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

Thinking like a bird

One of the things I love about my regular walk to the the train station is the chance to check out the critters’ daily routines while I’m in the midst of mine.  I’m an everyday intruder, just passing through.  Through the carpark behind the panel beaters’ shed where the glossy black cockatoos do their acrobatics.   Over the slimy patch on the footpath that used to lure eastern waterdragons out to play chicken in the traffic (I stress “used to”. Sad face). Past the carefully tended brush turkey mound in the scrub by the library and round the the blind corner where butcherbirds find their roadkill.  So far I’ve never seen them pecking at the flattened remains of kids on skateboards but I worry.

I was trudging home a few months ago, when there was a kerfuffle in the shrubbery that even the most self-absorbed commuter couldn’t ignore. An aggravated bird was repeatedly hurling herself at an invisible enemy, and making a tremendous din.  I spotted a tail sliding behind the trunk of a halfway up a tree – was it a goanna? a snake?  No, a brush-tailed possum, having a late afternoon snack in a grey butcherbird’s nest. Mum was willing to fight for her eggs to her last breath.  I don’t have any pictures of the stramash, unfortunately, despite roaming around Berowra most days like some bumbling stalker, a chunky camera swinging around my neck.

However, I feel a bit less sheepish about my amateur-hour suburban birdwatching – and a little less clueless about butcherbirds – after  reading Gisela Kaplan’s fascinating book Bird Minds (CSIRO, 2015) this week.

Butcherbird in near silhouette crop

Grey butcherbird makes a rare appearance in the backyard

Bird Minds considers most aspects of avian cognition – social learning, mimicry, tool use, play, abstract thought and emotion  – with a particular focus on the locals.  This, as Kaplan points out, is no mean feat.  Aussie natives are under-discussed in the world of scholarly ornithology, it seems.  She tells (with secret delight, I reckon) how the international community were forced to reluctantly accept that songbirds evolved in the part of Gondwanaland that came to be Australia, overturning 200 years of northern hemisphere prejudice.  The oldest songbird fossil ever found came from here, and recently the discovery of heron footprints from the Cretaceous Era in southern Victoria showed that birds and those other, non-avian dinosaurs cohabited this part of the world, at least, for millions of years.

So, as well as summarising the work of researchers from around the globe, to fill the gap in the published research on Australian natives, Kaplan draws on anecdotes from bird watchers (like the amazing tales of fire-starting black kites that have done the rounds in the papers lately) and her own experience of studying, observing and hand-rearing birds over the decades.  My particular favourite is her story of the adopted 75 year old galah who liked to summon all four household dogs by name in a passable impression of Kaplan’s voice just for the fun of bossing them around.  Every week.  It’s this kind of jolly jape that keeps a bird young.

Galahs in the rain crop

Pair of galahs

Butcherbirds are just the type of birds that Kaplan is interested in, although her own research for the last 25 years has been on another member of the Artamidae family, the Australian magpie.  Currawongs, butcherbirds and magpies, like many other Australian natives, don’t fit a northern hemisphere perspective on avian lives.  Grey butcherbirds are wonderful mellifluous singers, for example (though their tunes are less feted than the improvisational outpourings of the pied butcherbird).  But their carolling doesn’t fit the familiar songbird story.

Kaplan points out, for instance, that while northern hemisphere songbirds are most vocal during the breeding season, the Australian bush is often quietest at that time.  Amongst the much studied birds of high latitudes, males sing as part of a courting display.  In comparison, she observes, “Australian species often seem rather ‘egalitarian’ “.  For many Aussie birds, including butcherbirds “there is often no difference in the song between male and female, no marked difference in plumage or size, brooding and feeding of youngsters and defence” (Kaplan 2015 114).  I have to confess, this whole line of argument really appeals to me.

Magpie with fluff horizontal smaller

Magpie in spring

I also get sneaky pleasure at Kaplan’s observations about the cleverness of Australian birds.  Smarts, she suggests, are one strategy for coping with harsh environments and unreliable climatic conditions.  The humble budgie, a desert dweller, for instance, has one of the largest bird brains for its size, along with Cape York’s palm cockatoo, a formidable tool user.  These clever cockies select, shape and stash particularly excellent sticks, some to use as percussion instruments and others to improve nest-hole drainage.  Behavioural flexibility is a sign of sophisticated thinking: I guess musician cum plumber fits that bill quite nicely.  Birds like this, Kaplan thinks, playful, inquisitive and social, fill the ecological niche of monkeys in an Antipodean environment.

Australian birds often live much longer lives than their northern hemisphere equivalents. Permanent pair bonding means that galahs, for instance, or sulphur crested cockatoos may end up in a 60 year partnership.  Kaplan suggests that these long-term pairings require social nous and a sophisticated communication repertoire.  Forget relationship counselling, it could be time to take advice from the local cockies!

Young Australian birds are also likely to spend a long time hanging around with their parents learning the ropes – an extra year for grey butcherbirds, as much as four for white-winged choughs. Which explains the whiny teenagers I’ve been hearing everywhere lately.

It’s hilarious watching great hulking juvenile wattlebirds, indistinguishable from adults to my untrained eye, sitting in the Japanese maple tree out back, calling plaintively and endlessly for parental attention until someone hops up and gives them a lerp.  And last week on the way home, as I passed Butcherbird Corner, I heard the sounds of a youngster calling out that all-too-familiar refrain: “Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum!”.  It drives me mad when my kids do it, but on this occasion, pester-power put a smile on my face.  The lumbering youngster was a survivor of the Possum Bloodbath of 2015, demanding quality time (and a take-away) from its weary parent.

The youngbloods may hang around with mum and dad for ages, but they do get off the couch and help with the housework.  Raising your chicks with the help of older siblings and even unrelated adults – “cooperative breeding” – is surprisingly common in Australia, in comparison to elsewhere. If refraining from tearing your life-partner limb from limb with your own beak during the course of 60 years together is a challenge to a bird’s emotional control, how much more so is long-term living with the extended family?

This is an idea that Kaplan toys with throughout the book – that “negotiated living” might  “require… changes in powers of perception: a watchful eye, powers of observation and careful scrutiny of others… watching others means awareness of others and such habits can change from behaviour reading into mind reading” (Kaplan 2015 122).  Complex social lives go along with complex minds.

I rather enjoyed the sly dig at northern hemisphere birds (they sound nice, but could well be dim) that runs alongside Kaplan’s argument for the evolutionary value of cooperation.

in the competitive mode, learning (in males) is for a well-rehearsed performance: an Eistedfodd of dance or song. In the cooperative model, learning is for communication (Kaplan 2015 119)

Old leftie that I am, I can’t help liking the idea that cooperation, “egalitarianism” of the sexes and general smarts go along together.

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Long billed corellas giving me a funny look

I can’t vouch for the rigor of Kaplan’s science, but I loved reading her stories of the cleverness of Australian birds – their “versatility, resourcefulness, complex social and individual problem solving abilities” (Kaplan, 2015, 193).  Reading Bird Minds has given me plenty to look out for as I make my workaday way through the suburban territory we share.

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.

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 square

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.

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 ParkSmall 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…)

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.