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February 6, 2021

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Backyard birds, brood parasites, feeding fledglings, habitat, Insects, Native birds

Growing up is hard to swallow

Juvenile koel sitting in a pittosporum tree

Juvenile koel in a pitto tree

It’s all about the young koels in our yard at the moment. We have at least two of them hanging around the back yard, begging for food and slowly destroying the mental health of their red wattlebird adoptive parents. Well, I hope for their sake there are more than one set of parents doing the provisioning.

Red wattlebird with spider for its koel young

Red wattlebird ready to take off with its spider

Wattlebird feeding a koel chick

juvenile koel with outstretched wings being fed

koel mantling for a discreet meal

While I’m still hearing koels begging endlessly, I have a suspicion that the parents are trying to back off from supplying food. As a parent of teenagers I can certainly empathise. Wattlebirds normally feed fledgelings for two or three weeks after leaving the nest. The soundscape of our yard started to be dominated by the pleas of the koel youngsters around mid-January, so I think the parents’ patience is starting to wear pretty thin. I’m pretty sure that the koels are trying to push that envelope though.

I watched this rather grown-up looking chick sitting on a branch to beg relentlessly for at least half an hour without attention. It whined and shuffled, whined and groomed.

Koel impatiently grooming

It seemed to despair of getting any attention at one point and started rummaging around for its own tucker. Clearly this flaccid flower didn’t cut the mustard.

Desperation drives an attempt to eat whatever was within reach

Eventually the relentless moaning did result in a couple of snacks.

Koel fledgeling begging

Wattlebird coming in with food

A big mouth…

…being fed

While waiting …. and waiting, and waiting… (I was almost as impatient as the koel for this fledgeling to get a feed…) I spotted a second youngster lurking nearby. It looked a bit skinnier and its plumage a bit patchier and at first I wondered if it was a younger chick, hogging the attention of the exhausted parents. But usually female koels only lays a single egg in a nest – which make sense since the chick heaves competitor eggs and hatchlings out. Sometimes, it seems, koel females will return to lay an egg in a sequence of different nests so perhaps this second youngster was being fed by a different harried parent. I feel kind of relieved on their behalf.

Nestmate? Biological sibling?

One way or another, all that whining seems to be getting less of a response this weather. So our backyard koel chicks are having to forage for their own food. This nugget looks kind of unappealing, though perhaps no worse than the spider that I saw mum or dad retrieving a couple of weeks ago.

Koel chick with mysterious food

Our neighbour’s bangalow palm seems to be a favourite foraging ground.

Koel in the bangalow palm.

Juvenile koel eating bangalow palm berries

Koel in bangalow palm

Perhaps the temptations of the palms are a bit too great. Last week, I watched a youngster beg from a branch near our back verandah for a while. No parental attention was forthcoming, and I thought it had given up, as it went surprisingly silent for quite some time, hunching and looking pensive. Then this happened:

Juvenile koel waiting for…

this cameo appearance

from a bangalow palm fruit

and its subsequent disappearance

I think this mysterious fruit must have been stashed in the bird’s crop, . Certainly this same koel was stacking away the berries at an extraordinary rate on its visit to the bangalow palm, so the idea that it was tucking it away for a later snack seems pretty plausible. Having read a bit about the way birds use crops – a muscular pouch in the oesophagus that stores food – I am now tremendously jealous. What a terrific idea! Why the hell don’t humans have one? I suppose blokes can use beards, although that’s a visually disturbing alternative.

Koels – noisy, whiny parasites – get a bit of a bad rap around here, but I can’t help admire them – their chutzpah, their gorgeous feathers, and their admirable capacity to never, it seems, go hungry.

Juvenile koel perched on a bangalow palm with blue sky in the background

Koel posing

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 31, 2020

Posted under

Backyard birds, breeding, cicadas, competition, Insects, mating, nesting, predation, raptors, territoriality

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Crested hawks for Christmas

Every birdwatcher has a list of sightings they dream about (if that sighting is accompanied by a National Geographic front-cover-worthy picture all the better). For the cognoscenti – sophisticated, proper twitchers – this list seems to feature rare, endangered or hard to spot critters, that may or may not be kind of boring to look at. But for the crass newbie like myself, bling is important. Flashy, that’s how I like my bucket list birds.

For a long time, a decent look at the gloriously multi-coloured (but annoyingly canopy dwelling) spotted pardelote was top of the list. A camping trip to the fabulous Wolgan Valley a couple of years back ticked that box. Worth sweating my way up a hill to look down on the magic of the diamond-bird.

Spotted pardelote

Obviously rainbow bee eaters were on also on the list, until my parents moved to Bingara in on the northern slopes of NSW, a town where grey nomads and bird nerds duke it out for dominance in the local economy.

Pair of rainbow bee eaters

Since then, my top two have both been raptors. There’s the black shouldered kite with its glorious red eye and hauntingly regular presence along highways. I see it often on long road trips, hanging out near boggy pasture land, but getting a photograph seems to require a willingness to pull the hand brake on at high speed in the middle of a major road. I’m not saying I won’t do that, but I’m still working myself up to it. And then there’s the absurdly excellent Pacific Baza.

Stunning golden eye – tick. Dramatic black-and-white belly stripes – tick. Elegant flight, even acrobatic during the mating season – tick again.

And, absurdly, a crest – its nickname is the “crested hawk”. Does it get any better than that? I think not.

I was hugely excited when I spotted what I thought was a baza in our neck of the woods a few weeks ago – zipping past and disappearing into the leafy top of a liquidambar tree. Birds seem to be attracted by a pheromone released by amateur photographers who are not carrying a camera. Certainly that was the case on this occasion. Lacking any visual evidence of the encounter, I figured it was a wish fulfilment sighting. Probably one of the collared sparrowhawks, also stripy chested canopy dwellers. They’ve been back on the scene at our place over the last month or two, hanging out in the top of the neighbour’s pine tree, bragging about their kills and having brief and frustratingly hard to photograph sexual encounters first thing in the morning.

Collared sparrowhawk hiding in the foliage of a liquidambar

But this week – a late Christmas present. My outstanding neighbours Laura and Steve texted to say that the mysterious bird they had previously seen lurking in a melaleuca tree had made at a guest appearance by another neighbour’s pool, and been IDed. It was a Pacific baza.

It’s a miracle that I didn’t get hit crossing the road as I raced over to their place.

Adult Pacific baza

The trip to casualty that could have ensued would have kept my from not just a single baza but a little family – a pair (I think) and a large and whiny fledged chick. Naturally, they were lurking in the very top of the tree, and of course, my skill-set with my flash new camera meant that my career as a natural history photographer is not going to take any great leaps forward.

Adult Pacific baza avoiding eye contact with a juvenile

Blurry as it is, I interpret the body language of the parent here as indicating an unwillingness to provide further snacks. We saw both adults make a few short flights, and at least once definitely offer the youngster some prey. The juvenile whined without interruption, inching along the branch towards the adults, ducking its head and restively half-opening its wings. This parent avoided eye contact and eventually flapped off to a separate spot in the tree. A couple of weeks after they leave the nest, apparently, juvenile bazas stop getting food provided by their parents, so I guess this was what was playing out here. Baby Baza was certainly less than happy.

Juvenile baza (I think) in a huff

To say I was ecstatic to see the family of bazas within 100 metres of my front door would be to underestimate my degree of excitement. But then a troubling thought struck me… would the presence of the bazas harsh the buzz of the sparrowhawk pair that I’d seen canoodling on my side of the street? The pair appeared soon after a fierce storm that tore some big branches in our backyard and might well have trashed a nest somewhere down the road. Would the appearance of the bazas spoil the chance of a late-breaking bit of nest building?

Juvenile baza showing crest and aggro

Like Pacific bazas, sparrowhawks spend a lot of time in the treetops. They’re ambush hunters, lurking in amongst the leaves ready to burst out and pluck small birds from the sky.

Looking for prey

Sparrowhawk hunting from a pine tree

Sparrowhawk ignoring dregs of its last meal

They’ll take sparrows (perhaps unsurprisingly), mynahs and miners, mudlarks and wattlebirds, even birds as big as crested pigeons or crimson rosellas. Here’s a pic I took recently of a sparrowhawk trying to choke down the remnants of a leg of a bird. See the toes poking out of its beak? I watched it pacing up and down on the branch, wiping its beak repeatedly and generally looking a bit agitated. I note that the left over leg remained untouched and I can kind of understand why.

When something gets stuck on the way down

Maybe its not surprising after this kind of experience that a sparrowhawk might want to ring the changes, diet wise. And in fact, sparrowhawks won’t say no to a bug or two. A Canberra study found half of sparrowhawks’ prey, by the numbers, were snails, spiders or insects, with Christmas beetles and cicadas a particular feature. All those insects weren’t too filling – they made up only 2% of the biomass. But still, that interest in insects could them into competition with bazas, which eat fruit, frogs, lizards and snakes, grabbed from the foliage at the tops of trees, but especially like stick insects.

Yet another thing to inspire delight in bazas – an eccentric specialist diet. When I was looking at this critter in the Berowra train station, I wasn’t thinking “if only I ripped that to bits it would make a toothsome snack for my children”. But if I was a baza, I would have been.

Stick insect

However, larger insects are a favourite of Pacific bazas, while sparrowhawks seem to go for nothing bigger than a huntsman or a cicada.

Disappointingly, the bazas have disappeared from the paperbark in Steve and Laura’s drive, for all its proximity to a refreshing backyard pool and ample opportunities for hunting in the tops of tall trees, undisturbed by competition for their favourite phasmids. They’ll probably be nearby – these raptors aren’t migratory and Berowra sounds pretty close to their ideal habitat:

tropical and sub-tropical forests and woodlands, largely within 300km of the coast. In the breeding season they frequent tree-lined watercourses, rainforest, sclerophyll forest and tall woodland, but range widely following nesting to lower ground, when they may visit urban parks and gardens.

One birdwatcher in Queensland followed the reproductive fortunes of a pair of bazas as they nested in a series of different trees within a couple of hundred metres of his house on his property for a decade. So, no National Geographic cover photo as yet but I remain hopeful. 2020 really was a dud year but with the crested hawk in town, who knows what fine things could be in store for us in our backyard next year.

No, don’t look back to 2020 sparrowhawk! Forward, always forward.

Raptor encounters in our neighbourhood

Sex, nests and dogfighting – sparrowhawks set up house in our local pinetrees

Sparrowhawk sibling rivalry – baby serial killers learn to hunt

An eagle in suburbia – a wedgetail on Berowra Creek

The very big fish – sea eagle vs mulloway

References

Briggs, Allan (2018) “Breeding biology and behaviour of a pair of Pacific Bazas ‘Aviceda subcristata’ in central-coastal Queensland over 10 years”. Australian Field Ornithology, Vol. 35, 2018: doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20938/afo35095101.
James, P. (2004). The breeding cycle of a pair of Pacific Bazas Aviceda subcristata in south-eastern Queensland. Australian Field Ornithology 21, 133–140
Olsen, Jerry, Judge, David, Trost, Susan and Stephen Debus (2018) “Diets of breeding Brown Goshawks Accipiter fasciatus and Collared Sparrowhawks A. cirrocephalus near Canberra, Australia and comparisons with other regions and raptors” Corella, 42

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 8, 2019

Posted under

anthropocene, Biodiversity, extinction, Insects

Cute critters

Tiny juvenile praying mantis on my knuckle

Somehow International Women’s Day seems like a good time to post about this tiny praying mantis, who visited us last week. So very very cute.

Australia has 118 varieties of mantis – well that’s the ones we know about anyway – new insect species are being discovered all the time. The crowdsourced wisdom of the Australian amateur entymology Facebook page suggests that this one is a snake mantid Kongobatha diademata, a species that not often spotted, though it’s probably around more than we think. It’s hard to see because even the adults are quite small – only two or two and a half centimetres long. This youngster isn’t even as small as young snake mantids get. The first instars when they hatch out with 20 or so siblings from their ootheca, or egg case, are pale – almost transparent. So this nymph as already shed its skin at least once. Imagine how tiny that discarded exoskeleton would be! Unbelievably cute – something for a cabinet of curiosities in a dollhouse.

I’m not sure that snake mantids indulge in sexual cannibalism. I definitely need to spend more time exploring the CSIRO’s online insect resources to get genned up on this kind of thing. But without being in any way definitive about it, it is possible this exceedingly cute and tiny creature is a female that will grow up to bite off the head of her mate mid-coitus. Especially if she’s feeling a bit hungry. Don’t mate with the hungry ones, fellas (apparently they try quite hard not to)!

Despite (or perhaps because) of such assertiveness, praying mantises are apparently the most popular insect pet. Meeting this one, you can really see why. But mantises belong in the same group – or “superorder” – dichtyoptera – as termites and cockroaches. Equally convenient to find around the house and garden but not cute enough, it seems, to keep as pets.

Mantis head on arm crop

Maybe it’s these big eyes that – along with a small nose and mouth, short limbs, and smallness in general, being child-like, unthreatening, helpless and sometimes a bit podgy – make something cute. Cockroaches tick some of those boxes but obviously not quite enough. This miniscule mantid instar, on the other hand, still too young to have wings, looks like a tiny green pony, running through the waving fields of hair on my forearm.

Young praying mantis roaming around on my forearm

Given reports of catastrophic declines in insect numbers in the industrialised world over the last thirty years, maybe we need to start cultivating the same feeling of fondness for other insects as I felt about this lovely little mantid after it had capered around on my person for half an hour or so.

Ed Yong, assessing recent claims of an insect apocalypse, observes the mindboggling diversity of the insect world, and the resilience that might spring from that sheer variety. “There are more species of ladybugs than mammals, of ants than birds, of weevils than fish” he rightly marvels. Surely amongst all these critters, we can find more to love and less to be creeped out by.

On the other hand, there’s something fundamentally rude about the word “cute”, isn’t there? You’re not cute if you’re even a tiny bit scary. If you have might just bite someone’s head off. Or maybe you can still be cute, as long as you’re biting someone else’s head off?

Either way maybe it’s not more cuteness we need to improve things between humans and the insect world, but more r.e.s.p.e.c.t.

Mantis licking crop wide

References

Laforteza, Elaine (2014) “Cute-ifying disability: Lil Bub, the Celebrity Cat m/c journal 17(2)

Prokop, Pavol and Maxwell, Michael R. (2016) “Female predatory response to conspecific males and heterospecific prey in the praying mantis Mantis religiosa: evidence
for discrimination of conspecific males” Journal of Ethology 34:139–14

Svenson, Gavin (2007) The origins, evolution and phylogeny of praying mantises (Dichtyoptera – Mantodea) PhD thesis, Brigham Young University.

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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!

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mccnmatt

Posted on

January 1, 2018

Posted under

egg laying, Insects, national parks, Native birds, nesting, Uncategorized

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Things to do with termite nests

Lace monitor in an arboreal termite nest

Happy New Year!

I don’t know about yours, but one of my resolutions for 2018 is to pay a lot more more attention to bugs. Or rather, insects in general, and how they interact with all the other critters around them.

So the year was off to a good insect-oriented start when I took this photo just down the hill from the spectacular lookout at West Head in Kuring-gai Chase National Park.

What’s this little monitor doing as she peeps out of this termites’ nest, a few metres up a gum tree?

What’s her story? And what’s she up to with those termites?

View north from West Head

At first, I thought she might have been after kingfisher eggs or nestlings.

A couple of years ago my bird watching brother told me to keep an eye out for termites nests in trees, pointing out that kingfishers often made the hollows in these “termitaria” to nest in. Since then, I’ve seen plenty of arboreal burrows on my paddles around the Hawkesbury, and occasionally a sacred kingfisher lurking suspiciously nearby.

Kingfisher nest in an arboreal termite nest

Sacred kingfisher hanging out nearby

Many species of kingfishers, including (to my great surprise – I’m not sure why), kookaburras, often nest in termite mounds. I had assumed that birds would choose abandoned arboreal termitaria, but in most cases where animals reuse mounds, it seems, the original builders are still in situ when the new residents move in.

Synchronised kookaburras

Unlike other birds, such as the hooded parrots of Arnhem Land, kingfishers don’t wait to build until the mud of the mound is softened by rain. They do construction the hard way, through sometimes lethal collision flights into outer wall of the nest. Both members of the pair participate in this headbanging activity until a 25 cm tunnel is dug. As you can see in the picture of the burrow above, the tunnel slopes downward a little, to help with keeping the it clear of the young’s faeces. If only dealing with human children’s ordure was a simple as a gently sloping bedroom and hallway, eh? Once the initial tunnel is dug, the kingfisher sometimes leaves the excavation for the termites to tidy up inside, sealing the interior walls of the nest.

New Zealand Sacred Kingfisher

But kingfishers aren’t alone in using termite mounds as a handy place to breed. I’m not quite sure what was using this big nest near Port Stephens. I suspect it’s not kingfishers. Like many Australian birds, they are cooperative breeders, with their youngsters from previous broods helping raise the new babies, but they don’t seem to nest colonially. As these burrowholes or just access points for some insect-eating predator to have a crunchy snack?

Many nest? Or access holes for snackers?

An azure kingfisher – a juvenile?

But back to our termite loving monitor lizard. As a bird-savvy informant pointed out, had my lizard been munching baby kingfisher eggs, the parents would have had something to say about it. In fact, what I saw wasn’t a nest-raid but most likely the aftermath of a hatching.

Another lace monitor in Kuring-gai National Park

Because, as it turns out, lace monitors also lay their eggs in termite mounds, using the warmth generated by the insects to incubate their young. Once the eggs are laid, the lizards lets the termites seal them in, safe from predators in their incubation chamber in the treetops. Or perhaps slightly safer.

No-one seems to research lace monitors – too damn common it seems. But, researchers studying the related Rosenberg Monitors found that females defended the nests for a few weeks after the eggs were deposited. Some hard core conflict was observed:

“The most aggressive fighting observed was between a defending female and a marauder, with females fighting males more than twice their body mass. Both attacker and defender sustained injuries, including dislocated or broken limbs; broken ribs; spinal injuries; and severe bites to head, throat, and abdomen” (Rismiller, McKelvey, Green, 2010).

Baby rosenberg monitors dig their own way out of their natal termite heap, but everyone’s a bit vague about how the baby lace monitors escape their birthplace/prison. Despite the female’s willingness to break a spine or limbs to ensure the safety of their young at the point eggs are laid, herpetologists don’t give goanna mothers a lot of credit for subsequent interest in their offspring. Some researchers think that the mothers come back to dig their babies out of captivity when the right time comes. Others seem to think they just happen to be digging randomly in likely-looking termite mounds when they accidentally happen upon their young (Kirshner, 2007). This sounds all rather implausible to me .

Lace monitor in Wollemi National Park

I’m still not 100% clear about what I saw up a tree at West Head. Was the lizard I spotted was one of the little ones, lolling around in its birthplace after its mysterious liberation. Or a female spending some time hanging out in the nest, having helped her young to freedom? I’m just not sure.

One way or another, one of our common-as-muck goannas was doing its thing in its ordinary, fascinating way. With the help of a multitude of insect Mary Poppinses.

The termetarium from a distance

Further references

Kirshner, D. (2007) Multiclutching in captive Lace Monitors, Varanus varius. Mertensiella (16): 403-421

Rismiller, P.D., McKelvey, M.W., Green, B. (2010) “Breeding phenology and behavior of Rosenberg’s Goanna (Varanus rosenbergi) on Kangaroo Island, South Australia” Journal of Herpetology 44(3):399-408. 2010

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 16, 2016

Posted under

Bees, Gardening, Insects, Native animals, Permaculture, Pollination, Uncategorized

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Beekeeping without pain

The big bee reveal

Our tiny pets exploring their new domain

“Do you still want that hive of stingless bees?”

Are there people out there who say no to the offer of a thousand tiny flying pets? Perhaps there are, but I’m not one of them.

So when my marvellous friend Laura decided to divide her hive of native bees – Tetragonula carbonaria, the variety of Australia’s 11 species of stingless bees most commonly kept in backyards – I was certainly not going to look a gift bee in the mouth. Even if I was able to inspect the teeny mouths of these diminutive 4mm long critters.

Laura was able to share the joy because about every 18 months a healthy hive of these highly social bees doubles in size and can be divided to create a new colony. There’s no worries about finding a queen for each of the two new hives. European honey bee queens sting their rivals to death, but in a charmingly democratic process, the queen for the new colony of native stingless bees is selected by the workers from the emerging virgin queenlets hanging around waiting for their moment. This thought pleases me almost as much as the factoid acquired from my new bible, Tim Heard’s (2016) The Australian Native Bee Book, that bees are kind of like wasps that evolved to become vegetarians. My new pets are a vego workers’ collective.

Ms 10 hoping to pat her new pets

Closeup of Tetragonuna Carbonaria

Splitting hives is how Kuring-gai Council’s WildThings bee programme (that, via Laura’s benificence, has made us beekeepers) has distributed 900 hives around NSW. And it’s how the number of meliponists – the appealingly pretentious name for keepers of stingless bees – tripled between 1998 and 2010. Carbonaria are opportunistic snackers and seem to like it in the suburbs, with their mishmash of local and introduced flowering plants.

There are around 1600 types of native bee in Australia. We’ve put up a lovely poster by Gina Cranson of some of the locals on our back door to try to improve our bee-spotting skills. But of the highly social Australian stingless bees T.Carbonaria is the one that copes best with a temperate climate, with a range that extends from the Daintree to the NSW South Coast.

Isotoma axillaris … I’m reliably informed native bees are keen on this one

First flowers on the river lily – perhaps a little large for the Carbonaria?

Crowea coming into flower… bring on the bees

Here in Sydney it’s getting on the chilly side for them, so we won’t be able to harvest sugarbag from our hive. Our bees will need the pots of honey they stash around the beautiful and distinctive spiral shaped brood comb, along with their surprisingly large reserve of pollen, to make it through the cooler months. Stingless bees produce a lot less than European bees anyway – a kilo or so a year, compared to up to up to 75 kilos – although sugarbag is apparently delicious.

We can’t steal sweet treats from them, but our tiny pets won’t be idle. Native bees don’t seem to be vulnerable to varroa virus, the nasty bug threatening bee health the world over that may spread to Australia any day now. So I can be sure that my mango, macadamia and avocado trees will have pollinators in the eventuality of a bee-pocolypse… assuming I don’t succeed in killing the trees (or the bees) first. Happily, however, given my patchy track record as a farmer, our new friends will happily roam up to 500 metres away, well beyond our wonky fence line in search of tucker.

Mango flower buds … to be pollinated by our new bees?

Kiwifruit – will the bees take over from me a chief pollinator?

You don’t have to walk bees, desex them, groom them, clip their nails or pick up their poo (although in winter the “house bees” can’t be bothered carrying the dunny can too far from the nest, so if you choose to keep stingless bees on your verandah and you are the sort of person who is troubled by piles of barely visible dung you might need to invest in a nano pooper scooper). But of course, despite that, I have managed to find something to worry about.

Stingless bees don’t like spells of frosty weather or very very hot days. If it’s over 42 degrees inside the hive the whole damn lot of them can die. So I was a bit antsy when Sydney had a couple of sizzlers in our first week as bee keepers. The spot we’ve picked out for them is shaded by vines and protected from the afternoon sun, as well as catching the morning rays in winter time. And our hive is wrapped in a polystyrene cover to insulate the colony against temperature extremes. Once we’ve had them for a year or two we might take Laura’s approach: “tough love”. But because we don’t really want to execute our bees (to be referred to collectively, the kids have decided, as Bob) before we even get to know them, this time we rigged up a bit of extra shelter and some evaporative airconditioning.

Evaporative airconditioning for bees

Belt and braces approach to providing shade on a 38 degree day

The only trouble with polystyrene is, as all chicken keepers know, it’s like crack to birds. They don’t have too many taste buds and for some reason they can’t get enough of that squeaky mouth feel. The gaggle of teenaged brush turkeys that loiter in our backyard hoping for leftovers from the chooks obviously decided that bees with a side-order of synthetic aromatic polymer would make a refreshing after-dinner snack.

Maybe I’ll come to regret the peace loving nature of the vegan commune in the backyard.

What happens to polystyrene if it’s left in the garden

Hive cover post brush turkey attack

A small clique of the 10 or so brush turkeys that frequent our yard

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mccnmatt

Posted on

July 12, 2015

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Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Companion planting, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, Herbs, Insect pests, Insects, Iron deficiency, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons, Vegetables

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A dead-end trap crop

A “dead-end trap crop”: is it the germ of a new Dr Seuss tongue twister or a surplus insult from a John Cleese and Graham Chapman sketch? Nope, it’s the my latest strategy for dealing with the beautiful but deeply irritating cabbage white butterfly.

Confused cabbage white butterfly on a shallot flower

I like to think of our choice of a garden on a steep, shady south west facing slope not so much a tragic error in garden planning but a deliberate strategy for replicating temperate conditions in a subtropical climate. It wasn’t an inability to use a compass that led us here. Absolutely not. Instead it was my cunning plan to produce home-grown raspberries.

This fantasy has been somewhat tempered by our brassica disappointments of recent years.

Radishes are considered to be idiot-proof and we’ve usually managed to get them to grow, if not to actually eat them. I like the long-rooted daikons since there is a brief interregnum between germination and gnarly inedibility. The daikon sits happily in the ground waiting for me to make sushi. If don’t get my act together in time, there’s always the lovely white flowers to look forward to.

Mandala of bicycle wheels – didn’t keep the chooks off the radishes, let’s see how it does protecting the roots of the persimmon tree

Daikon radish flowers

Radishes taste tested by chickens

This year’s bash at radishes hasn’t worked out quite so well, thanks to my innovative (a.k.a. totally ineffective) strategy for keeping the chooks at bay – a mandala of brightly coloured children’s bicycle wheels. Evidence, if you needed it, that (a) the Goddess doesn’t necessarily protect every vegetable sheltering in a life-enhancing spiral (b) chickens are definitely not supertasters. In fact, apparently chickens only have about 300 taste buds, and they’re on the roof of their mouths, which may explain the chooks’ enthusiasm for eating polystyrene foam (“crack for chickens” as someone once put it on a backyard chicken forum).

Brussel sprouts having a bad hair day

The look for Chelsea 2015 – the recycled underpants drawer

I’m also a serial failure at growing brussel sprouts. Perhaps they’re paying me back for all the bad-mouthing I gave them as a child. I console myself with the thought that it’s a bit warm in Sydney for this member of the brassica family anyway. You need to start early – I’ve heard you need to have your seeds in by November if you want tidy looking mini-cabbages and not some kind of ad hoc freeform leafy thing.

I banged in some seedlings in autumn – I’m reserving judgement but at this stage I’m not optimistic. The “bad hair day” of the plant pictured above may be a consequence of a close encounter with the repurposed wire drawer I was using to keep the bandicoots at bay. Since the cure appears to be worse than the disease, and the bandicoot seems to share my childhood dislike of sprouts, I’m living on the edge and letting the brussels go commando. The wire drawer, along with a bisected fan-cover, is off to provide security and support to my newly planted swiss chard and salsify. I’m hoping the look is more “frugal locavore’s organic garden” and less “disturbed hoarder’s junkyard” but I reckon it could go either way.

Red bok choi – what’s not to love?

And now we turn to the Battle of the Bok Choi.

Over the years my passion for purple and anaemic lust for iron-rich veggies resulted in an epic struggle to produce a decent crop of my favourite asian green, Red Bok Choi. Cabbage whites seem to share my enthusiasm. Bok choi butterflies would seem a more apt (and alliterative) choice of name.

My first effort – a feeble attempt to conceal my pretties underneath the generous leaves of a (ultimately fruitless) zucchini – underestimated the persistence and acute senses of your average crucifer-loving butterfly. Interplanting with coriander was a break through. In Sydney, you can harvest your coriander leaves for aroundabout ten minutes before your plant goes to seed. Growing cilantro as a kitchen herb here is an essentially doomed enterprise. That said, stinky old coriander leaves do seem to throw the insect pests right off their game. There’s apparently a couple of genes that are implicated in some peoples’ deep distaste for cilantro – maybe that’s a part of the genome we share with bugs.

But this year’s lone self seeded bok choi is looking more perfect than last season’s coriander-defended efforts. Is it the chilly weather? The location inside the repurposed chicken tractor/brush turkey and possum exclusion zone? or is it… (drumroll) the magic of the dead-end trap crop?

Giant red mustard

Red bok choi

After my embittering exeriences with kale and marigolds, I’m a tiny bit skeptical about companion planting. But given the cruel fate dished out to our broccoli by an evil alliance of brassica loving bugs and furry critters last year, I’d give anything a try to get a bit more broc to the table.

I’ve been growing land cress a while. It was one of the few food crops I managed grow – in a polystyrene foam box parked by the outdoor dunny – in the concrete back court of my terrace house in the rainy British north-west, back in the day. Here in Berowra, it flourished in a damp and shady patch next to the chook yard, giving us for two La Nina years an unending supply of the “house soup” – vicchysoise hotted up with landcress, jerusalem artichokes and zucchinis. Flatulence-inducing but fabulous. All in all, a great plant.

So when I heard that upland cress has the reputation as a Black Widow for a crucifer-loving insects I figured I’d give it another whirl.

Sacrificial or trap crops are tasty things used to distract bugs from your favoured plants. Dead-end trap crops, on the other hand, lure insects away from the plants you want to protect and then kill them. Land cress, it seems, contains the spicy-flavoured glucosinolates, prompting some moths to lay their eggs on its leaves where its caterpillars hatch, feast and die. Gruesome but apparently effective.

Miracle broccoli surrounded by land cress

The seeds I ordered from the ever-reliable Green Harvest were the familiar looking upland cress (Barbarea vernis). Unfortunately, the variety of land cress (sometimes called winter cress or yellow rocket) that’s been been tested as a dead-end trap crop is Barbarea vulgaris, a related, taller plant with similar yellow flowers but a less rounded leaf.

Barbarea vulgaris is resistant to another pest – the diamond back moth – which produces a smaller caterpillar that’s also a lover of brassicas (to identify whether you’ve got got a diamond-back larvae, give the grub a bit of a nudge – it will give a bit of a wiggle backwards. But hopefully not leap up and punch you in the eye.) It’s a bit less clear about whether winter cress is quite so deadly to cabbage whites. And then there’s the vexed question of whether the landcress in my garden – barbarea vernis – does the same job.

But it’s all going swimmingly so far. My land cress is unchewed, and my the kids have already turned their noses up at a couple of meals of home-grown broccoli. I’m sure they’ll be pleased to find there’s loads more to come, not to mention heaping platefuls of mustard greens, land cress, kale and (with luck) brussel sprouts.

And so the time honoured tradition of intergenerational brassica torture continues…

Land cress – Barbarea vernea

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Posted on

March 3, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Garden trees, Insect pests, Insects, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Weeds

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Ecosystems of evil

Okay, I know there’s no such thing as evil ecosystems. You create plenty, and things come. Plenty of chicken food and regular eggs, you get nine teenaged brush turkeys, slouching around your backyard, eating anything that’s not nailed down. Lots of grapes vines and your resident possums bite their way through the mesh exclusion bags and let in the fruit flies. A yard littered with the sulphurous fermented droppings of a cocos palm (not to mention the ordure of those brush turkeys), you get loads and loads of flies.

Aesthetically pleasing flies

Too many bloody flies

I’ve had a red hot go at taking an aesthetic approach to the flies, with their sparkling metallic blue and golden armour and crazy eyes. I’ve tried to think about them as simply part of the cycle of life, but I am starting to stare pointedly at my watch, waiting for the arrival of the cavalry, a wheeling flock of insectivorous SBBs (small brown birds) that will weave through the undergrowth and snatch the pests from the air without breaking formation. I want one of those neat and tidy ecosystems, the ones where the annoying insects become a food source for endangered and good-looking avian visitors.

But no – desite my native shrubs and the absence of a horde of noisy miners, our place is rich in bombastic generalists and SBBs are thin on the ground. Your kookaburra – good for tidying up your left over sausages. Your cockies will make short work of the peach crop. But both of them bloody useless at disposing of flies. The garden skinks have been a disappointment as well. Allegedly they are avid carnivores, and flies are a favourite treat, and we’ve got more Lampropholis guichenoti in the backyard than we have five cent pieces rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine. But they, too, have failed to come to the party. Once again, Gaia appears to be napping on the job.

While the Cocos palm absolutely and definitively a weed (I like the nuggets of invective in the Grow Me Instead Brochure – “a blot on the landscape” “can give the appearance of a garden planted with telegraph poles”) my hatred for this vermin-attracting plant was masked for a while by a sense of gratitude. After all, it did save the house and possibly the family from being crushed under a giant gum tree.

I was at work one day when RB called. “I don’t want to worry you but a tree’s just fallen on the house”.

The SES was summoned: a marvellous mob of guys and gals with chainsaws who belayed themselves to the wonky car port and swarmed over the roof of the house, making short if noisy work of the tree. The big gum had lost its grip on the ground and fallen sideways towards our verandah. Fortunately a forked branch wedged itself across the Queen palm, holding the eucalyptus suspended just a smidgen above the roof. The sum of the damage: one branch lightly brushed a gutter and gave it a bit of a bend.

So, thanks for that, Queen palm (and, needless to say, the SES. You are legends.). We’re grateful for the structural integrity of our roofline.

But if you think it’s going to stop us chopping you down, you couldn’t be more wrong. The possums might view your fruit as ideal picnic food but you’re a hazard for the flying foxes. It’s a worry when you rely for 30% of your diet on something that gives you acid reflux, damages your teeth, chokes you and leads you to stumble around on the garden being mauled by suburban dogs. Even Maccas isn’t that bad. That’s an evil ecosystem if ever there was one.

And that’s leaving aside the trip hazard for someone as poorly coordinated and lazy with the garden broom as I am. So unless I hear about a recipe for cocos palm wine before I afford a tree surgeon, Cocos palm, you’re cactus!