Curious Nature

Candle In The Wind

Only as large as a family-size Steggles, the rare and very threatened Malleefowl is capable of the most amazing feats of architecture, engineering and construction. The male rakes together a mass of stones, loamy soil and leaf litter to create a nest mound that rivals the great pyramid of Giza.

Permit me to imbue upon you a quick lesson on evolutionary biology, reproduction and behaviour: As a general rule the more fecund an animal is the less parental care that animal will invest into it's young. Put simply, the more babies one has the less effort one needs to put into rearing them, as at least one of them will survive to continue the genetic lineage of the parent. Conversely, those species that only give birth to one or two offspring must take very good care of their young to achieve that same end result.

Female sea turtles lay well over one hundred eggs, but they do not bother to wait around to nurture the young. The babies hatch and make a beeline for the waters edge under constant ambush from birds, monitor lizards and feral fauna, such as wild dogs, foxes and cats. No matter their peril; at least one of them is sure to make it! As for the male? His parental investment does not extend beyond the few minutes of rumpy pumpy.

Parental investment of the male Emu into its chicks sits at the other end of the biological / behavioural spectrum. The male is solely responsible for incubation over the entire 8 weeks of the egg's development and then he follows that up with 18 months of 24/7 nurturing. This is enough to make the average male Homo sapian extremely embarrassed when he considers his own contribution to child rearing.

The Malleefowl is a very odd sod. Rather than producing dozens and dozens of eggs once per year and dumping those eggs into a hole in the ground for nature to incubate (like the turtle) the Malleefowl invests the most incredible effort into the construction of it's very own incubator, the temperature and moisture of which it constantly moderates through the action of scraping soil and detritus on and off the mound.

Like the Emu, the male Malleefowl is incumbent with all of the parental care obligations: nest construction and, in effect, incubation. Unlike the Emu, however, neither the male nor the female invest a jot of energy in the young once they hatch. The eggs hatch, the young emerge and just run off into the bush.

But any amount of parental care comes at a price to the care giver. Please consider my greying follicles or depleted bank account if you require any further affirmation of that fact. In the case of the Malleefowl, the price is very high: Death by feral predator. This bush chook spends weeks, if not months, working in the same area on the same mound. As each day passes the probability of falling victim to predation increases; the outcome is almost inevitable.

The video (Candle in the Wind) is a little confronting and the music is not meant to be crass or obtuse. A candle in the wind is exactly what I thought of when I saw what I saw. Some of the greatest architects and engineers never lived to see their creations come to fruition; they never got to see the fruit of their labour. This is a truly sad reality.