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December 19, 2020

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estuaries, kayaking, landscape photography, Photography

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Art and the river

It’s been a long year, 2020, what with the apocalyptic fires, the global pandemic and higher education (my industry) going into meltdown. Between the smoke, the worrying, the working twice as hard as usual, the home schooling, the doom-scrolling, the worrying about children worrying, there hasn’t been a lot of time for blogging, although there have still been moments of tranquillity and wonder on the water and and in the garden.

A triangle - the front of a wooden kayak - bisects a very still river, which reflects foggy trees on either side.

But something really good did happen, towards the end of the year, worth getting out of my rut to blog about: my first photography exhibition. I had opportunity to take over Hornsby Council’s Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre – closed for much for 2020 during the pandemic – for a couple of weeks. The exhibition was called “Deerubbin at Dawn” and was part of Sydney’s annual Head On photography festival – which normally happens in May each year but was deferred this year, like so many other things. But thanks to Hornsby Council and heaps of curatorial help from my fabulous friend Jane Simon it did end up happening!

Looking down from the landing to the front entrance

Jacaranda blossom out front

The Verandah Room

Beautiful pressed ceilings

Hanging the exhibition

The lift lobby

I was really lucky to have my colleague and friend, Dr Ian Collinson, polymath and environmental humanities guy, write a catalogue essay for the exhibition that we also put on the wall in the grand front entrance:

Deerubbin at dawn: river lives on the Hawkesbury reveals Nicole Matthews’ familiarity with her neighbourhood, a familiarity that is a product of the conscious and frequent ‘looking’ that landscape photography demands of its practitioners. Taking many pictures of the same landscape over a protracted time—in different seasons, from different vantage points—produces images that evince an intimacy and a local knowledge, as well as epic and aesthetic grandeur. These are pictures of home not a remote wilderness, even though some may stir a romantic desire for the distant, the untouched and the awe-inspiring. The exhibition speaks to the interconnectedness of what we unhelpfully label culture and nature as though one could exist without the other.

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Taken from a kayak, these photographs alter our normal perspective as we see the River from a different viewpoint: from the inside out, from the River itself rather than a distant look-out. The images are also taken at an unfamiliar time of day. Through the floating eye of the camera we see the River at dawn with its soft, subdued colours and unique misty veils that tease and disappear as daybreak turns into day. Through this double shift of perspective and time the exhibition wants us to look again (and again) at what might be a familiar landscape to those who live in the embrace of the Hawkesbury River.

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Despite their romantic moments, these are pictures of a cultural landscape, landscape as everyday life as it is lived in a place, a life transformed by topography and a topography transformed by life. Deerubbin and its margins is an Indigenous ‘Country’, a national park, a suburb on Sydney’s northern edge, a landscape crafted by generations of human action and activity. The images speak to the labour and leisure that are intertwined and enabled by Deerubbin, of oyster-farming, the daily migration of commuters, and weekends spent sailing, motor-cruising or fishing. Humans are put in their place here; present but not overbearing, integral but not dominant.

Distant picture of a group of yachts and a buoy

A closeup of a decrepit boat with orange flowered weeds growing from its deck

Australasian Darter, wings out, facing a bleached out moon

Sandstone with a reflection and a small tree growing in front of a small cave

The front of a wooden kayak heading into a reflective misty scene

If you’d like to get more of a sense of the atmos of the gallery, here are some little videos with some of the soundtrack I had playing in the space to make it seem a little more… estuarine.

Two weeks of chatting to friends and blow ins, of zoom meetings with real-life mansion background, of selling a surprisingly large number of prints and 2021 Calendars (thank you generous pals and hooray for Christmas) and it was all over.

Four wires dropping against a white wall

The empty gallery

But not completely! Buoyed by how enjoyable I found the whole thing, and cheered that people seemed to like my pics, I have another, much smaller exhibition happening in the front room of the Dangar Island Depot from January 24-March 6 2021. It’s not many islands in a major river in Australia that are accessible by public transport but Dangar Island is one of them – jump off the train at Hawkesbury River Station (with its spanking new lifts, opened only last week) and onto the Brooklyn Ferry Service and you’re there.

And if you’re too far away to come along, you can buy prints of any of the photos on this post. Prices are between $60 and $350, depending on size. Or you can buy a 2021 calendar for $30. Check out the images in the calendar here:

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mccnmatt

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September 28, 2019

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anthropocene, Climate change, estuaries, Fire, grief, kayaking, landscape photography, national parks, Photography

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Hoarding and hope

Bar Point jetty

Heading straight into the grey emptiness where Bar Island ought to be, out on the river last weekend, I felt grateful that the cloud enfolding me wasn’t bushfire smoke.

Into the emptiness

We live in difficult times. Rainforests on fire, burning not just in the Amazon but up and down the Australian east coast. We knew this was coming, we’ve known for a long time. But it’s hard to believe it’s happening so soon. Too soon, too close, too damn sad. Unbearable to think about for more than a few moments.

A few eucalypts flowering after a dry winter

So I headed back to beautiful Marramarra Creek, to salve that ache. What precisely is that feeling? Not quite solastalgia – the pain of losing a beloved landscape. Not here, not yet – at least not for me, though I guess the traditional owners of this part of the river feel just that. For me it’s a different kind of climate grief. The sadness of knowing the time is coming when this beautiful place will be changed, razed.

Big Bay on a still morning

I find myself returning again and again to the same places, taking very similar pictures of the very same riverscapes.

Yet another oysterfarm

And another

There’s a comfort in doing something over and over again, repetition with infinite small variations. A lower tide, raising the oysterbeds. A jellyfish bloom. A flush of eucalyptus flowers across the hillside or a flock of honeyeaters swirling their way up river. The surprising sight of a juvenile sea eagle, quietly sitting in the dappled light of the mangroves

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

Up Marramarra Creek

And another oysterfarm

If my instagram feed is a little repetitive, I can console myself that by staying on my home patch at least I’m not spewing out carbon and clocking up the air miles.

Mystery objects in the blue

Of course there’s another reason to return – “fog bathing”. Perhaps I could try to get some kind of wellness movement going. Surely time spent lingering on a misty river is just as healing as walks through the most pristine Japanese forest.

Oysterfarm abstract

And then there’s remembering. Going back to the same scenes, taking photos over and over, to capture a time and place as you see it in front of you right now. The same compulsion to hoard pictures as parents have, knowing their toddler will soon be grown and gone.

Bruce and boat

Up Marramarra Creek

Skies over the Hawkesbury

Of course , the memories you’re harbouring aren’t always good. Two years ago, for instance, the much anticipated multi-family jaunt to the water-access only campsite at Twin Beaches. Fine still mornings and fireside yarns. But also engine failure, unexpected high winds, a swamped coracle and endless bickering over alcohol. Not to mention screaming, blood and an emergency visit to Hornsby Hospital, to have oystershell fragments with their scary bacterial payload scraped from the ten year old’s feet. What can I say but when heading out on the Hawkesbury check the weather, pack light and wear shoes!

On the way to Twin Beaches

Mangrove saplings of Big Bay

Mirror creek

Sunset skies at Twin Beaches

An overloaded coracle

Pelicans in Marramarra Creek

Marramarra Creek has other memories I can only guess at. Every time I pass Friendly Island, I ponder on that name and the violence it hints at but hides.

Friendly Island in Marramarra Creek

But memories, even bad ones, can also guide you. As I put Bar Island behind me I found the fog stretching out in all directions. This line of oysterpoles retreating into white, I knew, would take me where I wanted to go.

Oysterpoles showing the way

Fishermen in front of an invisible Bar Island

On the way to Friendly Bay

On the beach in Bar Island

Cormorants staring out at nothingness

The jetty on Bar Island

If we’re lucky, maybe our stash of memories of beautiful places will tell us how to go forward, and maybe even show us a way back.

One of the pair of whistling kites on Peat’s Island

Other paddles in Marramarra Creek and thereabouts

The silver river

Of gods and map readers

The river that knew

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

Broken bay at low ebb

A scene from the Sydney climate strike on Sept 20

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August 24, 2019

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Climate change, estuaries, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, superb lyrebirds, Uncategorized

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The singing and the sea

Bute with shiny landscape tidied When you put your boat in at Cowan Creek, you know you’re paddling in the sea. Yes, there are rocky slopes on every side, and eucalypts and banksias lean over the shoreline. The rows of hot pink bells of epacris longifolia dangle amazingly close to the waves.

Epicris longifolia

Smith Creek reflections

White cheeked honeyeater and banksia

But look over the side of your boat, especially in this big dry, and your gaze falls metres deep into into the crystal clear green water. It might be called a “creek” but there’s no murky river water here. Further downstream, where Cowan Creek meets the Hawkesbury proper at Broken Bay, the Pacific meets the horizon and you really know you are in the ocean.

Fishermen off Flint and Steel Point

Looking out to sea

Lion Island

Fog near America Bay

Speedboat off Juno Point

Cormorant off Juno Point having a snack

But far above the official mouth of the river – the limit of “flat water sailing” drawn between Juno Head and Flint and Steel Bay – the water is briny. The tide rolls up the Hawkesbury as far as the Grose River Valley, 138 kilometres from the sea, taking a wedge of salty water upstream. If Broken Bay, where these pictures were taken, is essentially a marine environment, Cowan Creek is not too much different.

Yachts off Cottage Point

Because of course, the Hawkesbury is a drowned river valley. The river channel that once wound its way twenty five kilometres to the east, across the continent shelf, has long ago disappeared two hundred metres or more beneath the ocean. The late Quaternary Marine Transgression that drowned the Hawkesbury started 18,000 years ago and went on for 10,000 years, with the water level peaking just a metre or two above current sea levels.

Paul Boon, in his fascinating history of the Hawkesbury, reports that during that time, sea level rose at perhaps 8-10 metres every millennium, at some times as 40 metres in a thousand years (Boon, 2017, Chapter 3). It‘s hard to imagine what that must have been like for the first people here, the Guringai and Dharug people, moving again and again ahead of the rising tide, away from the coastal flat lands to the hills of the Hornsby plateau.

On the way to Stingray Bay

Even more mindboggling to think, as Boon quietly points out, that over the last few decades sea level has been creeping up by around three millimetres a year. If the CSIRO scientists are right, and I for one don’t doubt they are, sea levels are changing as worryingly fast, if not as fast as the speediest rises in the Flandrian Transgression. On the bright side if I live long enough, there’ll be far more of the upper reaches of Cowan Creek to explore, in an admittedly sweaty and decrepit manner, in my kayak

Sunrise sky near Cotton Tree Bay

Last weekend’s paddle reminded me of what a special place the Hawkesbury is, a drowned river valley where, after rain, waterfalls tumble off the sandstone straight into the sea. I was coming back from a jaunt to Smith’s Creek when, heading into a bay to avoid a plague of water skiiers, I heard a lyrebird going for broke.

According to Birdlife Australia, superb lyrebirds are inhabitants of moist forests. I’m sure the one I heard scratching around in the undergrowth by the shore, would soon be heading back to the gullies and the treetops. But in its distant melange of calls – of satin bowerbirds, kookaburras, currawongs, red wattlebirds and other things I just can’t recognise – was a sound I’d never heard a lyrebird make before. I’m sure I heard an impression of that paradigmatic bird of the beach – the silver gull.

And that’s the soundtrack of the Hawkesbury estuary, right there,

What are your bird call spotting skills like, dear reader? Can you recognise any other shore birds in this estuarine lyrebird’s song? If you can spot any extra calls, please let me know!

The green water of Cowan Creek

A superb lyrebird I prepared earlier

Other stories from Cowan Creek and thereabouts

A glimpse of a peregrine falcon hunting: death and good fortune in Cowan Creek

Old hands: how Smith’s Creek was nearly Canberra

Stingray Bay – lost and found

The Hawkesbury in winter: the shortest days and how to use them

Broken Bay at low ebb: the troubled history of Hawkesbury oysters

A winter morning in Cowan Creek

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March 30, 2019

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estuaries, habitat, juveniles, Native birds, territoriality

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The trouble with the younger generation

Egg the ancient kayak on the way to Joe Crafts Bay

It’s not often that the stars are in alignment for a midweek paddle but occasionally it happens. Children elsewhere, being forced to make music for 48 straight hours; the car (or “kayak transportation device” as I prefer to call it) sitting there unused and no pressing work engagements before 9 am on a Wednesday morning.

Berowra Creek was delightfully quiet, save for a handful of tinnies bearing estuarine commuters towards the wharf and the road to the big smoke roundabout 7 o’clock. I guess that’s rush hour on the Hawkesbury.

Pre-dawn rush at the Berowra Creek ferry

A peaceful river, low tide… time for the shy critters to come out of the mangroves and feast in the mud.

Striated heron getting ready to strike

And … stretch!

Juvenile Striated heron hunting silhouette with catch brightened

Juvenile striated heron with a tiny fish

I go past the mouth of Joe Crafts Bay quite regularly. It’s a magical place, blessed with reflections and rolling fog, and a secret creek filled with darting fish.

Looking to Joe Crafts Bay on a misty day

I’m always expecting to see something exotic there, like the critically endangered Eastern Curlew, visiting Australian coast during the northern winter after an epic migration from Russia and western China. Mostly I see bird-shaped sticks. But on this quiet morning, what I initially suspected to be a stick turned out not one, but two striated herons.

Juvenile striated heron pretending no one is looking

It’s pretty unusual to get a good look at these birds, described on one twitcher website, unnecessarily cruelly I think, as “a dumpy little heron with a large head“. Or if you were really mean you might describe it as a dumpy little heron with a jack-in-the-box neck.

Juvenile striated heron alarmed lightened 2 amended square

Juvenile striated heron with neck stretch

I normally spot striated herons only after I’ve already bugged them enough to burst out of their hiding places in the mangroves and fly off, disgruntled, down the river.

Adult striated heron perching at high tide

They are not given to making a lot of noise and hunt stealthily, perched on a low branch over shallow water or creeping along the shoreline looking for little fish, crabs or crustaceans. Interestingly, they sometimes also fish with bait – dropping a feather or leaf on the water to lure fish to the surface to investigate. These birds seem to be quite smart – researchers have even recorded youngsters playing with bugs, fruit and pieces of wood – perhaps practicing for bait fishing.

But for all their creativity, young herons like most juvenile birds, seem to be a little bit slow on the uptake when they unexpectedly encounter a mammal in a boat. And long may that stupidity continue.

Juvenile striated heron from behind square and lightened

Pensive looking juvenile striated heron

There was also an adult bird on this particular mudflat, clever enough to stay a lot further away.

Adult striated heron, macroryncha subspecies

And while the adult wasn’t incredibly impressed with me being in its territory, it was really very pissed off that it was having to share its patch of low tide real estate with a young heron. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Heron Conservation group – an impressively specialised body – African striated herons are so determined to defend their territory that you only find a couple of individuals in a 13 kilometre stretch of river. Our aggro Aussie adult, true to form, went after the youngster no less than three times while I was watching, chasing it off the prime spots on the mudflat with real venom.

Adult straited chasing juvenile crop long

Adult striated heron chasing off a juvenile off his feeding grounds

Not so the adult could hunt. Oh no. Youngster was finding fine pickings. But having cleared him out, the adult heron did this:

Adult striated heron freezing while white faced heron feeds

Striated heron pretending to be a statue

Nada. Played a game of statues. Or maybe pretended to be a stick for the benefit of nosy kayakers. It’s always pleasing to see birds behaving as expected. Here we see an “adult… freez[ing] when disturbed; standing motionless with their bill… at 45 degrees”

I was surprised to find that the striated heron, shy and retiring as it is, has been described as “one of the more cosmopolitan herons“, which suggests somehow it has well-used hand luggage tucked away in the mangroves somewhere and frequent flyer points. Sub-species (in an attractive range of colours) are found right around the world – from Africa, Madagascar, the islands of the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and South America.

Adult Striated heron walking toe out good pattern

Adult striated heron stepping out

Australian striated herons – both the east coast macroryncha, grey with perhaps a flush of wine colour on its underparts, and the reddish-brown stagnatilis which living in the north west – are a bit fussier than many overseas subspecies, living pretty much exclusively in coastal areas in and around mangroves. That’s quite different to the rarer but to my untutored eye somewhat similar looking black bittern that is found along forested rivers, like the Wyong River where I spotted this one, and even rivers much further inland.

Black bittern on the Wyong River

Juvenile striated heron in the fog

If you’re kind of fussy about where you live, Joe Crafts Bay seems a tremendous place to end up. No wonder the grumpy grownup wants to keep it to himself.

Joe Crafts Bay at its magical best

More adventures on the Hawkesbury

A visit with the eagles of Mooney Mooney Creek

Magic scenes on a cold and foggy day on Cowan Water

The silver river – up Marramarra Creek

Of gods and map readers – into Muogamarra National Park

Two sad islands, three whistling kites – a visit to Barr Island

Burnoff at Bujwa Bay

Alhambra on the Hawkesbury

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October 13, 2018

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Biodiversity, estuaries, fish, predation, raptors, waterways

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The very big fish

Mulloway on the rocks by Joe Crafts Bay

I’m a fish idiot. I see them all the time as I paddle around the Hawkesbury – grey, striped and translucent; foot long granddaddies heaving themselves out of water and hundreds of fry flicking the surface like tiny scaly synchronised swimmers . But don’t ask me what sort of fish they are, where they hang out, or anything else about them really. I don’t eat them, or hunt them, or keep them as pets so somehow my brain spontaneously ejects all information about them.

But it was hard to ignore a fish as big as this, splayed out on the riverside rocks near Joe Crafts Bay. Especially given the spectacle of the local white-bellied sea eagles trying very hard, but ultimately not hard enough, to carry this giant juicy snack to a convenient spot in the treetops.

Sea eagle flapping with fish b&w amend square

White-bellied sea eagle trying to fly off with a very big fish

This fish was too much even for the second largest raptor in Australia to carry off to eat in peace. Male sea eagles can weigh as much as 3.7 kilos, females half a kilo heavier, with wingspans of two metres or more. But this great big fish, I have been assured by expert fishermen, was a mulloway, a giant of coastal waters that can weigh 60 kilos and grow to two metres long. This one was a tiddler, maybe only two or three feet in length (I guess. But then I’m the kind of person who has to try two or three lids before successfully covering a saucepan, so I could be wrong). But the sea eagle still couldn’t wrangle it safely into the trees. Trust me, it tried. Take off was aborted several times. And then a boat with some noisy humans came and anchored inconveniently close to this enormous and tempting snack.

Blue boat

The sea eagle flew off, disgruntled. But it didn’t fly far. Or more to the point, they didn’t fly far: in fact, there were three sea eagles keeping an eye on this feed – a pair and a youngster I labelled “Itchy”.

Itchy the sea eagle

Pair of white-bellied sea eagles waiting for seafood breakfast

The boat moved along, after a while – obviously no other mulloway were coming up from the deep that morning. Before the sea eagles got wise, someone else decided on seafood for breakfast.

Australian raven casing out a great big fish

Raven checking for sea eagle attach

At last, a nibble of mulloway

The raven and its mate tried to keep the great big fish to themselves, but in the end, might is right on the river it seems.

Pair of Australian ravens chasing a sea eagle

I’m not sure if Itchy got a look-in, but the sea eagle pair both got a decent meal, taking it in turns to run the gauntlet of the river-traffic (including a nosy kayaker with a zoom lens). One bird ate warily while the other stood guard in a nearby tree.

Sea eagle tearing the flesh of the fish

A nibble of entrail

Planning the next bite

One member of the sea eagle pair eating…

While the other stands guard.

White-bellied sea eagle enjoying mulloway for breakfast

They’d hardly made a tiny dent in the corpse of the mulloway by the time a second boat came along to break up the party. I’m sure another meal happened later in the day, but I try to be out of the water by the time the roar of powerboat engines drowns out the whizz and plop of yak-fishermen casting. One less bothersome boatie for the sea-eagles to worry about.

Boat off Joe Crafts Bay

I’m sure this mulloway has a story. If the white-bellied sea-eagles couldn’t take off with this whopper fish, it’s hard to imagine how they could have caught it and lifted it from the water. How did this beauty end up, forlorn, on the river-side rocks? Surely no human fisherfolk would leave such a prize behind? My fishing friends tell me that the great mulloway, jewels on its back glimmering in the water, is a fish to dream about and pursue – after dark, in the deepest holes in the river. And good eating too.

Stocks of these big fish crashed by the early noughties, burdened by commercial and amateur fishing. T he minimum catch size for recreational fishing went up from 45 to 70 cm long, so maybe this one was caught but found short of the mark (like most of the mulloway hooked by recreational fisherfolk). Released, perhaps, already wounded, destined to wash up on shore, breakfast for the ravens and the eagles.

Sea eagle portrait dark background cropped.jpg

Thanks to Denis Crowdy and Peter Doyle for fish identification and mulloway tales.

Other posts about the raptors in our beautiful backyard

Sibling rivalry as the young collared sparrowhawks in our neighbour’s pine tree learn to hunt…

The world’s fastest bird catches a meal

Three whistling kites, two sad islands

Encounters with the local eagles

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Posted on

September 19, 2018

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estuaries, jellyfish, Uncategorized, Waste, waterways

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A ghostly tide in Calabash Creek

It’s true what they say: you can’t step into the same river twice. Especially if that river is really an estuary, briny water moving up and down between the mangroves.

Last time I was in Calabash Bay, back in February, it was full of stingrays. The bigger rays were over a metre from head to tail, the smallest a quarter of that size, sliding along the silty creek bed bottom at a surprising speed as I wrestled with the manual focus on my camera.

Little black cormorant

The entrance to Calabash Bay

Stingray in Calabash Creek

Upper reaches of Calabash Creek

But this Sunday, in the golden hour, I floated alongside a parade of hundreds of thousands of jellyfish. Not the jelly blubbers that gather in the bends and eddies of the Hawkesbury proper, orange and beefy and disturbingly solid under the paddle. These were moon jellies, aurelia aurata, diaphanous as mermaids’ undergarments, their shadows on the sandy bottom more substantial than themselves, tumbling and drifting downstream.

A flock of moon jellies

Moon jelly and reflection

Moon jellies flaunting their horseshoe shaped gonads

Stinging tentacles on display?

They’re common enough, moon jellies. They’re easy to see and easy to study because they like to hang out where we humans do. Harbours and jetties give them somewhere to latch onto in the polyp phase of their intriguing two part life cycle. And blooms of millions of the medusa form – like the one I saw this weekend – are not unusual either, especially in enclosed and not too salty waters, where the nutrient level is high, the oxygen level low and predators are few. But I’d never seen so many moon jellies in one place before, and never seen them here. Perhaps the stiff south easterly breeze and a rising tide blew them implausibly high into the tree-lined reaches of Calabash Creek.

Burns creek during a burnoff

Maybe it was a coincidence, but along with the mysterious tide of jellyfish, Calabash Creek and the trees and rocks that flanked it were draped with garish green algae. The creekbed and mangrove roots were coated in it and dried mats of it hung like fragments of ripped clothing from low branches. Water quality is much better in the Hawkesbury these days, but it seems like Calabash Bay is a hotspot for algal blooms, both toxic and less so, thanks to sewage outfalls upstream and a legacy of nutrients from earlier, dirtier days buried in the sediment.

Whatever the cause, the creepy drapery and the feeling of being entirely surrounded by slowly moving, half-invisible jellies lent an otherworldly feel to these quiet waters.

Whitefaced heron in a monochrome landscape

Dried mats of algae looking like torn clothes

Algae draped over a rock

Baby mangroves

So I guess I can’t say for sure whether you get to step in the same river twice. My feet never went near that water. They were tucked up in the canoe with no chance of touching ghostly jellies, stinging tentacles or strangling slime.

Burnoff sunset over Berowra Creek

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Posted on

July 13, 2018

Posted under

estuaries, fish, kayaking, Native birds, Uncategorized

Shags: here there & everywhere

Symmetrical cormorants and fake owl for crop

A pair of great cormorants not at all threatened by a plastic owl

I think I’m slowly overcoming my prejudice against ducks. My duckism, if you like. There’s a sudden movement on the waterline, I fumble for my camera, then I realise it’s “just a duck”.

Water off a duck’s back

Wood ducklings

A male musk duck

Pacific ducklings?

A chestnut teal in Berowra Creek

A pacific duck… perhaps?

But slowly I’ve been persuaded that ducks are worth the effort. There’s the crazy goitre of the musk duck. The hardhead, gruesomely named after the challenges taxidermists faced stuffing its cranium. The nest-thieving pinkeared eared duck, with its black and white stripes and hints of neon. The good-looking but possibly feckless chestnut teal, said to engage in “dump laying” – dropping eggs in other teals’ nests to be raised. Even shooters participating in the autumnal “kill a duck in a national park” festival aren’t allowed to blow away the increasingly rare blue winged Australasian shoveler. (Field and Game Australia chair was said to be “disappointed” about this).

In the same way, I’m slowly starting to come around to the shag . It’s not that I’ve got a particular prejudice against them. It’s just that they’re always there. Whatever the time of day, season or weather conditions. Familiarity breeds not so much contempt as slight indifference.

But these foggy winter mornings have shown cormorants in a new (filtered) light.

Cormorant raft monochrome flying bird crop square

Post-apocalyptic stillness and deep chill don’t deter them. When there’s nothing moving – maybe just a single sea-eagle enveloped in the mist – the cormorants are the silhouettes that make that gloomy snap worthwhile.

Yacht reflections

Oysterbeds at Bar Island, cloud down

Cormorants in the fog at Collingwood Point

Little black cormorants near at the marina in Dusty Hole

Distant silver gull in the fog

Pied cormorant in Berowra Creek

Great cormorant at Bar Island

Four of the five species of Australasian cormorants can be found on my bit of the Hawkesbury. Only the black-faced cormorant, which only lives on the south coasts – in Tassie, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia – has never made an appearance around here.

My favourite is the biggest, the great cormorant, Phalacrocarax carbo (or the black shag in New Zealand). It’s the world’s most widespread cormorant, found across Europe, India, Africa and South East Asia.

Great cormorants – perching and flying

Great cormorant at Milson’s Point

The little black cormorant is lovely too, with its jade green eyes and black-on-black pattern. I’ll never forget the feathered hush of a huge flock of them passing overhead as I paddled in in Myall Lakes National Park a few years back. Like other cormorants, they usually nest colonially, with lots of other waterbirds. These little black cormorants sometimes combine in flocks of hundreds to feed cooperatively as well, a line of birds trapping fish in inlets as the tide retreats. But I’ve never seen them flying or feeding en masse on the Hawkesbury or its tributaries.

Little black cormorant and its beautiful green eye

Crested tern and little black cormorant in by the promenade in Newcastle

The pied cormorant is a regular sight around here too. I haven’t seen them nesting though, even in the mangroves of Big Bay or Spectacle Island, though flooded forests – along with coastal islands – are apparently the sites they pick to raise their young. In the past, the pied, along with the great cormorant, were suspected by fishermen of raiding nets and at times licences were distributed to cull them. But mostly, along with crustaceans and molluscs, they eat the small fry, too insignificant to interest human fisherfolk.

Pied cormorant portrait

I’m off!

Pied cormorant skewering a fish

I’m not so keen on the little pied cormorants – no glamorous green eye! I see fewer of them, though apparently they do congregate in large flocks in coastal areas. Along with the little blacks, they’re also found right across Australia’s inland waterways and dams, feeding on crustaceans, especially freshwater yabbies, as well as little fish.

Little cormorant drying wings good wave pattern crop

Little pied cormorant drying its wings at Donnybrook Bay

I say cormorants are everywhere – from the turbid shallows at the top of Berowra Creek to the open water where the Hawkesbury meets the sea. But that’s not strictly true. Cormorants prefer fishing over seagrass – there’s a better range of things to eat there. And seagrass beds are under threat all over the place. A study tracking of numbers of coastal birds at a tidal bay in Victoria for over 40 years found that not only migratory birds but the year-round residents, including cormorants, had reduced in numbers:

The marked decline in some (predominantly) fish-eating birds (Australian pelican, great cormorant, little pied cormorant, white-face heron and grey-tailed tattler) around the early 1980s closely matches the beginning of a decline in commercial fish catch… Decreases in fish-eating birds and fish coincide with substantial losses of seagrass in the bay (Hansen et al 2015 524)

Cormorant about to be eaten bigger square

Cormorant avoiding a shark at Dusty Hole in Berowra Creek

And it seems, cormorants tend to steer clear of shallow water, no matter how good the spread, if there’s sharks about. Just another reason for a kayaker to love a shag!

Egg blue sky and fog on beach at Twin Beaches

Egg the ancient kayak at Twin Beaches

Additional references:

Dorfman, E.J. and Kingsman, M.J. “Environmental determinants of distribution and foraging behaviour of cormorants (Phalacrocorax spp.) in temperate estuarine habitats” Marine Biology 2001 138 1-10

Hansen, B., Menkhorst, P., Moloney, P and Loyn, R. “Long-term declines in multiple waterbird species in a tidal embayment, south-east Australia” Austral Ecology (2015) 40, 515–527

Heithaus, M.R. “Habitat use and group size of pied cormorants (Phalacrocorax varius) in a seagrass ecosystem: possible effects of food abundance and predation risk” Marine Biology (2005) 147: 27–35

Traylerd, K.M., Brothers, D.J., Woollera, R.D., and Potter, I.C. 1989 “Opportunistic foraging by three species of cormorants in an Australian estuary” Journal of Zoology (1989) 218, 87-98

Cormorants in mist

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mccnmatt

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August 27, 2017

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estuaries, kayaking, national parks, Native animals, Native birds, waterways

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Stingray Bay: lost and found

After years of denial, I have finally accepted that I’m a map hoarder.

Though my other half has long been known by the moniker “Map Man”, it’s me that whiles my evenings away at the Lands and Property Information’s map shop, and I’m the one who takes our topographic maps on most of their little outings on the water, snug inside their “Hercules” double zip-lock plastic bags. There have been some unfortunate errors – we have a few maps of dull little patches of agricultural wasteland with a bit of barely navigable waterway in one corner. But despite the ridiculously small slices of this wide brown land that can fit on any given 1:25000 map, they really are quite useful things.

Although possibly less useful – without a compass – in a white out.

Setting out from Appletree Bay

Fog and mist are picturesque, right? “In…mist, the picturesque artist can celebrate obscurity, lack of clarity, indistinctness, that which is veiled… the picturesque tourist is prepared to spend days in fog” (Murray, 2004, 874). Or possibly, not so much prepared to spend days there as trapped there for indefinitely unable to find their way out, as you can see from the baroque twists and turns captured on my phone’s GPS on my last jaunt to Stingray Bay. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to fish it out of its dry bag and consult it for directions!

I often laugh at the giant directional signs you see on the waters edge of the Hawkebury – they really look like they belong by a freeway, not a pristine riverside – but if it hadn’t been for a bloody great sign looming up through the fog, I might still have been floating aimlessly around Cowan Creek days later.

Lost

Fishermen?

Egg and Easter sun

Jellyfish in the fog

I was quite keen, back in April, leaving the boat ramp at Appletree Bay on a high and rising tide, to check out Stingray Bay. It’s a decent step – about sixteen ks, slightly more if you decide to do baffled pirouettes mid-stream – but not an epic yomp. A trip up Smith’s Creek is a good one to do when the tide rising steadily rather than on the turn, since you can go with the flow on at least half the journey, and ride the current on last leg home.

I’d had a pit stop there at Stingray Bay before, on my way further up Smith’s Creek. The Hawkesbury in these parts is a steep-sided sandstone gorge, flooded these last six thousand years with bottle green water, so this is a rare spot where you can get out of a canoe to stretch your legs. You will most likely standing in knee deep water but that’s not so bad, unless you happen to step on the eponymous sting rays. We worry more about sharks, but apparently after blue bottles, stingrays – most likely round these parts the common stingaree – cause the most injuries to beachgoers in Sydney.

They’re not aggressive animals. Richard Wylie, a marine biologist from Monash University, described them as “wonderfully inquisitive and gentle marine animals“. Stingrays give birth to live young and in Yolgnu communities in the far north, stingrays – specifically the mangrove whipray or Gawangalkmirri – were seen as devoted parents, the sort we humans should aspire to be. And while I feel might fret about an encounter with a ray, indigenous communities have long seen them not as a threat but as an important and delicious food source.

But if you do happen to frighten stingrays – for instance, stomping on them while they’re hiding in the sand – you can get a sting from the toxin-bearing barb on their tail. Apparently it hurts like hell. Immersing your feet in hot water denatures the toxin and takes the pain away, apparently, although a lot of people need pieces of barb removed from their wound and sometimes stitches and antibiotics too.

Seagrass and sand in Stingray Bay

I’ve never stepped on a ray, though I have seen them, just once, in the shallows of Calabash Bay in Berowra Creek. But just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you walk around in shallow estuarine waters, it’s best to have footwear and shuffle rather than stride. Fortunately, my bum is usually so numb by the time I stumble out of my kayak that shuffling around stirring up the sand with my protective booties is not so much safety measure as a physical necessity.

I paddled straight over the sting-ray shallows, though, back in April, past yachts barely stirring in the morning mist and moody cormorants staring out at the post-apocalyptic blankness.

Yachts moored in Stingray Bay

Cormorant contemplating the end of civilisation

A pied cormorant – I think suffering from a fishing line wound

Ravens being suitable gothic

Jellyfish in the mist

Slightly rumpled sea eagle

Even at half tide, you can skim safely above the seagrass and on up the creek. There’s a deep swimming hole, and above it, two tiny waterfalls tumbling into a bowl of rocks. Despite my morbid fear of breaking my precious and ancient wooden boat, I even managed to clamber out onto the rocks for a comfort break and a look around. It’s a really lovely spot – a great place to come for a picnic and a splash around in warmer weather.

Egg at the rock garden at the top of the creek

Dawn spiderwebs

Rock orchids

And not a bad place to hang out if you’re a baby fish either. There may not have been any stingrays, but there were certainly plenty of little fishlings when I visited again, in very different weather, last weekend. So very many fishies, swirling away from the paddle like living iron filings toyed with by slightly sadistic magnet… yet so surprisingly difficult for a bumbling amateur to photograph.

The creek at Stingray Bay

Mangrove reflections

Stingray Bay reflections

Many many fish

Stingray Bay certainly looks different (if possibly less picturesque) when you can actually see it.

Looking up Smith’s Creek

Reflections in Stingray Bay

Pied cormorants fishing at Cottage Point

Oyster reflections

And the journey there and back again’s not too hard on the eyes either. Except when you’re paddling straight into the morning sun.

Looking past Cottage Point

Boats at Cottage Point

Dawn through the trees

Little pied cormorant

At Peach Trees

Sandstone escarpment

The cormorants, the escarpment and the sun-touched tree tops might have been perfectly visible and, thanks to months with virtually no rain, the clear green water might have offered a vertiginous view of sandstone slabs sliding into the depths, but not all the mysteries of Cowan Creek were revealed to me on my paddle back to Apple Tree Bay.

Was it that persistent dive-bombing tern that plunked so heavily into the water behind me, leaving only a ripple by the time I spun around to see? Did some underwater creature make that line of bubbles I paddled through on the way past Waratah Bay? Could it have been dolphins? Or more worryingly, a bullshark? Maybe it’s better not to know.

Dawn in Cowan Creek

Mystery bubbles

Water and sky in Stingray Bay

Australian raven at Appletree Bay

But not while you’re navigating!

Bobbin head sign

References

Emma Macevoy (2004) “Picturesque” from Murray, Christopher ed The Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1850, Vol 2, Taylor and Francis

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mccnmatt

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August 3, 2017

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Meet the Royals

Spoonbill looking back good portrait 2 wide To be honest, I’m a republican more than a monarchist, but over the weekend I met one set of royals I have some time for: Royal Spoonbills. They carry off the ceremonial garb beautifully without raiding the public purse for grog or helicopter rides, and their landed estates are mostly mud, swamps and reed beds, as opposed to, say 20 million acres of Britain’s finest arable land.

Royal spoonbill with breeding plumage

Typical feeding process – swishing from side to side

Feeding takes place in water less than 40 cm deep

Royal Spoonbills are not uncommon birds – their conservation status is secure across much of Australia, and they can be found not just in rivers and coastal mudflats but also in temporary inland waterways during times of flood, wading through shallow water, feeling for fish, crustaceans and aquatic insects with their vibration-detecting spoon-shaped beaks. They’ve also made it to New Zealand, where their numbers seem to be increasing.

But I’ve only seen them on two occasions in my weekly outings on the Hawkesbury, at the same time – early morning an hour or two after low tide- and in the same spot, in the mangroves near the shambling boatyards in Mooney Mooney. It’s place with a splendid outlook but it won’t be appearing on the front cover of Vogue’s Marina and Oysterfarm magazine. Unless they’re doing a special spread on “2017’s best retro refits for your partially sunken houseboat”

Spectacle Island in the foreground and the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge behind

White bellied sea eagle at dawn over Spectacle Island

The perpetually roar from the freeway, the piles of maritime junk and even the unchained dog wandering round the quayside didn’t seem to bother the herons, the pelicans or the spoonbills. The tidal mudflats fringing Mooney Mooney and the nature reserve at Spectacle Island across the way must make for good pickings, and the stands of mangroves by the boatyard a safe place to nest, over the water.

I’m pretty sure this is a regular hang-out for them. Spoonbills living near the coast are sedentary and often use the same nests from year to year. My failure to spot them over the intervening period is, I suspect, more to do with cluelessness about the best tide time to catch them, rather than a sign they wander around a lot.

Like darters, they breed in colonies with other waterbirds. The first time I saw this group (or to use the proper collective noun, bowl) of spoonbills, in September last year, they were in the company of another wader I’ve rarely seen on the Hawkesbury, an egret. And this time, as well as the ubiquitous white-faced herons feeding en-masse on the mud flats at dawn and then later in the shallows, there were a flock of the much maligned white ibises – or “bin chickens” as urban Australian call them disparagingly – hunting in amongst the mangroves down the way.

The ubiquitous white-faced heron. One of around 20 I saw hunting in the shallows later that morning.

Australian white ibises in their natural habitat

Spoonbill with friendly egret

Australian pelicans on a channel marker at Mooney Mooney

Pelicans shouting at each other crop small

Apparently this is a male pelican (in breeding colours) chatting up a likely female!

I read that juvenile spoon bills have even been spotted grooming other species of waterbirds. Shortsighted? Or just very very friendly?

Spoonbill in July with no visible crest

In full breeding plumage in September

This time there was no sign of the spoonbills’ breeding plumage, a 20cm long crest of feathers on the back of the necks of both males and female (although the crest on female, like their legs and beak, is apparently shorter than the males’). October to April is said to be the breeding season, so I must have caught them, last time, just before they paired up and started thinking about the next generation. It’s probably lucky I didn’t catch them any later in the year, since it seems they’re very sensitive to disturbance when they’re on the nest.

Birds do seem to be more chilled around a photographer gliding along in a canoe than someone stumbling in the undergrowth with a camera. It is pleasing to have this observation, made on the water over the past three years, confirmed by a recent paper, entertainingly called “Up the Creek with a Paddle”. According to its authors, Hayley Glover, Patrick-Jean Guay and Michael Weston, the FID (flight-initiation-disturbance) distance of royal spoonbills is 23 metres if you are in a canoe, versus 55 metres if you’re on foot. Mind you, driving up to birds in your car is also scientifically vindicated way of getting (slightly) closer to them before they make a break for it, but unless you want your SUV bobbing in the water next to the Mooney Mooney houseboat, perhaps not such a good idea in this instance.

Guay, Glover and Weston, having presumably spent quite some time running loudly (with a tape measure) through the reeds towards a range of species and then ramming them (carefully and scientifically) with canoes, recommend a “set back” from waterbirds for boaties of about 90 metres*. Which is a long way, even if you have a good zoom on your camera. But I think, at least for the next few months, I’ll give the spoonbills a wide berth and let them raise their babies in peace.

Spectacle island mud flats lines abstract long and thin small

Spectacle Island mudflats at dawn

References

Glover, Hayley K., Guay, Patrick-Jean and Weston, Michael A. (2015) “Up the creek with a paddle; avian flight distances from canoes versus walkers” Wetlands Ecological Management, 23:775–778

Guay, Patrick-Jean; McLeod, Emily M; Taysom, Alice J and Weston, Michael A. Are vehicles ‘mobile bird hides’?: A test of the hypothesis that ‘cars cause less disturbance’. The Victorian Naturalist, Vol. 131, No. 4, Aug 2014

McLeod EM, Guay P-J, Taysom AJ, Robinson RW, Weston MA (2013) “Buses, cars, bicycles and walkers: the influence of the type of human transport on the flight responses of waterbirds”. PLoS ONE 8:e82008

Mo, Matthew (2016) An apparent case of interspecific allopreening by a Royal Spoonbill Platalea regia. Australian Zoologist: 2016, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 214-216.

Glover, Guay and Weston are undoubtedly bird lovers and did their research with the greatest sensitivity and care. I just always find it funny / slightly disturbing to read about the things animal researchers sometimes do to expand the range of human knowledge. Most poignant I’ve read in recent times: releasing migrating songbirds into a planetarium and allowing them to try to navigate by the stars…

Spoonbill fishing 3 cropped larger asymmetrical

Perhaps not a beautiful bird but certainly eye catching!

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mccnmatt

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July 30, 2017

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estuaries, Gardening, kayaking, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, waterways, Weeds

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Mother-of-millions takes to the waves

You know a weed is a baddie when it will grow without dirt and entirely surrounded by salt water. The Mother of Dragons inspires GoT fans and baby names but Mother-of-Millions – the stowaway on this attractively decrepit boat moored off Dangar Island in the Hawkesbury – inspires a deep and abiding hatred in bush regenerators, whose job is to try to get rid of weedy garden escapes like this one.

Mother of millions against sky closeup cropsmall

Mother-of-millions – a native of Madagascar – was imported to Australia in the 1950s as a drought tolerant garden plant. It’s now a restricted invasive plant in Queensland, and can’t be given away, sold or released into the environment. Here in coastal NSW and the northwest slopes and plains, it’s a declared noxious weed which means landowners (or in this case boat-owners) have a legal requirement to control it. Like two-thirds of Australia’s noxious weeds, it’s a garden plant that got away.

To add to its charm, mother-of-millions (aka bryophyllum delagoense) is also toxic to humans, pets and livestock. If animals eat enough of it (5 kilos for an adult cow) they quickly die with heart failure. If they just have a snack, they’ll get bloody diahorrea, drool saliva, dribble urine and then die of heart failure. Fortunately cattle are probably safe from this particular crop of bryophyllum. Unless they are bovines with boats, or like a good swim.

Mother of millions below the porthole crop small

Mother of millions side of boat lighter small

You can pull mother-of-millions out by hand but it is, apparently, a soul destroying job. The plant can reproduce from tiny seeds, dispersed both by wind and water – I’ve certainly seen colonies in bushland by Berowra Creek. I hate to think how far and wide the seeds from this estuarine Typhoid Mary have spread. The seeds remain dormant in the soil for ages, so getting rid of mother-of-millions is not a one-time-only job. Like its toxic relative bryophyllum pinnate – the evocatively named resurrection plant – little plantlets growing on the leaves can also detach as you’re weeding. Any tiny fragment of leaf can generate a new infestation. You can spray it with herbicide, leave it in a black plastic bag to die, or hope for a visit from the (also introduced) South African Citrus Thrip which burrows through the leaves’ waxy coating to lay eggs on its flesh. But none of this horticultural horror show works as well as setting it on fire.

We all have a biosecurity duty, of course: “any person… who knows (or ought to know) of any biosecurity risk, has a duty to ensure the risk is prevented, eliminated or minimised, so far as is reasonably practicable”. And as a responsible gardener and card-carrying greenie, I take those duties seriously. However I’m not sure the owner of this rickety vessel would embrace the idea of a passing kayaker with a molotov cocktail torching his boat, for all its mother of infestations.

Mother of millions side and rope better cropped small