Antechinus
Babies' lungs, and flu
viruses, and the antechinus that decided to come into our holiday house in the
middle of the night by scraping its way through the metal roof. These are are
small things with a capacity to have a large impact on the wellbeing of a fully
grown human.
'He's a mouse and not
a mouse read the literature in the cottage'. Its name also means resembling a
hedgehog, ' ant-echinus'. I was very excited. Something stirred in my memory
from long ago. Ten years before, for 15 months I did little other than sit at
my computer, writing and rewriting texts
on mammals. I also, I recall, walked my dog, and ate, but that is all. My job,
which was my first, was to assistant edit the new Oxford University Press,
Encyclopedia of Mammals with David Macdonald. Our task, if you will excuse the
pun, was mammoth.
We had around 200 scientific entries all written by different
mammologists. There were only funds to revise one quarter of the text, but
David was determined to update all 400,000 words. The desire for inclusion, the
favours and benefits Prof. David had
bestowed over many year s as a pivotal character in conservation biology and
frankly his squeaky clean charm, did the job. People began sending in revised
copy from literally the furtherest flung corners of the globe from Siberia to
Botswana. Big cat and hippo and elephant and dugong biologists came in from the
savannah and desert and jungles and tundra to email their writing to me. And my
job, was to rewrite and reduce, to captivate a general audience while retaining
and augmenting all scientific content.
One of the strangest stories told in that vast tome was that
of the mouse-not mouse of our holiday cottage. But his story was not of
mistaken identity. His was a tale of love and death. Antechinus, a small marsupial mammal that
looks like a mouse, with a big nose, consumes its own body from the inside out,
to compete for females and access to opportunities to make babies. All males
die before the age of one. They can spend twelve hours at a stretch mating. After
the breeding season, they die exhausted and deplete.
They are one of the world's few 'semelparous' mammals. Like
some salmon, which live to breed only once, dying in the spawning grounds,
their dead bodies feeding the running waters of their children's nurseries with
nutrients, so the antechinus sacrifices itself to love. A dramatic life for so small and inconsequential
a 'non-mouse'.
My antechinus came in the middle of the night rattling a
tin. Or so it seemed. In fact after being awoken six times by a loud clattering
sound, I searched the inside of our cottage kitchen, but found the creature
eventually after venturing outside, in
between two roof struts, busy breaking and entering. It froze in my torchlight,
its spiky fur standing on end as though damp from extertion. This
mouse-non-mouse, non-hedgehog thing was a creature of zoological myth, come
alive for me in the dark, mint-scented, eucalptypus night of the blue
mountains. I froze too, in awe.
He woke me up which normally makes me very grumpy, but this
non-mouse could do no wrong. I was and am simply grateful to have had the
enchanted chance to meet him on his own turf, living wild in the antipodean forests.
Sasha x
Sasha x
