Thirsty cockatoos in Canberra, the national capitol of Australia

A few days ago, I stumbled off the jet after a 13 hour marathon flight from Los Angeles to Canberra, the national capital of Australia.  Soon afterward, I was cool and cozy in the home of my good friends Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, who live on a shady street about a twenty minute walk from downtown and not much farther from the sprawling lawns around Australia’s Parliament.

As you’d expect, Canberra is a thriving urban center with tall buildings, neckties, and high heels.  But surprisingly, it’s also loaded with wildlife.  I’ve never seen a city with so many amazing birds.   Every morning, I’d step out the door at sunrise and into a great natural concert featuring some of the most beautiful singers on earth—magpies and shrike-thrushes, currawongs and kookaburras.

And not only that, Canberra is absolutely loaded with parrots.  As you might know, parrots are not exactly operatic, as if their evolution focused on good looks rather than good vocals.   For a North American, the native parrots of Australia are shockingly beautiful and exotic.

Crimson Rosella

And just by sitting in Tom and Libby’s back porch, I can see this amazing bird show flinging overhead or perched in the back yard trees: Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, brilliant white and big as hawks; Crimson Rosellas, named for their flame-red colors; creaky-voiced gray and scarlet Gang Gang Cockatoos.

I haven’t mentioned the Australian ravens that moan up the dawn, the soft-cooing doves, the scintillating blue fairy wrens, the appropriately named Beautiful Firetails.

Aussies often call birdwatchers ‘twitchers,” an affectionate tease that I don’t mind at all.  And if ever a city could be called Twitchers Paradise, it would have to be Canberra.

~R.N.

Recently, I went to a large lake near my home in southeast Alaska to make an Encounters radio program about subsistence salmon fishing.  I found these bears taking advantage of sockeye salmon piling up behind a weir (used by biologists to count fish returning to spawn).

This program is the beginning of an Encounters series exploring various aspects of salmon and their place in the history, economy, and culture of Alaska’s people.  The series is funded by the Alaska Sustainable Salmon Fund.

I spent many hours watching the fish.  I even managed to catch a few, and I was lucky enough to keep peaceful company with a mother brown bear and her two tiny, hopelessly cute cubs.

And the next day, a very dark brown bear took advantage of the huckleberries in my own back yard.                                                                                                                            ~ R. N.

A very dark brown bear in my backyard

Unwelcome surprise at Bittangabee Campground in Ben Boyd NP

An outhouse in a wild, remote Australian national park should be a peaceful and undistracted place to reflect on…well, nature. 

A few days ago, I visited one such facility, where the toilet paper dispenser was a tall, rectangular steel box with several rolls stacked vertically inside. The bottom roll was empty, so I removed the cardboard tube and stuck my fingers into slots on either side of the box to pull down a fresh roll.  

At the same instant, a spider about the size of my palm erupted from the box, scrambled around to the front. It perched starkly on the pure white surface of the new toilet paper, so if I had tried to unroll a bit, the spider might have sprinted straight up my arm. 

I didn’t yell or thrash around, just stared in astonishment at the brown, hairy, outsized, kinky-legged arachnid a few inches from my elbow. Like a lot of people, I appreciate spiders most when they’re small and colorful and about six feet away. 

This was unmistakably a Huntsman—common in Australia, much like a tarantula but lightning fast, and capable of delivering a painful but not dangerous bite. 

It was a startling reminder that Australia, for all its uniqueness and beauty, also offers some creepy possibilities. There are a few nasty spiders here—the very aggressive and deadly Sydney Funnelweb, the bright and bulky Mouse Spiders, and a Down Under version of the black widow called the Redback. 

If you tromp around the Australian bush, you’re also likely to come across scorpions, giant centipedes, blood-sucking leeches, disease-carrying ticks, and big ants that deliver extremely painful bites. 

Australia’s vast and alluring coastline opens endless possibilities for trouble in the water. Of course there’s the Great White Shark, sometimes called “the man in a grey suit”, plus many other big dangerous sharks. Also keep in mind the stingrays, the long-spined venomous Stonefish and Lionfish, the beautiful but deadly Cone Shells, the notorious Blue-Ringed Octopus, and the nearly invisible but profoundly lethal Box Jellyfish that keeps most swimmers out of tropical seas in the summer months. 

In the steamy Australian north, you wouldn’t want to forget the biggest reptile on earth—the Saltwater Crocodile—which occasionally snatches someone foolish enough to wade or swim in a deceptively placid waterway. 

Most famous, of course, are Australia’s poisonous snakes—including the taipan, brown snake, death adder, and tiger snake. About 25 species living Down Under are considered potentially lethal to humans. 

But before you cross Australia off your list of places to visit, consider the reality: 

There’s almost no chance you’d ever encounte a truly dangerous animal in Australia. Anyone determined to see a snake, crocodile, shark, or other potential nasty should add a zoo or wildlife park to their itinerary. 

As in North America (which has its own assortment of spiders, scorpions, snakes, sharks, and so on), the uncontested champion among all dangerous animals is our very own species. Especially when combined with a motor vehicle. For example, road accidents took almost 33,000 lives in Australia from 1980 to 1990. Over the same ten years, wild animals accounted for a total of 70 fatalities—including bee stings (20), snake bites (18), small marine critters (12), sharks (11), crocodiles (8), and just one from a spider bite. 

Interestingly, Alaskan friends often tell me they’re reluctant to visit Australia because of all the deadly snakes. While Aussie friends tell me they’re hesitant to visit Alaska because of all the dangerous bears. Ultimately, I guess this comes down to our overactive imaginations. 

Today I was thinking about that startling Huntsman during another outhouse visit in a completely different national park. It had an identical toilet paper dispenser, and as luck would have it, the bottom roll was empty. A moment of déjà vu made me hesitate, but again I poked my fingers in to pull down a new roll. 

And incredibly, another oversized Huntsman spider burst out! 

I was even more startled this time, but calmed down enough to take a picture. Then, as I’d done with the first huntsman, I found a stick and flicked the big spider down onto the floor. 

It dashed for the underbrush…and I vowed to bring my own toilet paper to these wild Australian outhouses from now on.  RN

The kookabura has a maniacal, infectious laughing call

For the past few days I’ve been camping in Southeast Forests National Park, a gorgeous place in the mountains a couple hours’ drive inland from the southeast coast of Australia. I’ve had the campground completely to myself, far from any busy roads, nested in silence and solitude.  

My “office” is a shaded picnic table and my home is the tent just a few yards away. It’s the middle of a warm February day—midsummer in this part of the world—with the sun blazing down between patchy white clouds.  

There’s a broad green meadow in front of me, densely surrounded by tall Eucalyptus trees. And pouring out from the forest edge is an absolutely preternatural sound—a chorus of intense, frenetic, chattering, high pitched almost maniacal laughter. This has been going on intermittently all day, but I can’t help stopping to listen every time it happens.  

The voices belong to Australia’s most famous and most iconic bird–the kookaburra. I suppose it’s one of the world’s best known natural sounds—often heard in old jungle films and modern Australian movies. Something inside apparently commands us to mimic this voice once we’ve heard it: koo koo koo kaa kaa kaa koo koo!  

Kids are especially good, or uninhibited falsetto adults. But no human can match the machine gun speed, grandstand volume, staccato resonance, and trampolining pitch of a real kookaburra.  

Like the whiteness of snow, a kookaburra’s voice can only be described in reference to itself. There just isn’t any other sound like it.  

And this campground in the mountains of southern Australia has easily the most spectacular kookaburra outpourings I’ve ever heard. I’d guess ten or fifteen kookaburra families claim territories around this meadow and in the nearby forest, each with 2 to 10 members, so there might be 100 kookaburras sounding off sunrise and sunset.  

There’s a brief silence after each group’s performance and then another bunch takes the stage. The effect is magnified in this particular meadow because every voice resonates between the encircling forest walls.  

Back and forth they go as the dawn brightens into day…a glorious rampage of sound, heard nowhere else in the world except Australia.  

Imagine an entire continent that starts every day, all year round—from the cities to the farmlands to the outback—with this vast, thronging, synchronized, uproarious chorus of laughter. I wonder if this has something to do with the Australian people’s pleasant, easygoing temperament.  

For me, the kookaburra chorus is a guaranteed charge of euphoria before breakfast.  RN

Wild Dingo-Dog on the road from Mt. Kaputar National Park

 I had a surprise sighting on the long drive down from Mt. Kaputar National Park. The road tunnels through a forest of white-trunked Eucalyptus trees. Just where it starts opening onto patchy meadows, a dog broke from the underbrush and trotted across the road in front of me.   

It was built like a medium husky but with bright golden-red fur. I knew instantly this was no ordinary dog. It was a dingo—the wild dog found only in Australia.   

I stopped the car and kept the engine running (to avoid the sudden silence that often spooks wildlife), while the dingo slowed to a saunter about 40 yards into the meadow. Where, to my amazement, it turned sidelong and stared at the car.   

I grabbed my camera from the passenger seat, wondering why some of us are compelled to make a “media event” out of everything. For whatever reason, I wasn’t content just to watch…and if the recorder hadn’t been in the car’s trunk I probably would’ve tried to catch the sound of its footsteps.   

Instead of sprinting for cover as I expected, the dingo stood for a long minute without a twitch, staring intensely at the car while I snapped a few pictures through the windshield.   

“Dingo!” I whispered. Even the name is purely and quintessentially Australian. But dingoes are latecomers here. Biologists figure they arrived roughly 4,000 years ago with fisherman-traders from Indonesia. Aboriginal people adopted them as hunting dogs and wrapped up with them beside waning fires on “Three Dog Nights” in the desert winter.   

Dingoes also went wild and spread throughout Australia. They live in loose packs of several to a dozen and collaborate on hunts for large prey like kangaroos. But they often prowl alone for birds, lizards, or small mammals.   

When Europeans settled Australia they tried to wipe out the dingo, just as they did for wolves in North America. They even built the longest fence in the world to keep dingoes out of eastern Australia…but it was a total failure.   

When I drove past the Dingo Fence in the desert country a few years ago, somebody had shot or poisoned two dingoes and hung their desiccated carcasses from the top wire—as if to say: “These two won’t kill any more lambs!”   

Like the coyote, dingoes are clever and adaptable, and they remain common in much of Australia. But today they’re threatened by a strange kind of extinction.   

Look closely at the Mt. Kaputar dingo. It should have perked-up ears like a wolf and its body should be lean like a red fox. Like most dingoes today, this one has some domesticated dog in its pedigree, even though it remains as red as the central desert sand. The only other dingo I’ve seen had a reddish-gray coat with black markings—obviously a crossbreed.   

Sun setting on the plains surrounding Mt Kaputar NP

Facing the possibility that it could vanish by hybridization, Australia is now trying to protect the few pure dingo populations that still exist.   

It’s a different story from those of the wolf and coyote in North America, but there’s something almost eerily familiar about the love-hate relationship between Australians and the dingo.

Eastern Gray Kangaroo in Warrumbungle National Park

It’s my last day in Warrumbungle National Park, a few hundred miles inland from the east coast in New South Wales and edging up toward the subtropics. Usually this is a dry, brittle place, but this year it’s humid and jungly. 

Luckily the campground has lots of trees and I’ve had my tent snugged under one that gives pretty good shade. When I took down the tent around ten this morning, it was already like an oven inside. Temperature’s about 95 degrees now, dense and muggy with only a slight breeze. They say Warrumbungle means “Crooked Mountain”, for the jagged volcanic peaks and plugs, but I figure it should mean “Sunstroke.”

I’ve talked with lots of Australians in this campground and most haven’t even mentioned the heat. A couple of young guys from Sydney asked about winter weather in Alaska and when I said Sitka’s been down in the teens, one of them said, “God, I really can’t imagine what that would be like. How do people survive?” There we were in the full sunshine—they seemed fine after a long hike up a shadeless mountain and I was about to keel over just standing there. 

Every day I’ve been heading out before dawn to record birds and hike around before the heat. For some reason, I’m obsessed with recording kookaburras—the big kingfishers that have a classic maniacal laughing voice. So I go out in the evening, find where they’re roosting and the next morning I stumble through the dark to that spot and wait, while the quick little mosquitoes look for a spot without any DEET. 

 It’s about noon and I’m sitting at a picnic table under a big metal roof that’s creaking and conking from expansion whenever the sun comes out from behind a cloud. The cicadas are buzzing like miniature chainsaws and there are horseflies zinging around me, but luckily they don’t seem to bite.  RN

Red bellied black snake visiting my campsite--highly venomous but shy

I’m camping now in Warrumbungle National Park, in the northern part of New South Wales, a couple hundred miles inland from the coast. This isn’t all that far from the huge floods in Queensland. I’ve always avoided going inland during midsummer here, but decided to give it a try. The forecast called for reasonably cool temps, but turns out that still means pretty hot. It’s probably in the mid-80s but very muggy, and the sun is extremely strong.  

Basically I’ve been lurking around all day from one patch of shade to another.  

The big story down here is rain. After 10 years of drought, places that were just sprawls of dessicated brown land are now green and lush. The livestock people are doing really well, but the crop farmers have gone from a decade of struggle, to a spring and summer that looked perfect, to a situation where their crops are drowning or unharvestable because the fields are a sea of mud.  

I’m sure everybody’s heard about the floods in Queensland. Actually you have to redefine your whole concept of floods to comprehend what it’s been like. I saw a bit of television news yesterday, showing absolutely mind-boggling devastation. As one commentator said, it’s like an inland tsunami. 

Actually there have been ordinary, slow-rising floods here for the past several weeks. But the latest ones are flash floods caused by humongous cloudburst thunderstorm rainfalls. The most unforgettable footage was of a blue car being carried along like a tiny cork in a huge whitewater river running through the middle of a town. The car came bouncing along like a whitewater kayak, hit a section of fifteen foot standing waves, vanished in an instant and never reappeared. Can’t get it out of my mind…just hoping nobody was in that car. 

Here in the Warrumbungle National Park, the usually semi-desert landscape is almost a jungle of tall grass with flowers everywhere. It’s hard to walk off the trails because the greenery is so thick and the normally-dry ground has swampy spots everywhere with frogs croaking.  

After dark last night I was meandering past the bathroom building and some people with flashlights had come across a snake that was sliding along on the sidewalk just outside the building. It was a beautiful thing—shiny iridescent black, spreading its neck sort of like a cobra when I got close. It was a blue-bellied blacksnake, which is in the top 20 worldwide for the potency of its venom. I sort of herded it away from the building and off into the underbrush. Everybody seemed very curious about the snake, keeping a distance but not freaked out by it. Every reptile species in Australia, poisonous or not, is fully protected by law.  

One more quick story. Last year I camped in this same national park, and at the visitor center I talked a few times to the woman who collects your camping fees. I had asked her about stuff like koalas and emus, and mentioned that I was recording stuff for a radio program.  

I’ve always been amazed by Australians’ ability to remember people—even clerks in stores will recognize me from a previous year. But this took it to another level. Soon as the woman from last year saw me this morning she said: “Oh, you’re back again.” Then she asked if I’d be recording radio stuff. And when it came time to fill out the receipt, she said: “The name’s Nelson, right?” It’s an extreme case, but I really think Australians focus far more than Americans do on remembering people and their names. 

Well it’s cooled enough so the mosquitos are coming out and I have to decide whether to have cold cereal or instant Thai rice for dinner. Probably the rice.  RN

Black Angus on a cattle station in NSW, Australia

I’m on a cattle station in New South Wales in Australia, working on a program about cows.
I had an excellent time this morning with a little herd of about 35 black Angus cows and their calves, grazing in a broad, open pasture. I wanted to record their sounds, so I approached very slowly and then stood in one place for a long time.

Eventually, as I had expected, the cows started coming my way, until they were all around me, standing quietly, ears up, huge dark eyes fixed on me, as if they were fascinated, hypnotized, or waiting for me to take charge.

The longer I kept still, the closer they came, until several had approached within touching distance. Now they were arranged in a semicircle, like a theater audience at a one man show, every cow and calf staring at me.

After about twenty minutes, some of the cows started shuffling around and grazing, and several calves began nursing from their mothers’ distended udders. I turned on the recorder and caught a pretty nice sample of cow sounds: huffing, groaning, grunting, mooing, shuffling back and forth, nudging and shoving, grazing and chewing. One cow leaned out to snuffle at the parabolic microphone. And I also recorded the surprisingly loud sucking and smacking sounds of twin calves nursing side-by-side.

After about 45 minutes the herd gradually lost interest and meandered away, grazing and scattering through the lush green grass; and I was left alone in our meeting place.

I’ve never stayed so long with a bunch of cows and found them as interesting as they had found me. I was struck, above all else, by their protracted, silent, fixed, singular focus on me, as if I had been an object of careful study. And I was equally impressed by their gentleness—these huge animals that could easily bowl me over if they had felt inclined. If I made even a small unexpected movement, they startled back as if they imagined I was ten times their size and dangerous as a lion. This misperception of humans, along with a shy temperament and easy compliance, must have been bred into cattle over thousands of years.

Many of us who live in the North spend a lot of time thinking about the animals that feed us, like moose, caribou, and deer. But we rarely think at all about the other animal in our lives—the unseen, unsung cow—that gives us milk, butter, cheese, and ice cream; perhaps the occasional steak or burger; as well leather for our shoes and wallets and seat covers.  RN

The powerful tidal current in Sergius Narrows, taken from Wayanda Ledge, where the Encounters Tide program was recorded

For a recent Encounters program about Tide, I made a solo trip by skiff to Sergius Narrows, about 30 miles north of Sitka, Alaska.  It was one of those great, beautiful adventures.  Everything went perfectly, including the weather–two days of rare October sunshine and nice easy water for boating.

Sergius Narrows is a pretty small stretch of water–roughly a hundred yards long and a couple hundred yards across, with a small wooded island and some rocky reefs in the middle–all surrounded by forest and mountains and wildness.   This is where the full vastness of the open Pacific meets the complex labyrinth of the Inside Passage.  Huge amounts of water pour through with every change of tide.  Around the New Moon and Full Moon, the place roars with whitewater; there are huge boils; the surface is all hills and valleys, with big deep whirlpools.

Because Sergius is a major entry point to the Inside Passage, it does see a fair amount of boat traffic, although most stay clear until the current eases around the slack tides.  When I first started exploring the place in my 19 foot skiff, it really got my heart pounding; but after a couple days I felt more confident and had a better idea about the places to avoid.  Nevertheless, I had to go through the tidal race a fair number of times in order to find the best place for recording the Encounters program.  Being alone adds to the anxiety, but it also helps to keep you completely focused on the surroundings.

During my days around Sergius, I stayed in a Forest Service cabin on a protected bay–a gorgeous secluded spot.  It’s almost jarring to be surrounded by such peace and stillness just a few minutes away from the fracas at Sergius Narrows.

Navigation buoy nearly pulled under by powerful tidal currents in Sergius Narrows

I had always dreamed of recording a tide program while standing on a rock called Wayanda Ledge, which is smack in the middle of Sergius, with wild water on either side.  This idea seemed impossible because of the danger and because any boats coming by would think I was in trouble.  As it turned out, no boats were going through with the current going full speed.  And there was a remarkably calm spot directly behind the ledge when the tide was at full flood (not later because the rock eventually submerged).

So I could jam the anchor right in among the rocks and climb up on top.  The rocks are mostly covered with slippery kelp but there are sharp barnacles for traction…although they’ll cut like razors if you touch them.  From up there, I had a spectacular view of thrashing, whirling, roaring water on either side–a perfect place to record the program, while also keeping a close eye on the boat and the rapidly rising tide.  I suspect my anxiety will give a little edge to the program.  In any case, it was amazing to be perched on that ledge of rock after thinking (and worrying) about it for years.

Spending those days in the midst of Sergius Narrows, surrounded by all that beauty and power, really was a lifetime experience.  After I came back home, I had this wonderful euphoric feeling inside that lasted for several days.  And whenever I think of it now, something inside me does a little joyful dance.  RN