Murder, imprisonment and native grasses

This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing.  In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to.

When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the backyard.  Note, I don’t say lawn.  Which is fine by me, since an array of weeds offer much better nutritional resources for chickens than a monocultural sward.

So a sequence of domestic fowl have enjoyed the delicious mix of trad, ehrharta, buffalo grass, couch, and a plethora of other greens as a supplement to their laying mash and scratch mix.   The trad went first.  Chickens absolutely love this horrid weed and have scratched out every shred, producing the fabulously golden yolk that are a definitive feature of your happy free-range egg. For a while the other grasses held on, but, over a few dry winters, as our flock grew to six chooks and an apparently infinite number of semi-resident brush turkeys, the greenery eventually lost the fight.

Sequence of brush turkeys crop

Peak brush turkey

Perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t have a lot of pictures of the muddy home farm during this “trench warfare” period.  And I have absolutely no pictures of the traumatic events that followed.  It’s taken me nearly a year to get up the gumption to write about it.

Baby brush turkey astonished

Very cute baby brush turkey hanging out with our chicks a couple of years back

Until November last year, the many brush turkeys hanging around the backyard were an annoyance but nothing more: scratching up seedlings, stealing eggs and making free with the chickens’ dinner.  The baby brush turkeys liked to huddle up to our newly hatched little chicks.  The older turkeys also seemed to like hanging out with the flock but were easily spooked by them.  It only took boss chook Treasure giving a funny look to have the brush turkeys scatter or even flap away. But that all changed last spring.

A large male brush turkey started hanging around, pursuing and doing his best to mount the chickens.  One day we noticed that several of the girls’ combs were bloodied, and concluded it was the work of this nasty animal. The neighbours had spotted the sex predator too. There were rumours of pet birds being attacked all up and down the street.

Concerned, we decided to keep the girls in Colditz, the steel-framed predator-proof cage for a day or two, rather than letting them roam the yard as usual.  The next day I was working from home, and by the afternoon, seeing no signs of the turkey and feeling sorry for the poor chooks pacing up and down in their constrained night quarters, like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, I decided to let them out for a few hours.  I went back to my computer.

If you are easily upset, now is the time to look away.

Brush turkey wattle closeup.jpg

Male brush turkey extreme closeup

Late that afternoon I heard a pitiful squawking and rushing down to the yard.  All of the chooks were bleeding copiously from their scalps and two of our poor girls were mortally wounded, with huge slashes through their backs and terrible gouges to their heads.  Then we heard pitiful sounds from the last of our neighbour’s free-range chooks.  We jumped across the fence to rescue it, but too late – its eye had been pecked out. All three birds died soon after.

Needless to say I was inconsolable.

The only way I could atone my guilt was to make the surviving chickens a safe place to stay.  So that Saturday, in a frenzy, I pulled together an implausible collection of wire, wood from futon bases, half an aviary, parts of a picket fence, innumerable pieces of bamboo and that old standby, trampoline netting, to make a 8 square metre covered run adjacent to Colditz. The run featured Palm Beach as an elevated hangout zone and egg laying area, perches at a range of heights and diameters and its own personal orange tree.

The chooks were safe, and over the next few weeks slowly recovered from their head wounds.  But they weren’t happy.

So over the festive season, I had another crack, making an extension the same size again, which admittedly did involved purchasing a couple of steel droppers and a box of screws.  Otherwise, I was extraordinarily pleased I was able to make the “outdoor room” entirely from rubbish I scrounged from the side of the road.

Chook run extension

The outdoor room, featuring cot railing and an indoor clothes hanger feeding hatch

Now the chooks were secure in their generous run, an unworthy thought came to me.  The scorched earth of the backyard, without a single blade of grass and denuded of  every remaining seed, was now perfectly prepared for something I’d long aspired to have – a backyard full of native grass. The kids had started expressing a longing for a little bit of soft lawn to walk on, and I was keen to take on the challenge.  Buffalo, kikuyu and ehrharta outcompete native grasses, but thanks to the chooks, I doubted there was a single weed seed left on the premises.

It was time.

I decided to mostly use microlaena stipoides, weeping grass, a fine bladed grass that tolerates shade and enriched soils and, once established, copes with minimal watering.  I ordered a couple of hundred grams of a hybrid microlaena called Griffin weeping grass, a low growing variety bred by the Department of Botany at the University of New England.

My first sowing was in early summer – the best time for this variety – warm enough for a speedy germination and not so hot it’s impossible to keep the seed bed moist.  I raked in the seeds – they shouldn’t be buried more than 1 and a half centimetres deep – and covered them with the veggie nets that I usually use to protect seedlings from bowerbirds, chickens and possums that aren’t trying too hard.

The Great Berowra Storm of Christmas 2018 treated us relatively kindly ( two broken skylights is a pretty good outcome from golf ball sized hail) but did significantly undermine my efforts to even distribute those rather expensive grass  seeds.  But I guess the torrent saved me watering for a few days, as well as reminding me why we needed grasses and their root systems to stop our topsoil flowing away on those occasions when our yard becomes a tributary to Berowra Creek.  On hot days when we didn’t experience a climatic apocalypse, I did get out the hose for the first month or two – microlaena needs to be kept moist until its root system is sorted.

In the light of its inpropitious beginnings, the microlaena has done pretty well, coping with the chooks snacking on it a couple of days a week.  That brutish brush turkey has never returned (I suspect foul play given his cruel behaviour to most of the hens in the street) but we like to let them roam when we can keep an eye on them.  And the native grass has remained beautifully green through yet another very dry winter.  In the picture above, alongside the weeping grass, you can see my low-skill terracing with fallen wood and another native grass, poa labillardiere. The aim is to redirect any storm water into our new pond (more on that another day)

So after two days of drenching rain,  I decided this afternoon to sow another packet of griffin weeping grass, filling the gaps scoured by last December’s floods.  Yet more trampoline netting has been hauled out of the shed to protect the newly spread seed from the chooks on their weekend perambulations.

Even if I’m slightly nervous of what they might do to my baby grasses, I’m grateful to our girls.  Without their commitment to scratching and salad, we would never have got this far, and certainly not without reaching for roundup or something equally scary.   I hope I can return the favour by keeping them safe (if not always happy) and feeding them plenty of greens.

Microlaena and stepping stones

More stories of life, death and gardening from our backyard

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

Andy Ninja’s great escape

Chicken TV: the make-over show

DIY by subtraction: the kiwifruit arbor

The phantom egg eater: caught in the act

Scientifically hot: in which I fall in love with the Berkeley method of composting

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  Particularly when you are seeking revenge against a tree. Given the pace of their lifestyle, you have to drag it out for those guys to really feel it.

So how better to punish a seed-strewing, bat-choking, weedy cocos palm than – not simply chopping it down – but committing it to a doom of eternal proximity to rotting horse shit?

Surrounded by palm.jpg

How to torment a cocos palm: shower it with shite

What a red-letter year it has been for composting.  The year when I discovered the Berkeley method.  It sounds like natural form of contraception and it is hot, but it’s better than that because it works.  Time after time after time.

I have thought I had achieved the giddy heights of hot composting before, long ago when Treasure the white Sussex was queen of the chicken run, freaking me out by regularly supping from my vat of compost tea.

Treasure and compost tea

The much missed Treasure and her dangerous drinking habits

In those days I was convinced that the way to fast, weed free compost was my trusty tumbler,  still the first destination for our kitchen scraps and chookhouse bedding.  The tumbler certainly steams when you crack it open to add the week’s potato peel and apple cores, and not just on these winter mornings.

But I guess, like so many other lovely things, you don’t necessarily know whether you’ve really hot-composted, until you actually experience it  Then you realise that on all those previous occasions when you thought what you were doing was pretty hot, you were wrong, and in reality it was all distinctly tepid.

So what is the Berkeley method of hot composting and how do you get some of that good stuff?

The Berkeley method involves making a big heap of compost – at least a metre tall and a metre wide – all at once, using layers of high nitrogen (“green”) and high carbon (“brown”) ingredients.

I’ve used a a range of different “browns” – liquidambar and bamboo leaves, pine needles, sugar cane hay from the the chook cage (with its own little payload of nitrogenous ordure) and even cardboard boxes ripped up into small pieces.  This is a soothing activity to do in front of television and the only part of compost-making I can get my children have anything to do with).

Berkley heap 3

Berkley method heap 2 featuring lots of bamboo leaves

I usually try to sneak in some partially-rotted “warm” compost from my tumbler as a “green” layer low down in the heap just to keep our household waste systems from being overrun with biomass.  As a small household, we don’t really produce enough veggie scraps all at once to create the bulk materials needed for the Berkeley method.  Other people use thin layers of lawn clipping but we have chooks so we don’t have any need for lawn mowing.  That’s an understatement really – for much of the last three years our backyard has looked like the Somme.

My mainstay for “greens” is, ironically, distinctly brown – vast quantities of equine ordure, acquired at $1 a bag from the horsey country on the other side of the Berowra Waters Ferry.  I’m pretty sure my ten or fifteen bucks, left in an honesty box by the front gate, ends up in the pocket of a shovel-fit teenager, which gives me a warm glow.  You could get the same amount for free in another farm down the road if you had a trailer and good upper body strength.

It’s a fun weekend outing – I particularly enjoy coming back across on the ferry with the windows down, suffusing the palatial surroundings of the marina and its smattering of Hollywood celebrities with the fruity ambience of a stable.

Ferry

The always picturesque Berowra Waters Ferry

But if your idea of a good time doesn’t involve intimate encounters with 150 kilos of horse manure, there are other options.  Not carnivore poo though.  Just in case you happen to live near a zoo and were thinking of a midnight raid for high nitrogen materials, Robert D. Raabe, Professor of Plant Pathology, Berkeley, in his detailed account of hot composting, reminds us that tiger and lion shit are not worth the effort.

In my first few heaps I also added some wood ash after each layer – it‘s high in potassium, can correct acidic soils and since our wood-burner produces loads of it I’m always trying to think of uses for it.  There’s also a kind of wedding like gaiety to hurling handfuls of white powder over the mountain of poo which I really enjoy.

I think I got a bit carried away on my last batch of compost, though, as I discovered when my youngest did a science experiment: broad beans growing in three different soil types.  My newly made compost was literally off the scale on the Ph test. My vegetables are probably suffering but I suppose at least I now have a convenient lime-rich place for disposing of fresh corpses.

Each layer of your heap should be watered as you build it, til the whole thing is about as damp as a squeezed out sponge.  If it’s especially wet or hot weather you can cover it to stop it from drying out or getting soaked.  As you can see in the piccies above, I roofed my first Berkeley heap with palm fronds, partly to keep my heap from getting too dry and partly just to continue to torment the spirit of the evil tree they were hacked from. None of my subsequent heaps have had a cover, though, and they seemed to turn out just fine.

To be honest, while there are lots of really complicated rules for hot composting – for instance, this article gives a mind bogglingly detailed run down on the carbon-nitrogen ratios of a range of composting materials.  But in my experience, a rough and ready mix of about equal quantities of “greens” and “browns” just seems to work.

Then after you’ve built your heap, you just leave it for about five days.  All the while you are at work – sitting in meetings, shuffling paper or cruelly inflicting post-structuralist theory on innocent undergraduates – that aerobic bacteria is doing its thing.  It’s a curiously comforting thought.

Chickens on heap from side crop

Chooks cleaning up the last few weed seeds

Then you turn your heap.  The aim of Berkeley method hot composting is to create a friendly environment for the right kind of bacteria and fungi – the ones that like plenty of air.  They work quickly, produce plant nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium and even smell pretty good (trust me on this).  Over the first few days after you build your compost pile, a sequence of different bacteria go to work – first the psychrophilic, then the mesophilic, and finally, once the heap gets to about 37 degrees celcius, the thermophilic.  Once the pile gets up to between 55 and 70 degrees, the heat kills off weed seeds and most insects (and some bacteria too).  But the thermophilic bacteria quickly use up all the degradable materials unless the heap is turned.

But how do you know if your heap is hot enough?  Here’s the advice of one permaculture site: “as an simple guideline. if you can put your arm into the compost up to the elbow, then it is not at 50 degrees Celsius, and is not hot enough”.  If the idea of a forearm coated in hot shit doesn’t appeal to you, you can also use a cake thermometer.  But perhaps not on the same day as the school bake sale.

I don’t bother with thermometers.  After the allotted number of days, I just dig into the guts of the pile. If steam comes pouring out, creating a sort of horse-poo sauna for the shovel wielder, things are cooking.  Best not to turn your heap in your PJs or your ballgown,though.

I’m not so sure about white stuff you can see in the picture on the right. According to the University of Illinois‘ composting boffins, this is actinomycetes – “a higher-form bacteria similar to fungi and molds” which feeds on the woody bits in the pile and helps make well cooked compost smell earthy. Robert Raabe, Dr “Afraid of lion poo”, thinks it’s a good sign in hot compost.  But it usually turns up in an nonaerobic pile so this pic indicates that while my current heap is hot it probably have been turned a bit earlier.

As the old joke says “What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener? Two weeks”.  Still, with a turn over and a bit of oxygen, I reckon my compost will get back on track. A perfect heap might require that horse do-do up to the elbow but a pretty good heap seems to be manageable without that level of commitment.

My technique for turning the pile is quite primitive – kind of like knocking down a stinky sand castle.  I dig into the steaming centre of the pile, shovel the hottest part of the heap to one side (up against the remains of the tortured ex-cocos palm). Eventually the undercooked layer above caves in in a satisfying way.  I do that a few times, so the outside part of heap is in the middle, ready to heat up again.

Somtimes when I’m tending my compost heap, I feel like I’m channelling the spirit of a brush turkey dad, as he scratches his big pile of mulch around, keeping the temperature just right for his clutch of eggs.

Brush turkey mound

Brush turkey bloke tending his nest

Having turned your heap, you let the heat build up for a couple of days and then you turn it over it all again.  And then again every two days or even once a day if you ever get over-excited. That goes on for about two weeks.  The write up of the Berkley method in the University of California’s Vegetable Research and Information Center (my kind of place) stresses that “outdoor exercise is an added benefit” of hot composting.

For a kayaker, all that shovelling is not bad thing at all, leaving aside the fabulous pile of compost you get at the end of the three weeks of relentless digging.  It’s hot composting and hopefully you get hotter in the process of making it.  Truly, there is no downside.

Some other posts about gardening experiments

My attempts to grow luffa…. no it doesn’t come from the sea!

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

The ginger family stole my brain!

DIY by subtractions: the kiwifruit arbor

From battery to backyard: the story of our rescue chickens, Dusty, Crumpet and Ruff

Turning our garden into whipbird habitat by making a mess

References

Antonella Anastasi, Giovanna Cristina Varese & Valeria Filipello Marchisio
(2005) Isolation and identification of fungal communities in compost and vermicompost, Mycologia, 97:1, 33-44

Yan Guo, Jinliang Zhang, Changyan Dengand Nengwu Zhu (2012) Spatial Heterogeneity of Bacteria: Evidence from Hot Composts by Culture-independent Analysis Asian-Australian Journal of Animal Science Vol. 25, No. 7 : 1045 – 1054

Wildlife reboot: birds 2.0

Another January, and another trip to Ganguddy, on the western site of Wollemi National Park.  Same marvellous geology, same refreshing dam water, same hot weather.

But some things were different this year.  After the stupendously dry winter, the eucalypt forest was parched, the undergrowth sparse and the leptospermum flowers of last year’s visit few and far between.  We found a patch of sphagnum moss perched in a bowl of sandstone boulders so dry it crunched underfoot.

A “green” satin bowerbird panting in the heat

We spotted plenty of lizards, and the diggers were out in force – lyrebirds wandering through the camp as they tried to scratching their way down to moisture and a wombat turning up to twerk on a picnic bench.  But up in “kingfisher alley”, just before the Cudgegong River disappears into the reed beds, there were fewer blue and green flashes by the water.

Around the camp site, the bowerbirds and treecreepers panted in the heat.  Apart from the ubiquitous reed warblers, there seemed fewer birds altogether.  No sign of the friarbird teenagers of last year, and even the baby swamp hens seemed thin on the ground.

You have to wonder what it takes to change ecosystems irrevocably.  How many dry winters before the old inhabitants decide living and breeding here is just too tricky?  And who would move in to fill their place?

Back at Berowra after the trip, there are changes in the garden too… surprising ones.

We knew we’d be losing the sparrowhawks soon enough, but the family has dispersed in an unexpected orderThe adults disappeared off the scene weeks ago, and by the time we made it home with our ridiculously overloaded vehicle and small and ancient fleet of boats, the siblings had parted too.  There’s just one young’un now.  He seems lonely.

There’s a constant plaintive calling from the trees out back, that seems to intensify when he has prey on hand.  I’m not quite sure if he’s warning his imaginary sibling off or calling him to come and share a meal.

And that’s not the only shift in the soundscape around here.  The sparrowhawks have cut a swathe through the bird population on the premises.  Baby brushturkey numbers have fallen from previous plague proportions, noisy miners are few and far between and the “house” birds of yesteryear – red and little wattlebirds – are now just occasional visitors.

But as the numbers of resident raptors has dropped, a new set of critters have settled in.  Lewin’s honeyeaters which we’ve only seen once or twice in the backyard over the last seven years, have made our backyard their new home.  And we also appear to have acquired some brown thornbills, a raptor snack food if ever there was one.  And the local eastern spinebills, another tasty morsel for a sparrowhawk, are spending more time around here too.

The only explanation I have for the change of personnel is that the hawks have bumped the notoriously territorial wattlebirds, leaving the field open for new arrivals.

I’m pretty happy to have a new set of birds in the garden.  My dream scenario, I have to admit, would be to order up some songbirds that are a bit easier on the eye.  My birdwatching brother puts Lewin’s in a honeyeater “bin taxon” of pretty similar and drab looking birds it’s hardly worth distinguishing between.  Cruel, perhaps, but fairly accurate.

So, why not some new holland honeyeaters, for instance – gorgeous looking locals.  Or (still, my beating heart!) what about some pardelotes?  Just one or two?

On the other hand, it’s possible that all the vibrantly coloured small birds in the neighbourhood have been made into multicoloured meals over the past three months by our family of raptors.  After all, there’s got to be some evolutionary reason for all those SBBs*.

*note: this is a throwaway remark absolutely unsupported by any science.

 

Previous posts about Ganguddy

A bit about Ganguddy’s history and geology – and a little Tim Low on the side

Snakes versus whining teenagers – last year at Ganguddy

 

More on our sparrowhawk summer

Death and sibling rivalry

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

Baby brush turkeys versus nestling sparrowhawks… the battle of the backyard baby birds

The collared sparrowhawks return to our backyard… or are they brown goshawks?

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks… and a beautiful white goshawk visits the washing line

 

Further reading

Stephen Garnett, Donald Franklin, Glenn Ehmke, Jeremy VanDerWal, Lauren Hodgson, Chris Pavey, April Reside, Justin Welbergen, Stuart Butchart, Genevieve Perkins and Stephen Williams (2013) Climate change adaptation strategies for Australian birds: Final Report, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility

Office of Environment and Heritage, Premier’s Department (2011) New South Wales Climate Impact Profile Technical Report: Potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity

Death & sibling rivalry

Both birds eyes crop better again

The sibling sparrowhawks in their favourite tree… in my backyard!

It’s happened. Our babies, only three weeks or so out of the nest, are now out there in the big wide world, killing for themselves.  It brings a tear to your eye.

Distant with second bird flying crop

Keeping an eye on little brother or sister

But it’s not all cheery dismemberment:  there’s trouble in the nest.  The siblings to have an uneasy relationship.  I often see them perched on adjacent branches, and when they’re further apart they call out to each other every now and then.  And when one takes off to hunt, the other often falls into line, disappearing suddenly in a simultaneous dive.

But there’s also a certain amount of what might be described in human siblings as petty jealousy.

Yesterday I stood on a chair on the deck for an hour watching one of the sibs engage in  a comprehensive preening session / extended tai chi practice.  I wonder whether this serious self-care might have been the consequence of getting tangled up in one of the humungous org spiders webs stretched out between the trees to catch dragonflies, cicadas and, for the really ambitious arachnid, a passing sparrowhawk.

Preening headless profile tail out crop b&w

… and the headless sparrowhawk

I found the “revenge of the headless raptor” impressive, but his nestmate, looking on from a high branch, seemed rather unimpressed.

Distant top brother looking down b&w

Jeering at silly sibling

But both martial arts and sneering were set aside when the fledgling in the upper branches spotted something tasty beyond the neighbour’s yard.

Juvenile sparrowhawk wings raised square

I’m off…

There was a simultaneous stoop, and then a fracas in the jungle at the bottom of the garden.

White cheeked honeyeater crop

Dinner… a white cheeked honeyeater I prepared earlier

I don’t think the squawking was the work of dinner – an unfortunate white-cheeked honeyeater (rarely seen in our yard.  I wonder why…).  I reckon the ring-ding battle was between the sibs.

The winner landed, very conveniently for me, right next to my washing line, showing the total indifference to human proximity that seems to characterize most young raptors.

 

Sparrowhawk profile left with untouched prey

The lucky sibling with significantly less lucky white cheeked honeyeater

This diffidence did not extend to the presence of little brother or sister though.

Juvenile looking behind for rival

Keeping an eye out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juvenile with head turned mouth open amended

 

Just a few moments after the winner landed with their prize, there was another skirmish.  Luck favours the prepared, and this youngster was in position, with wings spread out protectively around the prey like a sort of meat umbrella. Ew, what a nasty image.

The hungry one had another go, and to be honest, I’m not really sure who was successful, since neither juvenile has any distinctive marks (like a scar over one eye or a dragon tattoo or anything) I am completely unable to tell them apart.

Juvenile plucking the prey

Settling in for a good plucking

Anyway, someone had a lovely meal of raw songbird and someone sat nearby looking on and feeling sorry for themselves.

Sibling watching

Luckless sibling looking on at the feast

Nevermind, buddy.  I’m sure there’s be some tiny, tasty, rather slow birds on the menu for you sometime soon.

The backstory of the serial killers in our backyard…

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

Baby brush turkeys versus nestling sparrowhawks… the battle of the backyard baby birds

The collared sparrowhawks return to our backyard… or are they brown goshawks?

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks… and a beautiful white goshawk visits the washing line

Sparrowhawk summer

The sparrowhawks in the bottom of the neighbour’s yard have beaten the odds.  Despite the visits of the hungry currawongs and randy cuckoos, two strapping fledglings have emerged from the nest this week.

Two juvenile sparrowhawks trying out their wings

Our days are punctuated by the insistent call of the mother and father hawks telling the teenagers that it’s time to head back to the ridiculously tiny nest for dinner.  And the juvenile’s answering pitiful cries, disproportionate to their galumphing size.  They’re easily as big as their parents even at this early stage.

Photo of juvenile sparrowhawk with its mouth open

Fledgling sparrowhawk talking back to its parent

And early in the morning, the ding-dong battles between the sparrowhawks and the local mob of sulphur crested cockatoos, that wheel across the valley each day to find the tastiest trees and finest roosting places. The hawks have been watchful but apparently unconcerned by the range of large and small humans arguing, gardening, driving, swimming and playing beneath their nest and, as you can see, endlessly photographing their activities.

But the arrival of a crew of a dozen or so seed eaters in their territory was apparently intolerable.  A crested pigeon is the biggest prey sparrowhawks have been known to take, but we’ve seen for ourselves they’re not afraid to send cockies and cuckoos packing.  The cockatoos didn’t take off without a bit of argy bargy but in the end the diminutive predators won the day.

The flock retreated off to our place, and relieved their frustration with some light demolition work on the rotting pine tree in our backyard.  I assumed it was the parents that did the chasing off, but Stephen Debus, who spent a lot of time hanging out in the Bundaberg Botanical Gardens with a digital camera and a pair of young sparrowhawks, seems to think that the young ones like to chase away bigger birds that they couldn’t possibly eat, everything from egrets, darters and ducks to kestrels and even currawongs, their erstwhile enemies.

There’s been an exciting new development in the last couple of days: the littlies are trying their hand with disembowelling.  Young nestlings are fed gobbets of freshly plucked bird flesh, straight from mum or dad’s beak, but this youngster was doing his own kitchen prep.  It took him a while.  Given the eye-claw coordination on display here, it may be a few weeks before this one is hunting on its own.  It seems that taking dinner from the talons of parents mid-air (and maybe snacking on cicadas in between meals) is the next step towards independence.

From the vantage point of our neighbours’ pool, we’ve watched the fledglings practicing their short haul flights (and awkward landings), whine a lot and bicker over food.  In a truly rare sighting, judging from my experience with human children, I even saw one of them give in to his sibling’s relentless complaining and share a meal.

Or maybe what I saw was big sister muscling in on little brother?  Sparrowhawks have distinct sexual dimorphism, and apparently any idiot can tell the smaller males from the females.  Not this idiot!  I look forward to being enlightened by sharp eyed readers.

As you can tell from the recent posts in this blog, I have got just a little obsessed by our in-house raptors these last few months.  Maybe because our four serial killers have cleared the area of other distraction – the usual “house” birds.

No baby brush turkeys this year (hooray!) and the noisy miners have been mercifully silent. But the gorgeous satin bowerbirds have also been thin on the ground, the newly arrived whipbird disappeared suddenly without leaving a forwarding address, and I’ve heard very few of the chocks and clucks of the wattlebirds that make up the usual soundscape of our neighbourhood.

We have about six weeks, it seems, before the young sparrowhawks will disperse, looking for another neck of the woods with the requisite tall trees for nesting and plenty of small gormless birds to ambush from a secret spot in the canopy.

Will the adults stay after the brood has gone?   Will they leave and come back next year?  It seems no one really knows much about the movement of these secretive birds, despite their presence all over Australia, in every habitat but the driest of deserts.

And, if our lovely raptors do leave us, will our usual cast of feathered friends – the nectar drinkers, the seed and flower and lerp eaters – return?

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

Debus, Stephen (2012) Birds of Prey of Australia: a field guide, CSIRO Publishing

 

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

and the latest from our backyard: the teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

 

 

 

Battle of the baby birds

There’s a festival of death going on in our neighbourhood at the moment.

Several times a day, amongst the robotic clicks of the bower birds and the squawks of the wattlebirds, there’s an insistent high pitched chittering call, often accompanied by the din of freaked out noisy miners.  I’m not 100% sure of its ethological or evolutionary significance, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a signal for me to drop everything and dart up our drive with my camera.  One of the resident pair of collared sparrowhawks – probably the male – has caught some small clueless bird and is perched in our neighbour’s radiata pine steadily eviscerating it.

He rips off the feathers and flings away less tasty bits (check out the beak mid-air above) all the while, often with his mouth full, calling out “Dinner’s up!” to his mate.

For the last few weeks she’s been spending much of her time in a the nest at the very top of another decrepit pine tree in the yard of next house along the way.  Sometimes he flies up to the nest with tasty chunks of flayed bird flesh in his claws, but I’ve also seen her fly in to the designated “disembowling” perch to join him a few times.  Occasionally, she seems to sneak away to do a little light hunting herself.  Risky, though, leaving the nest unattended.

There’s the pied currawong I saw hopping surreptitiously through the branches, warily inching towards the nest, until it was chased off by the indignant parents as it was virtually peeping over the side.  And the pair of cacophonous channel billed cuckoos I caught flapping around the neighbour’s garden a few weeks ago – apparently they sometimes parasitise collared sparrowhawk nests.

But I will be deeply unimpressed if the chicks that come out of that nest are bloody channel billed cuckoos, for all my secret admiration of those giant hornbill beaks and strapping crucifix silhouettes.

Because the sparrowhawks seem to have rid our garden of the plague of baby brush turkeys.

A whipbird seems to have taken up residence this spring.  Needless to say, I don’t have a photograph despite being nearly eye to eye with the noisy bugger once or twice.  So, tiptoeing round my backyard trying to catch a clear shot, I heard a scrabbling in the leaf litter.  “Ah, a baby brushturkey” I thought sagely.

And then it struck me… I haven’t seen a single baby turkey in our backyard this year.  Not one!  Last year, they were sleeping on top of the predator proof cage or standing outside in the daytime, gazing longingly at our flock of little baby chooks.  The year before one wandered into our pocketsized laundry and spent eight hours pacing the two foot long windowsill, failing to notice and thus escape through through the wide open door.  But this year… nada.

Collared sparrowhawks (unlike their lookalikes brown goshawks – so similar that it’s altogether possible they could be our resident raptors) catch most of their prey in flight, bursting out of their lurking places in the foliage to grab little birds on the wing.  But the baby brush turkeys that previously haunted our place do fly, right from the day they dig themselves out of their hatching place in their father’s mound of decomposing leaf litter, and start their life of unnaturally early independence.

So maybe the sparrowhawks have been catching them on those very first short flights from mound to chicken yard.

I don’t hate brush turkeys, but I do hate a having dozen brush turkeys hanging out in my backyard, sexually assaulting my chickens, nicking their food and, given half the chance, eating their eggs.  So the idea of generations of sparrowhawks breeding happily in the neighbour’s trees and keeping the local population to manageable levels is extremely appealing.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between the familiar sound of chainsaws and the plague populations of brush turkeys in Brisbane and the northern suburbs of Sydney over the last few years.  No dingoes, fewer foxes foxes thanks to baiting, and nowhere much for the local raptors to nest in suburbia these days, the tallest trees victims of fears about bushfires and death-dealing or at least car-damaging falling branches.

But today my endless blurry photos of the neighbourhood raptor nest brought good news: what seems to be a creamy ball of fluff snuggling up to its mum in the distant collection of sticks that is the sparrowhawk’s nest.  Bring on the next generation of brush turkey assassins!

Death and good fortune on Cowan Creek

Since reading the poetic prose of H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald’s story of how training Mabel the goshawk carried her through wild sadness that followed the death of her beloved father, it’s been all about the raptors around here.

Easter at Speers Point meant ospreys relaxing in the late afternoon sun.

And yesterday, on Cowan Creek, the contractual obligation white bellied sea-eagle.

Juvenile sea eagle belly horizontal

Juvenile white-bellied sea eagle

Then, just when I’d resigned myself to a pleasant if uneventful paddle after three hours on the water, there was an explosion of action right off my bow.  Two birds in an aerial battle, tumbling and squabbling over a kill.  The loser flew off, disgruntled; the death-dealer pulled up in the bright morning sunshine on a branch over the river, and waited for me to get out my camera.

A new bird!  One I thought I’d never seen on any waterway.  A peregrine falcon.

It turns out I had seen these birds before, long ago and far away – a pair tussling with ravens over a ledge to nest on at Malham Cove in Yorkshire.  Cliffs (or, if they are hard to find, skyscrapers) are one of the essential requirements of this beautiful raptor.  RB reminded me that peregrines used to nest in the ventilation towers of the tunnels under the River Mersey and high up in the Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the enormous red sandstone building I could see from my desk during my decade as a Scouser.

Peregrines may be the most widespread bird in the world, living on every continent except for Antarctica and on many islands (although strangely, considering its status as a bird watching paradise, not New Zealand).  Its name is derived from the Latin for “the wanderer” although only five of the nearly twenty subspecies – those breeding in the northern Arctic – really migrate very far.

For all their capacity to adapt to life in the city – eating feral pigeons and nesting in highrises – peregrines are widespread but not really common.  Since they mostly prey on smallish birds, themselves often insect eaters, falcons bioaccumulate pollutants. The use of organochlorines in insecticides like DDT devastated their numbers in the second half of the twentieth century.  By the 1960s there were no peregrines in the Eastern US and the birds were declared an endangered species. Numbers have bounced back, in Australia and elsewhere, although they are still classed as  “rare” here.  And recent work in Europe and Canada has observed a new chemical – flame retardants – turning up in the blood stream of peregrine chicks.

Once peregrines find a good nesting site, it’s a keeper.  Apparently, a falcon skeleton found at the back of a cliff-top eyrie in Tasmania has been carbon dated at 19,000 years, which makes that spot the oldest known bird’s nest. As I noodled along the northern shore of Cowan Creek, I’d admired the 100 metre high cliffs of Looking Glass Spur, eucalypts halfway up the face finding impossible footholds in the sandstone.  I wonder if my falcon and its mate have a scrape there, high above the expanse of the estuary.  Peregrines don’t eat fish but hunting grounds by water offer the space for their deadly turn of speed.

I feel less disappointed by my failure to spot the raptor’s stoop or to capture the battle on film after I figured out what I was watching.  The fastest animal in the world, dropping  on its prey at nearly 400 kilometres an hour.  That poor bird clutched in its talons -maybe a galah, the favoured meal of the big-footed Australian “macropus” subspecies – never had a chance.

I watched for twenty minutes, as she plucked and dismembered her meal, unperturbed by the rowdy parade of jet skiiers, cruisers and powerboats.  Galah feathers drifted down from her branch, making a delicate trail of death across the bottle green water.

For a few dodgy moments, I thought the gobbets of galah might be joined by flotsam from my shattered craft as Egg was washed perilously close to oystershell sharpened rocks.  And, if I had the Bond-style rocket launcher I’ve often fantasised about while ploughing  through powerboat wakes on sunny Sunday mornings, fragments of several jet skis.

I’m guessing my peregrine was a “she”.  Females are a third bigger than the tiercels – the males – but I didn’t have the chutzpah to hurl a swiss army knife up the tree for scale.  The two mid-air combatants looked well matched – two males or two females. Definitely not a pair.  Since peregrines mate for life – up to 20 years – and often hunt cooperatively, it would seem to be unwise from the point of view of domestic harmony, anyway, to bicker over food.

In fact, Derek Ratcliffe describes exactly what I saw: “feet-grappling over disputed food items” which happens, he says, “at food-territory boundaries during the non-breeding season” (1993, 201).   It seems these battles are nearly always between birds of the same sex, although sometimes peregrines fight with other crag-loving birds as well.  RB remembers peregrines in springtime at the cliffs at Creagh Dhu, attacking ravens, stooping then zooming straight up to the heights to do it all over again.  Sometimes pairs of peregrines will even take on the great golden eagle over rare and valuable real estate.

So maybe there’s more than one pair of peregrines on that beautiful bit of country.  Perhaps I’ll see this magic bird again, or her mate, or her rival, until I’m as blase about a peregrine strike as a whistling kite soaring on a thermal. But yesterday, as I took my four hundred photographs while the peregrine peaceably disembowelled its meal, showing the equanimity that makes them the favoured hunting falcon, I felt truly blessed.

Peregrine in front of branch staring at me crop

Peregrine falcon watching the watchers

More stories about raptors in Berowra’s backyard (and mine):

The beautiful white morph of the grey goshawk in Bluetongue’s back

A hunting collared sparrowhawk in Nude trees and naughty birds

The whistling kites of Bar and Peat Islands in Two sad islands, three whistling kites

The many white-bellied sea eagles of the Hawkesbury and Lake Macquarie in Encounters with eagles

Happy Easter from Morgan the syncretic leghorn

We have pommie chooks!  Or from somewhere north of the equator, anyway.  I’m not sure how they managed to make the perilous transcontinental journey before their cute fluffy butts made it to our place at a week old, but somehow they must have dodged border control.

4 fluffy butts horizontal crop

How do I know our feathered friends come from the far north?

Well, here in Sydney, we’re past the equinox and the nights are drawing in.  We may have had a February that smashed heat records, 1.3 degrees C above the longterm averages.   But it’s hours of daylight that tells chickens when to get laying (thanks to that sort-of-third eye) and the days are getting shorter.  Even as the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it is, nonetheless, autumn.

And yet my chooks have decided to start laying.  Just in time for spring with its baby bunnies, and peeping chicks, and Easter eggs, and its celebration of rebirth and renewal.  In the northern hemisphere, that is.

I love Easter.  Most religious festivals are a delicious mish-mash of stuff from the Big Book and whatever else people were into at the time.  But with Easter the syncretism is really out there, bouncing around with its ears pricked up, laying  coloured eggs in the spring greenery.  After witnessing the pre-Good Friday panic by shoppers terrified by the prospect of a day without ready access to a new packet of Cocopops, the nice young guy at the checkout reckoned  we might add a zombie apocalypse to the usual combo of vernal equinox, Passover, and frenzied confectionary consumption.  As he pointed out delicately, Jesus did after all, come back from the dead.

In the midst of this cultural mash-up, it seems appropriate that it’s Morgan the flighty leghorn, named after a Welsh enchantress in an Arthurian legend, who has marked the occasion of the (deeply seasonally inappropriate) Christian festival of rebirth with the gift of her first lovely white eggs.

A muddled pagan blessing to egg eaters, one and all.

 

Love, death and stray cats

It’s not often that I find myself on same page at Tony Abbott, Australia’s climate change denying PM.  But having exhausted the potential of their previous three word slogans, the conservative government recently moved on to a new one: “Kill the Cats”.  After this week’s events I think I could find some common cause with Tones on this theme.

I know you shouldn’t have favourites but Shyla was my favourite chicken.

She came to our place as a bundle of fluff and managed, uniquely, to survive our enthusiastic but doofus chick rearing.  She was the hen you would trip over at the chookhouse gate, where she would be pacing up and down the second the back door opened.  And then she would follow you round the garden waiting for lovely things like grapes or curlworms or weevil ridden comestibles and if none of those were forthcoming, peck your butt to see if it would make an adequate alternative.  Her response to a human approaching was to squat and jiggle in what I think translates loosely from hen as “ok, you can mount me now”.  Which was faintly disturbing, while at the same time suggested an affection of some strange kind.

And that’s not even mentioning the fact that she was our one reliable layer, producing a daily egg all winter long.

Since she was such a useful, friendly and characterful girl, she was obviously the first choice for a midnight snack when a great big feral cat came visiting our yard in the dead of night this past week.  I don’t want to sound callous but the bloody thing could have taken Snowball the silky bantam – smaller, ancient, more visible in dim lighting, huffy around humans, laying eggs only when the weather and the tides are just right.

But no, it had to grab Shyla, the life and soul of the backyard. The Top Chook took one for the team.

Everyone’s very subdued down in the bottom of the garden now, accepting the indignity of being carried, half-asleep, from their perilous perch on the edge of the fig tree barrel, to secure lodgings in Palm Beach, the long-abandoned vernacular modernist chicken coop.

Shyla was the victim of our hubris – the one who paid the ultimate price of six years without locking the chooks up at night.

So what changed in our suburban ecosystem?  I reckon it’s the departure of the (somewhat annoying) little yappy dog next door.  The neighbours on the other side have a laconic German Shepherd who doesn’t even chase the chooks.  But the yapster would have given a cat a run for its money.  If Tony and cronies want to get rid of feral cats, it’s not red-necks with guns that will do the job.  Scientists reckon the best strategy is to restore the top predators – dingoes.  Based on anecdotal evidence – the death toll in our backyard – I reckon they’re right.

With sufficient vigilance we can protect the chooks but we can’t do much for the bandicoot that still noses its way through the veggie garden at night.  Bandicoots recognise dingoes (and dogs more generally) – they know to avoid them.  In fact, some scientists have argued that this makes dingoes – placentals, only here for 50,000 years or so – natives.  But bandicoots still haven’t figured out cats.

I’m trying to find some positives in the situation.  My latest planting of broad beans has sprouted, magically unmolested.  I could attribute this success to my lavender mulch, or to the carefully secured veggie net, or the cold weather that has probably driven the local rodent population indoors (where we live.  Gulp.)  But perhaps the feral feline took a few rats as a chaser after devouring poor Shyla.  It’s a choice, it seems, eggs or beans.  Not fair!  I want both!

It’s all very sad.  Our eight year old got it right as she sobbed herself to sleep the other night: “you know where there’s someone in your care and you can’t protect them, you feel like there’s a hole in your heart”.  Yeah, babe I do.

I’ve been thinking about another lost lovely one this week.  The twelfth anniversary of our son’s death has just passed us by.  Born, unexpectedly, with a lopsided and innovatively organised brain, he was a bonny baby boy, whose plump little body suffered many seizures and would never really do quite what he wanted.  He had a short but lovely life, that ended suddenly and surprisingly (we shouldn’t really have been surprised) before dawn on on a beautiful winter’s morning, just like these last glorious days.

For a time, during the relentless rumination that followed our sleepy newborn’s diagnosis, I spent a lot of time thinking about stray cats.

Stray cats crapping in our pocket sized backyard.  Stray cats with a payload of toxoplasmosis gondii, “one of the most successful parasites on Earth”.  It inhabits the bodies of around half of the world’s human population, and plenty of other warm blooded animals too, but only reproduces only inside pussycats, emerging to infect other creatures, the parasite transmitted through cysts lurking in its poo.

Recently there’s been a pop science fascination with the consequences of toxoplasmosis infection.  While (most of the many many) infected people are asymptomatic, researchers have found that rats with the parasite become risk takers.  Losing their natural fear of cats, some even become attracted to the scent of their predator (not coincidentally, the parasite’s host).  Humans with toxo, too, seems to have somewhat different personalities than those without.  This idea, that humans – philosophers and planet conquerers – might have our very selves shaped by a single celled organism, disturbs and fascinates us.

If you are unlucky enough to be infected for the first time in the early weeks of pregnancy, your baby can be born with congenital toxoplasmosis, with possible serious consequences for the child’s health.  Toxo can cause problems with vision and hearing, seizures and intellectual disability.  Which is why I found myself thinking so long and hard, a decade or so ago, about my lack of gardening gloves and the roaming neighbourhood moggies.

In the end, my ruminations about infected cat shit went nowhere, like the dwelling upon dioxins from the incinerated corpses of foot-and-mouth infected cows that filled the air that year, or my endless Googling on the chromosonal origins of pachygyria (“Come back if you have another one with the same thing” the genetic counsellor suggested.  We were floored.  Although not quite so amazed as when she asked us, the Scotsman and the Australian, if we were cousins)

Very very occasionally Tony Abbott, MP, is accidentally right: sometimes shit just happens.

How do we make sense of these things, the deaths of our beloved children and the untimely demise of our pet chickens?  How are they connected, the miraculous germination of broadbeans and the midnight movements of predators?  The passing of parasites and personality traits from rats to cats to cat lovers?  The hidden life of the soil and the secrets in our bloodstream that can elate us and destroy us, often at the very same time?

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

It’s 7 o’clock on a midwinter Sunday morning.  It’s five degrees C.  And I’m about to go canoeing.

The thought that I may be slightly mad has passed through my mind.  A key motivation for hauling myself out of bed before sunrise was to try to get a better look at the whistling kite that hurtled past me into the distance last time I put the kayak in at Mooney Mooney.  And as I’m standing in my innovative Milan-style long-johns and wetsuit combination, what do I spy, perched in a dead tree right above the car park, but a whistling kite, defrosting in the first light.  Tempting get that pic and hightail it back to bed.

But no, Bar Island is calling me.  I’m heading back to the spot where I first decided, on a boatie camping trip just up the river at Back Beaches, that my mental health demanded the purchase of a cheap canoe.  And halfway across the river, when the first rays of the morning sun hit me, I feel truly blessed.

Bearing in mind my favourite quote from Antonio Gramsci (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”), I started out my jaunt by heading across to Olga Bay. Last time I was there, a magnificent white bellied sea eagle swooped through the golden afternoon sunshine and snatched a fish from the briny right in front of the boat.

Unfortunately, convinced that the Hawkesbury was going to sweep me out to sea, at the time I had my head down, as I blasted my way across the river.  The David Attenborough moment passed while I was fumbling around in the dank reaches of the canoe for my much abused camera.

Needless to say, the sea eagle didn’t do a repeat performance, though that Australian darter that I pursued heartlessly from perch to desperate perch up the Wyong River last weekend had an unpleasant surprise on that therapeutic holiday to a little hire cottage on Milson’s Passage that the doctor ordered.

Bar Island greeted me with the green flash of (what I think was) a sacred kingfisher watching from the mangroves as I clambered awkwardly (camera-less, of course) over the slippery rocks to the shore.

To be honest, I found it a gloomy place, weighed down by history and hemmed in by trees.  They’re important trees – casuarina glauca for the glossy black cockatoos and red ash which, according to the informative signs, feeds the copper jewel butterfly.  Perhaps I’ve been living with a Scotsman too long.  I have started to share his culture’s love of denuded landscapes and the sweeping views created by sheep, deer and industrialisation. We’ve dubbed the accompanying fear of excessive greenery “wood psychosis”.  There was a bit of wood psychosis going on in Bar Island this weekend.

And then there’s visible colonial history of the place.  St John’s Church was built on Bar Island in the 1870s, and the grave stones of some of the sixty or so European settlers who are known to have been buried there remain, along with reminders of the troubled history of the Hawkesbury as a brutal contact zone.  “A difficult time” as the plaque commemorated Sarah “Granny” Lewis carefully puts it.

The best spot to be on Bar Island on a chilly winter morning was, not coincidentally, the wooden seat near the midden on the northern tip of the island.  The midden’s metres deep, accrued over thousands of years of shared oyster eating by Darug, Darkinjung and Guringai people, whose country meets here.

And not far away, the resident kite and her nest, were also basking in sunlight.  RB has been working here, on and off, for three years, and the nest has been there for at least that long, renovated and extended each season.  The kite wasn’t moving, despite the clumsy paddling and clicking camera.  It’s her island now, and she knows it.

I thought I was smart, timing my trip upstream with a rising tide.  I wasn’t feeling quite so clever heading downriver again as I tried to take a racing line across an sharp S bend, with the current and the tide battling it out all round me.

First I ploughed exceedingly slowly, on that perfectly still day, through a stretch of strange standing waves.  And then I found myself swirling through a sequence of weird vortices, that churned up silt and the occasional jelly blubber.  I read Lisa-ann Gershwin’s Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Oceans a while ago.  She concludes, to put it bluntly, that we should enjoy fish while they last, as the jellyfish, floating around in the oceans since the pre-Cambrian, are on their way back with a vengeance, thanks to acidified, over-fertilised and over-fished oceans (not to mention climate change).

Since then I see every jellyfish as a portent of doom.  Given this slightly apocalyptic worldview, after about an hour and a half trying to escape this turbid hellhole (okay, it was about ten minutes) I began to worry that one of those whirlpools were going to suck me down into the bowels of the river, just the icefloes in this extremely spooky youtube find.

Needless to say, I survived The Whirlpool of Death.  In marked contrast to many of the people who went to live at Peat Island, which I paddled past on the last leg of my route home. Built to detox alcoholics early in the twentieth century, the site was used for over ninety years mainly as an asylum for people with mental illnesses or learning difficulties.  From all reports it was a horrifying place where inmates were caged, neglected and sexually abused.

The last residents, treated somewhat less brutally than those who came before, left in 2010, and the site is now padlocked and empty, awaiting redevelopment into a 250 berth marina and suite of five storey apartment blocks.  Because there’s nothing that says “high density living” and “brownfield site” like a place with national parks on all four sides.

I spotted one last whistling kite – in fact, a whistling kite actually whistling – in the Norfolk Pines on the island.   And in the distance, somewhere out of view, the elusive sea eagles, honking away like a pair of castrati ducks.  I know it’s sentimental in the light of these grim tales of the river, but I hope the birds are still there when the jet skiiers come to stay.