Sometimes on these winter mornings, really properly waking up takes a while. Hopefully you’re reasonably alert by the time you get behind the wheel and barrel down ridge-line freeway with a kayak strapped on the roof of your vehicle. But it turns out, some days, when you arrive at the boat ramp, the landscape hasn’t quite woken up either.
The river’s still rubbing the sleep out of its eyes.
Last Saturday morning, no signs of morning mist in Mooney Mooney Creek but the resident royal spoonbills seemed far from ready to face the day.
Sleeping spoonbills
I hung around for a while, seeing if anyone would make a move when the first rays hit the water. Eventually one spoonbill started going about his morning ablutions in just the kind of groggy way the not-really-a-morning person would do – staggering around in the shallow water to no particular effect; wetting his whistle (or in this instance, spoon) and doing a bit of ad hoc grooming.
As he sleepily ruffled his feathers, he looked so torpid it seemed like he might just leave his head under his wing and go back to sleep
I thought the rest of the group might wake and start looking around for breakfast, but no. I love watching spoonbills searching for food, their bills swishing from side to side as they walk through the shallow water, feeling for critters with those vibration-detecting papillae. It would have be nice to hang around. But the tide was dropping and a long stinky walk across the mudflat dragging the boat wasn’t how I wanted to start my day.
By the time I came back from my jaunt up Mooney Mooney Creek it was low tide, and brunch was over for the spoonbills.
The royals were comfortably seated high above the action – there had been a shift change. The white-faced herons were out in force. Twenty at least on the tidal islands and silty shores between the freeway and Spectacle Island.
The herons are ubiquitous on the Hawkesbury of course. I’ve never yet been out in the boat without seeing one, or a pair (or two or three or even more). But this spot, between a tumbledown wharf and a band of mangroves, is the only place I’ve seen spoonbills in these parts. Royal spoonbills only feed in water less than 40 centimetres deep, hunting for fish in the sweet water and crustaceans in the salty. I guess this spot at the mouth of Mooney Mooney Creek, with its shoals and shallows, fits the bill perfectly.
The white-faced herons, on the other hand, are generalists. Birdlife Australia describes them as “extremely versatile”- “seen in many different wetland habitats: they occur on reefs, in rock pools and mudflats by the coast, in estuaries and saltmarsh, swamps, rivers, drains and at farm dams; they even occur in pasture and hypersaline wetlands.”
Here we see herons hanging out on the rocky shores of Berowra Creek; hunting in a freshwater swamp at Ganguddy in Wollemi National Park; poised elegantly in a tree at high tide in Marramarra Creek and leaping in a demented manner to catch some kind of flying bug in the playground of the local primary school.
They’re everywhere and they eat nearly anything – frogs, lizards, fish and crabs as well as whatever critters live around school soccer pitches. On an afternoon walk to Waratah Bay from Berowra station, we even saw them chowing down on squid.
On Saturday, as I jumped into the boat, an older fella asked me if I had been paddling around there before. I obviously looked clueless, a middle aged woman in long johns and an implausible beanie, heading off on my own. Watch out for the gangs of jet-skiers that tear up and down the river, he warned me. I reassured him – I’d be wending my way through the Mooney Mooney oysterbeds, not the best territory for high speed jet-powered exploits (I’d almost like to see them try).
Oysterfarm at low tide
But, in truth, what keeps me and my little wooden kayak safe and sound is that I’m more like the spoonbills than the herons. I’m a specialist. I’m not out there in the middle of day or the middle of the summer, with the boofy blokes and the powerboats. I’ll take the shallow water and the early shift.
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