Category: habitats

What remains

This week, the children carried magnifying glasses. The first things that drew their attention were the kangaroo bones at the Ngaraka Shrine.  Some crouched low, studying intently the intricacies of the bone textures and shapes.bones through glass

Others walked around holding their magnifying glasses up to the sky.  This led to an unexpected discovery as one child, holding a magnifying glass at arms length, found that it made things appear upside down.  Others soon caught on and the children delighted in this new way of looking at each other and more distant objects such as trees – ‘Everything is upside down’ and ‘You look upside down.’

upside down1

 

 

 

Before long, the children remembered their favourite spot from the last few walks. ‘Let’s go to the fallen trees!’. They ran in eager anticipation towards the site that had become so familiar.

heading to trees

But what disappointment! Where the tangled trees had once lain sprawling and invitingly across the ground was now a bald clearing. There was nothing remaining of their favourite fallen tree playground but some sawdust and a few scattered bare stumps. The area had  been ‘cleaned up’, as had the small shelter the children had built with the branches.

trees gone1

‘Oh no‘ they kept repeating in shock. After recovering from their initial dismay and disbelief, the children started to reminisce  – ‘I remember I used to crawl along this’ and ‘Now I can’t climb on there anymore’. They noticed a pile of tell-tale sawdust and fresh cut marks, quickly connecting this with the recent work of chainsaws.They examined the sawdust trails with their magnifying glasses, thinking they might lead them to the culprits – the ‘bad’ people who had sawn up and taken away their fallen trees.

 

trees gone cut traces                         2016-08-18 10.39.47

With some encouragement, and their magnifying glasses still to the ground, they eventually set off towards the kangaroo grasslands, looking for new trails.

There, they found ample evidence that the rabbits were out and about again. There were new scratchings everywhere. As well as plentiful signs of rabbit life, a small group of children stumbled upon the remains of yet another dead rabbit. Its decomposing body held their attention for quite some time. Armed with their magnifying glasses, they intently studied the details of the rotting corpse – spotting a centipede crawling inside the stomach cavity, noting that the fur was coming off the skin and there were lots of exposed bones. ‘I can see where its eyes were’, ‘I can see its nose. Its nose is peeled’.  ‘Hey guys’ they called out to alert the other children, ‘dead bunny, another dead bunny, with a centipede on it!’ The subsequent discovery of tufts of rabbit fur in a nearby grass clearing seemed to trigger their imaginations of yet another crime scene, and as with the cleared fallen-tree site, they started speculating about what might have happened.

dead rabbit - 18 aug walk

As if mapping the action, one child offered this explanation: ‘Maybe a fox grabbed the bunny and pulled out its fur, and then picked it up and ran over here, and killed it. But it didn’t eat it all, and it ran away down there’.

This reminded another child about the day that a fox killed her pet chook. There was an air of sombre acceptance about the fate of small animals who become prey to others – a moment of fatalistic reflection on the harsh life and death realities of the food chain. ‘I’m sorry this happened to you bunny’ declared one of the children.

With the remains of the fallen trees and the bunny now witnessed, registered and remembered, it seemed the children were ready to move on. After all, it was a lovely sunny late-winter day, with the promise of spring to come, they wanted to be out in it. A bit like the rabbits, they returned to whole-heartedly immersing themselves in the warming world around them.

grass rabbits

This meant that the rest of the walk was spent by many ‘being rabbits’. Pealing off their winter coats, many children hopped enthusiastically through the grass. Eventually tiring themselves out, they found a small weeping acacia to be their new tree-cubby ‘rabbit home’.

rabbit home2Uncannily, this walk, with its unfolding theme of (tree and rabbit) loss, remains and remembrance, was intermittently marked by the sounds of the Long Tan Vietnam memorial event, being held at the nearby Australian War Memorial. It started early in the walk, with the arresting distant boom of repetitive cannon fire. By the time the children had become rabbits in the grass, their play was accompanied by the reverberating sonic roar of a large formation of vintage war planes circuiting the city. The planes did several laps and were quite deafening as they zoomed directly overhead.  For the children being rabbits under the weeping acacia, this reinforced the need to further retreat into their bushy hide-away:

‘We don’t like noise’

‘Those are army planes’

‘We don’t like noise or army planes’

‘We like hiding’rabbit home3 sleeping

‘This is the perfect spot to hide’

‘I’m going to be sleeping now’ [snoring sounds]

‘This rabbit is sleeping’

‘Uh oh! Person!  Evacuate, evacuate!’

‘No, we just have to hide a bit more. No one can ever see us’.

When it was time to return to the centre, the rabbit children had to be enticed out of their new hiding place with the promise that we would soon return.

trees gone carrying last bit

 

One child carried a souvenir from the cleared fallen-trees – a remnant branch that she had held onto resolutely for most of the walk.

While in many ways this walk was marked by the memorialised sounds and visions of loss and destruction – there was nonetheless a strong sense that ‘what remained’ was far from a static, mournful and lifeless shell of past lives and events.  The children seemed very able to respectfully witness, grieve, remember and move on, and in the process, to creatively transform the remains of the past into an emergent and lively present.

 

 

Returning to the fallen trees

IMG_6322

The children were keen to return to the fallen trees, which have become a favourite playground over the last week. We had intended to look for animals in their branches, but there were still few to be seen out and about in this cold weather. Instead, quite a few of the children themselves became tree animals, resuming the play they had started on the previous walk.

 

 
possum in tree watching boy

One child became a possum, climbing on the branches and hissing at the children below. He was looking to see if they had any food for him to eat. The children are familiar with possums. There are plenty that visit the preschool playground at night, leaving their tell-tale possum poo on the paths and in the sand pit. In lean times, it’s not unusual for the children to see them during the day, staring down from their vantage points above. They come out when they smell the fruit and are waiting to eat the scraps.

The possum boy in the fallen tree was enjoying the view from above. He stared intently to see what was going on below, and then crawled along the trunk, hissing loudly to attract the attention of a group of children at the ‘top’ end of the tree. They were being koalas in the leafy canopy. They were too preoccupied with the business of hiding in the leaves to notice him. ‘I’m a camouflaged koala’, they repeatedly told each other, and ‘I’m eating leaves’.

green tree frog

 

 

Another child, who had been quietly watching the possum, decided to follow suite. He started off as a baby possum, crawling along the same tree trunk, but suddenly changed his mind and declared himself to be a ‘transformer green tree frog’. ‘Look I’m a hopping green tree frog’ he said.

 

 

 

Apart from the children, there were few live animals to be seen in the fallen tree. However, some long-gone small creatures had left behind their tell-tale marks.

Worm patterns IMG_6312

One of the bare tree trunks was imprinted with the long, windy tracks of previous wood eating occupants, and another spotted by insects holes and pimpled with the small raised bumps of insect larvae.

The children were fascinated with the patterns and textures of these bug habitats. They ran their fingers over the lines and bumps.

tracing worm marks  IMG_6318

Paper tracing worm marksworm mark rubbings

Inspired by the insects ‘drawings’ on the wood, they made their own imitations with paper and pencils – tracing the lines and making rubbings of the textured surfaces.

By now keenly attuned to the different kinds of markings on the trees, some of the children took another look at the wrinkles in the bend of the tree trunk. They had been running their fingers over these wrinkles on the previous walk. They noticed that they were not like the lines carved by the bugs, but couldn’t quite work out how they had come to be there.

feeling tree wrinkles     bleeding tree

They were not so perplexed by the ‘cut’ in the trunk, however, which they immediately identified as a ‘bleeding sore’, and as evidence that the tree had been injured when it fell.

The children’s close and pensive inspections of all these scars suggested that they had a sense of the fallen trees as more than just their playground. Although mysterious and not always easy to ‘read’, the inscriptions they were tracing on the surface of the tree trunks, seemed to bear witness to the fact that these trees have had their own lives and stories to tell.

 

Sheltering

Snow clouds were gathering over the Brindabella Mountains, and when the westerly wind gusts blew across from them, we were pleased to be so rugged up. One child noted the force on her body when she commented ‘I’m trying to walk this way but the wind is pushing me back that way’. It was definitely not conducive weather for animals to be on the move – there were very few out and about. We didn’t even see any rabbits run out of the grass. We asked the children to think about where the animals go when it’s so cold.

Rabbit grass home

They found the first possible answer to this question in the tussocky grasses  – a round hollowed out form that they hadn’t noticed before. It was not quite a burrow – more of an above-ground hole. It looked like the kind of place where an animal might temporarily stop for shelter, rather than permanently live. We weren’t sure if the rabbits made the hollow shelter, or some other kind of animal. ‘Could be a rat?’ one the children suggested, but the rabbits had definitely used it.

rabbit grass shelter

 

We knew this as they’d left their tell-tale scratchings and droppings at the front door. Once the children’s eyes were attuned to the shape of this grass hollow shelter, they started to notice that there were quite a lot of them. ‘Here’s another’ someone would call out, inviting others to run over and inspect.

 

 

 

 

 

rabbit toilet

 

In stark contrast to the noticeable physical absence of rabbits in the grass, there was (as always) abundant evidence that rabbits still live here – in increasingly large numbers.  Rabbit markings – scratchings, burrows, piles of poo – have become a ubiquitous feature of the landscape, seemingly reshaping it now on a daily basis. The children have become so accustomed to the signs of rabbits everywhere, that they’ve become quite blasé about them. For instance, they’ve taken to regularly chanting ‘Another rabbit toilet’ in ‘ho-hum’ tones, as they walk along.

 

dead rabbit no3

 

They were not quite so blasé when they came across yet another dead rabbit, lying next to a burrow. These encounters with dead rabbits have become a regular occurrence, and we’re beginning to really wonder what’s going on. This time, the rabbit’s body had been partially eaten and was starting to decompose. ‘I can see the spine bones’ one child commented – perhaps also recalling the kangaroo spine bone fragments they often identify at the shrine.

 

 

The semi-enclosed pathways under the casurina trees beside the lakeshore are always a drawcard, but they exerted a specific kind of pull in this weather. The children quickly ran across the exposed open parklands to get there. Once ‘inside’, they came across a pair of wood ducks and a few purple swamp hens also sheltering in this relatively protected space.

watching swamp hen

 

They immediately stopped running, clustered together and started to creep along – trailing the shy swamp hens. ‘Shhh’, ‘shhh’, they kept reminding each other to stay quiet, knowing from past experience that the swamp hens are very easily startled and would fly away if someone made a loud noise.
blanket for fish

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of children started gathering fallen casurina branches and throwing them into the lake. When queried, they explained that they were ‘making a warm blanket for the fish because they must be cold’.

 

On our way back to the centre, the children couldn’t resist stopping off at one last favourite spot. This time it was the covered thicket of garden bushes that drew them in. They’d inspected its dark understory many times before, for animal traces. Today it became the children’s own shelter – their ‘home-corner’ cubby.

home under bush