A tool-wielding Australian eagle with an emu egg. Photo / Jill Worrall
A tool-wielding Australian eagle with an emu egg. Photo / Jill Worrall
KEY POINTS:
The gait was the same, the rumblings were almost identical but today's camel ride was in all other ways a stark contrast to my last camelback expedition just a few weeks earlier in the wilds of Syria.
Certainly, Lucille the Alice Springs camel who took me to breakfast at the Frontier Camel Farm was not as richly festooned with tassels and rugs as my camel in Palmyra - but then her owner was not trying to use her as a four-footed babe magnet.
Our four-camel trek made its way along the dry Todd River bed just after daybreak. The air was cool, the flies still sleepy but the cloudless sky was already glowing with the promise of another scorching summer's day. Lizards darted away from the camels' soft padded feet and galahs swooped and screeched through the eucalypts along the river's edge.
Lucille is one of more than an estimated half a million camels that roam Australia's deserts.
Camel farms such as this one don't bother breeding their own animals - when they need to increase their herd they simply head for the Outback and rope in a few more.
They might not be native animals but camels have been part of Australian desert life for more than 150 years.
Most came from the Indian sub-continent along with their camel drivers who were known to the white Australians with a geographically cavalier attitude as Afghans, even though many were more likely Baluchis from south-western Pakistan. This meant that Lucille was probably distantly related to a camel I once spent a week riding in Baluchistan.
As we plodded our way back to a large breakfast of bacon and eggs (there was sensitively no camel on the menu) I began wondering if my links with camels were becoming a little worrying.
Was I about to start uncontrollable buying of camel-related knick-knacks and wrapping myself at nights in a camel blanket?
Maybe some time in a camel-free zone was needed?
I found that in Alice Springs Desert Park, a government-funding national park that is home to dozens of native bird and animal species and hundreds of desert plants. Not a camel in sight.
Free-flight aviaries nestle among groves of native trees and they rustle and chatter with birds. I know it's ornithologically shallow of me but I loved the fluorescent blue fairy wren and the almost impossibly red scarlet chat. Apparently it's now non-PC to call the wren by its full name.
In the nocturnal house I watched quolls, hopping mice and bilbies going about their nightly routines, which - in the case of the bilbies - involved some enthusiastic mating. (The guide planned to report that so calculations could be made about when to expect the patter of this endangered species' tiny feet).
The grand finale was watching an eagle demonstrating the rare avian skill of using a tool (in this case a rock) to break open an emu egg.
Flushed with his success the eagle then took off and when I left the park was flying in lazy circles somewhere in the direction of Alice Springs while his keeper sat on a spur of the nearby MacDonnell Ranges waiting for him to get hungry and come home.
