and across our paved verandah. Antechinus!  I have lived in this house on a small bush block for 15 years and this is my second sighting of this little animal. The antechinus is a carnivorous marsupial, in the same family as the Tassie Devil, quolls and the rat-sized Brush-tailed Phascogale.

The last time I saw our resident antechinus was also at dusk, as he or she drank deeply from a bird bath that is set on the ground. But how do I know they are here all the time? Their scats!

Antechinus scats or droppings are the key to identifying whether your scuttling brown mammals are rats or native marsupials. In most bush houses and gardens around here we have a mix of introduced Black Rats, Agile Antechinus and possibly native Bush Rats.

A beautiful little critter, note the notched ears. Pic by Mel Williams

To tell the difference between a Black Rat and a native Bush Rat – look at the tail. The Black Rat’s tail is twice as long as its body and is nearly naked, almost segmented like a very skinny earthworm. The Bush Rat’s tail is shorter than its body and quite furry. Warning: the cuteness factor does not help you distinguish between these two species – some Black Rats are simply adorable with their fine whiskers, soulful eyes and little white chests. We had a visitor from Sydney taking pics of a Black Rat clambering around on our washing up – only later did I realise it was not an adorable Antechinus or native Bush Rat! Oops.

Black rat: left, Bush rat on the right: credit Taronga Zoo

 

Scat identification is a fun hobby – it is all about textures, and knowing a bit about the animal’s diet. Black Rats and Bush Rats are omnivorous – indeed Black Rats will eat nearly anything. Their scats are hard, cylindrical pellets that are pretty uniform in size and shape, often with a little point at one end. When you break them open they are compacted and simply break in half. Mouse scats are similar in texture, just smaller.

Agile Antechinus, on the other hand are insectivores – they eat mostly insects, with hard chitinous exoskeletons. The antechinus has long pointed jaws full of many sharp teeth which chew their insect prey up very finely. So when you pick up an antechinus scat and crumble it slightly between thumb and forefinger the whole thing breaks up into a zillion tiny brown fragments which may have a bit of iridescence. In scat parlance, they are known as ‘friable’.

Antechinus scats may be cylinders with rough broken off ends, or even curled “Mr Whippy” style scats. If the scats are friable and full of insect fragments but tiny and in great numbers – you could be looking at bat scats, as microbats also have an insect diet.

One would think that being able to identify the scats means I can confidently say whether it is Black Rats or Antechinus keeping us up at night in the roof. At our house, it seems these two species coexist – and both scats may be found under our roof.

The Antechinus leaves more scats in the shed and across the woodpile – seeming to drop them freely as they scamper about, whereas the Black Rats seems to save their scats for depositing in their creepy lairs, in secret dark places such as under tin sheets in the garden,  and notoriously in car engines!

Another way to tell these two animal groups apart is their two very distinctive gaits. Rodents, whether they are native or introduced, run in a smooth continuous motion, kind of like a horse in a gallop. Antechinus move in a very different way, it is staccato and super fast, a kind of coordinated hopping gait that moves across the ground or log like a horizontal hop. The only other animals I have seen move like this are possums and bandicoots – also marsupials.

 

The Agile Antechinus is one of the most common animals in the Wombat Forest, and the star of the Wombat Forest camera trapping program run by Wombat Forestcare and the VNPA. If you live in the drier parts of the Hepburn Shire, such as Yandoit or Clydesdale you would have the Agile’s Antechinus’ larger fluffier cousin, the very pretty Yellow-footed Antechinus.

Beef: a book review

When trying to educate and inspire people to act you can take two routes: fact-based: a litany of facts that any sane person would want to change and then key actions to take- eg to stop pollution, ban the bag. As a wildlife advocate, my writing could consist of listing habitat destruction, new diseases, death by cars, fences, dogs and cats – in the hope of galvanising the reader to act.

Alternatively, you can take the route that aims to first create a connection to the very thing you are trying to save. This second route is what I try to do as a nature writer in my newspaper column, and here on this blog – I aim to help people notice the nature world, and then tell a story about the plants and animals we share our world with. Edgar’s Mission is a grand example of creating this connection – beautiful photos of rescued farm animals living safe, warm and happy lives; lives where their personalities are allowed to thrive.

Beef, by Mat Blackwell, also uses story to connect and capture the imagination. In this very probable near future, specially grown ‘vatmeat’ has enabled people to stop raising and killing animals. The idea of eating meat from a living animal is now culturally taboo, so much so that people get a kick out of watching ‘meatmovies’ which are old clips of people happily munching on the leg of a lamb, or a chicken’s wing!! To think!!

The invention of vatmeat has allowed people to continue to eat meat despite the known health effects. The author understands very well that people just want to keep doing what they have always been doing but without the slight, persistent guilt. So it is with a huge sigh of relief that the energy crisis is ‘solved’ by using the vatmeat byproducts as an endless energy source. Air conditioners, plasma TV’s: all still OK!

But Beef isn’t only a science fiction story exploring environment and ethics – it is a love story and a coming-of-age story for lead character Royston, the youngest of the Beef Corporation clan, the fantastically rich and powerful inventors of vatmeat and the subsequent energy crisis solution.

Royston is going through the motions of life in his eccentric family, and happy with his wife Lena and his daughter River. Until BAM! Gene enters his life. Royston falls head over heels for this luscious embodiment of womanhood and the two strike up a very close friendship that oozes with sexual tension and causes a fuckload of consternation for Royston. I say fuckload because if you don’t like swearing you are in for a challenging read. The language is colourful and expressive, perhaps borne from Mat’s years as a comedy writer for Good News Week and MANY other programs  ( The Glasshouse, The Sideshow, Room 101, Wednesday Night Fever).

Back to the story: there are deep secrets in the Beef dynasty, and there is also something going on with Royston’s best friend Luka. I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say the climax of the book is simply devastating!!!

The denouement was rather quick but I have to say that I was so moved by the revelations that I had to go and cry so a short wrap up worked for me.

Mixie, a dairy calf rescued from slaughter, now residing at Edgar’s Mission

The vegan worldview is really hard to understand until you give up all animals products for at least a month, and also research the realities of life for so many animals on the planet. Billions of them. We worry about our dogs and cats and horses being mistreated, but our modern civilisation’s dirty secret is the true cost of cheap meat. When an animal is simply an economic unit, its needs are irrelevant. Movies such as Earthlings explore these issues but they are usually so devastating that most people (me included) simply can’t watch them! They are like snuff films. In fact they are snuff films.

So being acutely aware of the suffering and the magnitude of this perfectly legal and socially acceptable suffering is extremely painful for vegans, and ever-present.

For example, most people look at a field of cows munching grass in the sunshine and they can’t see much wrong with the picture. A vegan sees a group of mothers, who are artificially impregnated year after year, through their stomachs without anaesthetic. Their terrified little calves are taken from them within days, trucked to slaughter and killed by a machine. The cow is then milked every day. This process is repeated every year until the cows are 4-6 years old and then they too are trucked to slaughter – instead of living until 14 or 15. I was a happy vegetarian for twenty years before I was made aware of this process – I still feel ripped off and lied to.

And now, as demand for meat and milk products rises worldwide, more intensive and more cruel methods are being trialled. One could write a very dark novel about this trend. One that would be very hard to read!

But Beef explores an alternate reality, the sort of world where the treatment of animals in this way is morally repugnant, and it reflects on the past in a very light-hearted and easy to read way. Without lecturing!

I am passionate about animal rights and transitioning from vegetarian to vegan slowly. I am also a nature writer who cares about advocating behaviour change for a kinder and more nature loving world. So this book really resonated with me, and really moved me. I would love to hear what a happy meat eater thought about the story and its conclusion.

Beef is presently self-published, and I purchased it online without any fuss. I think it works equally well as a love story or as science fiction, or speculative fiction, indeed Beef reminds me very much of one of my favourite authors, Margaret Atwood, just with more swearing! I recommend this book whole-heartedly to vegan, vegetarian and omnivore alike!

To read a non-spoiler interview with the author go here

And to buy a hard copy go  here

Fallow Deer family

A few nights ago, I spotted a family group of deer on the roadside as I drove to Daylesford.  There was a female deer, a male with small horns, and a young deer. The adults crossed the road towards Leitches Creek Bushland Reserve while the young deer stared at me with some confusion. I followed my kangaroo protocol – turn high beams off, slow down or stop (if safe to do so) and the young one joined his family soon enough.

Deer were introduced to Australia as game animals with much enthusiasm by the Acclimitisation Societies of the 19^th Century. There are several species in Australia which are naturalised – that is, they have self-sustaining populations in our forests and farmlands.

The Grampians is the home of the mighty Red Deer – those huge, impressive deer of Scottish wildlife documentaries. Eastern Victoria and particularly East Gippsland is the home of the Sambar, another massive species of deer. In the Otways and here in the Wombat Forest, we have Fallow Deer and, to a lesser extent, Sambar. Coastal areas such as Wilsons Promontary and the Gippsland Lakes have Hog Deer.

This is a female Fallow Deer without spots (pixabay.com)

Fallow Deer are smaller than Red Deer or Sambar – the males weigh up to 90 kg, while a Sambar male can be up to 250kg! Like most deer, males are larger than females, with females being about half the weight of males.

Fallow Deer are your classic spotty deer – a rusty, reddish-brown colour with white spots, blending to a white underbelly and legs. A black stripe runs along the back and extends onto the tail. Some deer do not have spots, and some are very dark – and quite a few deer are white. A farmer in Muckleford has a group of deer living on and around his farm, with a big all-white stag!

The deer we see wild locally are from deer farms that have gone out of business, and then the owners have set them free into the nearby bush.  Fallow deer can’t survive in purely native habitats such as huge stretches of forest. They rely on a patchwork pattern; a modified landscape of paddocks with introduced grasses, farms and farmlets and patches of open forest or woodland.

During Winter, Spring and early summer, there is some degree of segregation between the sexes – males form small groups and roam across their home ranges, while the females, yearlings of both sexes and juveniles remain more sedentary.

With this in mind, the family I spotted the other night may have been mum, big brother and a young one. This little group will stick together until late Summer/ Autumn, when the rut begins.  The males return to their favourite rutting territories, and make grunting calls, paw the ground, spread their urine and scent, and flay bushes and tree trunks with their antlers. The females visit the males and mate.

About seven months later a little fawn is born. The mother and fawn pretty much keep to themselves until the fawn is about a month old, and then they rejoin the local herd.

–Wonderful male Fallow Deer, by Jiri Nederost

Most of the information I could find about Fallow Deer was about their value and qualities as a game animal. Deer hunting is hugely popular and growing each year – some 60,000 deer were killed by hunters last year.  I have to admit I am in two minds about this! Wherever there are large herds of deer the native plant species are diminished in number, orchids and wildflowers destroyed, and the wattles browsed to such an extent that small birds lose their cover for feeding and nesting.

Fallow Deer predators are listed as wolves, cougars, lynx, bears, mountain cougars, coyotes and bobcats – no wonder they are doing so well in Australia! From what I can see from the Australian Deer Association, deer hunting requires a lot of patience and skill, and precision, as the deer are so wary and intelligent. As hunting goes, it seems fairer than duck shooting, or kangaroo hunting – both of which are horribly cruel and very unfair.

Hunting aside,  my heart sings whenever I see our local Fallow Deer – they are so pretty and gentle! I have Dutch and Irish heritage, so I think some deep, ancestral part of me really loves these animals.

For this year’s Words in Winter, I will be giving a  talk : “Hepburn Nature Diary: seven years and counting”, a behind the scenes look at my nature stories. Please come and say hello! Saturday, August 6, 6:30 – 7:20 at the Words in Winter Hub, 81 Vincent Street, Daylesford.

Male Fallow Deer picture:  via Wikimedia Commons and http://www.hvozd.eu/

For some information on ecology of Fallow Deer in Australia ( Tasmania) rather than hunting information, this paper is interesting Fallow-Deer-Species-Profile Tasmania