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February 11, 2016

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national parks, Native birds, snakes, Uncategorized, waterways

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Snakes vs whining teenagers

Tiger snake curled face crop long This is what people who hate camping think it’s all about, right? I suspect spiders, high winds and rowdy neighbours also make that list. Yep, a big tick next to them too – it’s all to play for when you camp in the summertime in Wollemi National Park.

But Ganguddy, or Dunn’s Swamp, to give its inaccurate and charmless non-indigenous name, was just as marvellous this January as it was when we first visited this time last year.

Ganguddy in early dawn light

Dew on some kind of orchid?

Lichen on native cyprus

Dawn at Ganguddy

Purple flower

Leptospermum flowers

Strange club shaped lichens

Dusk at Ganguddy

View from the pagoda lookout

Yes, there were more reptiles – lethal and benign – but to balance it out, there was also less torrential rain. At no point this year did it seem likely that the full set of adult campers, each clinging to a leg of the kitchen-gazebo, would take off and fly over the pagoda rock formations like a quartet of grubby Mary Poppinses. It rained, but not inside any of the tents. And the whining teenagers weren’t my delightful children but the feathered offspring of the camp ground locals.

“Feed me!”

“Where are you?”

Juvenile noisy friarbird wants a snack

It seems a bit unfair for such giant children to be demanding food, although Gisela Kaplan in her fascinating book “Bird Minds” suggests some evolutionary advantages to having hungry teenagers hanging around. Apparently adults noisy friarbirds only feed the young’uns for three weeks after fledging -hard to believe this galumphing one was so close to being a fluffster.

But you can see where all that food goes. You reckon your adolescent’s feet are big? What about junior purple swamphen‘s clodhoppers?

Juvenile purple swamp hen with giant feet

Adult swamp hen feeding the hungry bairns

Unhygenic as it sounds, the drop dunny seemed to be a particularly popular spot for a snack. The baby grey fantails spent a lot of time looking deliberately cute there in order to get a feed. If you were still uncertain about the superiority of the earth toilet, this little guy is a clincher I reckon.

Juvenile grey fantail hanging around the drop toilets

“I’m hungry”

“Please feed me – I’m cute!” – juvenile grey fantail

The white-browed scrubwren also enjoyed loitering out around the toilets. I didn’t see any juveniles, but then this one looked so stern, perhaps they were there but just too nervous to beg for tucker.

Grumpy looking white browed scrubwren

The suspiciously touselled looking eastern yellow robin – a juvenile perhaps – had worked out that the best place for tucker is definitely the barbecue.

Eastern yellow robin having a picnic

Eastern yellow robin

I’m not sure if the adult reed warbler had gone into head down, bum up, to feed some chicks, or if it was just going to extreme lengths to avoid facing the long-lensed papperazzi. I was rather pleased when after two years of trying I finally got a picture of one, without even having to visit the Rylstone Guns and Ammo for a flame thrower to thin out that pesky, snap obscuring habitat.

Reed warbler nest

Reed warbler

And, miracle of miracles, I found an azure kingfisher without ADD. I reckon I can put away my paddle now – 18 months of kayaking have not been in vain.

Kingfisher on stump 2 instagram square.jpg

At last – a sluggish azure kingfisher

The invasive gambezi minnows that fill this reservoir – built in the 30s as a water supply for a concrete works – seem to be an optimal snack size for the kingfishers – I saw plenty of them, along with a randy musk duck, the ubiquitous Eurasian coots and a pair of Nankeen night herons that alighted, mockingly, in the trees opposite the campsite, just after it got a tiny bit too dark for a decent photograph. But there was nothing larger – no whistling kites, for one. Judging from the frustration level of the fisherman in our party and the track record of these mosquitofish of outcompeting native rivals, I suspect there weren’t many more substantial meals to be had (on the bright side, possibly thanks to the fish, there weren’t too many mosquitos making meals of us either).

Musk duck courtship display

Musk duck tail on display

With all these LBBs – and all the fast moving ones I didn’t get a decent shot of – busy flocks of brown thornbills high in the canopy, white-throated tree-creepers spiralling their way up the tea trees, the baffling grey strike-thrush, the white-eared honeyeaters darting around in the dew drenched dawn – I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the snake that sidled through the camp site or or the one slithered along the ironstone tops. Let’s hope the top predators were more successful at catching the flighty little buggers* than I was.

Rock formations near the dam

Currawongs at the camp site

Tiger snake on ironstone?

Red bellied black snake in the campsite

Sandstone and lichen

More sandstone and lichen

Silhouettes of the camp site trees

Dawn over “Swallow rocks”

*Okay I know red-bellied blacks mostly eat frogs, which is why they were down by the reedbeds near the camp. But I bet they don’t object to the odd gormless yellow robin if it’s available.

* * *

There’s more info about the history and geology of Ganguddy in my previous post from here: In other sandstone country

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February 5, 2016

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History, kayaking, national parks, Uncategorized, waterways, Work

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A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn

I have a weakness for bridges. Romantic trysts just happen to be arranged with the backdrop of the world’s first iron bridge. Multiple crossings of the gorgeous Severn Suspension Bridge are absolutely essential for that work trip. And in pride of place of the mantlepiece, of course, is a railway poster of the famous cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that my paddles lately all seem to end up under what it pleases me to call Brooklyn Bridge. That’s not its real name, mind, but since it starts on Long Island and takes you through the thriving metropolis of Brooklyn (population 744) I think I can get away with it.

Brooklyn bridge and stone pillars plus boat.jpg

There was that morning jaunt from Parsley Bay, past the oyster leases and beneath the swooping welcome swallows, to the top of Mullet Creek, where the Newcastle trains disappear into the Woy Woy tunnel, once the longest tunnel in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on on some beautiful railway journeys in my life – from Montreal to New York in winter, past above-ground swimming pools frozen like giants’ ice-cubes; from southern Thailand to Bangkok, looking out at the richest of tropical orchards woven into the jungle; between snowcapped mountains and sea on the West Highland line to ~~Hogwarts~~ Mallaig. But I reckon this journey along Mullet Creek, not a place that will ever be immortalised in the baby names of the rich and famous, is my favourite. There’s something about a railway line that leaves roads far behind, forging its own way along the empty shore.

Sunrise at Brooklyn

Looking back at the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge and Long Island from the mouth of Mullet Creek

Freight train going up Mullet Creek

“You looking at me?” – pelican at Parsley Bay

If you ask the driver, you can get off near the top of the creek at Wondabyne, the only station sans road access in Australia. Every now and then, you see people jumping off the train and straight into a tinnie, zooming off to the shacks on the other side of the river before their fish supper gets cold.

For a few years in the late nineteenth century, while the first Hawkesbury River bridge was being built, if you were travelling north by train from Sydney, you would disembark at Long Island, board the double-decker paddleboat the General Gordon, and steam off to Mullet Creek Station, then just north of Wondabyne. Now people hop off here to do part of the Great North Walk – a 250 kilometre walk from central Sydney to the beautiful beaches of Newcastle – or to wander up to Pindar Cave. Judging from the smorgasborg of rusted out craft I saw in the shallow water at the top of the creek, it’s also a place where people take their boats to die.

White jellyfish in Mullet Creek

Barnacles on a wrecked ship in Mullet Creek

A boat that may well be beyond repair

Then there was this weekend’s jaunt, downriver from Deerubbin Reserve – a popular spot, right by the freeway, to fish or have a picnic for those who find the perpetual roar of traffic reassuring. With the ever present possibility of a quick exit, I guess it’s ideal for the heavily pregnant or those who find their relatives a bit hard to take. But I can’t really bag people for their passion for the internal combustion engine since I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of a paddle underneath (count ’em) three great big bridges.

Sunrise over Long Island

Three bridges in early morning light: the freeway bridge, the Pacific Highway bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge

Hawkesbury River Bridge in dawn light

This weekend’s jaunt took me past Spectacle Island Nature Reserve, under the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge, natch, and around Dangar Island, swished along smartly by the current and the falling tide.

Have you ever been bored enough in an airport to try walking the wrong way up a moving footpath? Trying to paddle across the current to get to one of the beaches on the eastern side of the island was a bit like that. It all seemed a bit too hard in the end, so I went where the river wanted to take me, downstream, floating just above perilous rocky reefs by off Bradley’s Beach and veering round the seagrass beds.

Sailing boats north of Dangar Island

Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge at dawn

White boat, blue hills at Kuring-gai National Park

And then through the sailing boats, swaying and tinkling like expensive marine windchimes, to Sandy Bay, the best place in the world to be homeless. The folks whose setup I saw there – a tarp flanked by a beached ramshackle boat and a solar panel – had no-one for neighbours but a horde of blue soldier crabs. There was no sign of the human residents, but I now know what it’s like to be a celebrity, thousands of beady eyes watching and waiting on your every move.

Quite a few people live rough around Brooklyn. “Good caves, a shower at Brooklyn Baths and walking distance to the bottle shop”, as RB commented with unseemly enthusiasm. In the Depression, apparently, lots of people came to live in these parts for just this reason – shelter and a bit of space for chooks or a veggie garden. I didn’t see a chicken run in Sandy Bay but Brooklyn does seem to have some kind of common flock, judging from these good looking fellas that we met down by the marina a while back.

Egg at Sandy Bay

Chickens on the commons at Brooklyn

A floating barn at Parsley Bay

Thousands of blue soldier crabs watching me

Blue soldier crab

I reckon the Hawkesbury estuary is Sydney Harbour through the looking glass – a parallel flooded river valley, bordered by bush instead of multimillion dollar apartments. If the Harbour has its iconic Bridge, the Hawkesbury has its own engineering marvel – nearly three times as long, resting 50 metres and more deep in soft black mud.

The modern bridge is the second one to cross the river here. The old bridge, finished in 1887, was the last link in the railway that spanned four colonies, connecting Queensland to South Australia.

Sir Henry Parkes, on the day of the bridge’s official opening, pronounced: “In this great system of material arteries which we completed today, we see the crimson fluid of kinship coursing through all the iron veins” (Sharp, 2001, 4). Apparently the other grandees were a bit more underwhelmed by the prospect of a federated Australia, bound together with railways. Nonetheless, the day after, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was headline was “United Australia”

Bridge silhouette 1

At the time it was built, the old bridge was the longest in Australia and had the deepest footings in the world – 180 feet below the high water line – though they still didn’t reach solid ground.

The Union Bridge Company from New Jersey won the contract to build it (on a pin-jointed truss system, as I’m sure you want to know), giving Brooklyn, the railway town that was set up to house the workers, its American name. The tender being won by an American company was one in the eye for the old country, though it pleases me in some strange way that the riveted steel for the spans was made by Arrol Brothers in Glasgow, who also worked on the bridge across the Firth of Forth.

The Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge from Long Island

The old Long Island Railway station

White faced heron checking out the engineers’ work on the new bridge

But the original Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge didn’t last. Its piers, filled with rubble instead of solid concrete, fractured under the weight of the trains that crossed here, the only bit of duplicate track on the line. The piles were starting to crack in the 30s, but the problem only came to light when a US railway geek doing a bit of light recreational reading of an engineering textbook spotted that the piles weren’t built to the original specifications. The death knell of the old bridge, though, was the extra rail traffic of the war.

The piers of the old bridge remain, like golden castles guarding the river.

The footings of the 1887 Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge. Or castles as I like to call them.

I’ve had a great time reading the fantastically detailed history of the building of the new bridge by Major-General Albert Cecil Fewtrell, the Chief Civil Engineer of the NSW railways, who supervised its completion.

There’s some entertaining reading between the lines. When it came to putting the metal spans onto the concrete footing, it seems some fool had a plan to float the 1,600 tonne metal spans over to the pilings at water level and then haul them out with giant cranes perched on the piers. But Major-General Fewtrell soon sorted them out:

“Consideration had been given early to the proposal to float out the spans at low level … The decision [was made] to revert to the high level method of floatation following the return of the Author from active service in 1943” (Fewtrell, 1946, 27)

The cuttings made for the construction docks for the 1946 bridge, and the boat that’s now doing bridge repairs.

The prep they did for the task of floating the massive spans from the construction docks – the cuttings still visible on the north shore of Long Island – onto the concrete pilings at high tide also gives you a sense of the guy.

A large board, representing the land and water at the site of the new bridge, was laid down in the southern tunnel. Model piers were accurately fixed in position in the “stream,” and miniature spans, pontoons, and equipment were used so that the men could practice in detail movements and prepare for emergencies.

Don’t you want to play with those 1/32 scale tiny cranes and miniature pilings? I really really do.

Fewtrell thought that everything had gone swimmingly. But the new bridge, the bridge that was supposed to last 200 years, is crumbling. After years of delays, just this last week, work started on repairing the concrete footings and its rusting reinforcing steel. When I paddled past, there were huddled men in high vis jackets and mysterious icons dangling from the bridge deck – all the signs that a new engineering miracle is about to begin. And I’m sure it’ll happen.

But at this stage, once again, I reckon it’s Hawkesbury River 1: human engineering 0.

Work starts on repairing the Brooklyn Bridge

Number 7 pier – the tricky one to get into place

Signal near the new bridge work

The elaborate connections between the pier and the span of the new bridge

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December 17, 2015

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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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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

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November 12, 2015

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Backyard birds, estuaries, Geology, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, waterways

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Old hands

I know I live on, walk on, paddle through, someone else’s country. Guringgai country, and sometimes Darug lands, since Berowra Creek, or so I read, is a boundary line between people of the coast and river people. Sometimes, I venture north of the Hawkesbury – Deerubbin – into Darkinjung country. I try hard to remember that I’m an uninvited guest in this land, and that I know next to nothing about it. Because it’s important to know what you don’t know, if you know what I mean.

But sometimes what you don’t know jumps out and smacks you in the eye. It happened out on the water, on Smith’s Creek, a couple of weeks ago.

I love the “road signs” of the waterways

Smith. It’s a joke name, isn’t it? The sort of name you use to check into a hotel for a dirty weekend with a person who isn’t the one you’re married to. A name white guys use to be anonymous. “Yes, I’m John Smith and so is my wife”.

I’m sure Smith’s Creek is named after a really very important Smith. After all, at one time at the turn of the twentieth century, Kuring-gai Chase – specifically the bit of bushland between Smith’s Creek and Cowan Creek – was considered a possible location for the capital of the new Commonwealth. Magnificent scenery and handy for getting back to Sydney, what? You have to wonder whether the sandstone escarpments of Kuring-gai National Park would have been quite such an amenable environment for roundabouts as Canberra. All in all, I’m very glad it didn’t happen. Aside from everything else, I don’t think I could handle a close encounter with Cory Barnardi at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning.

So, as I say, there I was in “Smith’s” Creek, blessedly free of conservative crusaders and, indeed, showing little sign of human life at all. In Apple Tree and Stingray Bay, the power boats were moored silently in rows like roosting birds. Nothing stirred.

Silent boats at dawn in Apple Tree Bay

Dawn stillness on Cowan Creek

Fog on the hillside

Looking back towards Berowra

Boat and water

Tree on sandstone

As I slipped with the tide towards Deerubbin, not a jetboat in sight, a wave of love passed over me for the sport of rugby. More specifically, a feeling of warmth for the thrilling final of the 2015 Rugby World Cup, broadcast to the sports fans of Australia at 2am the night before. What a fine influence sport is on the nation! How it improves the tone of the place! All those worn out rugby fans, tucked up in their beds, or snuggled down in their bunks, dreaming of triumph or of despair, but more to the point, not, as yet, starting up outboard motors.

Looking north towards the Hawkesbury

While the rugby fans were sleeping I paddled, more or less, back to Berowra, swaddled in fog that rolled down the valleys, smudging the pictures of my weekly sea eagle (curse it). They slumbered on as I turned the corner into Smith’s Creek following the great big signs on the shoreline, papped some peeved looking cormorants, tried and failed to see any sign of rays in the sands of Stingray Bay. In the stillness, I felt as if I was in a dream myself as I passed along sandstone cliffwalls, rippled and rainbowed, that slide down and down into the bottle green water, and beneath the smooth-barked gums that butt their way into solid rock a metre or two above a tideline line of oystershells.

Peeved pied cormorants

“Smith’s” creek on the day after the rugby final

The sports lovers were still sleeping when I had my magic moment – the one you wait for every trip – when moon and raptor met in the bright morning light. So for all their shiny cruisers and thrumming engines, the rugby fans would have been no good to me at all if Egg the ancient kayak had drifted away, as it very nearly did, while I tried to find that damn whistling kite in what seems, through a zoom lens, like a very very big sky. That would have been me, stranded in sparkling knee-deep water, with a ten k swim through the bobbing jellyfish, all the way home.

Whistling kite and moon

Having a rest in the shallows of Smith’s Creek

Jellyfish and photographer

It wasn’t until I got back and uploaded my photos that I saw, in the corner of a picture, the ochre hand prints on the golden rock. Who put them there and when? I really don’t know. Maybe someone not so long ago – the indigenous rangers of Guringgai take loads of school kids out to see the hundreds of carvings and paintings that are all over the park. I bet a bit of print making happens here and there. Could it be one of the people of West Head slain by smallpox – no accident it seems – just a few years after the convicts arrived? Surely not. Someone in the time in-between, making their mark on country. Still here, though many people were forced far away, as far as Yorta Yorta country, on the borders of Victoria.

I just don’t know. Those hands told me, at least, to remember that I don’t.

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October 26, 2015

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

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Of gods and map readers

I’m running out of map!

It’s not a real cartographic apocalypse – a Ken Loach-influenced Dr Who episode in which all the world’s maps are stolen away by some evil alien civilisation heavily invested in NavMan shares. But after a year with my canoe, there’s not much unexplored territory on this part of the Hawkesbury. I’ve nearly done with the alchemy of my Saturdays: transmuting ink on paper into trees and water and mist.

White bellied sea eagle flying through the mist

Milson’s Island, escarpments behind lit up by the dawn

Near Marramarra Creek

Misty trees in Muogamarra

Tinny in the morning mist off Bar Island

Looking up the Hawkesbury River

Maybe it’s my fading memories, but as I paddled just after dawn from Deerubbin to Kimmerikong Creek, I kept thinking of the west coast of Scotland. Something about morning fog: the sea eagles appearing and vanishing; mist spilling over the ridgelines and pouring down the slopes like an evanescent avalanche.

I remember my first view of Glen Coe through the bus window, RB naming each hill as we passed. What a gift, I thought, to know a place like this so very well.

Glen Orchy hills from Rannoch Moor

Buachaille Etive Mor in Glen Coe

Aonach Eagach

Peanmeanach from An Stac

Loch Lomond

Peanmeanach

The Cuillin on Skye from Arasaig

I was at a disadvantage this Saturday: I forgot my map, carefully folded into its extra large, double-sealed “Hercules” zip lock bag and left on the kitchen table. Google Earth is one of those things that prove we really do live in the future. And RB is always complaining about how rubbish Australian mapmakers are compared to the unsurpassable Ordinance Survey. Even so, I still think maps make us into gods.

With a map you know what’s going to happen next: what’s beyond the next hill or around the next corner. Geological maps and navigational charts are even better – you see into the depths of ocean or stare right through the surface of the earth. Short of being an X Man with laser eyes or clairvoyant powers, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

If you’re going to claim someone’s country or rewrite its history, of course, a map is a magnificent weapon.

Bar Island

Great Cormorant near Bar Island

The whistling kite of Bar Island

Of course, the untraversed parts of the map are the tricky ones, a little bit too far away from a put-in, further than the old easy jaunts. So it’s through known country to the unknown: past the Whirlpool of Death and Bar Island’s grumpy whistling kite, beyond the verdant urine-fertilised fields of warrigal greens at Back Beaches, though not quite as far as Ant Hill Point (saving that excitement for a really slow weekend). Just when you feel you are truly in the wilderness, with only cormorants for company, you turn a corner and there’s a line of houses that look like they’ve been helicoptered in from deepest suburbia. I half expected to hear a solar powered leaf blower or hedge trimmer.

Just across the other side of Berowra Creek, Muogamarra Nature Reserve is deliberately kept something of a secret. It’s only open to the public six weekends of the year, in early spring. There is a field station there, and in the water of Kimmerikong Bay scientists have been testing those Qx resistant oysters I regaled you about a couple of months back. The reserve was originally declared in the 1930s to protect the many rock carvings, hand stencils, scarred trees, middens and grinding grooves there: this is a landscape long and intimately known. However, I guess National Parks are trying to stop this particularly lovely part of Hawkesbury sandstone with its 14 mammal species (including tiger quolls!), 900 plant species and 140 varieties of birds from being “known” in a biblical sense; that is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

Threatening sign

Grey spider flower

Boronias of some sort

Isopogon

Some sort of leptospermum

Red spider flower

I hear that Cowan, the town that sits on the edge of Muogamarra, had a crime-wave a while ago. Since no-one locks their cars, a street’s worth of gps’s disappeared in a single night. A sign was put up in the window the general store: if all the missing devices turned up outside the community hall there’d be no need to call the police. Everyone got their Tom Toms back. This story gives you a hint of how the people of Cowan might view the official regulations preserving the sanctity of Muogamarra. Since I was an incomer from Berowra, a good six kilometres away, however, I figured I was safer keeping my feet in my canoe as I wound my way through down Kimmerikong Creek, deep into the reserve.

The creek, looping from the cliffside on one side of the valley to the escarpment on the other, looks nothing like it does on the map, but exactly as it does from space, the shroud of mysterious grey mangroves slowly falling back as you paddle upriver, exposing the glint of the creek to a satellite’s view.

Mangroves at the base of Kimmerikong Bay

Grey mangroves again – or are they river mangroves

New muddy baby mangroves

Grey mangroves and the northern side of the Kimmerikong Creek

Bottom of the cliffside in Kimmerikong Creek

Grey mangroves at half tide

Google Earth may have imaged the mangroves of Kimmerikong Creek to its satisfaction but I know I haven’t captured it to mine. Somehow my wan photographs of these flooded forests fail to catch the sense of invisible ferment, mysteries hidden between the hoary tree trunks and their reflection, the hush that hints at unknown things slowly emerging. I imagine a wading Ent, striding and squelching towards me through the mire, hairy-legged with pneumatophores and flanked by an bevy of miniscule leaping fish, wearing a National Parks and Wildlife uniform and demanding payment of that $3,000 dollar fine.

No Ents this time, though, and no bird photos either. I heard, I think, maybe 138 species of bird as I ducked and crashed through the overhanging branches, and didn’t see even one. Perhaps I need to get up even earlier – 4 am? 3 am? – to capture the mangrove’s magic, as The Goat the Wrote does in his stunningly beautiful photos. The stalwarts of the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic can paddle all night, so why can’t I? 111 kilometres in a one day – with that kind of stamina the folds of the map would open up like a flower. Ant Hill Point here I come!

I’ll have to work on it. This time there was no bonk, but the pied cormorants of Milson’s Passage looked on pityingly as I swirled downriver through the tidal race, kermit-armed, back home to my plans and my maps.

Inquisitive look from a little pied cormorant

The way back to Milson’s Passage

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October 4, 2015

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anthropocene, Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, Waste, waterways

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Encounters with eagles

May I present this week’s sea eagle?

Sea eagle and a view of Budgewoi Lake

Sea eagle retreating to a pole to eat its fish

As yet on my estuarine adventures, I haven’t seen a score of sea-eagles on a single morning (although I can imagine a battalion of them, flying in formation), but an encounter with an eagle has become as much a regular feature of my kayaking expeditions as the ubiquitous white-faced heron. Those cryptic little passerines in the riverside scrub are hard to spot even if you’re not short sighted and half deaf. So three cheers for the white-bellied sea eagle “large and conspicuous” “easily sighted when… soaring… in search of prey“. Haliaeetus leucogaster, you are the middle aged canoeist’s friend.

There was the eagle we saw battling it out with a pair of whistling kites over fishing rights on a fabulous family excursion across the Hawkesbury from Brooklyn, across the surf-line and up the Patonga River. According to Wikipedia, sea eagles harass smaller raptors like kites in hopes of stealing their prey. Not today, Josephine. This eagle was bested by the lowly kite, unwilling to relinquish a top notch fishing spot. I need to listen to my own advice to my students – don’t believe Wikipedia!

Sea eagle about to launch

Sea eagle soaring in for fish

Whistling kite defending its ground

White bellied sea eagle beats a retreat

Whistling kite aka archaeopteryx

Whistling kite coming in for the kill

Whistling kite hunting in Patonga Creek

An eagle even made a guest appearance on a modest little paddle down the end of our street. This was one mellow raptor, its apparent indifference to poorly coordinated amateur photographers splashing around trying to get a good shot belying its rep as a “shy and easily disturbed species“. Ruth, my companion on the water that day, had seen a sea eagle, earlier, on the very same bare branch, while bushwalking along the ridge above. Same bird or just a popular perch?

Sea eagle at Berowra Creek

An eagle eye

Casuarina forest on the edge of the salt marsh on Berowra Creek

Berowra Creek in morning mist

Board walk through the saltmarsh near Berowra Creek

Pied cormorant about to be eaten by a shark

Since the rule for my stolen Saturday morning paddles is no more than half an hour in the car, I’ve frequently had this very thought as I spot yet another sea eagle. Same bird? Am I being stalked by just one glorious if persistent raptor who’s somehow taken a fancy to my little craft, charmed perhaps by its avian-friendly name? Or is the Hawkesbury awash with sea eagles?

Even the Department of Environment in its definitive run down on Haliaeetus leucogaster doesn’t seem super sure. Their guesstimate of 500 pairs across the whole country is based on a one for every 40 kilometre of Australian coastline would pretty much mean that all the eagles in my photos are the same dude (or dudette – the females are larger but I find it’s kind of hard to tell if a bird is small or if it’s just far away).

Either way, I’m 100% sure this week’s eagle is a new one, since I saw it at the start of a paddle down Wallarah Creek, seventy ks north of here. The creek wends its quiet way through bushland past the Wyong North sewage treatment plant to Budgewoi Lake. What with my burgeoning interest in taking blurry pictures of distant bird-life, it seems I will be spending more and more time hanging around sewage farms – they seem to be the go-to venue for the would-be twitcher.

White-bellied sea eagle struggling with a supersized meal

The Budgewoi eagles seem a bit more coy than the Berowra locals, as you can tell from this dodgy pic on my maxed out zoom. Or maybe it’s just that this sea-eagle didn’t want to share her supersized snack.

Which, after observing the consequences of fraternisation with humans for other birds I saw on my way up Wallarah Creek, is probably a good thing.

Pied cormorant strangled by a fishing line

Female australasian darter tangled up in fishing line

Up until recently, it was thought that carelessly discarded bait, hooks and line were the big killers of waterbirds, and there have been some efforts made to make sure fisherfolk dispose of their scraps in the rubbish rather than leaving them lying around – not such a big ask really. Some have even argued for the use of biodegradable line and hooks that will rust away (eventually).

But efforts to get fishermen to clean up their act have had surprisingly little impact on the number of waterbirds being injured or killed by fishing tackle. In fact, research by academics and wildlife rescue organisations in South Australia and New South Wales suggest that the vast majority of birds that get entangled or hooked – often pelicans, but also plovers, gulls and stilts – get caught up when they are close to people actually fishing.

After my trip up Wallarah Creek I can see why. As I passed riverfront houses with their landing slips and jetties I saw pelicans lounging on back lawns and an excited egret being thrown small fry by a local. Even the striated heron, normally shy, flew off in the direction of human habitation, not the other way. The birds around here are familiar with humans, their tinnies, their by-catch and, unfortunately, their fishing lines.

Greater egret coming in to land

Greater Egret hunting in Budgewoi Lake

Wallarah Creek

Striated heron

Casuarinas in Wallarah Creek

Scary paperbarks

Existential graffiti channelling the thoughts of the strangled cormorant

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Posted on

August 29, 2015

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anthropocene, Climate change, estuaries, kayaking, national parks, natural history, predation, waterways

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Broken Bay at low ebb

Oyster leases exposed at low tide

Last weekend I decided to explore the lower reaches of Mooney Mooney Creek from its meeting point with the Hawkesbury, riding on a rising tide. After my spooky solo paddles in Mangrove Creek, I had a hankering for the open horizon and a bit of human life around me. From my put-in at Deerubbin Reserve beside the freeway, and all the way round Spectacle Island, a nature reserve in the mouth of the creek, the constant hum of the traffic and the echoing rumble of trains crossing Brooklyn Bridge remind you that “civilisation” isn’t far away.

Freeway bridge at first light

Crepuscuar rays over Spectacle Island

Brooklyn Bridge in dawn light

The shore of Spectacle Island

Under the freeway bridge

White-faced heron and crabby breakfast

Low tide at Mooney Mooney Creek means mud and oyster leases. The lingering blue haze from last week’s hazard reduction burns descended on the poles and frames, forlorn in the shallows, blurring them into beautiful abstracts.

The story of oyster farming in the Hawkesbury in recent times is a sad one, full of strange historical ironies.

People have been harvesting shellfish from the shores of the river for a very very long time and Sydney rock oyster has been farmed in Broken Bay since the 1880s. In those days oysters were dredged from the estuary floor and after the meat was eaten, the shells, along with those from ancient middens, were burnt to make lime for mortar.

Rocky shores of Brisbane Water National Park

Oysters on the beach in Brisbane Water National Park

Oysters upstream in Mooney Mooney Creek

But in 2004, after a hundred years of farming oysters here, Qx disease hit the Hawkesbury.

The “Q” in the name stands for Queensland. The Sunshine State produces a 10th of the oyster harvest it did in the nineteenth century, thanks to Qx and to the oyster-infesting mudworm (introduced from New Zealand in the 1880s along with imports of oyster spat). The “x” was a scientific shorthand for “what the hell is this anyway? We really don’t know”. Since then, researchers have figured out that Qx is caused by Marteilia sydneyi, a single-celled organism that during the summer infects oysters, causing them not just to slowly starve to death, but also to reabsorb their own gonads (nasty!). The parasite then releases spores that cycle their way through a polychaete worm, Nephtys australiensis, in the winter, before reinfecting the oysters the following season.

M. sydneyi isn’t always the kiss of death. The parasite is found in estuaries all along the coast of NSW and Queensland, even in “low risk” areas where Sydney rock oysters are still being commercially grown. Environmental stress, it seems, triggers outbreaks of Qx and surprisingly few wild Sydney rock oysters, the ones I saw lining the rocky shores of Mooney Mooney Creek, die from Qx. Which is good, if mysterious, news.

So, facing of losses of over 90% of the harvest, what could save the oyster industry in the Hawkesbury?

It was noxious pest to the rescue.

The Pacific oyster, farmed in Japan for centuries, was smuggled into Port Stephens in the eighties and spread quickly through the intertidal zones of New South Wales. It’s a fecund and fast growing bivalve, planktonic eggs and larvae travelling far and wide, crowding, outgrowing, and sometimes settling on and smothering native rock oysters. A “selfish shellfish”, in the words of one inspired Tasmanian subeditor.

The very qualities that have made the Pacific oyster such a hateful invader came to the rescue of the Hawkesbury farmers in 2005. A process for producing sterile “triploid” Pacific oysters had been developed in North America in the 1980s, with the aim of pumping out meatier shellfish fast. When fertility mean spawning 40 million eggs in a season (not to mention changing sex several times over a lifetime) avoiding reproduction saves a lot of energy.

Local farmers restocked with these “triploid” Pacific oysters. As well as being immune to Qx, they were ready to harvest in less than two years compared to the three and a half years it takes rock oysters to reach the table. The new “tamed” Pacific oysters took the Hawkesbury by storm.

And then in 2013 disease struck again. Millions of oysters were wiped out overnight by a virus that affected Pacific oysters and Pacific oysters alone.

Like the oyster itself, the scientifically spawned sterile “triploids”, and indeed the settlers that farm them, “oyster herpes” or POMS (Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome), first seen in France in the late noughties, had circled the globe to Broken Bay.

Only three oyster farming businesses are still going in the Hawkesbury these days, hanging on for scant supplies of Qx resistant rock oyster spat, first found amongst the survivors of the Georges’ River outbreak in the mid 1990s.

Right now, the derelict oyster farms are mostly places for posses of pied cormorants to hang out.

Pied cormorant

Pied cormorants on an oyster lease

Looking up past Snake Island to the middle reaches of Mooney Mooney Creek

Knackered looking Eastern Curlew

Snake Island

Rock garden in Brisbane Water National Park

Pelican

Rock warbler

But there’s still plenty of life to be found at Mooney Mooney at low water: globe trotters like the eastern curlew, exhausted after a long flight south, and locals like the rock warbler that only lives on Sydney sandstone, compensating for its drab colours and homebody ways with a goth-style nest of grass and spider webs it hangs in the darkness of caves and crevices. And I clocked a new heron record – twenty at least, catching crabs in the mud of low tide.

White faced heron in front of Brooklyn Bridge

References

Michael C Dove, John A Nell, Stephen Mcorrie and Wayne A O’Connor “Assessment of Qx and Winter Mortality Disease Resistance of Mass Selected Sydney Rock Oysters” Journal of Shellfish Research 32(3) 681-87 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2983/035.032.0309

Wayne A O’Connor and Michael C Dove “The changing face of Oyster Culture in New South Wales, Australia” Journal of Shellfish Research, Vol. 28, No. 4, 803–811, 2009.

J.A. Nell “The history of oyster farming in Australia” Marine Fisheries Review 63(3), 14-25

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August 23, 2015

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kayaking, national parks, waterways

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Paper roads, private rivers

Sea eagle at Mangrove Creek

It’s been a long time since I have had a close encounter with a tinny. Perhaps it’s being on the river for the winter sunrise, but I’ve been finding myself all alone on the water for weeks now.

Which is mostly – in fact, almost entirely – a good thing. But rattling down the road to Mangrove Creek last weekend, I began to have doubts. Could I hear the sound of duelling banjos in the distance? Was I about to make an unplanned appearance in the sequel to Deliverance? (This is not a film to select as a fundraiser for your local canoeing club, by the way)

What was it that was freaking me out? Was it the bags slung over the heads of the traffic lights as I crossed an abandoned stretch of the Pacific Highway? The rubble-flanked track plunging down the escarpment into the rainforest, a lyrebird breaking cover the only thing on the road for miles around? The isolated tumbledown houses, walled in by rusted-out cars and half-drowned boats? The total lack of mobile coverage? Or the large signs at every turnoff: “Private property! Keep out, city slickers, or you WILL be disembowelled!”

Yep, that’s it: that nasty feeling that I might be chased, possibly at gunpoint, off someone’s private land. This particular stretch of river – owned by the Crown like most tidal waterways, surrounded on all sides by national parks and serviced by public roads – is particularly tricky to access. Glenworth Valley, for instance, a patch of acreage between Popran Creek and the National Park of the same name, offers pony riding, quad bikes and guided kayak tours to cashed up visitors (and very nice they are too, I’m sure). But if you want to launch your own craft from there that’ll be $50, thank you very much. Maybe as a nation-building project we should institute publicly funded zip lines so kayakers can hurtle directly from the towering if unprofitable sandstone rockfaces in the national parks to the miles and miles of marketable creeks below.

Casuarinas besides Cabbage Tree Creek, a tributary of Popran

Gnarled vine in a secret valley by Cabbage Tree Creek

Back to Popran Creek

Almost decent picture of a shy azure kingfisher

Alien spores.

Mysterious cutting. Possibly paid for by your $50 launch fee.

It’s not getting any better, either, in NSW anyway. The current state government is selling off thousands of Crown roads – paper roads as they’re sometimes called, since they exist mostly on maps – sketchy unformed tracks or riverside reserves, sometimes illegally fenced off, across private land. But flimsy and flyaway as they might sound, paper roads are routes in to rivers and other wild places to anglers, bushwalkers and kayakers. And they’re being erased from the map, to the faraway ker-ching of cash registers. Perhaps that was the noise I heard in the distance, not red-necks with banjos, after all.

Possibly because Shooters and Fishers’ Party hold two seats in the NSW Upper House, anglers get a once-over at the Crown roads put up for sale before they go. Perhaps we need to set up a Canoeists, Backpackers and Assorted Outdoor Types With No Aspirations to Kill Things Party to get a gander too…. Mmmm, thinking about it, maybe the CBAOTNAKT already exists…

Contractual obligation white-faced heron in the mist on Mangrove Creek

But, without the comforting presence of my local CBAOTNAKT Member of Parliament in a kayak beside me, I was distinctly on edge last Sunday as I parked up next to a semi-collapsed shed largely supported by a jumble of discarded oil cans, non-functional bicycles and rolls of ancient carpet ideal for concealing the bodies of trespassers. Did this private dump signify total indifference or was it the rural property owner’s equivalent of the pile of discarded undergarments on the bedroom floor, mess in a place so private you expect no other eyes on it at all? With the valley under a blanket of mist, I hoped I wouldn’t find out.

Stumbling on an apparently abandoned riverside caravan park in the fog didn’t reassure me either. We all know desolate motels and the like are the optimal spot for a horror movie – leaving aside sororities full of nubile sophomores, of course (I think I’m fairly safe on that front). There was a spooky stillness about the place.

And then some ducks took off with a clatter and the channel changed. A pair of kingfishers chased each other, squeaking and swerving in and out of the mangroves’ eves and old blokes in shorts appeared out of kitchen doors, morning coffee in hand, to have a natter and a tinker with the outboard.

I love to watch the day unfurl from its cocoon of mist. A silence shared with a white-bellied sea eagle; the hunting herons and the whirling swallows apparitions in the cloud. Then the fog parts and the first wattle-blossom catches in the morning light. Before you know it, the blue river is dazzling and it’s time to go home.

White-bellied sea eagle fluffed up in the morning mist

White-faced heron making its exist

Welcome swallow and ghost

Early wattle on Mangrove Creek

The last of the mist rising off Mangrove Creek.

As I paddled the last few hundred metres to the car, I saw figures on the shore, and my heart sank. I don’t know I was more afraid of aggrieved landowners demanding a handful of cash or a mob of ferals threatening to slash my tyres.

It turned out to be a trio of local teenage boys not old enough to have a licence, filling in their long, long, long country Sunday with a walk along the river. They were much more sheepish to find an adult in their hangout zone than I was to be there. And I remembered: when you’re a kid, you have no private property – everything belongs to someone else.

View up Popran Creek, towards the private property.

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July 29, 2015

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Animal communication, anthropocene, Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, natural history, waterways

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Nine herons hunting

Striated heron fishing

Striated heron enjoying the happy moment of having caught something

Striated heron moving out of the puddle to eat its crabby prey

Nine herons hunting… could it be the beginning of a carol for Christmas-in-July? Not a bad sound track, perhaps, for a paddle on a wintry 25th down Mooney Mooney Creek.

There were (roundabout) eight cormorants, some of them cacking….

Oyster leases in Mooney Mooney Creek

Pied cormorant telling me what it thinks of being stalked by a kayaker with a camera

… three posing pelicans

… two eagles soaring

White bellied sea eagle

Wedge tailed eagle soaring

Wedgetailed eagle showing wedgie tail

A bit of colour and uplifted wings

And a kingfisher in a mangrove tree (no photo, naturally).

The sacred kingfisher was probably in this picture of mist rising on Pile Creek though it’s hard to say

But realistically, I could only get all the way through the twelve days of anti-Christmas by including the many invisible mud-loving animals that all those herons were stalking. And I’m not quite sure if I have the alliterative and euphonious verbs to use for them. Twelve isopods…. idling? Eleven worms a-wobbling? Ten crustaceans crawling?

First white-faced heron for the day… look harder!

Even if it can’t offer swans a-swimming or geese a-laying, Mooney Mooney does pretty well for both visible and invisible animals, considering how damn noisy it is.

I first started dreaming about paddling this creek as we swooped above it, across the lofty freeway bridge. It’s a gorgeous structure, if you are partial to well-formed concrete: elegantly curved, arching vertiginously above the treetops of Brisbane Water National Park. An endless stream of cars and semis cross the valley on the F1, the main route north from Sydney, on the tallest road bridge in Australia, the still water 75 metres below.

Mooney Mooney Bridge – a beautiful bit of concrete

Mist on Mooney Mooney Creek on an earlier jaunt

The Pacific Highway, looping its way down to its own modest crossing point, has plenty of traffic too: bikers switchbacking their way up the old road. This Saturday, I didn’t see a soul in three hours on the river, but for a mile or more I could hear the hiss of compression brakes and the revving of engines.

And yet, if I had to pick a place, of all the waterways I’ve paddled so far, to find and fail to take a picture of a kingfisher, this rowdy river is the one I’d choose. The traffic noise seems to keep the humans at bay, but not the herons. What’s going on with the wildlife around here?

Looking back towards the Old Pacific Highway bridge

There’s plenty of evidence that traffic noise bothers birds. I particularly like a recent experiment where researchers planted speakers in a long line to create a phantom road. That’s just what the freeway feels like from Mooney Mooney Creek – a road you can hear all over but mostly can’t quite see. The phantom road, with its invisible traffic masking mating and alarm calls and the sound of approaching predators, cut numbers by a quarter, and drove two species away from the area entirely.

Some cope better than others. High pitched songs are less likely to be blocked out by the roar of traffic, and so squeaky voiced birds are more likely to hang around in noisy places. Species with a little vocal versatility often start to sing a bit higher, a little slower or in purer tones, just to be heard.

If you’re carnivorous, being able to hear the critters scuttling around in the bushes is a boon. Seeds and nectar are less likely to make a break for it, so background noise seems to be less of a big deal for the plant-eaters. Also, birds that feed on the ground seem to mind the noise less – perhaps there’s more obstacles between them and the din.

Everyone agrees that in loud places, birds spend more time on the alert for predators – a high maintenance lifestyle. That said, some nest-robbers are also put off by the rumble of traffic, so for some species, chicks hatching in noisy nests have a better chance of survival. If you can handle the decibels, you may have a competitive advantage.

What does all this tell me about the plentiful birdlife of Mooney Mooney Creek? Thinking about it, I saw high-pitched squeakers, mud-hugging stalkers and sharp-eyed hunters (see, I’m getting into the swing of this avian carol singing thing!) I’m guessing striated herons don’t echolocate for crabs. This white-faced pair were happy to ignore not just the distant thunder of trucks but the much more immediate annoyance of a nosy canoeist with a camera.

“The mud is like a Christmas tree”, my eight year old said, hearing the story of my low-tide adventures, “and the bird were excited to find all their presents”.

When the eating is this good, it seems, the soundtrack scarcely matters.

WFH Pair back hunting in focus end one crop

WF Herons one in front of other still crop

References

Francis, C.D. (2015) “Vocal traits and diet explain avian sensitivity to anthropogenic noise” Global Change Biology 21(5), 1809-1820

Francis, CD and Jesse R Barber (2013). A framework for understanding noise impacts on wildlife: an urgent conservation priority. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 305–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/120183

Francis, CD, Ortega, C and Cruz, A. (2009) “Noise Pollution changes avian communities and species interactions” (2009) Current Biology 19(16) pp.1415-19

, , , , Published 6 November 2013. Royal society proceedings B DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2290

Patricelli, Gail L. and Jessica L. Blickley (2006) “Avian communication in urban noise: causes and consequences of vocal adjustment” from The Auk 123(3): 639-49

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Posted on

July 20, 2015

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

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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.