Fend, defend

                                Mountains, rivers, the great earth, the sun, the moon and the stars
                                are none other than your own heart and mind.        Mazu Daoyi

First snow on the ranges; I know it’s there because of the feel of the air in the afternoon and the high feathered edges of nimbostratus rearing up in the west, but the mountains themselves are invisible in the storm. Next morning as I drive along the ridge road to E and H’s house, for a moment looking south there’s a gap in the cloud and in it, a huge white shoulder turning away.

The four magpies tune up from the tips of macrocarpas in the windbreak, then all glide down to the pasture below to stand carolling, facing inwards like any quartet making sure they can hear each other. It’s now several years that they’ve come and gone around the farm – I wonder where they nest, or if they nest? S, our neighbour down the hill says she often sees them near her house, but there’s no sign of a permanent roost.

Sunsets and sunrises redden with the smoke of fuel reduction fires as rain comes at last, enough to soak in. It falls from the edge of a system that’s flooded towns and drowned people and their herds on the mainland. As vast weather systems roll over the island from north and south and catch us in their coils, I dream fire and flood together, flames leaping clear of the trees below the house, and the river flats upstream under water.

To remind myself that for now at least, the trees aren’t burning, I walk down among their breathing presences, which welcome fire, as they make abundantly clear, standing in their shedding skirts of bark, the forest floor beneath them deeply layered with branches and dead leaves. Where T burned a couple of seasons ago, a small forest of currajong – a local member of the mallow-hibiscus family – and acacia of various kinds and coprosma is springing up, and the prickly box, though burnt to the ground has made new shoots from its woody roots. The currajong saplings are a couple of metres tall and flowering already.

The understorey has a withdrawn and waiting feel. Only the currajong is blossoming, though under the bluegums a few immature flower capsules have been knocked to the ground by foraging birds; no flowers on the prickly box, no pea flowers or Billardiera or Goodenia, and no fruit or even seeds in evidence. Most activity is underground – as it always is to some degree – and as if to confirm this, the soil is pocked with bettong and bandicoot and echidna diggings. I see very few insects; there are no bull ant scouts wandering, and the jackjumper nest-pyramids are quiet.

I’ve been thinking about ants and their intimately entangled connections in the insect and plant worlds. A local example is the relationship between Anonychomyrma ants, bright copper butterflies (Lycaenidae), and the summer-flowering prickly box (Bursaria spinosa). Hard to know how to describe it – does it start with the Bursaria, which attracts butterfly pollinators with its sweetly scented, nectar-rich flowers along with leaves that are food for caterpillars? Does it start with the butterflies, whose larvae mimic the ants’ in-house chemical signals so that the ants don’t attack them, while at the same time offering honeydew and amino acids as food for the ants?

But let’s say it starts with the ants, who carry the plant’s seeds to their underground nests where they eat the seed’s expendable food body. Protected from wildfires, the seed germinates there when conditions are right. Once the plant has grown and the butterflies have arrived and laid eggs, the ants carry the eggs down into chambers they’ve made within their nests. There they’re protected from predators until they hatch, and then the ants shepherd the caterpillars up to the leaves overhead each night to feed and back down underground during the day, while themselves feeding on honeydew the caterpillars produce. Even the pupating larvae, which no longer offer honeydew, stay in or close to the nest, guarded by the ants until they emerge.

On the way back up the hill I stop to watch birds come down to bathe in the small dam that’s tucked into the hillside. A green rosella and its child eye me as they dive into their reflections again, again, again! All the birds bathe assiduously now, careful to keep their feathers clean and insulating in the cold. Hard frosts have begun to settle in the valley after clear nights, and though they’re rare up here on the ridge, on a couple of mornings I’ve woken to find every twig and leaf rimed and limned. Despite this, a few late roses continue to open against the warmth of the house wall. Condensation gathers in the shaggy guard hairs of the cows’ winter coats as they stand or lie on the driest ground they can find. The air is so damp and still, it’s useless to hang out washing even on sunny days.

A lone swamp hen has taken up residence near the house. Though usually these birds live in big noisy families, this one has been here on its own every day for months, grazing the weedy bandicoot-and-potoroo-dug grass, pausing to drink and bathe in the water pots. I think it’s a female. When I step out the door or arrive home from somewhere, she comes toward me and looks me in the eye then pecks elaborately at the ground, looks at me some more, pecks again. I’m being invited into something; I squat down and peck the grass with my fingers. We go back and forth like that for a while.

In Switzerland a glacier collapses and brings down the side of the mountain below, burying a village on the valley floor, where the mineral richness and depth of soil which attracts farmers in the first place is a result of the accumulated mass of millennia of similar falls. Though now in a period of acceleration as snows on the heights melt, such landslides must have been chasing settlements back and forth along the valleys since the ice retreated to the tops at the end of the last glacial period.

Inside and outside, through collapse and reintegration of what has collapsed, relationships and interconnections form and reform. We think we’re fending for ourselves, defending those we love, and all the while, welcomed, compelled, enticed, we’re carried along within something vastly more complex. Emerging, going back in, we get a glimpse now and then of the mountain. 

References

J. Hall Cushman, Vanessa K. Rashbrook, Andrew J. Beattie. ‘Assessing benefits to both participants and a Lycaenid-ant association.’ Ecology, vol 75, no, 4, (1994): 1031–41.

Mazu Daoyi. ‘Mountains, rivers.’ Trans John Tarrant and Joan Sutherland. pacificzen.org.

Antoni Milewski. ‘The first triangular mutualism – plant-ant-butterfly?’ https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/67254-the-first-triangular-mutualism-plant-ant-butterfly