A busy day at the bullrushes by Terry’s Creek for this brown gerygone. It really got into a frenzy as it threw itself around trying to tug away the requisite materials for nestbuilding.
Although they’re quite common up and down the east coast from far north Queensland, down to Victoria, where they’re actually expanding their range, this is the only place I’ve seen gerygones. Half-way through my daily commute along busy Epping Road in suburban Sydney, in line of scrubby woodland only a couple of hundred metres wide flanking a malodorous creek in a valley awash with weeds. But there’s plenty of cover, a water source, and the bushland stretches maybe three kilometres along the creek, all the way down to Lane Cove National Park.
Gerygones are the kind of little insectivorous bird that do okay in quite small patches of suburban reserve, but absolutely don’t make the leap, in the words of Patricia Hodgson and Richard Major “into the matrix”. The urban matrix, that is. Some of the other birds I see regularly at Terry’s Creek – the white browed scrubwren and the red-browed finch – are quite happy hanging out in the scungy waste ground next to railway lines or dank weedy gullies, but are less keen on suburbia.
For some reason, silver-eyes are an exception – they’ve taken the blue and the red pill. You find them both in and out of the urban matrix in “almost any woodland habitat“. This one and his gang blithely flew in to have a nibble on a riverside pittosporum as I stomped around only an armslength away.
Silvereye in pittosporum
Some of the other locals at Terry’s Creek do sometimes visit gardens and backyards, but not ours (sniff). I’m pretty sure our “house birds”, the resident red and little wattlebirds, keep them away. This week I’ve seen the little wattlebirds have a go at putting the frighteners on some much heftier residents.
Head to head between a male satin bowerbird and a little wattlebird
And it’s on!
Just before the wattlebird bit the kookaburra on the bum!
And we’ve worked out why the wattlebirds are so aggro this weather. Only a couple of metres from our backdoor, at eye level, right beside the path to the chook run and the washing-line, there’s a nest in the middle of one of our banana trees.
If you made an extensive search around the yard to try to find a place more exposed to human influence you’d be hard pressed to find one. Tobacco fumes constantly waft around the nest from the chain-smoker on the back verandah, and children run past shouting maybe ten times a day. More often, now we’ve spotted the nest and the two brown speckled eggs inside it.
The incubating female has a genuinely terrible approach to camouflage. Whenever human is nearby, popping into the laundry or watering the herb garden, she points her beak to the sky and stays very still. She’s pretending to be a stick, I think. A surprisingly bird shaped stick with a beady, watchful eye.
Female wattlebird incubating eggs in our banana tree
The tail’s a bit of a give-away as well.
Initially I figured that the wattlebirds picked this impropitious spot to raise their young because they were, frankly, a bit dim. But then I thought back to last year’s summer of the sparrowhawks – the sheer number of chicks I saw eviscerated and the dramatic drop in local wattlebirds population at that time.
Now, the collared sparrowhawks seem pretty laid back about humans, spending more energy guarding their nest from raids by currawongs and channel-billed cuckoos than worrying about our comings and goings. But even so, I’ve never seen them perching on the back step or checking out the laundry. So maybe the wattlebirds aren’t so stupid. Perhaps they’ve figured its safer to raise your young around the slow-moving noisy bipedal predators than the airborne ambush-hunting ones. They’re not just surviving in the matrix – they know how to hide there.
Collared sparrowhawk on the look-out for prey
References
Woods, K.A. 1996 “Bird assemblages in a small public reserve and adjacent residential area at Wollongong, New South Wales” Wildlife Research 23 605-20
Hodgson, Patricia, French, Kristine and Major, Richard E. 2007 “Avian movement across abrupt ecological edges: differential responses to housing density in an urban matrix” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol 79 Issues 3-4, pp.266-272