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February 26, 2022

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Backyard birds, feeding fledglings, habitat, national parks, Native birds, Plants that attract wildlife

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

Juvenile whipbird looking for tucker in the native violets

Juvenile whipbird with its find

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

Whip bird and brush turkey good crop sized

Eastern whipbird and brushturkey drinking from the same bird bath

Eastern whipbird and brushturkey peaceably drinking

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.

Having a splash

If the coast is clear, the youngster appears.

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

Eastern yellow robin

Spinebill feeding from a banksia serrata

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.

Rainbow lorikeet in an angophora

A drink from the loft pool

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Juvenile spinebill hovering

Spinebill drinking

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 spinebill attacking a juvenile

“Keep away from the pool”

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

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

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mccnmatt

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January 23, 2022

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Backyard birds, Fire, Native birds, nesting, Plants that attract wildlife

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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.

saplings by the creek

golden whistler

Bauera ruboides

grey strike thrush

mountain devil

silhouette of a thornbill

Male variegated fairywren being sat on by females in his group

spring flowers by the creek

new holland honeyeater and mountain devil

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

Striated thornbill drying off

White browed scrub wren trying to have a wash

A pair of striated thornbills

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.

Red browed finch surveying the scene

Ejected honeyeater

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

Drawing though more casuarina needles

Reaching for materials

Nest building

Weaving the top part of the structure

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

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.

Birdwatching moments down the road from our Berowra backyard

Not just splendid, better than superb

Warbling in lockdown

The very big fish

The trouble with the younger generation

The sacred comes to the neighbourhood

An eagle in suburbia

Thinking like a bird

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 22, 2021

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Backyard birds, national parks, Native birds, nesting, Plants that attract wildlife, raptors, territoriality

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Loves and leaves

Burn-off sunset.

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.

Sparrowhawk in profile

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.

Sparrowhawk demanding attention

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.

sparrowhawk philosophical for close square

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.

Sparrowhawk from below, perching on a twig

Sparrowhawk with wings out on a delicate branch

Sparrowhawk in profile in the dead branches of a pine tree

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.

Sparrowhawk perched in a bare-branched liquidambar tree with a blue sky behind

Sparrowhawk trying to grab some twigs for the nest

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

The bush of choice for sparrowhawks but not bird photographers

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.

Failure to launch with this one

Reaching down for a twig

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

Sparrowhawk with stick

Sparrowhawk taking off with nestbuilding materials

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.

Little wattlebird facing off with a kookaburra

Red wattlebird in autumn leaves

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.

Juvenile sparrowhawk protecting its prey

Fledglings eating a new holland honeyeater

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.

Kookaburra with lizard mouth open crop squaresmall

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.

Sparrowhawk recouping after being chased by a kookaburra

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.

Kookaburra family resemblances

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

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Posted on

September 29, 2018

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Backyard birds, Native birds, nesting, Plants that attract wildlife, Predators

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Into the matrix

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.

Brown gerygone in bullrushes

Finding nest material

Gerygone ready to line its nest

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.

White browed scrubwren with twigs for crop

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.

Silvereye in pittosporum

Eastern yellow robin

Male superb blue wren

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!

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.

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.

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

September 14, 2018

Posted under

Backyard birds, Fruit, fruit trees, Gardening, Insect pests, Insects, Native birds, Plants that attract wildlife, Subtropical gardening, Uncategorized, Weeds

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Blue eyes and biteys

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.

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.

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 9, 2018

Posted under

Backyard birds, Insects, Lizards, Plants that attract wildlife, Uncategorized, Vines

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Cracking the whip in a messy garden

Typical whipbird picture crop tighter

This is a fairly typical photo of an eastern whipbird. Thanks to its cracking call, you know with absolute certainty that the bugger’s there somewhere, darting from bug to evasive bug. But up until recently all of my pics of them were abstract impressionist in style – an suspicion of a smear in the undergrowth.

Which is a pity, because even aside from their excellent call, these are fine looking birds. I am a fool for anything with a crest, no matter how run of the mill.

Beautiful crested pigeons

But my days of cursing invisible whipbirds are officially over. Because we now have a resident pair in our the garden.

The elusive whipbird

My efforts at growing food in surburbia, or at least food for human consumption, have been largely in vain. Every now and then we get a few bananas or kiwifruit, tamarillos or jerusalem artichokes before the local possums, bowerbirds, cockies, bats and rats figure out they make good eating.

If I have singularly failed to feed us, I have been fairly successful in turning the garden into a tangled mess riddled with trip hazards. In other words, top drawer whipbird habitat.

My pomegranate crop for this year 🙁

Kennedia rubicunda – running postman

Grapevines and kiwis – no fruit (for humans) but lots of cover!

Satin bowerbird enjoying native ginger berries (taken through flyscreen!)

Cardamom ginger, bamboo and plecanthus argentatus

An ex-tree – Darth Vader mask positioned by the tree surgeon

And now they’re here, there’s a decent chance they’ll stay. Whipbird pairs are territorial, usually nesting each year within a few metres of last year’s spot. And it seems after their chicks are raised, they stick around.

I’ve certainly seen our pair doing their best to defend their territory by seeing off the impudent rivals they spotted in the mirror in the bottom of the garden. Judging from the time they spend singing into it, that mirror has had far more impact on the whipbirds than the horde of male brush turkeys it was intended to discombobulate.

Whipbird midbath calling clear crop long

Eastern whipbird having a lovely sing in the bath

Something I didn’t realise until recently is that the distinctive call of the whipbird is an “antiphonal duet”, just like the call of the koels (or “those bloody koels!” as they are known locally). The male of the pair produces the whipcrack, followed seamlessly by a “chew chew!” from its female partner. This kind of singing is usually done by established pairs.

Tactful ornithologists describe whipbirds as “socially monogamous” (a bit like National Party MPs?). Whipbird researcher Amy Rogers comments that, in general, duetting birds like these have “very low divorce rates” compared to non-duetting birds (Rogers 2004 433).

A juvenile bloody koel

Having spent years crouched in the undergrowth surreptitiously observing the sex lives of South Australian whipbirds, Rogers has has concluded that duetting is “acoustic mate guarding” – a way for females to keep close tabs on their other half. In the nests she tracked, twice as many female birds were born as males. Consequently spots with attractively tangled undergrowth were awash with unattached lady whipbirds seeking a mate and territory.

Whipbirds blokes seem to be a good catch, fetching plenty of food for nestlings, even if they don’t help incubate eggs. After the youngsters leave the nest, each parent exclusively feeds just one of the fledglings. You can only imagine young whipbirds end up spending a fortune in therapy.

So once a female has hooked up with a male and they’ve nabbed some decent territory, she keep tabs on him by finishing his sentences, as it were.

Female whipbird in vine

I reckon our place, with its undisciplined shrubbery, snake-friendly piles of sticks and vines that loop their way through the trees at perfect garotting height would be damn desirable breeding grounds. I’ve certainly seen the whipbirds gleefully leaping around our carport picking off the window spiders (3/5 for toxicity in the “deadly critters of Australia” book I gave my Scottish spouse to help him settle in when he first arrived).

Little wattlebird in our giant hibiscus tree

Visiting white-headed pigeon

Wonga-wonga vine

Ambitious spider in our kitchen

Mystery moth in a correa

Eastern water dragon in the back garden wood pile

Eastern water dragon from our back deck

Whipbird enjoying insect snacks in the car port

It may be cockroach infested deathtrap but the whipbirds and the lizards seem to like it here. I’m not complaining either.

You’ve got to admire the ambition

References

Frith, C.B. (1992) “Eastern whipbird psophodes Olivaceus listens to fruits for insect prey” Sunbird 22 (2)

Guppy, Michael, Guppy, Sarah, Marchant, Richard, Priddel, David, Carlile, Nicholas and Fullagar, Peter (2017) “Nest predation of woodland birds in south-east Australia: importance of unexpected predators” Emu- Austral Ornithology Vol 117 Issue 1

Mennill, Daniel and Rogers, Amy (2006) “Whip It Good! Geographic Consistency in Male Songs and Variability in Female Songs of the Duetting Eastern Whipbird Psophodes olivaceus” Journal of Avian Biology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 93-100

Rogers, Amy C. and Mulder, Raoul A. (2004) “Breeding ecology and social behaviour of an antiphonal duetter, the eastern whipbird” Australian Journal of Zoology Vol 52 Issue 4 417-435

Rogers, Amy, Langmore, Naomi and Muldera, Raoul (2007) “Function of pair duets in the eastern whipbird: cooperative defense or sexual conflict?” Behavioural Ecology Volume 18, Issue 1, Pages 182–188

Toon, Alicia, Joseph, Leo and Burbridge, Alan H (2013) “Genetic analysis of the Australian whipbirds and wedgebills illuminates the evolution of their plumage and vocal diversity” Emu – Austral Ornithology Vol 113 Issue 4

More birds to be found in our backyard

A family of collared sparrowhawks – bickering as siblings do

Chilli loving satin bowerbirds, and migratory friends

Mimicking magpies

Female eastern koels, battling over a bloke

Ageing romantic sulphur crested cockatoos

A gorgeous grey goshawk

Bold bug eating birds

Whipbird 5 splashing crop

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 14, 2018

Posted under

Australian natives, cicadas, citizen science, Garden trees, Insects, Native animals, Plants that attract wildlife, predation

Black princes, redeyes and floury bakers

My brother the twitcher has taught me the secret of finding birds. Tune into sound: let your mind move out from the place where you are standing, into the space above you and all around you and listen.

All this summer, I’ve been listening out for the sparrowhawks. Even lying in bed or sitting on the sofa, we could hear them begging for food or squabbling with the local cockatoos.

But come mid December, white noise and static started interfering with Radio Sparrowhawk. The cicadas had arrived.

This year’s a biggie for cicadas in Australia. Over 350 species of cicada have been described here, though there could be many more – we’re a diversity hotspot for these charismatic insects. And this summer, some of the biggest and noisiest species – the cherrynoses, the double drummers and the razorgrinders – have appeared en masse around Sydney. After maybe five or six years of living metres underground sucking on the tree-sap, the cicada instars crawl out of the earth and shed their exoskeletons for a short and noisy month or so as adults. It doesn’t happen every year. 2013 was a big year for cicadas in Sydney, and before that 2010. And now it’s on again.

Black Prince on a casuarina tree by the edge of Berowra Creek

No-one knows quite what triggers the horde of insects. In fact, no-one knows much about cicadas at all, despite their presence on every continent except Antarctica and their impossible to ignore, earsplitting calls. That long and decidedly boring youth, and the uncertainty about when they’ll re-emerge, makes researching them tricky. Imagine deciding to study the periodic cicadas of North America and then realising your three years as a PhD student would be over long before the seventeen years the critters spend underground was up?

An ex cicada thanks to the local orb spiders

One theory is that by appearing so infrequently and irregularly cicadas could avoid the predators – bird, bats, all sorts of mammals – keen to feast on the insect bounty. Very weird recent work from the US suggests that numbers of predating bird species start to drop around twelve years after the last cicada boom. Could it be that these devious insects are manipulating the beasts far higher up the food chain?

Razor Grinder in our front yard

Double-drummer in Berowra Valley National Park

In some ways, despite its wealth of cicadas, Berowra is less interesting for researchers than bits of Sydney not surrounded by national parks. Australia cities are unusual, it seems, in that they still have cicada species in the heart of suburbia. Silver princesses and green grocers survive in quite urban areas on the east coast. A local researcher (plants by day, cicadas by night) Dr Nathan Emery has been trying to work out how these species have survived, and whether there are others that can cope with city life. He’s set up the Great Cicada Blitz, a citizen science project crowd-sourcing information about when and where various species of cicadas can be found.

I’ve had a great time over the last month wandering around recording the din in our neighbourhood and trying without a lot of success to spot the earbleedingly loud cicadas to add to the Blitz database. The male cicadas’ strategy to collectively produce a chorus so loud it hurts the ears of birds works on humans too, even those with the advantage of being partially deaf already. Apparently even the males cicadas “switch off” the equivalent of their ears (their tympana) to save their own hearing.

Thanks to helpful tips from the experts as they confirm my dodgy IDs, I’m slowly learning how to identify the common species around these parts. Nathan Emery’s nifty little book A Photo Guide to the Common Cicadas of the Sydney Region has been really handy too. It has a lovely introduction from (and is dedicated to) Dr Emery’s scientist dad who took him and his siblings out cicada spotting as kids – inspiration to continue tormenting my offspring with my nerdy passions. And who wouldn’t be nerdy about cicadas – an animal whose wings has in-built nanostructures that literally rip bacteria apart…

Graphical abstract for Aaron Elbourne, Russell Crawford and Elena Ivanova’s 2017 article “Nano-structured antimicrobial surfaces: From nature to synthetic
analogues” Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 508 603-616.
Shouldn’t EVERYTHING have a graphical abstract?

I should also thank the popularity of the big liquidambar in our front yard with the local insects for the chance to improve my cicada identification skills. Adult cicadas like to latch onto thin-barked natives, but if push comes to shove they will feed on introduced trees, and liquidambars seem to be a favourite, of our local population of redeyes at least, although I think I’ve also heard calls from local tibouchina and robinia trees, as well as the local Sydney red and blue gums.

Red eyes in the neighbour’s pittosporum undulatum

A razorgrinder (or a eucalypt) “leaking”

Loads of razorgrinders on a sydney red gum at the edge of Berowra Valley National Park

Though some cicadas don’t seem to be too fussy about the trees they sup from, you have to worry for the next generation. In the last year, 15,000 trees – 3% of the tree cover on private land in Hornsby Shire – disappeared, thanks to a rash of tower buildings replacing the old fibros with rambling jungly backyards that used to hug the railway line. Next gen cicadas popping out about 2023 may find nothing taller than a cordyline to sing from and property developers taking over their traditional role local bloodsucker.

Rough barked tree with cicada shell bettersquare

An exoskeleton clinging to the bark of a tall tree in a local school

I’ve not seen any green grocers or yellow mondays or silver princesses around here. There are double-drummers in the national parks down the road – they don’t do so well in back gardens, needing an expanse of acreage or bushland to survive. And so far we’ve heard at least four species around our yard: razorgrinders, black princes, floury bakers and the locally ubiquitous redeyes.

One of a whole bunch of redeyes high up in a Sydney red gum raining down excess tree sap on me

How do I know the red eyes are one of the most common cicadas around these parts, even before I started collecting photos and audio? Well, that’s the gossip from the local kids.

Cicadas weren’t a feature of my childhood, growing up by the River Murray in South Australia. But they’re a big part of children’s lives around here. Even the common names of the local species are courtesy of kids, which explains why they are named after colours or days of the week and not dead white European men as per normal service!

A razorgrinder, with black and white patterns on its wings

A dead red eye, I think, judging from the heavier black lines at the end of the wing.

My younger daughter (Anonymous Bob as she wants to be known) gave me the low down on what Berowra kids know about cicadas:

“At school in the cicada season, when the teachers aren’t looking, people climb the trees to try to catch cicadas. They climb the big thick trees because that’s where you find them. The main cicada zone is the little mossy grove next to the library. We treat them like exotic pets and look after them, until they want to be free or they die.

Once, there was a little boy. An older boy gave him a cicada to look after – it was sort of like an adoption. But the little boy decided to let him go so he could be free.

Another time, a bunch of kindies robbed a guy of his cicada. It was freshly caught and it had one leg missing, so he was desperate to protect it. They wanted to call it Princess and he wanted to call it Jeffie. They threw a ball at it while it was clinging to his shirt. It nearly fell off and died. And then the kindies started chasing the guy saying “Princess! Princess!” and then they had an attempted robbery but then a teacher came.”

Jeffrey Princess

“It’s fun to look after the cicadas. They’re kinda cute. Most cicada collectors try to find other species because in our school the redeyes are the most common. We find what they eat and take care of them. The cicadas cling onto your clothes which makes them pretty portable pets.”

Red eye at our place

“A while ago we did a thing where we would prank the teacher with cicada shells. At first it was just a joke and then it became a whole fiesta. It became a game and a compulsory activity. Not that the teacher said it was a compulsory activity, we just made it one.

Originally it was just seven cicada shells a day but it ended up with many many many shells from each person. We gathered cicada shells, and every day we would leave cicada shells around the classroom and she would have to find them.”

A very popular grapefruit tree in my neighbour’s garden

“We found the cicada shells everywhere – on plants, on trees, on everything. A few boys were the main gatherers. They did it at school, home, everywhere. They came in with huge plastic bags full: they were the main source of our cicada shells. Sometimes we used white out and sharpies to paint war paint onto the cicada shell to make them unique.

Graphical abstract of cicada exoskeleton on teacher’s key ri

You know how cicada shells have a slit? We slipped that onto the teacher’s key ring and when she found it, she was like “Not again!”. We started making a joke that she was cursed by the demon of cicadas.

At the very end of the year a few of the boys laid the cicada shells in a big love heart on the carpet and put a huge pile of chocolates in the middle and wrote their names on a card with love to the teacher.”

The love for a teacher expressed in the language of cicadas

Maybe there’s another project to be done on cicadas – a children’s natural history of these rowdy, charismatic insects…

Do you have any stories of childhood exploits with cicadas, in Australia or further afield? I’d love to hear them!

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

December 17, 2015

Posted under

Lizards, national parks, Native animals, Native birds, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Uncategorized, waterways, Weeds

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4 Comments

Persistent twitching in Weed Central

This is my argument for an active commute:

My view about halfway through my morning commute from deepest suburbia. Beats the back of the car in front, doesn’t it? Okay, except if it’s this car:

Cornish witches' vehicle small crop.jpg

As soon as we’ve had breakfast, fed the chickens and wasted a small but irreplaceable part of our lives looking for a missing shoe, there’s the walk via school to the train station. It’s a twenty five minute rail journey – just long enough to get depressed by the newspaper – and then the last three k on foot from Epping Station to Macquarie Uni. I’m ashamed to say it took me several years to figure out that the cash I save on therapy by hoofing that last leg well and truly pays for the expended foot-leather.

I’ll admit, it’s a pleasant, if hilly walk, down leafy suburban streets and across the bridge at Terry’s Creek, a tributary of the Lane Cove River. In fact, over time, I’ve come to feel rather attached to this spectacularly weed infested rivulet – I’m tempted to say it’s not Terry’s, it’s mine.

Asparagus fern

Morning glory vine

Balloon vine tastefully draped around privet fruits

Senna and privet hedge

Ochna or “mickey mouse plant”

I think it would be fair to describe this waterway as a colourful year-long festival of invasive and noxious species, as you can see above. And I haven’t even included decorative photos of the willows, the trad or the waving walls of bamboo that line the way. Terry’s Creek is so densely hemmed in and overhung by broad leafed privet that walking down the path towards Brown’s Waterhole feels like stepping into a suburban remake of Apocalypse Now.

Danger! High voltage!

What with the perpetual roar of Epping Road and welcoming ambience of the nearby electricity substation, your first thought wouldn’t be “valuable wildlife sanctuary”. But in the 10 minutes I spend each morning and afternoon walking through through this part of Pembroke Park, a 500 metre strip of weeds and scrub, I’ve seen more small birds than I’ve seen over six years in beautiful Berowra, surrounded by national parks and with the freshest air in town.

Firetails flying off horizontal crop

The superb blue wrens, willie wagtails, red-browed finches and eastern spine bills are regulars. My photographic evidence of the yellow thornbills and silver eyes consist of a sequence of butt-shots and blurry silhouettes – my white-browed scrubwren is only marginally better. I’ve often been tempted to hunker down for an hour or two with a view to improving my collection of snaps but somehow I don’t think it would play well if I failed to rock up to my own lectures because I was busy with a long-lens camera behind a bush.

Male superb blue wren

Dollarbird

Red-whiskered bulbul (a non-native species)

Red browed finch

Eastern spinebill

So there’s no proof I ever saw that startled pair of white-headed pigeons and or an eastern whipbird, the only one I’ve ever actually eyeballed. I suspect I snuck up on it, gallumphing footfalls obscured by traffic. However, a few weeks back, I was dead chuffed to snap a very distant dollar bird having a rest in the overhead powerlines.

But according to a habitat survey from a few years back, there’s still loads of locals I haven’t seen. Pardelotes!! Powerful owls!! Someone bring the smelling salts!

Firetails alert plus wren crop closer

I’m not quite sure why this is such a good spot for LBBs (and LRBBs – little red and brown birds, LBBBs – little blue and brown birds, LYBBs etcetcetc). There’s the creek of course, and the lantana and the privet berries, and the tangle of bamboos and morning glories to hide in – weedy or not, the kind of dense multilayered cover that small birds need to survive, as this beautifully specific guide by the Habitat network points out.

There’s also plenty of native grasses, vines and trees, some quite recently planted, many pleasingly photogenic but also lots of the kind of spiky unglamorous bushes that are favoured by smaller birds as hide-outs – kunzea ambigua, for instance. This part of Pembroke Park, scrubby and not at all fun to bushbash through, is part of a line of green spaces stretching north to Lane Cove National Park. Small birds need such “stepping stones” – contiguous patches of cover – to flourish.

The wrens and finches seem to particularly enjoy the grassy area a wee bit back from the main road, even during recent months when guys in high viz outfits driving tiny diggers would regularly park up around there and talk seriously about sewage pipes. I suspect the more knowledgeable would call it an ecotone – an area where a number of different habitat types meet (… main road, suburban grass deserts, bush, privet rainforest, bike path…)

Clematis aristata

Clematis aristata (earlier in the year)

Flowerstalk of a grass tree

Egg and bacon plant?

New plantings – dianella and some grasses

Hakea flowers

New growth on the hakea

Some kind of acacia!

Grevillea sericea

Equally interesting is what I don’t see in this little patch of scrub and noxious weeds. I’ve spotted a wattlebird or two, but the mynahs and the currawongs seem to prefer the closely shaved lawns and unlovely topiary of adjacent suburbia only a few hundred yards away.

It’s lucky, probably, that the water dragons don’t share my landscaping snobbery. They seem equally happy basking on the buffalo grass by the kerb, nestling under the hateful row of aloe plants, or zipping into the hinterland of privet, ehrharta and abandoned tyres. I guess a suburban lizard’s gotta do what a suburban lizard’s gotta do.

Attractive dragon habitat

Eastern water dragon enjoying some aloe plants

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

July 20, 2015

Posted under

Australian natives, Backyard birds, national parks, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

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7 Comments

Russet trees & scarlet tails

Is that fall colour I see?

Is that fall colour I see on the hillside as the mist parts over Calabash Bay? Nope, wrong season, wrong continent. It’s the golden-brown tips of the casuarina trees, the males that is, laden with pollen and catching the morning light.

For all their evocative latin label – named after their cassowary-like foliage – the casuarinas are a mournful kind of tree, I think. The wind whistling through the wispy branchlets of the she-oaks takes me straight back to solitary times in childhood. Even Wikipedia notes, rather poetically, how quiet it is in a she-oak forest, sound muffled by the blanket of fallen “needles”, in an understory where other things refuse to grow.

Berowra Valley Nation Park in afternoon light

Male casuarina tipped with pollen

Not so quiet this morning, though. Just as I was cursing my missed train, there was a “kraaaaak!” and a flash of red in the trees between the commuter car park and the RSL. New guys in town (or new to me anyway): glossy black-cockatoos.

What’s that caught in the tree?

Upside down glossy black-cockatoo

Alley-oop

Red trail against a blue sky

Two young fellas and an older female, I reckon – a typical little group for these birds, it seems, unlike the yellow and red tailed black-cockatoos that stay in bigger flocks. The two lads flapped from tree to tree, red tails glowing in the sun, while mum (or cocky-cougar?) chilled out next to Berowra Car Care, having a good old preen.

Juvenile glossy black-cockatoo

I’m outta here!

Glossy black-cockatoos are fussy eaters. The penny has dropped for yellow-tails that they need to diversify their eating habits and these days they’re doing okay, thanks to pine trees like the great big decrepit ones in our yard. But these birds really only like the woody fruits of the allocasuarinas – and turn their noses up at even some of those. The black she-oak, casuarina littoralis, is a particular favourite and, now I’ve started to notice them in their winter finery, it seems there’s plenty of them around here.

But the black oaks don’t come back too well from big, hot fires. And the glossy black cockies are competing with galahs, corellas, sulphur cresteds and mynahs – birds that don’t mind land being cleared and subdivided. Humans knock down the big old trees, feral bees nick the nesting hollows and possums steal black-cockatoo eggs. Perhaps it’s not surprising I haven’t seen these lovely birds before.

Or maybe they’ve been here all along, “inconspicuous and cryptic”, leaving a trail of half-chewed casuarina orts, just a red flash in the golden silence of the she-oak trees.

Adult female glossy black-cockatoo

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 2, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants that attract wildlife

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5 Comments

Timber!

Black cockatoo on the top of the tree cropped further

We’ve had a mob of at least fifteen yellow tailed black cockatoos hanging around in the last few days, mewing like strangled cats and being chased around by magpies and (I think) even noisy minors. We get the yellow tails quite often around these parts, especially in the winter-time, thanks to the large and sickly but apparently tasty radiata pines that loom over our place.

A male yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a pine cone in the neighbours’ yard

Yellow tailed cockatoo tucking in

Silhouette of a yellow tailed black cockatoo

The rule in Hornsby Shire is you can cut down a tree that’s within three metres of the foundations of your house. If only there was some special by-law where the council chops down the tree for you for free if you can’t slip a paperback book between a towering pine and your bathroom. One of these days I’ll be communing with nature and the nearest treebole will swell just that tiny bit further and burst straight through into the shower cubicle. That fresh piney smell with not a cent spent on disinfectant.

Two of the less prepossessing pines in our yard

This tree is cold and wants to be inside

It’s been very very very windy in Sydney lately, and quite a few people have been unfortunate enough to experience that piney odour, quickly followed by plenty of refreshing indoor rain. We’ve been pretty lucky, but we’ve spent a lot of time staring anxiously out the window at various ominously swaying monumental specimens. When I lived in Brisbane I used to be a bit judgey about the lawn to tree ratio in most peoples’ yards. But if cyclones start creeping their way down the coast I may have to reconsider.

Female yellow tailed cockatoos and a male peeping out of

Yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a dead tree at our place

Black cockatoo angel

Yellow tailed black cockatoos are doing pretty well on the east coast, including urban areas, no doubt thanks to their penchant for pines. But apparently they often struggle to find nesting sites, preferring hollows in trees a century or more old. They seem to like our senescent radiatas, and spend time perched high on the various dead branches voguing. I hope, when we finally save enough shekels to pull down the extensive array of dangerous trees in our yard, we still see them.