I REMEMBER as a boy on a hot summer night sleeping out on the front lawn in urban Adelaide to escape the blistering heat.
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At dusk, high in the sky above was a V-shaped flock of water birds numbering in their tens of thousands.
From 1972, our family would make the Christmas pilgrimage to Adelaide from NSW.
It took us about three days, travelling overnight to avoid the extreme heat of the Hay Plains. We came constantly across thousands of flying insects in huge swarms; car radiators had to be covered in mesh and frequent stops were needed to clean dead bodies from windscreens.
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Dame Mary Gilmore recounts a story from her childhood. In the distance she could hear what resembled thunder, but there was not a cloud in the sky.
She tugged her mother's skirt and asked for an answer. "That is the sound of black swans beating their wings in the lagoon five miles away as they prepare to take off," her mother casually replied.
Once the plough was stopped by the sheer number of earthworms in the soil.
Aldo Leopold writes of a "living wind" and "a feathered tempest" created by the now extinct carrier pigeon in the USA.
One 1855 (Yeoman 2014) account from Columbus, Ohio described a "growing cloud" that blotted out the sun as it advanced toward the city. "Children screamed and ran for home ... Horses bolted," it was reported.
When the flock had passed over, two hours later, "the town looked ghostly in the now-bright sunlight that illuminated a world plated with pigeon ejecta".
IN OTHER NEWS AROUND BATHURST:
In the Central West, 10 per cent of Australia's land surface, and Australia's oldest inland European agricultural lands, there are 572 vertebrate species. Only 186 (32.5 per cent) have a secure future, 16 are extinct and the remainder are either declining, vulnerable or endangered.
It is an appalling record.
The platypus, once in teeming numbers, was hunted for its pelt to the point of near extinction.
The late Professor Jock Marshall summed up the loss of wildlife brilliantly in his classic 1966 book title, The Great Extermination. His subtitle was even more cutting: A guide to Anglo-Australian cupidity, wickedness and waste.
Species, plants, animals, fungi and bacteria are not just ornaments in the landscape. Rather, each has a role to play, and any losses lead to land degradation.
