A day out at the pool with the kids

During most of spring we woke up every morning to the sound of sparrowhawks shagging.  But for the last couple of months the alarm clock has been the crack of a whip.

An eastern whipbird pair have been whiling away time in our garden, offering their distinctive antiphonal duet – the male first with his whipcrack, followed up by his mate with a “chu chu”.  But they’ve had an extra with them this year – a youngster, with a kind of squelchy call that reminds me a bit of the red-crowned toadlets that I’ve been hearing on the fire trails throughout this soggy soggy summer.

Recently fledged juvenile whipbird

The whipbirds have some interesting child-rearing habits, according to researchers Amy Rogers and Raoul Mulder.  They usually lay a couple of eggs.  Once the chicks fledge, the parents divide the task of looking after the kids quite formally between them.  Each parent looks after one of the fledglings exclusively.  You can imagine the therapy bills .  There’s an exception – if only one chick survives, then it’s mum who’s in charge.  So I guess it’s maternal care we’ve seen as we’ve watched the adult and juvenile slipping in and out of sight around the garden.  There’s definitely a whip-cracking male around, but all thee have only been spotted together in the garden once – and I wasn’t there with my camera to catch it, so I question if it ever really happened.

Whipbird chicks spend about six weeks with their parents after fledging, sometimes even hanging around until the next season, and it’s been interesting watching the adult and its offspring interacting, as the young one slowly morphs from its slighty fluffy, brown “I just came out of the nest” look to something more like an adult appearance.

Adult whipbird with a juvenile following it

I think one reason the whipbirds make such regular appearances in our yard is the frightful mess it’s in.  We’re not path sweepers or lawn groomers.  More stick-pilers, fungus-harbourers and ignorers-of-organic-detritus.  My efforts to promote biodiversity are not solely confined to a failure to rake, however.  I’ve sunk the value of at least one of the kids’ kidneys into shrubs, vines and groundcovers, some of which have survived.  While I have regularly seen the whipbirds in our kiwifruit arbor and the youngster has been spotted leaping about in a demented way amongst the ferns and vines outside our kitchen window, the native violets, which are threatening to overrun the house during this wettest summer in 30 years, seem to be a favoured spot.

Here we see chick watching mum head down bum up in the viola hederacea (you can just see the tail in the lower half of the first picture).  Next it’s little one that has its butt in the air, retrieving something invisible but presumably tasty.

Juvenile whipbird watching adult hunting for food

 

Despite their furtive habits and preference for the undergrowth, it turns out whipbirds can be pretty assertive under the right circumstances.  I was impressed by the use of eye contact in a  show-down with one of our many resident brush turkeys over a bird bath.

Eastern whipbird and brush turkey eye to eye

Showdown at the bird bath

The best time to spot two generations of whipbirds is around lunchtime, at the birdbath.  Mum arrives first, has a wash and then a bit of a groom, perched above on some wonga wonga vines.

Whipbird mum having a wash

Having a splash

If the coast is clear, the youngster appears.

Juvenile whipbird perched on a bird bath

Juvenile whipbird taking its turn in the birdbath

Juvenile whipbird and mum nose to nose 2 crop amended small

Juvenile whipbird and mum beak to beak

Awwwwww.

Having watched this scene of filial affection unfolding around the birdbath at home, I was quite delighted to catch what I thought were some similarly touching moments at a pool in a more natural setting.

Brown thornbill in a banksia serrata

Brown thornbill in a banksia serrata

Eastern yellow robin

Spinebill feeding from a banksia serrata

Grey fantail - perhaps a young 'un with a bit of brown on the breast

Grey fantail – perhaps a young ‘un with a bit of brown on the breast

Lewin’s honeyeater in a banksia serrata

Juvenile spinebill hanging

As a devoted parent, I’m always happy to drive my kids to music lessons… especially if the music teacher’s home happens to be right next to a national park.  On a sunny late afternoon during one of these high-speed twitching sessions, I spotted some action high up in a Sydney red gum.

A hollow on top of a horizonal branch seemed to have formed a natural pool which was evidently a magnet for the local birdlife.

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Juvenile spinebills playing, fighting or perhaps play fighting

Juvenile spinebills playing, fighting or perhaps play fighting

I could see that there were some juvenile spinebills about, and some adults too.  Squinting through my lens I wasn’t quite sure what kind of pool side action was going on up there in the canopy.  Perhaps adults giving a tour to youngsters of all the best places to drink and bathe in their forest home? Showing them the ropes in this lofty aquatic environment – explaining the avian equivalent to those “no petting” “no bombing” rules perhaps?

When I got home and had a good look at the photos I found out otherwise.

Adult whipbird shirtfronting a juvenile by the angophora pool

Adult whipbird shirtfronting a juvenile by the angophora pool

Adult spinebill after a celebratory bathe

Adult spinebill after a celebratory bathe in the treetop pool

These poolside antics give “competitive dad” a whole new meaning.

Apparently, spinebills can have up to 5 clutches of eggs each year – almost as soon as one clutch are fledged, the parents start making a new nest ready, driving the older juveniles away.  And no free pass for the pool it seems!

Much as I love the gorgeous spinebills, for human Sydneysiders with our eyewatering real estate market and clutches of offspring near at hand, somehow the parenting style of the whipbirds feels closer to home.

Adult male eastern spinebill in a hibiscus tree

Adult male eastern spinebill in a hibiscus tree

More birds in our backyard

Cracking the whip in a messy yard

Blood feud in the dawn redwood

Death and sibling rivalry

Growing up is hard to swallow

Blue eyes and biteys

 

References

K. A. Wood (1996) “Bird Assemblages in a Small Public Reserve and Adjacent Residential Area at Wollongong, New South Wales Wildlife Research, 23, 605-20

Amy Rogers and Raoul Mulder (1996) “Breeding ecology and social behaviour of an antiphonal duetter, the eastern whipbird” Wildlife Research, 1996,23, 605-20

Hot property, water views

It’s been a good season for NSW’s floral emblem. The terrible fires of 2019-20 put some species of waratahs under threat.  Others, subject to fires of lesser intensity, have regrown from the massive underground lignotubers, up to half a tonne in weight, that allow them to regenerate after a burn.  2021 was the first year when botanists predicted a big flush of flowers – and it happened between August and October this year.  And people were out in the bush to appreciate them, thanks to the east coast lockdowns which meant that one of the few activities people could legally and safely do was bushwalk.  Appreciate them and sadly, steal them.  The floristry industry grows its own waratahs but last year so many flowers went missing thanks to visitors to national parks close to suburbia that rangers took to daubing the flowers with blue paint.  Around my way there is much proprietorial concern about the local waratahs.  Pictures of flowers and advice on walks to take to see them appeared on the local facebook group and there was much angst about stolen blooms.  If the flowers are picked, waratas don’t produce seedpods.  The high carb content of waratah seeds, making them a tasty snack for critters means its pretty unlikely they’ll find a spot so well hidden that they get a chance to grow anyway, but if the flower is sitting in a vase on someone’s sideboard, that’s certainly not going to happen.

The flowering season is over now, but waratahs are still hot property as far as the local birdlife is concerned.

Over the summer, I’ve been wandering regularly down to a nearby creek (perhaps rivulet is a better word) to spy on LBBs.  Under the twisted  limbs of the angophoras, the little birds frolic through waist-high shrubs, and nest in the stands of saplings along the creek edge.  It’s a little bit magical.  I’ve been lured along that path by a bold grey strike thrush, who hopped along in front of me the whole way; watched the variegated fairywren blokes get hassle from their female companions; been serenaded by golden whistlers and caught one of the ubiquitous new holland honeyeaters sipping nectar from a mountain devil.  Not to mention regular encounters with the local dragons.

Little waterdragon that hangs out on the rocks by the creek

Male variegated fairywren being sat on by females in his group

A particular spot where the path crosses the creek has been my go-to since late last year, when I spent an hour watching a parade of little birds quarrelling over bathing rights in the shallows.  It was so delightful I keep going back hoping for more.

Brown thornbill

So a couple of weeks ago, to stretch my legs after a day staring at screens, I headed down there.  I spotted the construction in the waratah bush right away.  A nest – exciting in itself, but there was movement.  A live one!

New Holland Honeyeater standing on a nest in a shrub and peeping at the photographer

New Holland honeyeater peeping at the photographer

New holland honeyeater sitting in a waratah bush

New holland honeyeater snug in a nest

This new holland honeyeater seemed so at home, rummaging around in the bottom of the nest, and then sitting in the classic “bird in a nest” position, I assumed I’d met the author of this structure.  But, apparently not.

Red browed finch arriving with nest building materials to find it is occupied by a honeyeater

I would love to hear the inner monologue of this red browed finch.

The finch took a pit stop in another branch of the waratah to recover itself.

Red browed finch with nesting material waits to eject the honeyeater in its nest.

Honeyeater in denial.

I was distracted by a passing dollarbird, and by the time I looked back things were looking very different.

Once the nest was reclaimed, the finch and its partner kept on with the nest building.

A few days later, I went back to check out this waterfront property after the builders were done.  No signs of the pair of finches.  Perhaps they were tucked up inside?  I hope they hadn’t miscalculated in picking this nest site, so close to a footpath.

What was this honeyeater interloper was up to?  While brood parasites like koels and channel billed cuckoos (obviously) lay eggs in other birds’ nests, to the best of my knowledge stealing a nest from another bird isn’t a common thing, at least amongst smaller birds – although, dear reader, I’d be happy to be corrected on this.  My favourite example of nest reuse (more accurately “protective nesting) is the story of various little birds – sparrows, swallows and starlings – finding spots to lay their eggs in the 3 metre pile of sticks that ospreys accumulate as they return to the same nest over the years. The raptors and their squatters seemed to breed happily side by side, with the insect eaters snaffling critters attracted to the rotting fish corpses in the osprey nest, using osprey feathers for nest lining and getting some protection from predators by cohabiting with great big raptors.

Nonetheless, even reusing your own nest from a previous season’s nest has some downsides.  They often get a bit nasty, hoaching with fleas and other ectoparasites.  Predators also get to know the location. Things are different when nest sites are hard to come by – hollows are often reused again and again – and there’s evidence of the same cliff side peregrine scrape in Tasmania being used for 13 thousand years.

If he wasn’t trying to steal the nest, perhaps the honeyeater was lost?? The red-browed finches’ nest at the time he popped by was a similar shape to the cupped nests that honeyeaters make.  They’re fidgety birds that look like they have a short attention span but it seems a little bit unlikely.

new holland honeyeater perched on a twig

More likely he dropped in to filch some nest materials, a habit lots of birds have.  Looking back at my pictures, it looks like he started out on the hunt for materials and then just settled in and got comfy.
I’ll be back to the creek to keep tabs on this waterfront hot property – from a respectful distance, of course.  The red splash of a waratah in spring is a rare treat but the red baby redbrowed finch or two would be a wonderful consolation prize.
red browed finch in profile
Birdwatching moments down the road from our Berowra backyard

Loves and leaves

Yet more lock-down luck.  Company, space, a rambling garden desperately requiring attention, three national parks in walking distance and enough devices to make home learning while working full time quasi-feasible – I already have plenty to be grateful for.  And now, the collared sparrowhawks are back, getting friendly in the neighbour’s pine tree.  They have perfect timing.  It’s just at that point in the lockdown – eight weeks in – when even the most avid homebody/hoarder is running out of distractions.  I’m not saying that trying to get a photograph of the local raptors having sex is my only reason to get out of bed in the morning, but it is a reason.

Morning does seem to be the time for it.  No pictures – this is a family-friendly blog, after all (nothing to do with me being slow on the draw with the zoom lens).  When the sparrowhawks are around, we usually hear them soon after sunrise.  There’s relentless calling from near the top of a tree – mostly, I think from the female.  The male perches, in a diffident kind of way, in a nearby branch.  Then they’re at it, with a brief distinctive flurry of calls.  Afterward, the male shuffles or flaps a distance away on the branch, studiously avoiding eye contact.

The one time I managed to watch the process from go to whoa, afterwards the female chilled out in more or less the same spot high in the pine tree, catching the morning rays, and keeping an eye out for small bird snacks.

Meanwhile, what I think was the male (though this might be a gender stereotype), started attempting some DIY.  Collared sparrowhawks build a shallow nest of stick, high in the canopy, and line it with fresh leaves each year.   This pair seem to be using the same spot in the very top of the neighbour’s tree, notable for its inconvenient lack of a line of sight from my place.

Watching the male gathering construction materials, I’m once again reminded of the limitations of the sparrowhawk’s modest beak and  delicate legs for this kind of building work.  The bird seemed to spend a lot of time eyeing up flimsy looking twigs and then flailing around with its wings in an attempt, mostly unsuccessful, to break some bits off.

 

As you can see, this bird had a red-hot go at getting some twigs from dead branches on one of the usual pine trees.  Eventually, however, the nest-building one of the pair got a bit experimental.  The liquidambar in our front yard – stripped of its leaves by winter, and not so good for ambush hunting – got a visit, solely for construction purposes.

However, some of the neighbour’s shrubs with thin whippy stems and fine needle-like leaves and seemed to be nest-material of choice.

Even so, the process was neither dignified nor ubiquitously successful.  These photographs are both fails.  Photographic fail – frustrated nest builders crashing around in the shrubbery are not an easy capture.  Also, nest building fail – neither of these twigs made it back to home base.  I did, however, see more success on another round of visits to this same bit of greenery the next day.

And they’ve kept at it, with occasional success.

Watching the nest-reno in action has made me reflect on our luck in having these gorgeous critters hanging out nearby – and  on what kinds of habitat create that kind of luck.  Sparrowhawks need tall trees to nest in. This pair (assuming it’s the same one returning each year) nest in one pine tree, and use a sequence of three others nearby as regular hunting spots.  Thanks to lots of greenery, we have loads of undemanding smallish birds on the premises of the right size for raptor snacks – little and red wattlebirds, chicks of the ubiquitous brush turkeys and, of course, loads of bloody noisy miners.

I’ve definitely seen the sparrowhawks devouring birds that we don’t see at our place though – I’m sure they hunt in the national park that’s 500 metres down the hill.  Here’s one of the fledglings from a couple of years ago, chowing down on what I think is a white cheeked honeyeater – I’ve never seen one at our place, but they’re pretty common in the bush not far away.

In the two seasons when they successfully raised chicks, the fledglings seemed to practice short hop flights from one pine to another.  The liquidambar in our yard is an occasionally hunting spot in summer, and I do wonder if the cicadas that appear to feed on its sap in mid-summer offer useful meals for the chicks.

And then there’s the necessity for nest-lining trees with appropriately flimsy branches.

Sparrowhawks are generalists and live all over the place – everywhere except the most arid regions of Australia.  So they’re obviously not too fussy about the finer details of their immediate environment.   They’re pretty low key around people and don’t seem to mind suburbia.  I wonder how much they need the bushland I’m finding so sustaining in lock-down.

The sparrowhawk pair isn’t the only birds aware of the value of this bit of floristic real estate, though.  I’m pretty sure currawongs took some of the sparrowhawk’s nestlings in previous clutches, and I wonder whether the presence of these smart and social predators has kept the pair away for the last three years.  But yesterday a bit of argy-bargy with another of the locals – a family of kookaburras.  I’ve been seeing them around a bit more than usual this winter, surveying the scene from our dawn redwood and the remnants of our long-dead pine trees.

Yesterday I wandered up the drive to see if I could capture any trysts or DIY activity, and there was a cheeky kookaburra in the exact  spot I saw the sparrowhawk chilling in the day before.  And another, on a second favoured hunting perch, further up the tree.  The sparrowhawks were in the vicinity, but as soon as one landed in that pine, the kookas were after it.

Here’s a deeply discombobulated sparrowhawk, catching its breath a few metres away.  A minute later, the kookaburras were back and the pair of raptors hightailed it into the distance.

I feel stupidly anxious about this, for some reason.  Every year about this time, we hear the sparrowhawks and I’m always hoping they’ll hang around and try to raise some chicks again.  For the last couple of seasons we’ve been disappointed.  But this year, silly as it seems, it feels a bit more high-stakes, and not just because we’re stuck at home with near-infinite opportunities for bird watching.  It feels symbolic even.  If this avian couple’s romance and nestbuilding comes to fruition, somehow it signifies that my little family will stay safe here too, safe and sane and together.  And if not… these things somehow seem less assured.

But of course, that’s a nonsense.  Birdwatcher magical thinking.  If the sparrowhawks find a better place to nest, and our trees get a different set of inhabitants, there’ll still be things to do, birds to listen out for, a different family to get to know.

The previous adventures of our local sparrowhawks

Sex, nests and dogfighting

Collared sparrowhawks vs Pacific bazas

Motherhood on a windy day – the sparrowhawk chick grows up

Death and sibling rivalry

Sparrowhawk summer

Battle of the baby birds

Welcome beautiful stranger

An ice storm, a flood and eight invisible fish: the fraught tale of a frog pond

hailstones in hand crop long

Water features have everywhere in Berowra this last year.  With half the suburb’s roofs smashed to bits by golfball sized hailstones just before Christmas, an ice-storm followed an hour or so later by torrential rain, lots of those water features were indoors and distinctly unwelcome.  In a suburb that has come to be known over the months of waiting for insurers to come to the party, as “Tarpaulin Heights” we got off relatively lightly, with our indoor water feature making only a cameo one-time appearance.

Inundation was the origin of our new outdoor water feature as well.  Thanks to topography and a inexplicably ruptured stormwater drain – I did fear at one time it was an inexplicably ruptured sewer, so I’m thankful for small mercies – when the rain comes down in Berowra, most of it seems to come through our backyard.

The weather pattern in Australia now, even here on the coastal fringe where the trees are still alive and there is grass, which is sometimes even green, seems to be long dry months punctuated by occasional periods of quasi-apocalyptic rainfall.  So catching some of the run off and making some use of it seemed like a good idea.  And then there’s my fantasies about frogs.

So in December last year, I dug a big hole, downhill from the stormwater drain and uphill from my veggie garden.  Deep holes are not easy to dig on Hawkesbury sandstone.  I was aiming for a depth of no more than 30cm, since I really didn’t want to have to fence my pond, but even 30 cm was a push. I rationalised the shallowness of the hole with reference to the gently sloping edges that would allow the amphibians of my dreams to rest comfortably on the edge of the pond.  Not a very convincing excuse to avoid further shovel work.

releasing fish

I lined the hole with a few centimetres of sand from the local garden centre.  Carpet underlay is sometimes recommended for a layer underneath pond liner but I went an old trampoline mat, since that’s the kind of thing I have lying around in my shed.  Retrospectively I’m not sure that was a great idea.  On top of that I put down rubber pond liner – quite a lot more expensive than vinyl, but not plastic and, in a household full of underused bikes, I figured, quite patchable.  In theory.  Underneath that footlingly small pond is six square metres of heavy duty rubber.

lily leaves late Jan

Nymphoides montana. I think.

Sensible guides to pond making recommend that you set up your fountains and filters properly, then add native plants, give it a week or so and then add fish.   However, a couple of days after setting up the pond with a solar powered aerator, native grasses (Carex fascularis and Schoenoplectus Mucronatus) and pond plants (Marsilea mutica, and if memory serves, Nymphoides montana) I spotted a huge number of wrigglers frisking gaily around their new habitat, and decided we would need to go fish shopping.

Our neighbours had demonstrated their true commitment to biodiversity by not just accepting but actively welcoming the idea of frog mating calls 24-7 outside their bedroom windows.  However, we thought adding a vast number of mosquitoes to the local ecosystem might not necessarily go do down equally well.  We decided to buy two pairs of pacific blue eyes to populate our pond, while we waited for other insect eaters – frogs and dragonfly larvae and the like – to arrive.

Pacific blue eyes are small fish – less than 8 cm in length and usually much smaller – that are keen mozzie eaters but not big enough to devour frog spawn.  They’re locals all up and down the East Coast, inhabiting both fresh waters and estuaries, so not too fussy about water quality.  Our local aquarium shop had a stock of them, though the staff were pretty clueless about which fish were native and which were not, offering us white cloud minnows (originating in China) as a possible alternative.  We took our two pairs of tiny, quasi transparent fish home and Ms 12 and good friend and frog lover from next door carefully introduced them to the pond, taking time to equalise the temperature of the water to minimise shock.

Fish introduction 2 before flood crop

All that happened around midday on December 20, the day of the hail storm and subsequent torrential downpour.  Within hours of settling our blue eyes carefully into our little pond, our backyard looked like this:

Ms 12 was desperately trying to block the exit from the pond, but I think realistically the Pacific blue eyes were halfway to Berowra Creek by this point.  There was much weeping and gnashing off teeth, counterbalanced, on my part at least, by a certain smugness that I hadn’t bought white cloud minnows or gambezi fish or something else that you wouldn’t want to end up in your local waterway.

Of course, what with the water being murky and the fish being small, shy and in essence invisible, we weren’t quite sure if we still had pacific blue eyes or not. Rather than waiting for the mosquito murmuration that would tell us that we didn’t, and with an eye to diminishing the level of weeping, we went back to the aquarium shop for yet another couple of pairs.

That was a nearly a year ago now, and there have been no further sightings of the fish.  The solar powered bubbler carked it in another downpour, along with the rainbow nardoo which I accidentally ripped out while clearing out excess algae during winter months.   But the wriggler count has stayed low and the pond has done pretty well as a habitat.  Not to mention the fabulous opportunity it’s given me to buy new plants (full list at the bottom of the blog)

On the down-side, I’ve been surprised how often I have to top the pond up with water.  Either it has a surprisingly high level of evaporation for a pond in shade much of the day or the logs and rocks I dragged around the yard to make a naturalistic edging have punctured the rubber lining in some mysterious but annoying way.  Perhaps there’s a reason people don’t recommend using old trampoline mats underneath your pond.

One way or another, I have become a pond slave.  I’m constantly ruminating on where I’m going to get my next hit of  non-chlorinated water. The many many hail-holes in our gutters all have a bucket underneath them and I usually have a bucket of tap water off-gassing somewhere around the yard. I have heard rumours there may be better ways of collecting rainwater than this.  Working on it.

Blue banded bee in flight cropped

Blue banded bee on Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells)

It was lovely to see the blue banded bees the visiting koala bells and dragonflies hovering over the water, but we’ve had to be patient with the frogs. The approach you take to getting a frog is a bit like the approach 1950s women had to take to getting a boyfriend – make yourself appealing and wait.  Chytrid fungus is devastating frog populations across the world and if you go and collect frogspawn or tadpoles you can help it spread.  So we waited.

Skinks by the pond closeup

A few months back I heard the distinctive pock of a striped marsh frog in amongst the waterside foliage. I was beside myself with excitement, but after I let the chooks out to freerange for the afternoon, the marshie disappeared.  Troubling. It seemed like having both chickens and frogs might be an impossible dream.

Apricot by the pond 2 crop

Apricot nibbling at the microlaena stipodes lawn.  And possibly frogs.

But by the end of winter, another striped marsh frog was in situ, vamping the local females with the alluring noise of a loudly dripping tap.  Perhaps this male was too large to be wolfed down by the chooks on their visits to the pond for a drink and an insect snack.

And, glory be, last week we spotted a couple of handfuls of tadpoles, huddling at the bottom of the pond near some algae.  I am now officially a frog mumma, as my daughter said.  But I’m not feeling too much eco-smugness.  According to the Australian Museum, the striped marsh frog is an unfussy beast – it likes a pond but even a polluted ditch will do.  Apparently they’ve been found breeding in dog’s drinking bowls.

So no pressure.  The bar has been set low for us as aspiring frog parents. Let’s see how low we can limbo.

Pond in Nov 19

Native plants in and around our pond.

Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells) – blue or pink flowers in summer.

Bacopa monnieri (Brahmi, memory herb) – small white flowers.  Grows in and near water – edible plant.

Carex fascularis (tassel sedge).  Grows in moist to wet soils in part shade, up to a metre high.

Centella asiatica (Gotu kola, pennywort).  Edible plant.  Grows in part shade in moist soils.

Cissus Antarctica (kangaroo vine)    Planted in the drier area around the pond.

Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern).  Grows in moist areas, nice pink new growth.

Finicia nodosa

Hibbertia scandens (guinea flower)   Flowers in shade,

Isolepsis cernua (Live wire) – low growing grass with interesting bright seed heads.

Juncus flavidus (billabong rush)

Libertia paniculata – in moist areas near pond in shade, alongside ferns. White flowers in early spring.

Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife)- growing in drier areas near pond.  Dark purple flowers in autumn.  Dies down in winter.

Marsilea mutica (rainbow nardoo) – pond plant.  Beautiful patterned leaves.

Microlaena stipoides (weeping grass) – grass surrounding pond.  Grows well in shade in damp or dry conditions.

Mazus pumlio (swamp mazus) – grows in moist soil.  White flowers in autumn.

Nymphoides montana – pond plant with beautiful yellow flowers.

Peperomia (native) – native succulent that grows well in shade.

Poa labillardiere (tussock grass) – grown in drier areas around the pond

Schoenoplectus Mucronatus – rush growing in the pond.  Interesting spiky seed pods.

Tetragonia tetragonoides (warrigal greens) – edible plant. Grows very well in damp or dry soil in part shade. Delicious to humans and also chickens.

Tripladeua cunninghamii (bush lily) – grows well in part shade, pink flowers in spring. I  killed it.

Dragonfly dark later

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

Into the matrix

Gerogone profile distance for crop wide

A busy day at the bullrushes by Terry’s Creek for this brown gerygone.  It really got into  a frenzy as it threw itself around trying to tug away the requisite materials for nestbuilding.

Although they’re quite common up and down the east coast from far north Queensland, down to Victoria, where they’re actually expanding their range, this is the only place I’ve seen gerygones.  Half-way through my daily commute along busy Epping Road in suburban Sydney, in line of scrubby woodland only a couple of hundred metres wide flanking a malodorous creek  in a valley awash with weeds.  But there’s plenty of cover, a water source, and the bushland stretches maybe three kilometres along the creek, all the way down to Lane Cove National Park.

Gerygones are the kind of little insectivorous bird that do okay in quite small patches of suburban reserve, but absolutely don’t make the leap, in the words of Patricia Hodgson and Richard Major “into the matrix”.  The urban matrix, that is.  Some of the other birds I see regularly at Terry’s Creek – the white browed scrubwren and the red-browed finch – are quite happy hanging out in the scungy waste ground next to railway lines or dank weedy gullies, but are less keen on suburbia.

For some reason, silver-eyes are an exception – they’ve taken the blue and the red pill.  You find them both in and out of the urban matrix in “almost any woodland habitat“.  This one and his gang blithely flew in to have a nibble on a riverside pittosporum as I stomped around only an armslength away.

Silver eye and flower squarer

Silvereye in pittosporum

Some of the other locals at Terry’s Creek do sometimes visit gardens and backyards, but not ours (sniff).  I’m pretty sure our “house birds”, the resident red and little wattlebirds, keep them away. This week I’ve seen the little wattlebirds have a go at putting the frighteners on some much heftier residents.

Satin bowerbird at drink with wattlebird good crop

Head to head between a male satin bowerbird and a little wattlebird

Satin bowerbird scaring off little wattlebird crop larger.jpg

And it’s on!

Kooka and wattlebird 2 crop and amend

Just before the wattlebird bit the kookaburra on the bum!

And we’ve worked out why the wattlebirds are so aggro this weather.  Only a couple of metres from our backdoor, at eye level, right beside the path to the chook run and the washing-line, there’s a nest in the middle of one of our banana trees.

If you made an extensive search around the yard to try to find a place more exposed to human influence you’d be hard pressed to find one.  Tobacco fumes constantly waft around the nest from the chain-smoker on the back verandah, and children run past shouting maybe ten times a day.  More often, now we’ve spotted the nest and the two brown speckled eggs inside it.

The incubating female has a genuinely terrible approach to camouflage.  Whenever human is nearby, popping into the laundry or watering the herb garden, she points her beak to the sky and stays very still.  She’s pretending to be a stick, I think.  A surprisingly bird shaped stick with a beady, watchful eye.

Wattlebird on nest in banana tree mid

Female wattlebird incubating eggs in our banana tree

Wattlebird tail and banana crop

The tail’s a bit of a give-away as well.

Initially I figured that the wattlebirds picked this impropitious spot to raise their young because they were, frankly, a bit dim.  But then I thought back to last year’s summer of the sparrowhawks – the sheer number of chicks I saw eviscerated and the dramatic drop in local wattlebirds population at that time.

Now, the collared sparrowhawks seem pretty laid back about humans, spending more energy guarding their nest from raids by currawongs and channel-billed cuckoos than worrying about our comings and goings. But even so, I’ve never seen them perching on the back step or checking out the laundry.  So maybe the wattlebirds aren’t so stupid. Perhaps they’ve figured its safer to raise your young around the slow-moving noisy bipedal predators than the airborne ambush-hunting ones.  They’re not just surviving in the matrix – they know how to hide there.

Sparrowhawk light on beak crop

Collared sparrowhawk on the look-out for prey

References

Woods, K.A. 1996 “Bird assemblages in a small public reserve and adjacent residential area at Wollongong, New South Wales” Wildlife Research 23 605-20

Hodgson, Patricia, French, Kristine and Major, Richard E. 2007 “Avian movement across abrupt ecological edges: differential responses to housing density in an urban matrix” Landscape and Urban Planning Vol 79 Issues 3-4, pp.266-272

 

Blue eyes and biteys

Brown cuckoo dove eye

The glamorous eye of the brown cuckoo-dove

We’ve had a visit from some old friends this week: a gorgeous pair of brown cuckoo-doves. who each took a constitutional around our patio before reconvening for an exhaustive mutual preening session above the chicken run.  They’re rainforest birds, but don’t mind wandering away from damp gullies in search of tucker – fruit, mostly, along with seeds and the occasional flower blossom.  You’ll often find them in disturbed areas and roadsides, feeding off weeds like lantana and wild tobacco, so what with the great swathes being carved, legally and illegally, through East Coast bushland, they’re doing better than many other forest loving critters these days.

And they are expanding their range as well.  Back in the day, Sydney was the southernmost point you’d reliably find a cuckoo-dove.  No longer.  Just a continuation, I guess, of the species’ earlier journeys from the north, where several close relatives still live. In fact, the amboyna cuckoo-dove of Indonesia  and the Sultan’s cuckoo-dove of Sulawesi were considered part of the same species only a couple of years ago when I last wrote about these portly visitors.

Cuckoo dove looking back from water crop

Brown cuckoo-dove quenching its thirst in our bird bath

I’m not sure what attracted them to our place, now we’ve executed the humungous broad leafed privet that used to lure them here.  The fruit-bearing natives we’ve planted to replace this nasty weed – lillypillies, blueberry ash, koda, bolwarra, native gardenia, small leafed tamarind, brush muttonwood – are all too teeny to offer snacks of any significance.  I spotted the cuckoo-doves innocently drinking from the bird bath but I suspect they may also be implicated in the overnight disappearance of the fruit from our mulberry tree.  Though since I chose to plant the mulberry right next to our washing line, maybe that’s a good thing.

Cuckoo dove long tail amend

For me, cuckoo doves are all about those beautiful blue eyes, though their exceedingly long tails are also a feature, helping them with fruit nibbling acrobatics, and at one time  earning them the name pheasant-tailed pigeon.  But as far as science is concerned, they’re mainly interesting for their body lice.

Cuckoo pair grooming 2 amended cropped

A female brown cuckoo-dove being groomed by its mate

Normally, it seems, parasites co-evolve with their hosts.  A family of lice tend to be found only on one family of birds (and in fact, each species of lice normally exclusively hang out with one species of bird).  But the Ischnocera – the family of louse that this pair are trying to remove from each other, in a rather romantic manner – can be found on all manner of birds – not just pigeons and doves, but also pheasants, quails, partridges and indeed megapodes.  Though not apparently our local megapode, the brush turkeys, or “the bloody bloody brush turkeys” as they are usually referred to in our household.

But if cuckoo-doves brought their own personal payload of body lice with them when they moved south to Australia, they also do a fine job of cleaning up some other pesky insects –  fruit flies.  Along with ripe fruits, cuckoo-doves gobble up loads and loads of larvae.  One researcher went so far as to say that vertebrates like brown cuckoo doves are the “natural enemies of fruit flies” (Drew, 1987, 287), words to bring joy into the heart of a sub-tropical gardener.  But further reading crushes these dreams.  Yes, cuckoo-doves, (along with rats) made a huge dent in the fruit fly population.  But unfortunately, they did so in the course of eating most of the available fruit.

I guess, then, its lucky I’m hooked on the looks of our frugivorous visitors, and I’m not banking on them for pest control.

Gorgeous eye closeup for amend

The blue eyes of the brown cuckoo-dove

Additional references

Drew, A. J. I. (1987) “Reduction in Fruit Fly (Tephritidae : Dacinae) Populations in their Endemic Rainforest Habitat by Frugivorous Vertebrates” Australian Journal of Zoology 35 283-8

Gibbs, David (2001) Pigeons and Doves: a guide to the pigeons and doves of the world, Bloomsbury Books

Gosper, Carl and Gosper, Dennis (2008) “Foods of Pigeons and Doves in Fragmented Landscapes of Subtropical Eastern Australia” Australian Field Ornithology, 25, 76–86

Johnson, Kevin, Weckstein, Jason, Meyer, Mathys (2011) “There and back again: switching between host orders by avian body lice (Ischnocera: Goniodidae)” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2011, 102, 614–625

From battery to backyard

I’ve been following the activities of our local battery-hen rescuers – Let the Ladies Go – for a while.  Every few months they take a couple of thousand chickens from a local chicken farmer.  ISA browns lay like machines for a couple of years and then their fecundity tails off a bit – egg producers want to get new, younger hens at this stage.  The farmers who supply Let the Ladies Go choose to hand the older chickens over rather than slaughter them.

We’d been thinking about taking some rescue hens for some time, and when Let the Ladies Go sent out an urgent call for help on a sunny weekend when we had no commitments, we took a drive to beautiful rural Cooranbong with a big ventilated cardboard box.

The horde of rescued chickens seemed pretty happy wandering around their giant holding pen in the bush, but the logistics of feeding and caring for thousands of chickens must be mindboggling.  The rescuers take the really sick and injured chickens – the paralysed, the totally featherless, the partially blind – indoors to nurse them back to health (with the help of hand-knitted chicken jumpers and chicken nappy pads).   So our girls, like all the others in the yard, were surprisingly healthy, if only patchily feathered and with slightly clipped beaks.  We planned to take a pair of chooks home but in the end got talked into taking three, thinking that if one pegged out, the two remaining girls would still have each other for company.  But all three chooks – Ruff, Crumpet and Dusty – have made it (so far, anyway).

When they first arrived the girls’ experiences of captivity were pretty visible.  I was too disorganised to have their enclosure totally sorted, so when we got back from our drive we plonked their cardboard box, top open, in the yard, while I got creative in my favoured artistic medium – zipties and bamboo.  All three of the girls were quite capable of flapping out of their box, but they sat tight for an hour, scarcely noticing that escape was an option.  Which was lucky in a way.  We wanted to keep our existing chooks physically separated from the new girls for a week or two – although they could suss each other out through the chicken wire fence – until the rescue hens built up their strength.

Over the next fortnight we got to see them learn about the outdoors: the taste of sweetcorn, autumn leaves underfoot, the touch of sun on their feathers.

Ruff and Crumpet enjoying 2

Eventually, feeling more confident that the rescue chooks weren’t bringing disease to the backyard, we let the two flocks mingle. The new girls weren’t entirely happy to find that their bucolic patch in the sunniest part of the garden was a favoured hang-out of the incumbent chooks as well.  In particular, Winter the leghorn, low on the established pecking order, proved to be tyrant.  “Winter is coming” …. something strike fear into the heart of an ex-battery hen.

Needless to say, there were ructions when we decided it was time to move all the hens into Colditz, our predator proof cage, recently upgraded with a light-sensitive automatic door.  Because chickens are up with the sun, but these humans generally prefer not to be.

Winter was not happy about the girls moving in on her territory.  The new automatic door – the world’s slowest and bluntest guillotine – starts shutting when as lumens drop to single digits.  The new girls make an effort to get into the cage as the darkness began to gather but Winter stands, beady eyed, by the door.  The minute she turns round to head to her roosting quarters, though, they’re in like a shot.

Shima Cyan and Big Jenny

Shima the barred rock hanging out with the next door neighbours

The rescue chooks have settled in now, with only the occasional bit of light argy-bargy.  The new girls are even laying eggs – with the lengthening days, we’ve just started being able to give our neighbours the occasional half-dozen.  But more to the point, the rescue hens are really charming.  They seem quite egalitarian – they get on well as a threesome, and there’s minimal aggro between the three of them and our other chooks.  They’re curious and interested in investigating the world around them.  And they like people.  When I’m down in the garden, they loiter nearby, expecting all of the good stuff.  They’re much more sociable than the chickens we’ve looked after since they were week old balls of fluff – well, except for the loveable Apricot.

Apricot portrait 2

It seems strange that animals who have been treated, on the whole, quite badly by human beings nonetheless expect fine things from us.  Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

More backyard chicken adventures

The life and times of Andy Ninja, the escape chicken

Who’s eating our eggs?

Brushturkeys v chickens

Twilight of the chickens

Reflections of a ground predator

Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

 

Sweet dreams, baby avocado

It’s hard to love a plant with a death wish.  I’m on my third generation of spindly unwell looking avocado trees now and it’s starting to get old.

It’s hard to believe that a plant that springs spontaneously from seeds carelessly cast into the compost could be so very hard to keep alive.  Pretty much all the other trees I’ve sourced from the prompt and knowledgeable online nursery Daley’s Fruits have taken off without a hitch, but after several years of abject failures I’m starting to feel like the Avocado Angel of Death.

Or maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s my naughty chickens.  My avocados need protection, by which I don’t mean armed body-guards, though I’m not saying I haven’t considered that.

I planted a low-chill nashi pear a few years ago in a perilous location, right next to the giant trampoline that is the social hub for all the neighbourhood kids.  It’s going gangbusters, despite the ever present danger of being crushed by pre-teen gymnasts and the surrounding scorched earth environment created by the chooks.  The enclosure I made for it out of the slats of a bed base found by the side of the road, for all its “chook-house tolerances”, is still going strong.

And the gate constructed from a surplus-to-requirements Ikea bed continues to serve its purpose of keeping all but the most determined and agile chickens out of my bush tucker garden.

Who knew bedroom furniture could be the key to a flourishing food forest?

With these sleep-related successes in mind, I decided to turn to a wooden cot, long stashed under the house, into surrounds for my two poorly looking avocado trees. You often see cots like this by the side of the road during the council cleanup, so this is a project for everyone, even those without anklebiters.

With the addition of a handful of mismatched screws and a small number of shelf brackets I bought on an over-excited visit to the hardware shop many moons ago, I was able to put two surrounds together from one cot in my dining room in the space of a few hours.  Warning: do check the dimension of your door frames before trying this at home.

The first surround featured the rather stylish cot head and foot, spliced together with the cot base (cut in half).  The four panels for the other were made by bisecting the two sides of the cot.  With a modicum of creativity, I was able to use the holes already drilled in the frame and a few self-tapping screws.  The only time I needed a drill was to add the slightly unglamorous pieces of hardwood across the top, which I included to ramp up the degree of difficulty for ambitious or athletic chickens (Winter the escape artist leghorn, I’m looking at you!) to fly inside.  Those with fatter or more docile chickens might not want to bother with this addition.

The nice thing about repurposing existing furniture if your carpentry skills are as impaired as mine, is that you can rely on the expertise and functional set-square of the person who put together the joints in first place.  So the finished surrounds look fairly regular, despite my inadequacies with a tape measure.

And so far, despite a giant tree being hacked down more or less over the top of them, the surrounds seem to have done the job.  The chickens have done their level best to squeeze between the slats but haven’t quite figured out how.  The avocado roots are no longer being ripped from the ground on a daily basis in the search for invisible but delicious invertebrates, and the trees are (perhaps overly optimistically) producing new leaves.

On my past track record, it seems highly likely that these avocadoes are still doomed, but at least I’ve done my best to put their troubles to bed.  Sleep well, little trees!