Into the matrix

Gerogone profile distance for crop wide

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

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

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

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

Silver eye and flower squarer

Silvereye in pittosporum

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

Satin bowerbird at drink with wattlebird good crop

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

Satin bowerbird scaring off little wattlebird crop larger.jpg

And it’s on!

Kooka and wattlebird 2 crop and amend

Just before the wattlebird bit the kookaburra on the bum!

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

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

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

Wattlebird on nest in banana tree mid

Female wattlebird incubating eggs in our banana tree

Wattlebird tail and banana crop

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

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

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

Sparrowhawk light on beak crop

Collared sparrowhawk on the look-out for prey

References

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

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

 

Blue eyes and biteys

Brown cuckoo dove eye

The glamorous eye of the brown cuckoo-dove

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

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

Cuckoo dove looking back from water crop

Brown cuckoo-dove quenching its thirst in our bird bath

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

Cuckoo dove long tail amend

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

Cuckoo pair grooming 2 amended cropped

A female brown cuckoo-dove being groomed by its mate

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

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

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

Gorgeous eye closeup for amend

The blue eyes of the brown cuckoo-dove

Additional references

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

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

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

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

Sex, nests and dog fighting

Sparrowhawk from behind quite good crop

Adult collared sparrowhawk thinking about reproducing

The sparrowhawks are back!  And they’re ready to make babies.  How do I know?… well (ahem)… I’ve been watching. But not taking photos. No, that would be weird.

That said, I have captured the occasional intimate post-coital moment. It seems raptors don’t have a cigarette after coupling – they gnaw on raw flesh and collect sticks.  All in all, probably healthier options.

Pair Sparrowhawk pair square B&W

Post-coital moment.  Larger female (left) having a snack, male twig hunting.

Watching the pair collecting twigs to renovate the nest in the neighbour’s pine tree has been quite entertaining.  Collared sparrowhawks are such poised and elegant birds.  But with their finely built frame and long delicate claws they’re not natural construction workers.  Their technique seems to be to find some dead branches and leap awkwardly around on them hoping for the best, with a bit of light gnawing thrown in for good measure.

Sparrowhawk biting leaping on twigs crop

Sparrowhawk trying to create bits and pieces of stick for a nest

And whatever the sparrowhawks are trying to do, the pied currawongs are hanging around trying to stop them doing it.

It didn’t really surprise me to see a gang of six or seven currawongs loitering threateningly while a sparrowhawk tried to pluck and eat their breakfast.  I’ve seen the hawks move from tree to tree two or three times trying to get a few minutes without harassment.  But why would currawongs want to disrupt nest building? Especially when I’m pretty sure at least one or two of them got take-away chick from that very same nest last summer.

Nevertheless, the sparrowhawks have persisted, chasing off the currawongs whenever they can and fleeing them when necessary.  Aerial dogfights are a regular feature around here at the moment –  the hawks chasing away cockies and king parrots;  currawongs divebombing magpies and hawks; and of course me legging it after everything feathered with my camera. Not that the sparrowhawks seem to care about the activities of the humans down below.  All the critical action is happening in the canopy or the sky.

Sparrowhawk with twig stretched foot crop sharper crop

Collared sparrowhawk with twig heading back to do some nest renovation

More sparrowhawk stories

Death and sibling rivalry

Our sparrowhawk summer

Battle of the baby birds

Welcome back, beautiful stranger

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks

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.

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

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.

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).

Juvenile koel calling long

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).

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

Skink with giant cockroach crop

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

Wildlife reboot: birds 2.0

Another January, and another trip to Ganguddy, on the western site of Wollemi National Park.  Same marvellous geology, same refreshing dam water, same hot weather.

But some things were different this year.  After the stupendously dry winter, the eucalypt forest was parched, the undergrowth sparse and the leptospermum flowers of last year’s visit few and far between.  We found a patch of sphagnum moss perched in a bowl of sandstone boulders so dry it crunched underfoot.

A “green” satin bowerbird panting in the heat

We spotted plenty of lizards, and the diggers were out in force – lyrebirds wandering through the camp as they tried to scratching their way down to moisture and a wombat turning up to twerk on a picnic bench.  But up in “kingfisher alley”, just before the Cudgegong River disappears into the reed beds, there were fewer blue and green flashes by the water.

Around the camp site, the bowerbirds and treecreepers panted in the heat.  Apart from the ubiquitous reed warblers, there seemed fewer birds altogether.  No sign of the friarbird teenagers of last year, and even the baby swamp hens seemed thin on the ground.

You have to wonder what it takes to change ecosystems irrevocably.  How many dry winters before the old inhabitants decide living and breeding here is just too tricky?  And who would move in to fill their place?

Back at Berowra after the trip, there are changes in the garden too… surprising ones.

We knew we’d be losing the sparrowhawks soon enough, but the family has dispersed in an unexpected orderThe adults disappeared off the scene weeks ago, and by the time we made it home with our ridiculously overloaded vehicle and small and ancient fleet of boats, the siblings had parted too.  There’s just one young’un now.  He seems lonely.

There’s a constant plaintive calling from the trees out back, that seems to intensify when he has prey on hand.  I’m not quite sure if he’s warning his imaginary sibling off or calling him to come and share a meal.

And that’s not the only shift in the soundscape around here.  The sparrowhawks have cut a swathe through the bird population on the premises.  Baby brushturkey numbers have fallen from previous plague proportions, noisy miners are few and far between and the “house” birds of yesteryear – red and little wattlebirds – are now just occasional visitors.

But as the numbers of resident raptors has dropped, a new set of critters have settled in.  Lewin’s honeyeaters which we’ve only seen once or twice in the backyard over the last seven years, have made our backyard their new home.  And we also appear to have acquired some brown thornbills, a raptor snack food if ever there was one.  And the local eastern spinebills, another tasty morsel for a sparrowhawk, are spending more time around here too.

The only explanation I have for the change of personnel is that the hawks have bumped the notoriously territorial wattlebirds, leaving the field open for new arrivals.

I’m pretty happy to have a new set of birds in the garden.  My dream scenario, I have to admit, would be to order up some songbirds that are a bit easier on the eye.  My birdwatching brother puts Lewin’s in a honeyeater “bin taxon” of pretty similar and drab looking birds it’s hardly worth distinguishing between.  Cruel, perhaps, but fairly accurate.

So, why not some new holland honeyeaters, for instance – gorgeous looking locals.  Or (still, my beating heart!) what about some pardelotes?  Just one or two?

On the other hand, it’s possible that all the vibrantly coloured small birds in the neighbourhood have been made into multicoloured meals over the past three months by our family of raptors.  After all, there’s got to be some evolutionary reason for all those SBBs*.

*note: this is a throwaway remark absolutely unsupported by any science.

 

Previous posts about Ganguddy

A bit about Ganguddy’s history and geology – and a little Tim Low on the side

Snakes versus whining teenagers – last year at Ganguddy

 

More on our sparrowhawk summer

Death and sibling rivalry

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

Baby brush turkeys versus nestling sparrowhawks… the battle of the backyard baby birds

The collared sparrowhawks return to our backyard… or are they brown goshawks?

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks… and a beautiful white goshawk visits the washing line

 

Further reading

Stephen Garnett, Donald Franklin, Glenn Ehmke, Jeremy VanDerWal, Lauren Hodgson, Chris Pavey, April Reside, Justin Welbergen, Stuart Butchart, Genevieve Perkins and Stephen Williams (2013) Climate change adaptation strategies for Australian birds: Final Report, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility

Office of Environment and Heritage, Premier’s Department (2011) New South Wales Climate Impact Profile Technical Report: Potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity

Death & sibling rivalry

Both birds eyes crop better again

The sibling sparrowhawks in their favourite tree… in my backyard!

It’s happened. Our babies, only three weeks or so out of the nest, are now out there in the big wide world, killing for themselves.  It brings a tear to your eye.

Distant with second bird flying crop

Keeping an eye on little brother or sister

But it’s not all cheery dismemberment:  there’s trouble in the nest.  The siblings to have an uneasy relationship.  I often see them perched on adjacent branches, and when they’re further apart they call out to each other every now and then.  And when one takes off to hunt, the other often falls into line, disappearing suddenly in a simultaneous dive.

But there’s also a certain amount of what might be described in human siblings as petty jealousy.

Yesterday I stood on a chair on the deck for an hour watching one of the sibs engage in  a comprehensive preening session / extended tai chi practice.  I wonder whether this serious self-care might have been the consequence of getting tangled up in one of the humungous org spiders webs stretched out between the trees to catch dragonflies, cicadas and, for the really ambitious arachnid, a passing sparrowhawk.

Preening headless profile tail out crop b&w

… and the headless sparrowhawk

I found the “revenge of the headless raptor” impressive, but his nestmate, looking on from a high branch, seemed rather unimpressed.

Distant top brother looking down b&w

Jeering at silly sibling

But both martial arts and sneering were set aside when the fledgling in the upper branches spotted something tasty beyond the neighbour’s yard.

Juvenile sparrowhawk wings raised square

I’m off…

There was a simultaneous stoop, and then a fracas in the jungle at the bottom of the garden.

White cheeked honeyeater crop

Dinner… a white cheeked honeyeater I prepared earlier

I don’t think the squawking was the work of dinner – an unfortunate white-cheeked honeyeater (rarely seen in our yard.  I wonder why…).  I reckon the ring-ding battle was between the sibs.

The winner landed, very conveniently for me, right next to my washing line, showing the total indifference to human proximity that seems to characterize most young raptors.

 

Sparrowhawk profile left with untouched prey

The lucky sibling with significantly less lucky white cheeked honeyeater

This diffidence did not extend to the presence of little brother or sister though.

Juvenile looking behind for rival

Keeping an eye out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juvenile with head turned mouth open amended

 

Just a few moments after the winner landed with their prize, there was another skirmish.  Luck favours the prepared, and this youngster was in position, with wings spread out protectively around the prey like a sort of meat umbrella. Ew, what a nasty image.

The hungry one had another go, and to be honest, I’m not really sure who was successful, since neither juvenile has any distinctive marks (like a scar over one eye or a dragon tattoo or anything) I am completely unable to tell them apart.

Juvenile plucking the prey

Settling in for a good plucking

Anyway, someone had a lovely meal of raw songbird and someone sat nearby looking on and feeling sorry for themselves.

Sibling watching

Luckless sibling looking on at the feast

Nevermind, buddy.  I’m sure there’s be some tiny, tasty, rather slow birds on the menu for you sometime soon.

The backstory of the serial killers in our backyard…

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

Baby brush turkeys versus nestling sparrowhawks… the battle of the backyard baby birds

The collared sparrowhawks return to our backyard… or are they brown goshawks?

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks… and a beautiful white goshawk visits the washing line

Welcome back, beautiful stranger

Sparrowhawk square crop old

It shows a certain lack of character and imagination to be keen on raptors, but I can’t help it.  I love them anyway.  Even the whistling kites and white-bellied sea eagles I clock every single weekend out in my boat on the Hawkesbury give me enough of a thrill to  clog up my computer’s hard drive with a thousand pictures of them in every conceivable posture and mood.

So two years ago, when I caught this beauty in my backyard, I was beside myself with excitement.  It’s a collared sparrowhawk, one of three species of Acciper found in Australia, along with the very similar brown goshawk and the hauntingly beautiful grey goshawk.  So beautiful that on my one and only encounter with one (whilst pegging out the washing) my camera fainted and so in its barely conscious state was only capable of producing a groggy quasi-mystical image of the world’s only pure white raptor.

I know our beautiful visitor in 2015 was a sparrowhawk and not the very similar looking brown goshawk, having been schooled on the key differences.  Brown goshawks are slightly grumpier and more threatening looking, with a beetle brow and chunkier legs.  Both species, it is said, waggle their tail on landing, but the sparrowhawk does it a tiny bit more rapidly.  As my brother, a much more expert bird watcher than I am, points out, this has to be the most arcane and pointless advice for distinguishing two very similar looking birds.  “Sorry lads, the video of your tail waggling was slightly out of focus.  Can you just circle round and land side by side on that branch again?”

Collared sparrowhawks also have another feature – the absurdly long middle toe of the collared sparrowhawk, used to grip its prey while it systematically plucks them (starting at the vent) and then devours them.  It’s moments like these you’re grateful not to be a sparrow or a silvereye, isn’t it?

But is that enough to tell the difference between a goshawk and a sparrowhawk?  Both apparently have these long middle toes – the sparrowhawks’ toes are just longer and more delicate.

There are other differences too.  Goshawks have a rounded tail, and a smaller eye.  So is it welcome back stranger… or good to see you, lifer?

Both the collared sparrowhawk and the brown goshawk are widespread through their range in Australia and New Guinea – they can be found in arid areas as well as woodlands and suburbia.  They are one of the few raptors that will perch and hunt in gardens, as I saw today.  The fact that they’re partial to a snack on introduced birds like sparrows, starlings and newly hatched chickens (gulp!) may be one reason why they’re considered “of least concern” to people who worry about the current mass extinction event.

But still, they’re not exactly common. Numbers declined from the 1940s through to the 1980s thanks to DDT, although the effect of this insecticide – thinning the shells of eggs – seems to have been less dramatic for them than peregrines and some other raptors.  Loss of habitat for the small birds that sparrowhawks like to eat and competition from pied currawongs that will (somewhat implausibly to my mind) attack both adults and chicks are other threats.

It’s been a long couple of years since that last wonderful visit.

But over the last few days there’s been a new sound from the decrepit pine trees that stand (or should I say lean) between our place and our neighbours’.  At first I thought it was a whiny juvenile wattlebird begging for a feed – the call was a kind of feeble high pitched kik-kik-kik-kik.  And then I saw a creamy coloured bird with wide striped wings and a blunt head, superficially like the “green” satin bowerbirds that hang around here all year round scrounging off my chilli bushes and demolishing my bean plants.

But there’s something distinct and decisive about the way raptors fly.  I eventually got a good look as the bird chilled out in the trees, waiting to ambush passing little passerines, which they catch on the wing.  I’m really hoping they have a taste for noisy miners.

good sideways distant crop wide

These really are very low-key birds.  “Often lives unnoticed in mature-treed suburban parks and gardens” one ornithology site comments about sparrowhawks… “easily overlooked”.  Having spent quite a bit of today staring slightly hopelessly into the naked branches for an immobile, unconcerned and well camoflaged bird of prey I can confirm this.   “Trusting and approachable“, the Peregrine Trust’s turn of phrase for a collared sparrowhawk, seems like a slightly embarrassing description for a predator.

Sparrowhawk profile crop tighter still

A gorgeous profile on display.  One very chilled out bird.

The grumpy reputation of Brown Goshawk is apparently not just a consequence of their Resting Bitch Face.  They’re also apparently quite aggro around the nest.  True to form, sparrowhawks are said to be calmer.

Perhaps this parental behaviour will be the solution to my ID problem.  There’s a nest made of sticks high in the neighbour’s pine tree, a spot I saw the sparrowhawk returning to several times today.  If there’s anything better than grown up raptors in your backyard, it’s a clutch of baby raptors.

nest rop

Could this be a sparrowhawk nest?

A confluence of critters

dawn-small

Another sunrise, another paddle through a flooded river valley.  At Port Stephens the wide Karuah River meets the Myall as it meanders south, just behind the coastal dunes.

And where the water flowing from the network of wetlands and lagoons that is Myall Lakes joins the estuary, in a river delta protected from the destructive power of the Pacific waves, there’s Corrie Island.

A spot so fabulous for cautious amateur photographers in small and ancient boats, I circumnavigated it at the crack of dawn not once but twice over the silly season.  I may have been so exhausted I wept all over my Christmas crackers but it was worth it.

Just down the river from the RAMSAR protected wetlands at Myall Lakes, migratory birds that breed in the far north spend the arctic winters hanging out here.  I saw red knots (heads up: not very red in the non-breeding season) and grey tailed tattlers, far eastern curlews and bar tailed godwits.  In fact, I was treated to a bold dispay of the very barred tail of the bar tailed godwit, that tail that make the longest uninterrupted migration flight of any bird’s behind.

The eastern ospreys, in my previous experience elusive canopy lurkers, proved so indifferent to human proximity that I actually got bored with taking photos of them posing in the beautiful dawn light, and starting trying to snap the LBBs in the beachside brush, while the ospreys observed my inadequate efforts with golden eyes.

osprey-3-d-claws-crop

osprey-looking-at-me-crop-square

two-ospreys-2-square

A pair of eastern osprey?  The females are larger.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, here come the dolphins.

The famous pod of Port Stephens dolphins – well, the easterly, sociable estuarine pod, one of two quite distinct groups that lives in the harbour – swung by to check me out.  I stopped still in the swell, watching them case the beach. At one point the still water by the boat upwelled and the tip of a bottle nose appeared above the surface for just a second or two a couple of metres off the bow.

island-with-dolphin-longer-fatter

Enter a caption

A couple of mornings later, I was back, having rashly promised my birdwatching brother dolphins, ospreys and eagles.  No need for a refund: they arrived one after another, right on cue.

And in between boat trips, it wasn’t just overeating and board games either.  There was also watching the local bird life overeating.

A baby sitella not quite sure how to handle the festive gift of a caterpillar…

And an Australian hobby enjoying Christmas dinner with us, swooping in to a branch above our holiday rental for some yuletide disembowelling.

I think we’ll be back.

egg-on-the-beach-at-end-of-da

What’s inside the bird cage?

Not artichokes.

I spent all of last autumn dreaming of artichokes.

In the three years since my last bumper crop, which grew splendidly with no attention at all while we were half a world away, I have tried and failed to get more magnificent edible thistles towering over my veggie patch.

Our garden is a challenging environment for any seedling.  I suspect the sad fate of the last two generations of artichokes can be attributed to the deep gloom that descends on the yard around the time of the autumn equinox.  But there are other possible suspects in the frame…

Yes, rabbits.  My transition to the Mr McGregor, the homicidal carrot fancier in Peter Rabbit is now complete.  But so far I’ve avoided GBH with a shovel.  Instead I got me a fine flock of bird cages.

A budgie lover in Berowra must have had a mass break-out just before the last heavy rubbish day and I was the lucky beneficiary.

But my visions of bounty weren’t to be.  I’m not sure if some small but dextrous herbivore lifted up the tiny food hatch and sneaked in for a unappetising meal of baby thistles or if the artichokes lost the will to live in dank captivity.  On the upside, budgie cages are evidently great at keeping rabbits off your rocket.

Not strawberries

So, there are no artichokes in my bird cages.  And so far, there’s no strawberries either.

My other score from the last council cleanup was a load of aviary wire and some nice hardwood architraves.  A few bucks on hinges and I was able to put into place the final stage of my termite-assisted plan to reduce my erstwhile (and totally pointless) garden path into rotten timber. My aim: to grow strawberries under the flight path of the gate-that-used-to-be-a-bed.  Or more precisely, to grow strawberries for human rather than chicken consumption.

I was pretty happy the outcome of my chookhouse-tolerances joints, held together with an assortment of mixed screws from the jar at the back of the cupboard.

Thus far the chooks haven’t managed to break in but the strawberries seem somewhat oppressed by their location.  Every day is a bad hair day.  I’m hoping they’ll be ugly but productive but the signs don’t look good so far.

On the bright side, lazily throwing scratch mix over the gate has produce a little protected patch of green in the razed earth of the chook yard.  I’m not sure the strawberries enjoy the competition from wheatgrass, but the hens have a hippie feast every time I do the weeding.

Fewer chickens than there oughta be.

Sadly, on one bleak and rain drenched evening in the middle of winter, most of our hens weren’t in the birdcage either.  Only Cyan, bottom of the pecking order thanks to her gammy eye, and Treasure, broody as usual, were in Colditz, the predator proof cage, when a hungry fox came to visit.

Only one of the chooks that had been perched in the favoured roost, the potted fig tree, survived, a fairly run-of-the-mill Barnevelder whose name we could never quite remember.  After the slaughter, we renamed her Xena as a mark of her prowess in battle.  Bold and beautiful Cleo, curmudgeonly Snowball, at least 8 years old, feisty Morgan, shy but reliable Abby and inexpertly named Tigress all disappeared or were found in bits in the yard the next morning by the shellshocked RB.    Given the sad end of Shyla under similar circumstances at the same season the year before, you can only conclude we are poor chicken keepers and, frankly, very slow learners.

So now, come rain or shine, you’ll find our remaining hens locked up every night.  At the moment, it’s a lonely night for Xena, locked up in Palm Beach.  Her mum, Treasure, laid low by has some mysterious ailment, has been in the intensive care ward in the laundry, while one-reviled Cyan has now attained the pre-eminent position of queen of Colditz, adoptive mother to three new day-old chicks.

Fortunately, Xena can always rely on her playdates.  Just like next doors’ kids, the neighbours’ hens nip through gap in the fence and hang around outside waiting for our girls to be let out for the day.  They share a feed and if we’re lucky lay an egg or two on our side of the “magic portal” (to clarify: we get eggs from the chooks but sadly not the kids).

Three cheers for the return of stay-at-home scrumping!  Low-level food thievery without even leaving your own backyard.

And no baby brushturkeys

Until they’re 12 weeks old, the chicks are confined to Colditz along with their adoptive mum, in case they get eaten by a kookaburra or pecked to death by one of their loving aunties.  None of them are taking imprisonment well.

Smuggling the chicks (sexed and vaccinated and genetically disparate) under relentlessly broody Cyan at the crack of dawn was a doddle. Especially compared the sleepless night I spent as a ignorant featherless human trying to keep the wee things safe and warm in a cardboard box under a desk lamp without setting the house on fire.

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They were happy at first.  But these days, the chicks and their mum spend most of their time pacing the length of the cage, apparently hoping to find a hidden exit.  Their only distraction is the thrill of scratching through the bug, straw and leaf litter mixture left in the potato patch after this year’s laughably miniscule harvest of spuds.

They’re particularly plaintive when they have visitors.

I’m not sure if all that frantic peeping is concern that one of their number has apparently gone astray from the flock, or jealousy that the baby brush turkey is free to roam the yard at will.

The little brush turkey spends a surprising amount of time close by, staring intently into the cage.  Perhaps there’s something more to it than the chick crumble dropping through the wire floor.  One night, tiptoeing down to shut in Xena for the night, I saw him roosting there, right on top of the cage.  Strange behaviour from a chick that never meets its siblings or its mother, let alone snuggling together with them at night.

Blood feud in the dawn redwood

male-koel-neck-arched-square

Every year for the last seven years, I’ve heard koels calling, loudly and desperately, right outside my window, day and night, for the three months from the equinox to Christmas.  And for the whole of that time I’ve been trying to get a decent photograph.  A while back, I caught sight of a whopping great juvenile sitting around on a branch of the pine tree, whining for more food from his adoptive mum, a harassed looking red wattlebird. But that’s it.

I know they’re there, skulking in the trees, the males advertising their availability in an increasingly high pitched, eventually hysterical squeak from the cover of the leaves.  And there’s that duet that koel couples, both equally well concealed and well amplified, produce – the male exclaiming “wurru-wurru!” while the female interrupts with a simultaneous “keek keek keek!”.  But where are these potentially ear damaging exchanges coming from?  Who can say.  It’s like trying to locate a pair of shy and slightly drunk ventriloquists.

But that all changed in my backyard yesterday.  I’ve finally got my stash of koel shots.

Why did these cryptic birds let me get close enough to take a million pictures?  I reckon it was because there was a battle on in the branches.   The prospect of scoring, through combat, a romantic enounter with the iridescent, satan-eyed male seem to make the feuding females oblivious to all that clicking and crashing in the undergrowth.

The  sexual proclivities of koels are not well understood (by humans anyway.  You hope koels have a decent grip on it).  Brood parasites are inherently interesting critters, so koels’ interactions with the honeyeater “hosts”, whose nests they visit to lay their eggs, has been studied exhaustively. The changes in their migrating habits as the world warms up have been looked into a bit as well (eg Chambers et al 2014).  But how and with whom they do their coupling is all a bit of a mystery.

You can’t give the ornithologists too much grief about this.  Even the most avid twitcher is going to be a bit dubious about spending the three years of a PhD shinning up trees clinging to a GPS tracking device, in an attempt to pin down the sexual encounters of an intercontinental migrant of no fixed abode.  And that’s not even considering the koel’s antisocial habits: the fact that they are “typically wary and difficult to observe [remaining] in thick foliage, high in trees, calling from concealed positions” (Healy and Healey 2007).

female-koel-peeking-around-leaves-crop

So what did I see (or half see) in our metasequoia tree after breakfast yesterday?

Did I witness a female, already partnered however temporarily with Mr Shiny Feathers, being challenged by a youngblood for access to a mate?  Koel males are apparently “polygynous” – they mate with multiple females.  But those ventriloquist duets suggest some kind of short-term liaisons, since couples that sing together like this, apparently, often have some kind of ongoing arrangement (Maller and Jones, 2001).

Or just two females both keen to hook up with guy who had command of such a fine calling station, my beautiful dawn redwood?

 

The male was staying well out of it, watching cagily from the side lines.  At one point I spotted him passing somethinga nuptial gift of a berry? – to one of the warring females.  I didn’t see if him get anything in return, unlike the lucky Asian koel spotted by this Singapore based bird watcher. But then with bird couplings, blink and you could easily miss it.

koel-eating-a-seed-crop-for-amend

Female koel… with nuptial gift?

 

But if the male bird was playing favours, this was strictly a chick fight.

At first it was a rap battle.

Eventually the two females settled at opposites ends of a branch, studiously ignoring each other, like gunfighters in a Western pacing the far ends of Main Street.  And then it was on, with a flurry of feathers and a fanning of tails.

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Two female koels about to tussle

 

Such chick fights aren’t as unusual as old-fashioned zoologists might think. Females that live in groups, it seems, often engage in “intense female-female competition over reproduction, dominance rank and other components of social-living” (Rubenstein, 2012, 2250). I’ve seen it with the chickens.  According to the implausibly named Clutton-Brock and Huchard, in a recent article for the Royal Society these fights “peak… during the reproductive season [8183], and … can lead to wounding or death [28,84].”  And fights are not just about access to mates, but about protecting eggs or nesting sites, space or foraging territories (Tobias et al, 2012; Krieg 2016).

Intriguingly, competition between females seems to go along with good looks or “ornamentation”.  Or better still “ornamentation and weaponry”.  And female koels, while not obviously armed to the teeth, surely are beautiful birds; like most ornamental or colourful females both substantial in size and hailing from the tropics (Dale et al 2015).

sideish-female-koel-with-good-view-of-stain-include-square

Hang on, what is that mysterious red stain on that creamy chest?  Was this a battle involving “wounding or even death”?  Was I witnessing an injured female being challenged, in her moment of weakness, by a healthier rival?

In some of my photos it surely looks like it.

Is that a blood stained beak?  Was this a ghoulish outcome of a predator attack followed by a desperate battle for genetic survival?

female-koel-with-red-beak-squareOr is it just mulberry season?

References

Chambers, L E, Beaumont LJ, Hudson IL (2014) “Continental scale analysis of bird migration timing: influences of climate and life history traits” International Journal of Biometeorology 58 (6) 1147-62

Dale, J., Dey, C, Delhey, K, Kempenaers, B, Valcu, M. (2015) “The effects of life history and sexual selection on male and female plumage coloration” Nature Vol 527 pp.367-71

Healy, C and Healey, E (2007) “Diet and Roost-site Fidelity in the Common Koel
Eudynamys scolopacea in Suburban Darwin” Australian Field Ornithology 2007, 24, 184–186

Maller, C J and Jones, D N (2001)”Vocal behaviour of the Common Koel, Eudynamys scolopacea, and implications for mating systems” Emu, 2001, 101, 105–112

Rubenstein, D.R. (2012) “Sexual and social competition: broadening perspectives by defining female roles”  Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol 367 No 1600, 2274-2293

Tobias, J. et al (2012) “The evolution of female ornaments and weaponry: social selection, sexual selection and ecological competition” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol 367 No 1600, 2274-2293

Krieg, CA, Getty, T. (2016) “Not just for males: females use song against male and female rivls in a temperate zone songbird” Animal Behaviour Vol 113 39-47