An unhappy threesome

The threesome in the bottom of the garden is just not working out well, or not for my lonesome lady kiwiberry anyway.

Most kiwi fruit are dioecious – to produce fruit you need both male and female plants.  Commercial producers have maybe one staminate pollinator to eight fruit-bearing pistillate plants. In our garden, there isn’t enough space for such large scale polygamy.  All in all, the plant sex around here is playing into the hands of the social conservatives.

The couply-couply Sweetie kiwifruits in the “solar pergola” have done their baby-making (with a little bit of help from me).  Inspired by their example, the Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry is now in bloom.  But it’s just not happening for Hairy Hayward, her pollinator (or his lovely vigorous and hairy wife).  It takes chillier weather to get their blood up, I reckon.

I’m not quite sure what should happen next.  Mr Sweetie has done his dash fertilisation-wise this year.  I have no shame – I am willing to act like a bee and transport the good stuff around the garden but I’ve gotta have something to work with.  Perhaps internet dating is the way to go: “Would like to meet: generous pollen-laden male kiwifruit.  A love of warm weather essential.  Variety and nectar-production unimportant. Must be willing to reproduce immediately.  No time-wasters please”

She may not have a fully functioning pollinator, but Mt Tomah Red does have a new BFF.  A teenaged possum has snuck into the marsupial sunroom – between an old pane of glass above the barely used airconditioner and the boarded up window behind it.  I don’t think he realises it’s like the Big Brother house in there: he might feel like he’s having a secluded nap amongst the kiwi vines but in reality anyone hanging out the washing can look in and catch him snoring.  And if he’s hoping that Madam Tomah Red is going to provide him with a sequence of midnight snacks, he’s mistaken there as well.

Going cuckoo

You’re suddenly awake.  It’s very very early in the morning.  There’s an loud, insistent two-note call right outside your bedroom window.  It goes on and on and on, each time inching up in pitch, getting more and more desperate until it’s pretty much a hysterical squeak.  Just when you think the bird’s going to start outright screaming or explode, abruptly it stops.  You settle down in bed.  And then it starts again.

Or it’s the middle of the night.  Somewhere in the darkness, there seems to be a huge, angry and deeply confused seagull, belligerently squawking in disgruntlement and disgust: “Where the hell’s the beach??! And where are my chips!!!?”

It’s spring and they’re back.  Koels with their plaintively annoying round-the-clock cries, and channel billed cuckoos, raging at midnight (and during the day as well).

I heard my first koel, bang on time, the day after the vernal equinox; a raucous channel billed cuckoo interrupted one of my classes a few days before.  They’ve flown in from the north in time for the breeding season.  Sydney: it’s officially spring.

Despite their loud voices I have only ever eyeballed koels a couple of times.  On both occasions it was a whining juvenile that got my attention.  Down the bottom of the garden a year or two, I watched a great galumphing teenager begging for takeaway from a  motherly if diminutive wattlebird. We’re still working on installing LBB (little brown bird) habitat around here.  In the meantime wattlebirds rule the roost, along with magpies, kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets, cockies, brush turkeys – the usual self-confident generalists and anthropophiles (is that even a word?).  Which suits the koels fine, since red wattlebirds seem to make great parents.

Channel billed cuckoos prefer currawongs and occasionally magpies as babysitters, and since a mob of maggies has been hanging out at our place over the winter, I wonder if we might get an in-situ “fig hawks” or two as well.  My dad spotted a mega-cuckoo at the top of the drive last weekend, so it just might happen. Surprisingly, considering its deafening cries and outlandish hornbird-esque appearance,  no-one knows much about what the channel billed cuckoos get up to in their spare time.   So, go, backyard birdwatchers, go! Do that citizen science thing!

For all the mystery, it seems these guys, like the brown cuckoo doves, cooing outside the kitchen window in a more decorous and paradigmatically cuckooish way, are some of the winners of the anthropocene.  They like us and our tasty fruit-bearing trees.  And they favour the parenting style of the other birds that enjoy the buffet. Currawongs have come down from the mountains in the last forty years to snack on Sydney’s privet and lantana, and the visiting cuckoos are pretty happy about it.

Reflecting on how much these birds seem to enjoy our company, I’m tempted by a “humans-as-brood-parasites” line of thinking.  Begging for food from our animal compatriots, all the while chucking their babies out of the nest. Terminating the blood lines of the things that came before us in a flash and replacing them with more and more of our own offspring.  Bigger, noisier and more devious than the critters that feed us and house us.

But let’s not go there.  It’s a nasty thought, and whatever we might say about humans, cuckoos just aren’t that bad.

Sulphurous romance

While hanging out the washing today, I witnessed a moment of cockatoo romance: a touching break-up-and-make-up scene.

A gang of sulphur crested cockies was chilling in our neighbour’s backyard jungle, napping, preening and crunching the odd stick.  I watched for some minutes (rather pruriently, I admit, but I had the excuse of avoiding housework) as a couple engaged in some heavy-duty necking.  Chewing the feathers around each others’ eyes:  it doesn’t get more intimate than that.  Then it all went wrong – there was a sudden squawk, a bout of wrestling and irritable pecking, and one took off to sulk in a nearby tree.

The remaining bird released a bit of tension by ripping off some chunks of bark and partially eviscerating a few palm fronds.  Then after about quarter of an hour (there was more than one load of washing), the huffy one came back.  He (I’ll say he, for no reason in particular) initially flapped over to the far end of the branch.  With an air of studied nonchalance, by turns looking diffidently about and intently examining his perch, he inched slowly towards his flame. It all ended up in some rather sultry ear whispering and gnawing.  Most satisfactory.

I know sulphur crested cockatoos are so common that many people view them as pests.  Particularly people whose balustrades or window frames or grain crops they’ve ripped apart.

But there is something magical about the sight of the big mob at dusk, floating across the valley, screeching and wheeling as they prepare to roost for the night.  They alight in one tree for a moment and then, all together, lift their wings and move on.  Drifting over the steep wooded slopes, passing across the creek and turning back again, they stitch together the sunlit and the shady side of the gully.  In their map of this place, I’m guessing, the switchback road and the marina, firetrails and bridges and cliff faces, the river a thousand steps below, fall away.

Watching the domestic scenes today: parents, siblings and lovers dangling and swinging in the branches, inspecting and deconstructing the palm tree, muttering, exclaiming, fondling and fighting, it’s easy to see how people want to keep these clever, beautiful creatures as pets.  And apparently while they can survive for forty or maybe even eighty years in the wild, they can live to be over a hundred in captivity.  So there’s something to be said for it, I suppose.  I’m reminded of those enthusiasts for longevity who have discovered you can live longer by eating less.  A lot less.  An extended life in which to contemplate the absence of pleasure.  For instance, here’s Cocky Bennett, a Sydney legend who apparently lived to 120, the last 20 years nude, mumbling “one feather more and I’ll fly”.

 

Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

Something weird happened today.  With a self-important summons to the other chooks, Treasure sped over the large disgusting vat of compost tea lurking under the tumbler and took a long, luxurious drink. After a good sup, she briskly trotted away with the kind of dirty stain on her snowy chest that speaks of an all-absorbing gastronomic experience.  Is this a chicken version of the breakfast long black?

Chicken coffee

Nom nom nom

Knowing as I do in the contents of the compost tumbler – innocent things like lawn clippings, comfrey cuttings and fallen maple leaves; but also less pleasing items –  mouldy citrus peel, rotten pears and fetid greens, barnhouse bedding weighed down with healthy gobbets of chicken manure, and in consequence a fine array of crawling and creeping things, their offspring and their excreta – the idea of the chickens necking great drafts of the liquid that oozes from this brew is really quite disturbing.

In general, I view keeping chickens as bit like teaching adults (my day job).  Kindy teachers have to wipe away tears, give cuddles and clean up vomit, but when you teach in higher education you can more or less rely on students to handle the basics on their own.  I don’t like to patronise my chooks – I reckon they have a fair idea of where to hang out, how to spend their time and what’s okay to eat.

But perhaps I’m being too laissez faire.  Maybe I should treat my hens more like my children and start policing their behaviour a bit more vigilantly.  Possibly letting the girls drink compost tea is the equivalent of doling out supersized glasses of Coke (and a Happy Meal?) to under tens.

This is the dark side of the compost tumbler.  It seems so sleek and neat, holding its dubious contents high above things that squirm and scamper and gnaw in the night.  You spin her wheel and steer her like a noble vessel towards the promised land of super-speedy compost, black gold faster than lightning.  And I can say, hand on heart, that after fifteen years of steadfast unintentional cold composting, one bucket of kitchen scraps at a time, with this tumbler, I’ve seen my very first batch of the good stuff, cooked within an inch of its life.  While most things (except for teaspoons and the plastic tags on bread bags) will rot down eventually regardless of how incompetently you build your heap or how infrequently you turn the pile, there is something glorious about seeing steam rising from your compost and knowing the nasties – weed seeds and plant viruses and pathogens – have been fricasseed.

But the path to hot compost is not pure.  Here’s what I found on the innocuous sounding Soil Forum while hunting out the best compost recipes, the perfect balance between browns (carbon rich things that crunch) and greens (nitrogen rich things that squelch):

“when we say that “anything” can go into a tumbler, we do mean “almost anything”. Whole small animals are OK but I would do deer heads in a separate pile! (Make too much noise flopping around in there!) I do have 20 deer lower legs on hand but they’d create quite a tangle sent through in one batch. However, I may simply saw them in half and run them all through the next hot batch.”

No, that wasn’t a post from Sarah Palin, though I’m sure she could cook up a fine tumblerful of deer-heads if she turned her hand to it. In case you were wondering, deer body-parts would count as greens (squelch).  Always put them in the very centre of your tumbler, where it’s hottest. (seriously, in contrast to anything Sarah might say, for rat, health and aesthetic reasons I never compost dead animals – there’s not a lot of corpses going round in a vegetarian household, and any tragedies that do occur are accompanied by a tiny funeral and ceremonial interring)

That said, there’s no getting around it: composting is still all about death and decomposition.  An interesting bit of that Peter Greenaway film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” comes to me.  The cook says:

“I charge a lot for anything black. Grapes, olives, black currants. People like to remind themselves of death. Eating black food is like consuming death. Like saying: “Death, I’m eating you”. Black truffles are the most expensive. Caviar. Death and birth. The end and the beginning.”

I quite like the idea that the chickens are engaged in some kind of philosophical act drinking up their ordure-enriched powerade.  That it’s not just forbidden pleasure, the subtle piquancy of insect exoskeletons or a health-giving blast of liquidised potassium that holds such appeal, but that they’re drinking deep from the existential heart of gardening.

Possum pruning and chicken lawnmowers

I seem to spend a lot of time talking about animals behaving badly.  Or at least, animals doing sensible, survival enhancing things I don’t 100% approve of.  That means you, Treasure!  You can’t hide – I see you eyeballing that rocket!

But it’s not only the bowerbirds that do useful nibbling.  The chickens also make great lawnmowers.  Although, describing our patch of grass as a “lawn” is stretching the definition considerably.  I can’t say how delighted I was to read the advice recently from the RSPCA that “a weed lawn rather than a monoculture lawn is recommended for free range hens”. Anyway, thanks to the very dry winter, this year the backyard hasn’t turned into the Somme – we’ve got at least some grass and not just vast stretches of mud –  and the chooks are keeping the grass down just fine.

The same happy thoughts about animals as horticultural helpers come to mind when I inspect my NSW Christmas bush.  It has gorgeous pinkish red new growth which the possums seem to enjoy as much as I do, though their appreciation is expressed through the medium of chewing.   Every now and then they pop down and do some tip pruning for me.

Spider on Christmas bush shoot

Ceratopetalum gummiferum is mostly famous for its flush of red “flowers” in December (in fact these are sepals – the real flowers are smaller and white and arrive in late spring or early summer).  The consensus seems to be that if you lop off branches for festive decoration the tree will “flower” all the more enthusiastically the following year.  Vindicating the view that if you give an inch, people will take a mile, some even claim you can cut them way down low and they’ll come back.  Eventually.   I’m not planning anything as brutal as that, though I don’t really want mine to hit five metres and mess with my view.  Regular snipping is the go but since I’m secateur shy, how kind of the possums to do it for me.

Bowerbirds: snacking for solar gain

Before the fall

Before the fall: it’s always sunnier on the other side of the fence

The gang’s back.  Loads of satin bowerbirds in the garden at the moment.  I’ve seen a couple of mature males, with their glossy blue-black feathers and gorgeous indigo eyes, but most of the robotic whistles, clicks, churrs and cracks in the trees seem to be the “greens” – juvenile males and females, hanging out in a pack.

I’ve heard grim stories about the antics of bowerbirds in the veggie garden.  Apparently they like to lull the backyard grower into a false sense of security and then swoop in and devastate your greens.  But I’m feeling kind of relaxed on that front.  After the brush turkeys exhumed my long awaited Hass avocado treelet, and my big girls, the young-bloods, the prodigious egg-layers, started lounging around under the baby banana trees, making eyes at my kale and chomping on every “poisonous” rhubarb leaf the moment it unfurled, I’ve decided to go totally Christo.  Every seed, every seedling, every newly planted tuber has its own little  blanket of horticultural fleece.  Anything growing that’s remotely likely to appeal to the poultry palate is swathed in netting.

The one upside of the chooks’ blithe disregard of the garden fence is the complete and total elimination of trad from the veggie patch.  Three months ago our spindly raspberry canes and brave little Nightingale persimmon were drowning in a lush wash of juicy stems and emerald leaves, even as the ground slowly dehydrated around them. But now – nada.  A few stems scattered around, waiting to reroot after the rain but not a leaf to be seen.  It’s all very satisfying.

So it’s not all bad when your flock take to the greenery.  The bowerbirds haven’t got a chance of getting my broadbeans.  But with their leaf-picking ways, they are doing sterling work for the environment.

Brushturkey in liquidambar

Brush turkey roosting in our poor denuded liquidambar

Their latest hang-out is the neighbour’s liquidambar tree – gorgeous and looming, throwing a great long shadow across our ice-box house all autumn. Basking in the sunshine on the other side of the fence, it steadfastly refuses to shed its leaves, months and months after our poor overhung specimen has shivered and shaken off its own.  And then, when the last ruby shreds are about to be blown from its branches, and the winter sun finally promises to warm our August days, the bloody thing starts growing leaves again!

But never fear, Super Satin Bowerbird is here!  I can’t prove definitively that their main objective was improving our passive solar gain but after closely studying these photographs for insights into bowerbird psychology and culinary habits, it certainly looks like it.

The egg eaters

Someone’s been eating eggs.  I don’t mean us, although obviously we have been eating them, and with great relish too.   I tried and failed to take a photograph of this morning’s scramble, that glorious renaissance of the freshly-laid goog.  It seems that these eggs are simply too magnificent to be captured by mortal photographic technology.  All that remained on film was this ineffable golden glow.

Scrambled egg yellow

No, I don’t mean us, the authorised Egg Robbers.  Some other creature has been eating eggs. It could be a rat or a possum. It could be Snakey the Diamond Python – there was a mysterious predatory smell in the garden over the last couple of days, along with scattered beige feathers. Andy Ninja was looking distinctly rumpled, like an ambitious nocturnal reptile might have tried to make her, perched temptingly amidst the lower branches of the coral tree, a late-night snack .  But I fear it may be…. a Cannibal Chicken.

The kids are on the case: “We questioned each of the chickens, by showing them an egg.  Shyla and Treasure were interested, but not too interested.  But Luna went close to it… too close.  I think she tried to peck it.”  So, after this exhaustive forensic investigation, Luna is in the frame (in a possible miscarriage of justice, Abbey the elusive Barnevelder escaped questioning by being impossible to catch).

Who is the inner Luna?  Who can say, although the disturbing photograph suggests an interior vortex and a single glowing eye.  Beware, Luna, we will be watching you…

Reflections of a ground predator

Drawing of Andy bigger

What noise does a chicken make?

Some people might go for the classic “cockadoodle dooo!” of an rooster at the crack of dawn.

But many people probably come up with something like this: “Buck buck buck buck” (here’s a video example).  That’s what chickens sound like to most of us.

In fact, this is a specific type of chicken alarm call.  It means “Ground predator! Watch out!“.   In this video, there’s a cat on the prowl.  However, this call sounds so familiar to us humans, even those of us who are not chicken obsessives, because we are ground predators.  So what we think of as “normal chicken sounds” say less about what chickens normally do, and more about the fact that we’re there, and they’re keeping an eye on us.

Chickens make at more than twenty four different calls (check out some of them on this very interesting video), which are not only referential (“aerial predator” “food” and so on) but are uttered differently depending on who’s listening and what’s going on.  In fact, they can be quite machiavellian, deliberately “lying” (for instance, some males make a food call to attract females when there’s no food to be had – though since chickens can recognise and remember up to 100 individuals, this is not a good long term strategy!)  They are pretty cunning too.  In a recent article in Scientific American K-Lynn Smith and Sarah Zielinski explain how researchers resolved a problem: why do roosters frequently call out a warning about a passing hawk even when this might attract the hawk’s attention and put the rooster himself at risk.  They found that roosters are very strategic.  For instance, they observe that “a male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences”.

To sum up, chickens are smarter than humans usually think (if not always nice), and humans… well, humans are ground predators.

Cliff hanger on Chicken TV

Last night we moved the young’uns out of the veggie garden and into the chicken run.  At dusk, I found them wandering disconsolately around the spot where the coop had been the day before, scratching out symbols in the mulch in an attempt to reverse the invisibility spell that had obviously been performed on their living quarters.  Having sorted out that problem, I made a late breaking decision to grab Snowball from her highly exposed roost and throw her in with the others.

Public holiday sleep-in abandoned, I was up at dawn to watch the next gripping episode of “Chicken TV”.  Who would be new Top Chook: Andy Ninja or the feisty contender, Treasure the Light Sussex? How would Snowball react after her night sleeping with strangers?   Could there be peace between the two clans, or would blood be spilled?

Major turn-up in the pecking-order stakes: Treasure not only monstered little Snowball, but had Andy on the backfoot as well. The two veterans, driven together in a “spirit of the blitz”, paced up and down while the two most brazen of the new girls muscled in on brekkie. We took 2 weeks to train the older chooks to use the foot-pedal feeder: it took Shyla the Australorp about 10 minutes.

So much for getting the new birds for Andy’s mental health – she spent much of the afternoon in her usual haunts in the front garden, on her own or in the company of one of the brush turkeys.  Snowball hung with the young team for a while, but it looks like it was a one-night stand in the coop – she’s back on her “fox appetiser” roost this evening.  So I guess Chicken TV is the poultry Home and Away: mostly about the triumphs of good looking teenagers.