It started out as a mission to win a bet and turned into a walk to remember in the wild.
The bet with a birding friend centred on whether the Octopus Tree on kunanyi/Mount Wellington is a swamp gum or a gum-topped stringybark. Within a half hour or so tramping the Shoobridge Track, the identity of the tree became incidental. It was the rainforest surrounding the tree, and the birds living within its lush and fecund confines that stole the show.
To answer the first question – and in my case lose the bet – is the famous Octopus Tree about 100 metres along the track off the Shoebridge Bend on the slow climb up the mountain is, in fact, a towering gum-topped stringybark.
I wasn’t totally wrong, however. The equally gigantic trees that surround it are swamp gums, the infamous Eucalyptus regnans of the forest wars in Tasmania.
The swamp gums represent the tallest flowering trees in the world, the regnans which are also called mountain ash in Victoria.
The Octopus Tree gets its name from its exposed roots, which envelope a rock lying beneath it like octopus tentacles.
On my latest excursion I took a eucalypt identification guide with me but I didn’t have to study leaf shape and seeds to separate the two species. The reddish, rough bark of the stringybark, compared with the grey and yellow smooth bark of the regnans, which also shed strips of bark hanging like ribbons in the upper branches, provided the biggest clues.
The gum-topped stringybark (Eucalyptus delegatensis) also appeared to be a more bird-friendly tree. The bracken and fern surrounding the roots rang to the twitters of Tasmanian scrubwrens – birds generally inhabiting the damp forest floor – and in the gum’s lower branches another Tasmanian endemic species, the Tasmanian thornbill, chased flying insects emerging as the rays of a rising sun brought warmth to the damp and dank forest underworld.
It was not long before perhaps the most spectacular of the forest tribe, the pink robin, emerged, perching in the Octopus Tree to sing a sweet melody to a female. And a Bassian thrush, its mottled plumage the colour of fallen leaves making it difficult to see, scuttled through an undergrowth dotted with the tiny white daisy flowers of stinkwood.
The parade of deep-forest birds was rounded off by strong-billed honeyeaters tearing at the bark of the Octopus Tree to expose insect prey, and a green rosella munching on new leaf growth.
It all presented another world, so different from the higher, more open slopes of the mountain from where the city and surrounding suburbia form a backdrop. Out of sight of civilisation, it’s a lost world that can take the visitor back to a primordial time before the comforts of suburbia blunted the hard, unforgiving impact of nature.