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mccnmatt

Posted on

January 2, 2018

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Backyard birds, Death, Native birds, predation, raptors, Uncategorized

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Death & sibling rivalry

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.

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.

Do the tail feather

And again

…neck roll….

… leg stretch…

… 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.

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.

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.

The lucky sibling with significantly less lucky white cheeked honeyeater

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

Keeping an eye out

Juvenile with head turned mouth open amended

My dinner…

All mine…

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.

Juvenile sparrowhawk protecting its prey

No time for a hungry sibling

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.

Settling in for a good plucking

Closeup of a honeyeater’s insides

Sparrowhawk eating honeyeater

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

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

November 12, 2017

Posted under

Biodiversity, breeding, Brush turkeys, Death, egg laying, mating, Native birds, nesting, predation, raptors

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Battle of the baby birds

Male sparrowhawk taking off with prey. Photo by Josh Matthews.

There’s a festival of death going on in our neighbourhood at the moment.

Several times a day, amongst the robotic clicks of the bower birds and the squawks of the wattlebirds, there’s an insistent high pitched chittering call, often accompanied by the din of freaked out noisy miners. I’m not 100% sure of its ethological or evolutionary significance, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a signal for me to drop everything and dart up our drive with my camera. One of the resident pair of collared sparrowhawks – probably the male – has caught some small clueless bird and is perched in our neighbour’s radiata pine steadily eviscerating it.

Female sparrowhawk getting stuck in

“Beak? Yuk” – see above the hawk’s head

Dead wattlebird being sized up

He rips off the feathers and flings away less tasty bits (check out the beak mid-air above) all the while, often with his mouth full, calling out “Dinner’s up!” to his mate.

Sparrowhawk calling for his mate

Mid-meal call

For the last few weeks she’s been spending much of her time in a the nest at the very top of another decrepit pine tree in the yard of next house along the way. Sometimes he flies up to the nest with tasty chunks of flayed bird flesh in his claws, but I’ve also seen her fly in to the designated “disembowling” perch to join him a few times. Occasionally, she seems to sneak away to do a little light hunting herself. Risky, though, leaving the nest unattended.

Currawong after the sparrowhawk nest

Collared sparrowhaw about to fly

There’s the pied currawong I saw hopping surreptitiously through the branches, warily inching towards the nest, until it was chased off by the indignant parents as it was virtually peeping over the side. And the pair of cacophonous channel billed cuckoos I caught flapping around the neighbour’s garden a few weeks ago – apparently they sometimes parasitise collared sparrowhawk nests.

Pair of channel billed cuckoos

But I will be deeply unimpressed if the chicks that come out of that nest are bloody channel billed cuckoos, for all my secret admiration of those giant hornbill beaks and strapping crucifix silhouettes.

Because the sparrowhawks seem to have rid our garden of the plague of baby brush turkeys.

Baby brushturkey in the backyard

A whipbird seems to have taken up residence this spring. Needless to say, I don’t have a photograph despite being nearly eye to eye with the noisy bugger once or twice. So, tiptoeing round my backyard trying to catch a clear shot, I heard a scrabbling in the leaf litter. “Ah, a baby brushturkey” I thought sagely.

And then it struck me… I haven’t seen a single baby turkey in our backyard this year. Not one! Last year, they were sleeping on top of the predator proof cage or standing outside in the daytime, gazing longingly at our flock of little baby chooks. The year before one wandered into our pocketsized laundry and spent eight hours pacing the two foot long windowsill, failing to notice and thus escape through through the wide open door. But this year… nada.

Baby brush turkey hanging out with baby Winter the Leghorn

Baby brush turkey being liberated from the laundry

Collared sparrowhawks (unlike their lookalikes brown goshawks – so similar that it’s altogether possible they could be our resident raptors) catch most of their prey in flight, bursting out of their lurking places in the foliage to grab little birds on the wing. But the baby brush turkeys that previously haunted our place do fly, right from the day they dig themselves out of their hatching place in their father’s mound of decomposing leaf litter, and start their life of unnaturally early independence.

So maybe the sparrowhawks have been catching them on those very first short flights from mound to chicken yard.

Baby brushturkey on an early flight

Dad and mound

Eight hours into the vigil on the windowsill

Much mourney Treasure the Sussex and an entourage of brush turkeys

Just a few of the even dozen visiting in the last few years

I don’t hate brush turkeys, but I do hate a having dozen brush turkeys hanging out in my backyard, sexually assaulting my chickens, nicking their food and, given half the chance, eating their eggs. So the idea of generations of sparrowhawks breeding happily in the neighbour’s trees and keeping the local population to manageable levels is extremely appealing.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between the familiar sound of chainsaws and the plague populations of brush turkeys in Brisbane and the northern suburbs of Sydney over the last few years. No dingoes, fewer foxes foxes thanks to baiting, and nowhere much for the local raptors to nest in suburbia these days, the tallest trees victims of fears about bushfires and death-dealing or at least car-damaging falling branches.

But today my endless blurry photos of the neighbourhood raptor nest brought good news: what seems to be a creamy ball of fluff snuggling up to its mum in the distant collection of sticks that is the sparrowhawk’s nest. Bring on the next generation of brush turkey assassins!

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mccnmatt

Posted on

September 22, 2017

Posted under

Backyard birds, Native birds, raptors, Uncategorized

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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.

The divine and impossible to represent grey goshawk

An ordinary, gorgeous juvenile white bellied sea eagle

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.

My bird in flight.

2015 bird: middle toe extends beyond the claw of the two adjacent toes.

Yesterday’s bird

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?

Sparrowhawk eye

This year’s bird – a smaller eye?

Sparrowhawk tail

A more rounded tail?

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.

“Green” satin bowerbirds making short work of my Thai chillis

Juvenile or female bowerbirds with virtually no tastebuds

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.

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

Accipiter not bothered by an audience

Note the absurdly long middle toe

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.

Could this be a sparrowhawk nest?

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 27, 2017

Posted under

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

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Stingray Bay: lost and found

After years of denial, I have finally accepted that I’m a map hoarder.

Though my other half has long been known by the moniker “Map Man”, it’s me that whiles my evenings away at the Lands and Property Information’s map shop, and I’m the one who takes our topographic maps on most of their little outings on the water, snug inside their “Hercules” double zip-lock plastic bags. There have been some unfortunate errors – we have a few maps of dull little patches of agricultural wasteland with a bit of barely navigable waterway in one corner. But despite the ridiculously small slices of this wide brown land that can fit on any given 1:25000 map, they really are quite useful things.

Although possibly less useful – without a compass – in a white out.

Setting out from Appletree Bay

Fog and mist are picturesque, right? “In…mist, the picturesque artist can celebrate obscurity, lack of clarity, indistinctness, that which is veiled… the picturesque tourist is prepared to spend days in fog” (Murray, 2004, 874). Or possibly, not so much prepared to spend days there as trapped there for indefinitely unable to find their way out, as you can see from the baroque twists and turns captured on my phone’s GPS on my last jaunt to Stingray Bay. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to fish it out of its dry bag and consult it for directions!

I often laugh at the giant directional signs you see on the waters edge of the Hawkebury – they really look like they belong by a freeway, not a pristine riverside – but if it hadn’t been for a bloody great sign looming up through the fog, I might still have been floating aimlessly around Cowan Creek days later.

Lost

Fishermen?

Egg and Easter sun

Jellyfish in the fog

I was quite keen, back in April, leaving the boat ramp at Appletree Bay on a high and rising tide, to check out Stingray Bay. It’s a decent step – about sixteen ks, slightly more if you decide to do baffled pirouettes mid-stream – but not an epic yomp. A trip up Smith’s Creek is a good one to do when the tide rising steadily rather than on the turn, since you can go with the flow on at least half the journey, and ride the current on last leg home.

I’d had a pit stop there at Stingray Bay before, on my way further up Smith’s Creek. The Hawkesbury in these parts is a steep-sided sandstone gorge, flooded these last six thousand years with bottle green water, so this is a rare spot where you can get out of a canoe to stretch your legs. You will most likely standing in knee deep water but that’s not so bad, unless you happen to step on the eponymous sting rays. We worry more about sharks, but apparently after blue bottles, stingrays – most likely round these parts the common stingaree – cause the most injuries to beachgoers in Sydney.

They’re not aggressive animals. Richard Wylie, a marine biologist from Monash University, described them as “wonderfully inquisitive and gentle marine animals“. Stingrays give birth to live young and in Yolgnu communities in the far north, stingrays – specifically the mangrove whipray or Gawangalkmirri – were seen as devoted parents, the sort we humans should aspire to be. And while I feel might fret about an encounter with a ray, indigenous communities have long seen them not as a threat but as an important and delicious food source.

But if you do happen to frighten stingrays – for instance, stomping on them while they’re hiding in the sand – you can get a sting from the toxin-bearing barb on their tail. Apparently it hurts like hell. Immersing your feet in hot water denatures the toxin and takes the pain away, apparently, although a lot of people need pieces of barb removed from their wound and sometimes stitches and antibiotics too.

Seagrass and sand in Stingray Bay

I’ve never stepped on a ray, though I have seen them, just once, in the shallows of Calabash Bay in Berowra Creek. But just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you walk around in shallow estuarine waters, it’s best to have footwear and shuffle rather than stride. Fortunately, my bum is usually so numb by the time I stumble out of my kayak that shuffling around stirring up the sand with my protective booties is not so much safety measure as a physical necessity.

I paddled straight over the sting-ray shallows, though, back in April, past yachts barely stirring in the morning mist and moody cormorants staring out at the post-apocalyptic blankness.

Yachts moored in Stingray Bay

Cormorant contemplating the end of civilisation

A pied cormorant – I think suffering from a fishing line wound

Ravens being suitable gothic

Jellyfish in the mist

Slightly rumpled sea eagle

Even at half tide, you can skim safely above the seagrass and on up the creek. There’s a deep swimming hole, and above it, two tiny waterfalls tumbling into a bowl of rocks. Despite my morbid fear of breaking my precious and ancient wooden boat, I even managed to clamber out onto the rocks for a comfort break and a look around. It’s a really lovely spot – a great place to come for a picnic and a splash around in warmer weather.

Egg at the rock garden at the top of the creek

Dawn spiderwebs

Rock orchids

And not a bad place to hang out if you’re a baby fish either. There may not have been any stingrays, but there were certainly plenty of little fishlings when I visited again, in very different weather, last weekend. So very many fishies, swirling away from the paddle like living iron filings toyed with by slightly sadistic magnet… yet so surprisingly difficult for a bumbling amateur to photograph.

The creek at Stingray Bay

Mangrove reflections

Stingray Bay reflections

Many many fish

Stingray Bay certainly looks different (if possibly less picturesque) when you can actually see it.

Looking up Smith’s Creek

Reflections in Stingray Bay

Pied cormorants fishing at Cottage Point

Oyster reflections

And the journey there and back again’s not too hard on the eyes either. Except when you’re paddling straight into the morning sun.

Looking past Cottage Point

Boats at Cottage Point

Dawn through the trees

Little pied cormorant

At Peach Trees

Sandstone escarpment

The cormorants, the escarpment and the sun-touched tree tops might have been perfectly visible and, thanks to months with virtually no rain, the clear green water might have offered a vertiginous view of sandstone slabs sliding into the depths, but not all the mysteries of Cowan Creek were revealed to me on my paddle back to Apple Tree Bay.

Was it that persistent dive-bombing tern that plunked so heavily into the water behind me, leaving only a ripple by the time I spun around to see? Did some underwater creature make that line of bubbles I paddled through on the way past Waratah Bay? Could it have been dolphins? Or more worryingly, a bullshark? Maybe it’s better not to know.

Dawn in Cowan Creek

Mystery bubbles

Water and sky in Stingray Bay

Australian raven at Appletree Bay

But not while you’re navigating!

Bobbin head sign

References

Emma Macevoy (2004) “Picturesque” from Murray, Christopher ed The Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1850, Vol 2, Taylor and Francis

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mccnmatt

Posted on

July 30, 2017

Posted under

estuaries, Gardening, kayaking, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, waterways, Weeds

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Mother-of-millions takes to the waves

You know a weed is a baddie when it will grow without dirt and entirely surrounded by salt water. The Mother of Dragons inspires GoT fans and baby names but Mother-of-Millions – the stowaway on this attractively decrepit boat moored off Dangar Island in the Hawkesbury – inspires a deep and abiding hatred in bush regenerators, whose job is to try to get rid of weedy garden escapes like this one.

Mother of millions against sky closeup cropsmall

Mother-of-millions – a native of Madagascar – was imported to Australia in the 1950s as a drought tolerant garden plant. It’s now a restricted invasive plant in Queensland, and can’t be given away, sold or released into the environment. Here in coastal NSW and the northwest slopes and plains, it’s a declared noxious weed which means landowners (or in this case boat-owners) have a legal requirement to control it. Like two-thirds of Australia’s noxious weeds, it’s a garden plant that got away.

To add to its charm, mother-of-millions (aka bryophyllum delagoense) is also toxic to humans, pets and livestock. If animals eat enough of it (5 kilos for an adult cow) they quickly die with heart failure. If they just have a snack, they’ll get bloody diahorrea, drool saliva, dribble urine and then die of heart failure. Fortunately cattle are probably safe from this particular crop of bryophyllum. Unless they are bovines with boats, or like a good swim.

Mother of millions below the porthole crop small

Mother of millions side of boat lighter small

You can pull mother-of-millions out by hand but it is, apparently, a soul destroying job. The plant can reproduce from tiny seeds, dispersed both by wind and water – I’ve certainly seen colonies in bushland by Berowra Creek. I hate to think how far and wide the seeds from this estuarine Typhoid Mary have spread. The seeds remain dormant in the soil for ages, so getting rid of mother-of-millions is not a one-time-only job. Like its toxic relative bryophyllum pinnate – the evocatively named resurrection plant – little plantlets growing on the leaves can also detach as you’re weeding. Any tiny fragment of leaf can generate a new infestation. You can spray it with herbicide, leave it in a black plastic bag to die, or hope for a visit from the (also introduced) South African Citrus Thrip which burrows through the leaves’ waxy coating to lay eggs on its flesh. But none of this horticultural horror show works as well as setting it on fire.

We all have a biosecurity duty, of course: “any person… who knows (or ought to know) of any biosecurity risk, has a duty to ensure the risk is prevented, eliminated or minimised, so far as is reasonably practicable”. And as a responsible gardener and card-carrying greenie, I take those duties seriously. However I’m not sure the owner of this rickety vessel would embrace the idea of a passing kayaker with a molotov cocktail torching his boat, for all its mother of infestations.

Mother of millions side and rope better cropped small

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January 12, 2017

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Animal senses, Climate change, Native animals, Uncategorized, Weather

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Too hot to handle?

floppy-claw-small

Although echidnas are pretty common, I’ve rarely seen seen them in Berowra. So when I saw this one flopped out in the neighbours’ front yard on my sweaty walk home from work yesterday – ambient temperature in the mid 20s even at 7pm – I was worried. Were echidnas, like fruit bats and stingless bees, troubled by temperature extremes? Had this one been driven from its usual secluded haunts by this horrid heat wave? Should I be on the blower to WIRES?

A cursory google did not inspire confidence. Wikipedia notes that echidnas don’t sweat (in fact, they don’t pant, lick, or even wee on themselves and flap their wings to cool off either) and suggests that they “cannot deal with heat well“. WIRES agrees that echidnas “cannot tolerate temperatures above 30 degrees“.

Notwithstanding, this seemed to be a very sprightly monotreme. Most of the echidnas I’ve met have more or less fixed this position:

This beastie, however, was very busy, ignoring me and rummaging around in the flowerbeds. Could it really be in trouble? I decided, for the moment, that human intervention wasn’t necessary and then went home to check whether I’d just made a stupid decision. Should I trust Wikipedia or my instincts?

echidna-snuffling-really-better-amend-small

I hit pay dirt when I found “Thermoregulation by Monotremes” by Queensland’s “Mr Hot Echidna”, Peter Brice. As a researcher who has devoted time to inserting “calibrated temperature sensitive radio-transmitters … coated with a smooth layer of inert wax… into the abdominal cavities of echidnas” (Brice et al 2002), he’s your go-to guy on this topic.

Niche subject as it might seem, the way echidnas and platypuses manage their body temperature has played an interesting role in propping up a hierarchical, human-centred view of evolution. You’ve heard the story before, I’m sure. From this viewpoint, animals whose bodies are set up differently to us fancy-pants “classic mammals” are viewed as “primitive”. Early twentieth century researchers decided that, for instance, that playpus had “an inadequate regulating mechanism” when after only 17 minutes at 35 degree temperatures, their research subject “turned onto its back and fainted” (Brice, 2009, 260). A poignant tale and the sort of thing that led one early twentieth century researcher to conclude that monotremes were “‘the lowest in the scale of warm-blooded animals’” (Brice, 2009, 256)

Don’t get me wrong, echidnas are very weird animals. And that’s leaving aside the egg laying mammal business and the once-venomous spurs in their backwards facing hind legs.

Echidna back claws

Echidnas are cool. 31 degrees counts as a “normal” body temperature for them, though only females incubating eggs really keep their temperatures steady for long. They seem to occupy a half-way house between warm blooded and “cold blooded” animals. Echidnas don’t entirely rely on their surrounding environment to warm themselves as reptiles – ectotherms – do. But unlike us humans – homeothermic endotherms – with our tedious need for a stable and predictable body temperature – echidnas can run hot or cold.

Just when you thought we were all “thermed”-out, you find that echidnas are also constitutional eurytherms – they can handle wide range of temperatures – and facultative endotherms – they warm their bodies up, in part, by doing stuff.

Echidnas also hibernate – well, some of them do, if they’ve eaten enough by the time the cold weather rolls in. But their hibernation, or its timing at least is, according to Brice (2009, 257) “distinctly odd”. They often kip out during the late summer and then wake up to mate at coldest part of the year. And they can deal with fluctuating temperatures in a way I can only envy – for instance, after a chilly night, they can dig their way out of shelter with their blood temperature of only twenty degrees. With no bedsocks.

Waddling echidna

Echidna eyes

And they can also deal with a day spent in a hollow log at 40 degrees C without expiring from the heat, though no one knows exactly how.

We shouldn’t seeing echidnas and their wildly fluctuating temperatures as primitive, I reckon. Instead we should admire the way these critters harbour resources with their furry but weirdly chilly bodies, helping them live above the snowline in the Alps, in the desert and even on the sizzling streets of deepest surburbia.

Echidna, close up and personal

References

Brice, Peter H. (2009) “Thermoregulation in monotremes: riddles in a mosaic” Australian Journal of Zoology, 2009, 57, 255–263

Brice, Peter H., Gordon C. Grigg, Lyn A. Beard, Janette A. Donovan (2002) “Heat tolerance of short-beaked echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus) in the field” Journal of Thermal Biology 27(6), 449-57

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 30, 2016

Posted under

Backyard birds, estuaries, kayaking, migration, Native birds, Uncategorized, waterways

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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.

pink-clouds-tiny-ripples-egg-upright-crop

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.

Cormorant after its dawn swim

Two of many eastern curlews

Pied oystercatchers

The barred tail of the bar tailed godwit

Cormorants in front of the heads

Bar tailled godwit in the mangroves by our holiday place

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.

Posing welcome swallows

Rather poor perch selection

Osprey profile

I almost feel I should buy a hotrod so I can paint this on it. Or just get a tattoo.

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.

Having a chat

Sanddunes near the channel to the Myall River

osprey-3-d-claws-crop

osprey-looking-at-me-crop-square

A pair of eastern osprey? The females are larger.

Contractual obligation white bellied sea eagle

Pied cormorants having a party

Pied cormorants preferring a private party

Contractual obligation white faced heron

White butted sea eagle in the dawn light

Check out that osprey’s claws

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

Mother and baby bottlenosed dolphin off Corrie Island

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.

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.

Dolphin watching

Two that were there when the shutter opened

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

Blue faced honeyeater

Dollarbird

Scaly breasted lorikeet

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

Sitella senior brings tucker

The open mouth

Baby sitella not quite sure what to do with a large caterpillar

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

Australian hobby giving me a stare

Hobby ready for Christmas lunch

Nom nom nom

I think we’ll be back.

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 21, 2016

Posted under

brood parasites, Native animals, Native birds, Pollination, Uncategorized

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Poor lost souls

koel-mouth-open-cropped

There’s new sound in the garden just now. A plaintive relentless cheeping. But not the tiny piping tones of a naked, newly hatched chick. No, it’s the muscular alto plea of the ginormous eastern koel chick to its diminutive red wattle bird parent.

And the wattlebirds are desperate. I eyeballed the juvenile koel, lounging comfortably high in the canopy. Meanwhile its parent wheeled and fluttered in frenzied manner, perching here and pecking there, apparently driven to madness by the insatiable appetite of its parasitic offspring.

wattlebird-and-begging-mouth-cropped-square-tighter

wattlebird-about-to-feed-for-crop-square-tighter

koel-and-mum-with-bent-neck-for-crop-amended-small

No sooner was the mega-chick fed than it returned to its incessant harping, as if unloved and cruelly abandoned.

koel-curved-neck-crop-real-crop

As I crashed around trying to get a clear shot of the elusive ear-splitting koel, I saw, at the top of the very same tree, something I’d never seen here before, something genuinely sad and alone.

flying-fox-illuminated-ears-cropped

A flying fox all by itself, a good twenty kilometres from the nearest bat camp way down the Pacific Highway at Gordon.

Flying foxes are very mobile, travelling up to 120 kilometres a night to feed. We often hear them around our place on summer evenings, squealing and hurling fruit around. During the year they migrate long distances following the peripatetic flowering seasons of eucalypts, melaleucas and rainforest trees, pollinating as they go. Just like giant warm blooded bees, they carry pollen on their fur from one fragment of forest to another. Flying foxes have been tracked moving as far as two thousand kilometres over the course of nine months and bat encampments have been described as more like railway stations or youth hostels than places of permanent residence.

But mega bats are sociable creatures and finding one on its own in the daytime like this is not a good sign. I realised later I should have called the local WIRES group so someone with more expertise and a better head for heights than me could shin up its extremely tall tree to check it wasn’t injured by any of the usual suspects – barbed wire, open weave fruit netting or a dog bite. But by the time I worked that out, it was the next morning, and the bat was gone – back to its digs in the local “Batpackers”, I hope.

I know some people feel about flying foxes the way I do about brush turkeys. If you’re a fruit grower in NSW it is still possible to get a licence to shoot them to protect your orchards, although the mega bats actually prefer pollen and nectar as a food source – and tightly secured, finely woven netting (one you can’t poke a finger through) protects crops better than a shotgun anyway. In my backyard, the bats would be at the back of a very long queue for the ripe fruit anyway. Ahead of me, of course, but behind the cockies and the possums for sure.

Deforestation means that there’s more conflict between flying foxes and humans these days, as the bats move into the leafy suburbs where the fruiting and flowering plants are diverse and well watered. They’re chatty critters with some “interesting” habits – urinating on themselves and then fanning their wings to cool down for one – which some people living nearby can find a hard to take (not to mention a couple of rare but deadly bat-borne diseases).

But the visibility of flying foxes in east coast Australian cities conceals the fact that (unlike brush turkeys) their numbers are in major decline. One article suggests that at current rates, the grey headed flying fox, the type I found in my backyard, will be extinct by 2070.

The mega bats are particularly susceptible to high temperatures. They start to “melt from the inside” in the words of a scientist, at just about the same temperature that is unsupportable for stingless bees, 43 degrees C. A couple of years ago in Queensland, 45,000 megabats, mostly the tropical black flying fox, died in one day during a heat wave. But high temperatures may just be the final straw when bats are short of food anyway.

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been scores of baby grey-headed bats found dead in parks along the east coast. Both habitat loss and the aftermath of an El Nino, according to researcher Peggy Eby, have led to a food shortage.

“The mothers are going through a difficult nutritional phase, and they’re reducing the amount of milk they’re producing and the young starve. They hang on to the females for the first several weeks of life, when she flies from the roost at night, and they simply would lose the strength that they need to hold on.”

I’m not sure why this stray found its way to our yard. I hope it wasn’t injured here. We don’t have a dog or barbed wire and we use veggie nets to keeps the bowerbirds and the brush turkeys off the fig trees (or if we’re feeling cheap, old trampoline netting from the side of the road). But we still haven’t raised the cash to chop down the nasty cocos palm that is so appealing and yet so dangerous to flying foxes.

I hope the neighbours’ pool gave was a spot for a cooling bellydip and the jungle at the bottom of the yard gave it somewhere to recoup, recalibrate its GPS and get ready to head back to its pals at base camp. Lovely as it was to have the chance to take his photo, I hope we hear him but don’t see him again.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 16, 2016

Posted under

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

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Beekeeping without pain

The big bee reveal

Our tiny pets exploring their new domain

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

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

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

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

Ms 10 hoping to pat her new pets

Closeup of Tetragonuna Carbonaria

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

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

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

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

Crowea coming into flower… bring on the bees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evaporative airconditioning for bees

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

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

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

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

Hive cover post brush turkey attack

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

November 11, 2016

Posted under

Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, broody chickens, Brush turkeys, chicken coops, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Predators, raising chickens, Uncategorized

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What’s inside the bird cage?

Not artichokes.

I spent all of last autumn dreaming of artichokes.

Artichoke and silver leaves

Globe artichoke closeup

Artichoke flowers

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…

Feral rabit

Possum

Brush turkey enjoying the sunshine

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.

Artichoke seedling in a birdcage

Artichoke seedling

Another hopeful artichoke seedling in a cage

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.

A previous year’s globe artichoke harvest

Rocket protected from nibblers by a birdcage

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.

Strawberry traps

Strawberries momentarily liberated from their cage

Treasure, post-illness, waiting for her rejuvenatin wheatgrass

Oppressed strawberry plant

Strawberry plant having a bad hair day

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.

Our visitors, the neighbour’s chickens

The “magic portal” between chicken runs

Our combined flocks

The “magic portal” through the other fence, used for human play dates

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.

Apricot knackered by her first day at our place

Apricot and Winter snuggling up to Cyan

Snacktime for the chicks

It’s definitely more comfortable here

chicks-in-sunlight-eye-open-crop

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.

Shima does yoga

Shima the Plymouth Rock grooming

Shima in sunshine

They’re particularly plaintive when they have visitors.

Baby brush turkey visiting the chicks

“Hello Shima”

Brush turkey haunted by exclusion from Colditz

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.