The butchers and the flower eaters

Closeup of sparrowhawk with prey against background of bark

Collared sparrowhawk with prey

The crowd of noisy miners  squabbling right outside my window had me jumping straight out of bed and reaching for my camera.  More than the usual disputes for territory with the “house” little wattlebirds, this had the distinct vibe of a predator in action.  And sure enough there was one of our collared sparrowhawks, perched on a low branch less than 5 metres from my front door, wrapping its laughing gear around what looked like one of the miners.  They weren’t taking the dismemberment of one of their own lying down.  The sparrowhawk stayed very very still while a crowd of miners scolded and divebombed  it. But eventually it was time to do some butchery.

After a certain amount of viscera had been hurled around, the miners obviously decided that Bob wasn’t looking likely to rejoin the flock.  While I was watching, one hold-out had a final swoop – the sparrowhawk ducked and called out repeatedly for moral support.

Sparrowhawk calling for its mate

Calling for moral support

I’m not sure if it was the male (smaller, more bomb-able) or the female (generally chattier) calling for help.  Male and female sparrowhawks really  similar, even though when you see them side by side the females are distinctly larger.

A pair of collared sparrowhawks, showing the female is much larger than the male

Sparrowhawk pair

No chance of comparing sizes on this occasions – calls for help were completely ignored. Eventually this most belligerent miner of the group wandered off to harass some less aggressive passers-by.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty years but this kind of gory scene doesn’t bother me one little bit.

Sparrowhawk with prey

Especially when it’s a noisy miner biting the dust.  I had a look in my files to see if I had any good pictures of miners but nada.  I’m not even that keen on their cousins the more elusive bellbirds – despite the atmospheric calls, like their cousins they’re colonial, driving other bird species out of their patch.  Groups of bell miners can even, somehow, execute the trees they inhabit.

I’ve been a bit surprised at the distaste of lots of bird lovers for scenes of raptor butchery, when I’ve definitely smelt the smoke of barbecues drifting from their backyards.  Where’s the solidarity with other top predators?  Plenty of people seem to be fond of cats.

Thinning out the noisy miners is  not the only environmental service provided by the local birdlife.  The wattlebirds make short work of the window spiders, hovering like hummingbirds and plucking them from the tangled webs, that according to my kids, “make it look like Halloween at our place the whole year round”.  The chooks clean up ticks and fruit fly larvae.  And I captured a juvenile satin bowerbird earlier in the year making a dent in the local caterpillar population, with the help of mum.

Adult female bowerbird feeding juvenile with caterpillar

I don’t mind when the bowerbirds do some tip pruning on my liquidambar tree.

Bowerbird silhouette in the top of a liquidambar tree

But I’m a bit less keen on the scarlet blooms of my “running postman“, few and far between, getting munched, even if that means the local bowerbirds are subscribing, like me, to a plant based diet

Because they’re so famous for their decorative skills, whenever you see male satin bowerbirds collecting pretty stuff, you expect them to be thinking about their bowers.  Like this visitor who I’m pretty sure was sussing out the “bowerbird blue” backyard tennis pole.

But I’m pretty confident that the Kennedia rubicuns flowers this bowerbird was collecting were for snacks, not for interior decor.  How do I know?  Well, some researchers got satin bowerbirds to choose their favourite colour of Froot Loop.  Turns out, even though bowerbirds prefer blue and violet things as decorations in their love-shacks, given a choice of Froot Loop for a snack (not something that happens a lot, admittedly), they’d rather eat red and yellow ones.

Why, you might ask, were scientists trying to goad satin bowerbirds into eating Froot Loops?  Well, it was all about the evolution of preferences for a blue-hued bower.  Researchers were testing whether male bowerbirds evolved to decorate their bowerbirds with blue things because female bowerbirds liked blue snacks (Borgia 1987).  Presumably they came up with this idea in a study with rump steaks, potato wedges and steamed broccoli framed and hung on the walls.

A black male satinbowerbird sitting on a branch looks curiously at the camera

These researchers already had a pretty good idea that they wouldn’t find red Froot Loops in bowers – I know this because of a series of experiments that seem to me to essentially be an interspecies wind-up.  One of these tests involved goading male birds by trashing one half of their bowers and seeing what would happen.  Another, capitalising the “intense dislike for red objects at their bowers”, involved “a clear container over three red objects and quantif[ying]the time for each male to remove the container” and “super-glue[ing] a red square tile to a long screw and fix[ing] the tile into the bower platform and ground below so that it could not be physically removed” (Keagey 2011 1064).  They also recorded the male bower-birds’ come-on lines – their mimicry of other birds – and spied on them to see if they got lucky. I don’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes, but is it a coincidence that the guy running this lab sports the name “Borgia”?

Juvenile satin bowerbird perched in a tree seen in profile with a background of green leaves

Turns out being smart improves your chances of getting lucky (if you’re a male satin bowerbird, anyway) but being very worried about red things in your bower not so much.  Also, bowerbirds are capable of making a clear distinction between decorative items and food.

Somehow this doesn’t seem so odd to me. It’s humans, it seems to me, who don’t seem to be able to adequately categorise their Froot Loops.

A sparrowhawk in flight against a blue sky

References

Jason Keagy, Jean-François Savard, Gerald Borgia (2011) “Complex relationship between multiple measures of cognitive ability and male mating success in satin bowerbirds, Ptilonorhynchus violaceusAnimal Behaviour 81 1063-1070

Gerald Borgia, Ingrid M. Kaatz & Richard Condit (1987) “Flower choice and bower decoration in the satin bowerbird
Ptilonorhynchus violaceus: a test of hypotheses for the evolution of male display” Animal Behaviour, 35, 1129 1139

Matthew Mo (2016) “Diet of the Satin Bowerbird Ptilonorhynchus violaceus in the Illawarra Region, New South Wales, Australia” Corella 40(2)

 

More stories about the sparrowhawks in our backyard

Death and sibling rivalry

Motherhood on a windy day

The battle of the baby birds

Loves and leaves: our sparrowhawks do some nestbuilding

Sex, nests and dogfighting

 

And more about our bowerbirds

The bowerbird bachelors

R2D2 in black and white

Gymnastic bees, virgin fruit and the birds that ate spring

 

Adult female bowerbird feeding juvenile red berry

Motherhood on a windy day

Kid with mum distant 2 wide crop

Last year two collared sparrowhawk fledglings made it out of the nest high in our neighbour’s pine tree.  This year it was just one.  It’s been a lot quieter around here.  No squabbling over snacks.  No shuffling along branches side by side or pratfalls high in the canopy.  No hightailing it after a sibling chasing a feed.

There’s been more adult and parent bonding, though. I rarely saw the adults and offspring together last year.  But a few weeks ago, in windy weather, I got to see them hanging out low in the trees by our drive, sheltering from the tossing branches.

Juvenile against bark close crop

The juvenile looked, by turns, absurdly sleek and adult, and fluffy and completely gormless.  Mum (or dad) seemed to be wrestling with the same conceptual problem – how grown up is this chick really?

Typically when the sparrowhawks catch a juicy white-faced honey eater or wattlebird chick, they call out, over and over again.  I’m not sure if this the dinner bell for partner or offspring, or just triumphant territory claiming.  They swiftly pluck the small bird they’ve caught and then gorily and fairly rapidly consume it.

But on this particular day, the adult hawk sat very still, prey gripped tightly, not taking even a bite.  The youngster lurked awkwardly nearby, apparently not sure what to do next.

Kid with mum lower

Eventually mum (or dad), probably irked by the local amateur photographer, flew to a higher perch in the trees.  But her prey, plucked, pink and gleaming, was still untouched.

Mum with prey 2

She was waiting. Eventually Junior flew up to join her.

He still seemed clueless about what she wanted him to do – as indeed I was.  I’m willing to have a guess, though.

Adult sparrowhawks start by feeding their young little shreds of meat – the avian equivalent of pulled pork, I guess.  I have heard the adults teach the fledglings to catch little birds mid air by dropping little snippets of prepared flesh to them on the wing.  This youngster was definitely not in possession of that skillset.

Mum and kid with prey high 3

But I think dad (or mum) was trying to give the not-so-little little one a low-stakes chance to prep the dish for her (or him)self.  But it certainly wasn’t happening on this occasion.  Young blood had a good look, then stumbled past and took off, not even having a tiny go at flesh-tearing.

Juvenile from behind looking over shoulder crop

To be honest, I’m really pretty worried about this young one.  I’ve been working from home a lot lately, and every morning, I hear sparrowhawk calls, and I race up the drive with my camera.

But it’s just the adult I see, calling and calling and calling.

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

 

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

Our sparrowhawk summer

The teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

Sex, nests and dogfighting

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

 

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.

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.

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.

Death and good fortune on Cowan Creek

Since reading the poetic prose of H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald’s story of how training Mabel the goshawk carried her through wild sadness that followed the death of her beloved father, it’s been all about the raptors around here.

Easter at Speers Point meant ospreys relaxing in the late afternoon sun.

And yesterday, on Cowan Creek, the contractual obligation white bellied sea-eagle.

Juvenile sea eagle belly horizontal

Juvenile white-bellied sea eagle

Then, just when I’d resigned myself to a pleasant if uneventful paddle after three hours on the water, there was an explosion of action right off my bow.  Two birds in an aerial battle, tumbling and squabbling over a kill.  The loser flew off, disgruntled; the death-dealer pulled up in the bright morning sunshine on a branch over the river, and waited for me to get out my camera.

A new bird!  One I thought I’d never seen on any waterway.  A peregrine falcon.

It turns out I had seen these birds before, long ago and far away – a pair tussling with ravens over a ledge to nest on at Malham Cove in Yorkshire.  Cliffs (or, if they are hard to find, skyscrapers) are one of the essential requirements of this beautiful raptor.  RB reminded me that peregrines used to nest in the ventilation towers of the tunnels under the River Mersey and high up in the Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the enormous red sandstone building I could see from my desk during my decade as a Scouser.

Peregrines may be the most widespread bird in the world, living on every continent except for Antarctica and on many islands (although strangely, considering its status as a bird watching paradise, not New Zealand).  Its name is derived from the Latin for “the wanderer” although only five of the nearly twenty subspecies – those breeding in the northern Arctic – really migrate very far.

For all their capacity to adapt to life in the city – eating feral pigeons and nesting in highrises – peregrines are widespread but not really common.  Since they mostly prey on smallish birds, themselves often insect eaters, falcons bioaccumulate pollutants. The use of organochlorines in insecticides like DDT devastated their numbers in the second half of the twentieth century.  By the 1960s there were no peregrines in the Eastern US and the birds were declared an endangered species. Numbers have bounced back, in Australia and elsewhere, although they are still classed as  “rare” here.  And recent work in Europe and Canada has observed a new chemical – flame retardants – turning up in the blood stream of peregrine chicks.

Once peregrines find a good nesting site, it’s a keeper.  Apparently, a falcon skeleton found at the back of a cliff-top eyrie in Tasmania has been carbon dated at 19,000 years, which makes that spot the oldest known bird’s nest. As I noodled along the northern shore of Cowan Creek, I’d admired the 100 metre high cliffs of Looking Glass Spur, eucalypts halfway up the face finding impossible footholds in the sandstone.  I wonder if my falcon and its mate have a scrape there, high above the expanse of the estuary.  Peregrines don’t eat fish but hunting grounds by water offer the space for their deadly turn of speed.

I feel less disappointed by my failure to spot the raptor’s stoop or to capture the battle on film after I figured out what I was watching.  The fastest animal in the world, dropping  on its prey at nearly 400 kilometres an hour.  That poor bird clutched in its talons -maybe a galah, the favoured meal of the big-footed Australian “macropus” subspecies – never had a chance.

I watched for twenty minutes, as she plucked and dismembered her meal, unperturbed by the rowdy parade of jet skiiers, cruisers and powerboats.  Galah feathers drifted down from her branch, making a delicate trail of death across the bottle green water.

For a few dodgy moments, I thought the gobbets of galah might be joined by flotsam from my shattered craft as Egg was washed perilously close to oystershell sharpened rocks.  And, if I had the Bond-style rocket launcher I’ve often fantasised about while ploughing  through powerboat wakes on sunny Sunday mornings, fragments of several jet skis.

I’m guessing my peregrine was a “she”.  Females are a third bigger than the tiercels – the males – but I didn’t have the chutzpah to hurl a swiss army knife up the tree for scale.  The two mid-air combatants looked well matched – two males or two females. Definitely not a pair.  Since peregrines mate for life – up to 20 years – and often hunt cooperatively, it would seem to be unwise from the point of view of domestic harmony, anyway, to bicker over food.

In fact, Derek Ratcliffe describes exactly what I saw: “feet-grappling over disputed food items” which happens, he says, “at food-territory boundaries during the non-breeding season” (1993, 201).   It seems these battles are nearly always between birds of the same sex, although sometimes peregrines fight with other crag-loving birds as well.  RB remembers peregrines in springtime at the cliffs at Creagh Dhu, attacking ravens, stooping then zooming straight up to the heights to do it all over again.  Sometimes pairs of peregrines will even take on the great golden eagle over rare and valuable real estate.

So maybe there’s more than one pair of peregrines on that beautiful bit of country.  Perhaps I’ll see this magic bird again, or her mate, or her rival, until I’m as blase about a peregrine strike as a whistling kite soaring on a thermal. But yesterday, as I took my four hundred photographs while the peregrine peaceably disembowelled its meal, showing the equanimity that makes them the favoured hunting falcon, I felt truly blessed.

Peregrine in front of branch staring at me crop

Peregrine falcon watching the watchers

More stories about raptors in Berowra’s backyard (and mine):

The beautiful white morph of the grey goshawk in Bluetongue’s back

A hunting collared sparrowhawk in Nude trees and naughty birds

The whistling kites of Bar and Peat Islands in Two sad islands, three whistling kites

The many white-bellied sea eagles of the Hawkesbury and Lake Macquarie in Encounters with eagles

Love, death and stray cats

It’s not often that I find myself on same page at Tony Abbott, Australia’s climate change denying PM.  But having exhausted the potential of their previous three word slogans, the conservative government recently moved on to a new one: “Kill the Cats”.  After this week’s events I think I could find some common cause with Tones on this theme.

I know you shouldn’t have favourites but Shyla was my favourite chicken.

She came to our place as a bundle of fluff and managed, uniquely, to survive our enthusiastic but doofus chick rearing.  She was the hen you would trip over at the chookhouse gate, where she would be pacing up and down the second the back door opened.  And then she would follow you round the garden waiting for lovely things like grapes or curlworms or weevil ridden comestibles and if none of those were forthcoming, peck your butt to see if it would make an adequate alternative.  Her response to a human approaching was to squat and jiggle in what I think translates loosely from hen as “ok, you can mount me now”.  Which was faintly disturbing, while at the same time suggested an affection of some strange kind.

And that’s not even mentioning the fact that she was our one reliable layer, producing a daily egg all winter long.

Since she was such a useful, friendly and characterful girl, she was obviously the first choice for a midnight snack when a great big feral cat came visiting our yard in the dead of night this past week.  I don’t want to sound callous but the bloody thing could have taken Snowball the silky bantam – smaller, ancient, more visible in dim lighting, huffy around humans, laying eggs only when the weather and the tides are just right.

But no, it had to grab Shyla, the life and soul of the backyard. The Top Chook took one for the team.

Everyone’s very subdued down in the bottom of the garden now, accepting the indignity of being carried, half-asleep, from their perilous perch on the edge of the fig tree barrel, to secure lodgings in Palm Beach, the long-abandoned vernacular modernist chicken coop.

Shyla was the victim of our hubris – the one who paid the ultimate price of six years without locking the chooks up at night.

So what changed in our suburban ecosystem?  I reckon it’s the departure of the (somewhat annoying) little yappy dog next door.  The neighbours on the other side have a laconic German Shepherd who doesn’t even chase the chooks.  But the yapster would have given a cat a run for its money.  If Tony and cronies want to get rid of feral cats, it’s not red-necks with guns that will do the job.  Scientists reckon the best strategy is to restore the top predators – dingoes.  Based on anecdotal evidence – the death toll in our backyard – I reckon they’re right.

With sufficient vigilance we can protect the chooks but we can’t do much for the bandicoot that still noses its way through the veggie garden at night.  Bandicoots recognise dingoes (and dogs more generally) – they know to avoid them.  In fact, some scientists have argued that this makes dingoes – placentals, only here for 50,000 years or so – natives.  But bandicoots still haven’t figured out cats.

I’m trying to find some positives in the situation.  My latest planting of broad beans has sprouted, magically unmolested.  I could attribute this success to my lavender mulch, or to the carefully secured veggie net, or the cold weather that has probably driven the local rodent population indoors (where we live.  Gulp.)  But perhaps the feral feline took a few rats as a chaser after devouring poor Shyla.  It’s a choice, it seems, eggs or beans.  Not fair!  I want both!

It’s all very sad.  Our eight year old got it right as she sobbed herself to sleep the other night: “you know where there’s someone in your care and you can’t protect them, you feel like there’s a hole in your heart”.  Yeah, babe I do.

I’ve been thinking about another lost lovely one this week.  The twelfth anniversary of our son’s death has just passed us by.  Born, unexpectedly, with a lopsided and innovatively organised brain, he was a bonny baby boy, whose plump little body suffered many seizures and would never really do quite what he wanted.  He had a short but lovely life, that ended suddenly and surprisingly (we shouldn’t really have been surprised) before dawn on on a beautiful winter’s morning, just like these last glorious days.

For a time, during the relentless rumination that followed our sleepy newborn’s diagnosis, I spent a lot of time thinking about stray cats.

Stray cats crapping in our pocket sized backyard.  Stray cats with a payload of toxoplasmosis gondii, “one of the most successful parasites on Earth”.  It inhabits the bodies of around half of the world’s human population, and plenty of other warm blooded animals too, but only reproduces only inside pussycats, emerging to infect other creatures, the parasite transmitted through cysts lurking in its poo.

Recently there’s been a pop science fascination with the consequences of toxoplasmosis infection.  While (most of the many many) infected people are asymptomatic, researchers have found that rats with the parasite become risk takers.  Losing their natural fear of cats, some even become attracted to the scent of their predator (not coincidentally, the parasite’s host).  Humans with toxo, too, seems to have somewhat different personalities than those without.  This idea, that humans – philosophers and planet conquerers – might have our very selves shaped by a single celled organism, disturbs and fascinates us.

If you are unlucky enough to be infected for the first time in the early weeks of pregnancy, your baby can be born with congenital toxoplasmosis, with possible serious consequences for the child’s health.  Toxo can cause problems with vision and hearing, seizures and intellectual disability.  Which is why I found myself thinking so long and hard, a decade or so ago, about my lack of gardening gloves and the roaming neighbourhood moggies.

In the end, my ruminations about infected cat shit went nowhere, like the dwelling upon dioxins from the incinerated corpses of foot-and-mouth infected cows that filled the air that year, or my endless Googling on the chromosonal origins of pachygyria (“Come back if you have another one with the same thing” the genetic counsellor suggested.  We were floored.  Although not quite so amazed as when she asked us, the Scotsman and the Australian, if we were cousins)

Very very occasionally Tony Abbott, MP, is accidentally right: sometimes shit just happens.

How do we make sense of these things, the deaths of our beloved children and the untimely demise of our pet chickens?  How are they connected, the miraculous germination of broadbeans and the midnight movements of predators?  The passing of parasites and personality traits from rats to cats to cat lovers?  The hidden life of the soil and the secrets in our bloodstream that can elate us and destroy us, often at the very same time?

Nude trees and naughty birds

Who lives in our backyard?  How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention.

I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think?  “Magpie”.  Humans, huh?

Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies.  But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction.  Well, a lego construction with integral insects.  Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away.  Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.

That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be.  Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round.  They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants.   If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.

And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.

There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg.  I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.

Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.

I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists.  Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious.  In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.”  I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”.  Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”.  I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.

Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein?  I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money.  Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.

And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from.  The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.

But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie.  Nude trees held no allure for her.  She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.

I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds.  Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit.  I’m hoping she got the best of them.  What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.

I hope she’ll be back.  I’ll be keeping watch.

Bluetongue’s back

There’s was something in the woodshed when I went down to feed the chooks this morning.  A scaly tail sliding out the door.  At first I thought Snakey was back, since the woodshed was a favourite haunt of hers (conveniently close to a regular supply of breakfast eggs).  But it was someone else warming up in the morning sun.

I reckon I’ve seen that face before.

After spending a disturbingly long time counting and colour-swatching scales, I’ve come to the conclusion this is the same bluetongue, way back in 2011.

Documentary evidence of a skink psychologically scarred by a standoff with a chicken. As I recall, there was a lot of awkward staring – the bluetongue blinked first.

Apparently blueys can live for 20 years or so.  Since our place is rich with “habitat” – that is, great big  piles of rotting sticks – the guy (or gal – apparently you have to dissect them or set up a fight to find out, thanks to the male’s insignificant hemipenes… *snigger*) may have been hanging round the whole time.  It’s a nice thought.

I had attributed our pleasing lack of slugs to vigilant chickens but maybe lizards have been doing their bit as well.  This sort of thing makes being an organic gardener seem less like a sequence of indecisive moments in the “slug bait” aisle of the hardware store and more like a practical pest management strategy.

The chooks seem to have a remarkable diffidence towards reptiles.  They were completely uninterested a couple of years back when Snakey took up residence in the chook run.  The sight of a snake in this position in my bedroom would freak the hell out of me:

But the gals toddled off to sleep, completely unfazed.  It was a different story on the day a white goshawk  drifted into the trees above the chook house.  The hens bolted into the undergrowth and were very very very quiet.  Gorgeous as this bird is – the only pure-white raptor in the world – even I found it quite menacing as, in Bond villain style, it flexed first one set of claws and then the other, gazing intently around the yard.

Maybe its not a simple matter of scales good-feathers bad. I’ve yet to see the chooks handle serious snake action, despite the occasional sightings of a red-bellied black by the neighbours.  The potential for reptile-avian dinosaur show-downs is definitely not exhausted. For more updates, I’ll certainly be tuning in to the upcoming episode of Bluetongue Encounters on tomorrow’s Chicken TV.

Apples of the earth vs the hungry gap

Truth be told, Sydney doesn’t really have a hungry gap – when your late winter dessert fruits are custard apples, the chillier months don’t hold too many terrors.

Nonetheless, things are moving… very…. very… slowly… in the garden at the moment.  Everything except whatever ate my first-formed head of broccoli, which moved far too damn fast – faster than I did, anyway.

A few stalwarts – purple mustard, parley, garlic and shallots – are ticking along despite winter sunlight and absolutely no rain, and the globe artichokes are still standing, like gorgeous silvery statues scattered around the garden.

Artichokes and peach blossom

But it’s harvest-time for one thing: yacon.  A real pomme-de-terre – the mostly delicious root vegetable you’ve never heard of.  Just when the apples are getting a bit meh, the granny smiths slipping out of your hands and the rest of them hardly worth picking up, it’s time to dig up the “apple of the earth”.

The whole eating experience is deeply implausible.  The tubers look a bit like turnips yet curiously you don’t feel like Baldrick when you eat them.

Baldrick and turnip

They’re crisp and sweet, a little firmer than an apple in texture but just as juicy.  You have to peel them, and the flesh has a distinct resinous tang – someone has described it as a little like sugar cane, which is spot on.  They would make a fantastic addition to a fancy-pants cheese plate, though my rather meagre harvest didn’t make it that far – too easy to crunch them as a snack.

Yacon share many features with jerusalem artichokes, but, critically, *not* the dangerous flatulence in the dining room or the irritating weediness in the garden.  Like artichokes, they shoot up to six foot over the summer and then die back down.  Mine have tended to keel over at a certain point, overburdened by their large, shapely leaves, but that hasn’t seemed to crimp their style.

I’ve been growing them along a fenceline that gets very little light from autumn equinox to spring, and they seem to handle those conditions, though I think I may need to fertilise and water them more generously this year.  The copious fruits of our Eureka lemon tree are being pressed into the hands of all our visitors at the moment – I’d love to to the same with yacon, like some sort of Johnny Appleseed of the Apple-of-the-Earth.

The egg eaters

Someone’s been eating eggs.  I don’t mean us, although obviously we have been eating them, and with great relish too.   I tried and failed to take a photograph of this morning’s scramble, that glorious renaissance of the freshly-laid goog.  It seems that these eggs are simply too magnificent to be captured by mortal photographic technology.  All that remained on film was this ineffable golden glow.

Scrambled egg yellow

No, I don’t mean us, the authorised Egg Robbers.  Some other creature has been eating eggs. It could be a rat or a possum. It could be Snakey the Diamond Python – there was a mysterious predatory smell in the garden over the last couple of days, along with scattered beige feathers. Andy Ninja was looking distinctly rumpled, like an ambitious nocturnal reptile might have tried to make her, perched temptingly amidst the lower branches of the coral tree, a late-night snack .  But I fear it may be…. a Cannibal Chicken.

The kids are on the case: “We questioned each of the chickens, by showing them an egg.  Shyla and Treasure were interested, but not too interested.  But Luna went close to it… too close.  I think she tried to peck it.”  So, after this exhaustive forensic investigation, Luna is in the frame (in a possible miscarriage of justice, Abbey the elusive Barnevelder escaped questioning by being impossible to catch).

Who is the inner Luna?  Who can say, although the disturbing photograph suggests an interior vortex and a single glowing eye.  Beware, Luna, we will be watching you…