29.3.11 – Insects dead and alive (Orroroo and Clare, South Australia)

29.3.11 – Insects dead and alive (Orroroo and Clare, South Australia)

Meg at big tree



Today we left the drama of the Flinders Ranges for Adelaide, the beginning of the long trek home. Hot and sunny, the same dome of blue sky, soft white drifting cushions of clouds. At Orroroo, another sleepy outback township, was largest tree in South Australia, a 500 year old red gum, with the ominous name of ‘Widow Maker’ - these trees have a habit of suddenly dropping boughs on people’s heads. At our picnic table, a notice informed us to ‘Beware – branches may fall without notice’. So why put the table there?? Another advertised a short hike to some Aboriginal paintings and a poem carved in the rock. A large red slab, sloping at an angle, needed some careful study before the ring shaped markings became visible. These, it is thought, at over 7,000 years old, are sign posts, indicating the way to various key places - today’s Aboriginals can still translate them. Further up the creek, and a scramble down some slippy rocks, we found the two poems, scratched into the rock under a crag, in 1896 and 1901, by one John McDonald, just as he was about to leave for the USA in order to promote his invention of a crank-driven bicycle – must google him.



Bill hiking

We were accompanied by much wild life, again mostly of the winged variety – dragonflies, looking just like little radio-controlled bi-planes; ants, tiny ones, always marching in precise columns along the red mud, or large black ones, about the length of my thumb nail, usually patrolling alone; little brilliant yellow or white butterflies, flitting amongst the wildflowers; snails, tiny and white, looking like flower petals as they clung in profusion to the leaves. Insect life has become a feature of our camping here. We have developed techniques for keeping them out of the van at night – turn off all the lights and wait a moment, so that the moths lose interest and fly away - and we trip over the step. Spray the lights with insecticide, resulting in fits of coughing. Last night we were besieged by gnats – their tiny black bodies were everywhere in the morning. At night in the forest, the lamps in the campsite were partially darkened by the immense number of insects fluttering and dancing around them. And crickets, about 3 inches long, looking for all the world like little metal toys – the kind that spring up when you least expect it. One joined us briefly yesterday evening, jumping up about three feet in the air and making us jump about the same height too.

I’m told that there are far more in the summer – Bill recalls the screen doors, invisible under a mass of heaving black bodies; the campsite lady says that you have to drive the 30 feet to the toilets rather than walk through insect soup. We’ve been told there has been a positive plague of grasshoppers this year. We certainly got evidence of this as we drove down towards our planned campsite at Clare. The landscape was flat, reaching to low rolling hills on each side. Unlike the bush, this was clearly farm land, white stubble, or red fields, some with tractors kicking up vast clouds of red dust behind them. And on the road were grasshoppers  - Yellow Winged Locusts to be precise - millions of them. As we drove along, they jumped up, and flew straight into the front of the van, dozens at a time. There was no way to avoid them. All along the road, they smacked into the windscreen and grill, sounding like someone knocking their knuckle on the metal. They exploded onto the glass, leaving a gluey yellow mess which would not wash off with the wipers. In the rear view mirror, they looked like snowflakes constantly twirling and falling in the turbulence left by our passage. And when we stopped, the front of the van was an indescribable scene of death and destruction, the white paintwork hardly visible under the encrusted yellow explosions that had been crickets, the grill packed full of little bodies, lace-like wings flapping in the breeze. We found a car wash, and I made a sharp exit into town, leaving Bill in charge of the powerwasher wand. I returned to find the van clean and the forecourt covered in wings and other less identifiable bits of cricket. There seem to be less insects round the van tonight – presumably because we have killed most of them. 

Insect covered van