There are just wars and unjust ones and one of the just ones is the ongoing war here in the ACT against the Common Myna (aka the Flying Cane Toad), an introduced brute introduced to the ACT in 1968.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Successful massacres of the species (the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group reported 3551 captures in 2012-2013 alone) have been waged not out of malice but on behalf of native species, like the Australian Owlet-nightjar peering out at you from our picture.
Reader Ric Hingee reports "I am one of the early members of CIMAG ) and have assisted in reducing the number of these birds to a point where they are now down from being Canberra's third most prevalent bird to being the 19th. I myself have dispatched around 500 of them from my backyard and have not seen any for many years now. This has resulted in many native birds returning to my garden ... The most recent to make its presence felt is the Australian Owlet-nightjar which I have found sitting in a tree in my backyard and on the TransACT wires on various days."
Owlet-nightjars will be grateful for the reversal of Myna fortunes because the pugnacious Myna's preferred nesting place includes exactly the holes, hollows and nooks in trees that Owlet-nightjars have to have.
These nightjars have a bouquet of common names and one of them is Banded Goatsucker. What this seems to be about is that, worldwide, crepuscular cousins of our nightjar are seen to hang around goats. Folklore has it that they suck milk from goats but facts (as usual spoiling good stories, good Folklore) suggest that these insectivorous birds loiter around goats so as to be able to eat the insects that teem around goats.
Unless you have backyard goats to act as goatsucker magnets you are much less likely to see your neighbourhood's nightjars than to hear them, especially at night. They have a call the doorstep-sized Volume four of the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand & Antarctic Birds at my elbow defines as "a churr, a short, shrill, purring chirr or chirk" that carries for up to 100 metres. To this columnist's ear it can sound at first like the sound made by a man-made, wind-up mechanism.
If you hear it in your neighbourhood and if you sally forth to hear it then you'll be behaving a bit like a nightjar because HANZAB says that most of their hunting is done while "sallying" (while out and about on the wing).
And while on the subject of troublesome species (like mynas) we turn to in-laws and to sculptor /ceramicist Steve Roper's startling work Brother In Law From Hell.
This bust is set to intrigue adults (and probably frighten small children) in the Belconnen Arts Centre's forthcoming exhibition Imaginarium, featuring works of 20 local and national artists.*
The Centre's flyer trills that "The exhibition will delve into the realm of imaginary creatures and/or forms that speak to interpretations of 'hybrids': imaginary creatures, creations, or objects that are fanciful, intriguing, even confronting."
Yes, you can see how Roper's Brother in Law From Hell fits into this surreal "realm".
Brother-in-law-blessed myself, I asked Roper whether this is a portrait of an actual brother-in-law or is just something fanciful.
Roper is one of those disarmingly frank artists who freely confesses that he may set out to depict one thing only to find, when it's finished, that it looks like something else. This almost certainly never happened with art's geniuses (one can't imagine that Leonardo's Mona Lisa began as his portrait of his Cocker spaniel) but it happened all the time with the great New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber. Attempting a woman on a couch he'd come up with a seal on a wardrobe, but then make the most of it.
Roper says that he'd just been fashioning this little bust of someone or other with "a goony expression" but then "When I'd got it finished I couldn't get it out of my mind that it looked like my brother-in-law."
It's not that his brother-in-law is especially awful but more that he certainly has had while younger and still shows today a playful "inner demon". Then, too, in a very Thurberesque way (things Roper hadn't thought of until he'd largely finished) the redness of the clay and the horn-like protuberances added to the Satanesqueness of the creation.
And while on the subject of works of art that don't emerge as they should there has been a late-breaking outcome of the philatelic "f--- up" mentioned in Monday's
International wasp scholar and ACT wasp-fighter Dr Philip Spradbery was aghast when Australia Post issued its Things That Sting stamp series. What Australia Post was calling on one stamp the notorious "European wasp" was something else, Vespula sylvestris, a species that's never occurred in Australia and so isn't as thing that stings Australians. The European wasp that Dr Spradbery fights (reminding some of us of Superman's righteous, unending, Metropolis-defending struggles with Lex Luthor) is Vespula germanica.
Dr Spradbery has just received Australia Post's frank admission that it has boo-booed, that he is right, and that it will "know better next time" to run any of its waspy brainwaves past him.
Another triumph for Truth and Taxonomy!
* Imaginarium is at the Belconnen Arts Centre from 23 January to 15 February.
