We are creatures of organic substance
Rare Books, Entomology, and Wildlife Care
Several new and terrifically exciting projects for 2026 are forming in the wings, and while it is too early to reveal them, in full, a small peep at the process, for the source material is spectacular, really must be shared. Our collage work is, as ever, growing alongside wildlife care, with the two literally side by side, interweaving whether intentional or not. Our Tiny but Wild shelter is our home-based studio and vice versa, and the knowledge from one flows into the other.
And so, today, assembled here, recent moments of our working process interspersed between a forest recharge at Buyjip State Park, a Haunted symposium of Australasian ballet (falling on Hallowe’en, those spectres), an update on the ringtail joeys, and a rope dancer or what clouds might feel like.
We are currently looking after a female Krefft’s glider (Petaurus notatus). Upon her arrival, the scales told us she weighed 99 grams, and yet she is a featherlight impossibility of softness to the touch. We’ve called her Roly (short for Rolanda) on the basis of her ruffly inbuilt cloak and her roll-into-a-ball charm. The genus Petaurus, meaning “rope-dancer”, refers to her awe-inspiring ability to expand the skin between her wrists and ankles enabling her to glide from tree to tree, and thereby avoid predators. Tree hollow dependent, these gliders are often referred to as nature’s BASE-jumpers, but let not her sweet visage fool you, gliders can make a barking noise, which we’ve heard once or twice.
Roly has since graduated to one of our outdoor enclosures, and she currently weighs 107 grams. Now that our trail cameras are no longer keeping an eye on the soft release quartet at Sutton Grange, we’ve popped one up to chart her movement overnight. The other camera is on the ringtail joeys, but so far they’ve either found a way to deactivate the camera to avoid detection or we have the settings wrong. With Pansy tickling 130 grams, she, too, along with her ringtail family, will soon be ready to graduate to an outdoor enclosure. To all this, a collage with an entomological twist, by way of Dante and Piranesi, continues apace.
Gliding evolved separately in the group that contains the squirrel-sized sugar gliders and slightly larger yellow-bellied gliders, which become flat squares when they launch into the air, as they have full wing membranes (called patagia) extending from their ankles right up to their fingertips. These membranes can carry a yellow-bellied glider for 140 metres (460 feet) as they travel between trees that they cut little Vs into for feeding on the sap. By contrast, greater gliders’ wing membranes end at their elbows, so their ‘parachutes’ are proportionately smaller. When they are airborne, greater gliders fold their hands under their chins, elbows out, in what has to be the most comical pose of the world’s ‘winged’ mammals.
— Jack Ashby, ‘Marvelling at Marsupials’, Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals
Breaking from the screen is important too, and a work about and for nature, for wildlife, can only benefit from a walk, from a chance to observe. Time to uncurl our backs, clear our heads, recalibrate. Momentarily, appears, a world of green and light reminiscent of Nan Shepherd’s: “How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces.”
In the Bunyip State Park, for our field notes we sighted a flowering of prickly tea tree on Tea Tree Road; a wombat, who gave the impression of a still though furred boulder; and four wallabies, one of which in the pouch. The thrill of seeing wildlife being wild and healthy and largely unperturbed by us as we tiptoed past was just what was needed. The thrill of feeling light again. And remembering how to find that feeling. “The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery” (Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland).
The title for this post is plucked and altered from Melanie Challenger’s How to Be Animal: What it Means to Be Human, cited by Susana Monsó in Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. (You can read an excerpt, ‘Elephant graveyards’ from Playing Possum, via Princeton University Press.)
We are a creature of organic substance and electricity
that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back
into the enigmatic physics of the universe.
The truth is that being human is being animal.
Image credit: The Natural History of Foreign Butterflies; The Naturalist’s Library, Entomology, Volume V by James Duncan, M. W. S., ed. by William Jardine, illustrated by thirty-three coloured plates, with memoir and portrait of Lamarck, published by W. H. Lizars, Edinburgh, 1837
