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August 24, 2019

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Climate change, estuaries, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, superb lyrebirds, Uncategorized

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The singing and the sea

Bute with shiny landscape tidied When you put your boat in at Cowan Creek, you know you’re paddling in the sea. Yes, there are rocky slopes on every side, and eucalypts and banksias lean over the shoreline. The rows of hot pink bells of epacris longifolia dangle amazingly close to the waves.

Epicris longifolia

Smith Creek reflections

White cheeked honeyeater and banksia

But look over the side of your boat, especially in this big dry, and your gaze falls metres deep into into the crystal clear green water. It might be called a “creek” but there’s no murky river water here. Further downstream, where Cowan Creek meets the Hawkesbury proper at Broken Bay, the Pacific meets the horizon and you really know you are in the ocean.

Fishermen off Flint and Steel Point

Looking out to sea

Lion Island

Fog near America Bay

Speedboat off Juno Point

Cormorant off Juno Point having a snack

But far above the official mouth of the river – the limit of “flat water sailing” drawn between Juno Head and Flint and Steel Bay – the water is briny. The tide rolls up the Hawkesbury as far as the Grose River Valley, 138 kilometres from the sea, taking a wedge of salty water upstream. If Broken Bay, where these pictures were taken, is essentially a marine environment, Cowan Creek is not too much different.

Yachts off Cottage Point

Because of course, the Hawkesbury is a drowned river valley. The river channel that once wound its way twenty five kilometres to the east, across the continent shelf, has long ago disappeared two hundred metres or more beneath the ocean. The late Quaternary Marine Transgression that drowned the Hawkesbury started 18,000 years ago and went on for 10,000 years, with the water level peaking just a metre or two above current sea levels.

Paul Boon, in his fascinating history of the Hawkesbury, reports that during that time, sea level rose at perhaps 8-10 metres every millennium, at some times as 40 metres in a thousand years (Boon, 2017, Chapter 3). It‘s hard to imagine what that must have been like for the first people here, the Guringai and Dharug people, moving again and again ahead of the rising tide, away from the coastal flat lands to the hills of the Hornsby plateau.

On the way to Stingray Bay

Even more mindboggling to think, as Boon quietly points out, that over the last few decades sea level has been creeping up by around three millimetres a year. If the CSIRO scientists are right, and I for one don’t doubt they are, sea levels are changing as worryingly fast, if not as fast as the speediest rises in the Flandrian Transgression. On the bright side if I live long enough, there’ll be far more of the upper reaches of Cowan Creek to explore, in an admittedly sweaty and decrepit manner, in my kayak

Sunrise sky near Cotton Tree Bay

Last weekend’s paddle reminded me of what a special place the Hawkesbury is, a drowned river valley where, after rain, waterfalls tumble off the sandstone straight into the sea. I was coming back from a jaunt to Smith’s Creek when, heading into a bay to avoid a plague of water skiiers, I heard a lyrebird going for broke.

According to Birdlife Australia, superb lyrebirds are inhabitants of moist forests. I’m sure the one I heard scratching around in the undergrowth by the shore, would soon be heading back to the gullies and the treetops. But in its distant melange of calls – of satin bowerbirds, kookaburras, currawongs, red wattlebirds and other things I just can’t recognise – was a sound I’d never heard a lyrebird make before. I’m sure I heard an impression of that paradigmatic bird of the beach – the silver gull.

And that’s the soundtrack of the Hawkesbury estuary, right there,

What are your bird call spotting skills like, dear reader? Can you recognise any other shore birds in this estuarine lyrebird’s song? If you can spot any extra calls, please let me know!

The green water of Cowan Creek

A superb lyrebird I prepared earlier

Other stories from Cowan Creek and thereabouts

A glimpse of a peregrine falcon hunting: death and good fortune in Cowan Creek

Old hands: how Smith’s Creek was nearly Canberra

Stingray Bay – lost and found

The Hawkesbury in winter: the shortest days and how to use them

Broken Bay at low ebb: the troubled history of Hawkesbury oysters

A winter morning in Cowan Creek

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May 13, 2016

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Geology, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, Uncategorized, waterways

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Delta bravo!

Kylie’s Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park

It’s lucky that travelling in reverse is just as easy as going forwards in Egg, my decrepit wooden kayak (currently held together with duct tape), because lately my paddles seem to be taking me back in time. Back to old haunts and old holiday snaps, but also really really far back into the geological past.

When I took this photo of beautiful Kylie’s Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park in 2011, for instance, I wasn’t thinking “My, what a fine example of a barrier dune system in a wave dominated estuary!”

Diamond Head and Watson Taylor Lake

And this snap from North Brother Mountain, taken on the same trip five years ago, demonstrates that I wasn’t paying enough attention to geomorphology at the time. It’s not a bad shot of the 100,000 year old Pleistocene sand barriers that protect Watson Taylor Lake from the crashing waves of the Pacific. But, in retrospect, I should have given the picturesque tree on the right the flick, and made sure I squeezed in a view of the mouth of the Camden Haven River.

Because, for the New South Wales anyway, this is a pretty special place. As you can see in the pic below by a more geologically literate photographer, enfolded in the lake is a classic river delta – a rare sight in this part of the world. It’s a mini-Mississippi, sloughing off its sediment as it flows into stiller waters, leaving muddy banks along the way and a cluster of little islands at river’s end.

Watson Taylor Lake. Bias, Gene. watsontaylorlake.jpg Pics4learning July 2004. 9 May 2016 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>.

Sad to say, I didn’t notice all this deposition and composition as I paddled down Camden Haven Inlet at dawn, skimming over the seagrass and the sand. Even when I got stuck in the mud – sorry, fluvial sediment – right in the middle of the lake. At high tide. Next to a bunch of knee deep swans. Sometimes I reckon I’m not the sharpest knife in the knifeblock.

Black swans smirking while I try to get afloat after running aground in the middle of the lake

It was only back at camp at Kylie’s, over a first reviving brew-up, when I stumbled on Rod’s Northern Rivers Geology blog with its intriguing story of the missing coastal deltas of New South Wales that I figured out what I’d seen.

South Brother Mountain in dawn light

Up a shallow side creek towards the lake

South and Middle Brother from the northern shore of the lake

A side view of the levees beside the Camden Haven River

Paddling dead casual-like towards the river mouth

Thinking back, I realised I’d been somewhere very similar just a few weeks ago, in another one of the New South Wales’ magical coastal lagoons. Where Dora Creek – home of freakish panda-snakes – empties into Lake Macquarie, the very same levees march, both sides of the river, far out into the open water.

Dora Creek doesn’t have mangrove topped islands at its mouth, like the Camden Haven. Perhaps their beginnings were washed away by the waves that scoot across five kilometres of open water to scare the hell out of unwary kayakers. In the same way storms, waves and the East Australian Current sluice river sand and sediment out into the Pacific or up the coast, leaving barrier beaches in place of river deltas all along the Eastern seaboard.

Island in the delta

But in the sheltered estuary of Watson Taylor Lake I got to enjoy all the rare pleasures of a river delta. Mosquitoes, for instance. More than I’ve encountered anywhere, even my backyard, locally famous for its blood buffet and chubby and contented microbats. With the mozzies come the mozzie eaters.

“Clumping” white-breasted woodswallows

Woodswallows peeping

Woodswallow grooming

I stopped to take pictures of the wood swallows, but in fact, this little beach, at the very end of the Camden Haven’s levees, had almost as many birds as it had bugs. Honey-eaters in an array of colours: brown, striped and yellow-faced. Noisy friarbirds, mobs of them, bursting from the casuarinas to wheel and chatter. Wagtails and fantails. Crested terns chilling out away from the surf. A drongo (I’m not being insulting – it’s a gorgeous bird). Not to mention a special treat – the rarely sighted fungus-faced thornbill.

Egg on “bird watching beach” near the mouth of the Camden Haven River

Spangled drongo

The rarely sighted fungus faced thornbill

Crested terns sticking their tongues out at me.

And, as I wended my way through the maze of islands with the help of the handy map in my Paddlers Guide to NSW, an unflappable young sea eagle, rising majestically above the cloud of biters. It takes a genuine love of raptors to continue taking snaps while half a dozen mosquitos are sucking on your eyelids.

White bellied sea eagle in a river-side casuarina

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

But as RB just reminded me, if Australia’s eastern coast is wanting for river deltas now, it’s not always been so. It was an enormous braided river delta, like the Amazon or the Ganges that laid down the golden Hawkesbury sandstone, a couple of hundred metres thick, right across the Sydney Basin, 230 million years ago.

Perhaps this is an approach to marketing I can put to the NSW Tourist Board. “Volcanos! Dangerous megafauna! Epic braided river deltas! Go back far enough in time, and New South Wales has it all!!”

Reflections of North Brother Mountain on my way back to the put in at Camden Inlet

More adventures on New South Wales’ coastal lagoons

Geomorphology and dawn reflections on a midwinter lagoon at Myall and Narrabeen Lakes

A paddle across scary Lake Macquarie to see the snake-pandas of Dora Creek

Encounters with eagles on Budgewoi Lake

Moonlit night on Kylie’s Beach

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March 7, 2016

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Animal communication, Animal senses, Backyard birds, Lizards, Native animals, Native birds, natural history, Uncategorized

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Thinking like a bird

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

Eastern water dragon

Alley-oop

Upside down glossy black-cockatoo

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

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

Grey butcherbird makes a rare appearance in the backyard

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

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

Pair of galahs

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

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

Magpie in spring

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

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

Nuzzling sulphur crested cockatoo

Lovebirds

What are you looking at?

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

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

Little Wattlebird on alert

Little wattlebird in the backyard

Juvenile grey butcherbird

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

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

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

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

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

Long beaked corellas giving me a funny look long.jpg

Long billed corellas giving me a funny look

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

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October 4, 2015

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

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Encounters with eagles

May I present this week’s sea eagle?

Sea eagle and a view of Budgewoi Lake

Sea eagle retreating to a pole to eat its fish

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

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

Sea eagle about to launch

Sea eagle soaring in for fish

Whistling kite defending its ground

White bellied sea eagle beats a retreat

Whistling kite aka archaeopteryx

Whistling kite coming in for the kill

Whistling kite hunting in Patonga Creek

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

Sea eagle at Berowra Creek

An eagle eye

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

Berowra Creek in morning mist

Board walk through the saltmarsh near Berowra Creek

Pied cormorant about to be eaten by a shark

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

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

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

White-bellied sea eagle struggling with a supersized meal

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

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

Pied cormorant strangled by a fishing line

Female australasian darter tangled up in fishing line

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

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

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

Greater egret coming in to land

Greater Egret hunting in Budgewoi Lake

Wallarah Creek

Striated heron

Casuarinas in Wallarah Creek

Scary paperbarks

Existential graffiti channelling the thoughts of the strangled cormorant

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August 29, 2015

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

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Broken Bay at low ebb

Oyster leases exposed at low tide

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

Freeway bridge at first light

Crepuscuar rays over Spectacle Island

Brooklyn Bridge in dawn light

The shore of Spectacle Island

Under the freeway bridge

White-faced heron and crabby breakfast

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

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

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

Rocky shores of Brisbane Water National Park

Oysters on the beach in Brisbane Water National Park

Oysters upstream in Mooney Mooney Creek

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

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

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

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

It was noxious pest to the rescue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pied cormorant

Pied cormorants on an oyster lease

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

Knackered looking Eastern Curlew

Snake Island

Rock garden in Brisbane Water National Park

Pelican

Rock warbler

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

White faced heron in front of Brooklyn Bridge

References

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

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

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

July 29, 2015

Posted under

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

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Nine herons hunting

Striated heron fishing

Striated heron enjoying the happy moment of having caught something

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

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

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

Oyster leases in Mooney Mooney Creek

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

… three posing pelicans

… two eagles soaring

White bellied sea eagle

Wedge tailed eagle soaring

Wedgetailed eagle showing wedgie tail

A bit of colour and uplifted wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mooney Mooney Bridge – a beautiful bit of concrete

Mist on Mooney Mooney Creek on an earlier jaunt

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

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

Looking back towards the Old Pacific Highway bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WFH Pair back hunting in focus end one crop

WF Herons one in front of other still crop

References

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

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

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

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

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

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June 23, 2015

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anthropocene, Geology, History, national parks, natural history, Seasons, Soil

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Midwinter lagoon

Bombah Broadwater in the gloaming

It’s past the shortest day of the year, but, in spite of her scrapes and dings, Egg the elderly wooden kayak doesn’t seem to be ready for drydock yet. Perhaps it’s that last unseasonable whirl of autumnal warmth, caught alongside the coast in the East Australian Current, that’s keeping the sea a balmy 20 degrees. Or perhaps it’s just the lure of still, winter water all around.

Since Egg was first laid in our driveway a year ago, I’ve been seeing Sydney differently. Those long roundabout routes from A to B via M and Q and P, punctuated somewhere along the way by a bridge or two, suddenly make sense. The city of roads and buildings retreats and, I feel, just out of sight on every side, the presence of water.

The Hawkesbury estuary

Upper reaches of Berowra Creek, a hop skip and jump from the Hornsby Westfield

This is our backyard, encircled by the salty embrace of the Hawkesbury estuary. But it doesn’t end here, with the secretive topography of flooded river valleys. All the way up (and down) the New South Wales coast, the shoreline is flanked by coastal lagoons. I’m not complaining, even the tiniest little bit, about all these sheltered waters. But I’ve started to wonder what geographic accident has given a timid canoeist so much to feel grateful for.

Along with marshes and flats, coastal lagoons make up maybe 10% of the world’s seaboards, and in NSW lots of us live by them, many more than by the ocean itself. Lagoons (or wave-dominated estuaries – there are ongoing hissy-fits around these definitions) appear where low-lying plains, rather than dramatic cliffs, meet a shallow gently sloping seabed. Usually, they are found on shores shaped mainly by waves rather than big tides, with underlying rock that crumbles nicely into beach sand not finer, silty sediment.

The more sand the better – perhaps our generous continental shelf harbours this bounty from a time when the Sydney Basin was a enormous braided river delta, like the Ganges today. But you don’t want too much rain – lagoons are usually fed by an underwhelming little creek or even just groundwater – that doesn’t (or doesn’t often) burst through the land between waterway and ocean.

Dawn breaks over the barrier between Bombah Broadwater and the open sea

To make a lagoon*, you need a barrier to the open sea. In the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, coastal geomorphologists duked it out over just how these barriers were born. Did breaking waves make for ever-rising off-shore sand bars? Did encroaching seas submerge coastal dunes? And then there’s the third, attractively named “spit accretion theory” (Davis and Fitzgerald, 2004). Not, as it might sound, a creation myth where bunyips drool into puddles between the dunes; just sand clinging to rocky headlands as it is carried along the coast by the (delightfully piratical) longshore drift.

It turns out that everyone was right, at least some of the time. Which is nice. It’s hard to keep the heat in a scientific controversy when lots of the evidence, hidden beneath the surface of the sea in the first place, has been washed away or covered over during the last few millenia by terrestrial silt or aeolian sand. Who could be angry with such mellifluous and frankly otherworldly-sounding geomorphologies in play?

Pelican landing on Bombah Broadwater

Most lagoons have only been around for a little while, geologically speaking, formed after sea levels began to rise as glaciers melted 18,000 years ago or thereabouts. Many, like Narrabeen Lake, which we whizzed round on our bikes in the company of half the population of the North Beaches a few weeks ago, are even younger, not seven thousand years old. A blink of the eye for people who were here 50,000 years before.

Strangely, lagoons move. Today’s surfers walk across the relics of yesterday’s drowned lakes. Barrier beaches migrated landward, emerging from the ocean just as “marine transgressions” (that’s advancing oceans, not the naughtiness of waves) slowed. Shaped in stable times, coastal lakes still don’t hang around for long. This shouldn’t surprise me – I know that, despite appearances, beaches are really rivers of sand.

If the tides were higher, if the rivers was faster or siltier, if Australia wasn’t so seismically serene, the lagoons would fill up and dry out or be washed away, and the cormorants would have to hunt elsewhere. In fact, for all our dredging and draining, it’s happening right now. Like life itself, coastal lagoons are a transitory phenomenon, a passing pleasure.

Surfers floating over the relics of yesterday’s lagoon

Narrabeen Lake

Black swans in Narrabeen Lagoon

(Little?) Black cormorants

Intermediate egret in Narrabeen Lagoon

And then there’s the gyttja, something so very special it’s found nowhere else in Australia, and helps qualify Myall Lakes as a unique protected wetland. What is it? Well, rotting pondweed. No, I’m underselling it: it’s up to 70cm of “a highly mobile and organic mud that has a gelatinous appearance”, a “flocculent green–brown material” (Drew et al 2008), “an uncompacted, anoxic and sulphurous ‘ooze'” made from “the decomposition of charophytes, macrophytes, cyanobacteria and algae”. Strangely, not so much about the ooze in the National Parks brochures. But it’s an ooze that’s been there for, perhaps, a thousand years.

Dusk on Bombah Broadwater

Looking west at dawn on Bombah Broadwater

Canoeists in the gloaming

Eric the Egret on the Bombah Point Ferry

Glorious Angophora

Reflections on the tea-brown waters of Myall Lakes

Still morning on Two Mile Lake

I’ve been thinking about lies beneath the surface of the water and the windblown sand. But paddling through the Broadwater two weeks back, in a startling moment I found myself not gliding above the mysteries of quiet waterways, but surrounded, right amongst it. A huge flock, a murmuration almost, of little black cormorants, perhaps returning from a fishing trip, passed above and on one side and on the other without a single cry but with a sound I’ve never heard before: the white noise of hundreds and hundreds of moving wings.

The sound of the midwinter lagoon, all around me.

Little black cormorants murmurating

* Be warned: there’s a chance my account of the origins of coastal lagoons is completely wrong. After all, the New South Wales coast “has provoked many questions and various degrees of controversy” (Thom, 2010, 1238). And perhaps it’s “premature to attempt a comprehensive analysis of coastal lagoon evolution and dynamics when so many lagoons have been so little studied” (Bird, 1994, 13). In case you want to check my workings:

References

Bird, Erik (1994) “Physically setting and geomorphology of Coastal lagoons” in Kjerfve, B. (ed) Coastal Lagoon Processes, Elsevier
Davis, R. and Fitzgerald, D. (2004) Beaches and Coasts, Blackwell Science
Drew, Simon Iona Flett, Joanne Wilson,Henk Heijnis, C. Gregory Skilbeck (2008) “The trophic history Myall Lakes, NSW, Australia” Hydrobiologia 608
Eyre, Bradley and Damien Maher “Structure and Function of warm temperate east Australian lagoons: implications for natural and anthropogenic changes” Coastal Lagoons: Critical Habitats of Environmental Change, dited by Michael J. Kennish, Hans W. Paerl
Martin, Louis and Jose Maria Landim Dominguez (1994) “Geological history of coastal lagoons” Kjerfve, B. (ed) Coastal Lagoon Processes, Elsevier
Masselink, Gerhard and Hughes, Michael (2003) Introduction to Coastal processes and geomorphology, New York, Oxford University Press
Thom, Bruce, Hesp, Patrick, Bryant, Edward (1994) “Last glacial ‘coastal’ dunes in Eastern Australia and implications for landscape stability during the Last Glacial Maximum” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 111 (3-4)
Thom, Bruce (2010) “New South Wales” Eric Bird (ed) Encyclopaedia of the World’s Coastal Landforms, Springer

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mccnmatt

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June 12, 2015

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Climate change, Garden trees, Gardening, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

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Autumn in terminal decline?

Red wattlebird in our Japanese maple

In amongst the nasty consequences of global warming – sea-level-rise-ocean-acidification-violent-storms-heat-waves-large-scale-extinctions (if you say it quickly and rock back and forth at the same time it doesn’t seem quite so bad) – a decline in the intensity of autumn leaf colour really doesn’t draw the eye. Bar a few unusual plants like the red-fruited kurrajong and the Antarctic beech, most deciduous plants around here aren’t even natives. So who cares, eh?

But as I huddle in my chilly house on its shady south-facing hillside, waiting for the leaves on the neighbour’s looming liquidambar to fall, the impact of climate change on deciduous trees seems like a tremendously pressing question.

I’m not the only one gripped by this crucial topic. The latest Trends in Ecology and Evolution has roundly denounced the scandalous neglect of autumn. Spring gets its own live feed on BBC TV, but even scientists get depressed by extended discussions of leaf senescence, it seems. Garnering less than half as many articles as its greener sibling, autumn, according to the indignant authors, is a “neglected season in climate change research”.

Well, neglected no longer! Not here in the backyards of Berowra. Right here, right now we bring you…. in the prophetic words of Gallinat and her outraged colleagues… “the future of autumn research”.

Rainbow lorikeets in the bare liquidambar

Liquidambar leaf pattern

Red liquidamba leaves

As we march boldly into fall’s future, I’m cling to the hope that photoperiod (that’s the day-length to you and me) will rescue me from climate change, sending that winter-sun-blocking foliage promptly into the compost bin regardless of how roasting hot it is. And it’s not a vain hope – the amount of light a deciduous plant receives does seem to help many decide whether it’s time to shed their leaves or not.

In the case of liquidambar, long days or lots of light delay dormancy, as you can see from these nifty pictures of a specimen down the street, well illuminated day and night so as to minimise deaths on a local pedestrian crossing, clinging to its leaves long after its neighbours have shrugged their own.

Illuminated liquidambar leaves

The leafy and the leafless

Liquidambar experiencing artificial lighting “long days”

Depressingly, it does seem that sweetgums need cooler weather to finally ditch their leaves, even in the short days of midwinter. Photoperiod matters most near the poles – but for trees at the lower latitudes (like Sydney, curse it) temperature is the clincher.

This raises interesting questions about the future of the veggie garden. Around the winter solstice it lurks in the shade of our dawn redwood, a living fossil that grew across the temperate Arctic when dinosaurs stomped the earth, and was dramatically rediscovered in the 1940s in a single isolated valley in China. Will its gorgeous copper needles still fall in time to give my broadbeans a decent run-up to spring when we’re wearing shorts all winter?

Fall leaves of dawn redwood

In the words of a Facebook status update, “it’s complicated”. Could this be why climate scientists, like nervous singles, are staying well clear?

For instance, warmer springs lead to earlier bud burst, which can sometimes mean earlier leaf-fall. And deciduous trees in general tend to lose their leaves more readily in dry weather. “On average”, according to Estiarte and Peñuelas (2015) “climatic warming will delay and drought will advance leaf senescence”. Work that one out.

And that’s not even throwing nutrient availability into the mix. For instance, what if trees start going ballistic with all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? This vision of a greenhouse planet jungle awash with joyful plants growing at breakneck speed sounds like something out of a climate denialist fantasy, doesn’t it? “More open cut mines, pretty please!” beg the earth’s desperate forests “my future is coal!”

Sadly for the wind-farm haters, it mostly doesn’t work like that. Carbon dioxide can give trees a flying start but eventually the nitrogen supply conks out, or drought and too much CO2 do the leaves in. Even with the help of globe-trotting survivors like sweet gums and dawn redwoods, coal (and copious quantities of greenhouse gases) won’t make the world greener. Let’s just hope, even gardening in our bikinis, we can still find gold.

Little wattlebird doing something mysterious with a maple leaf

Sulphur crested enjoying liquidambar seeds

Mooned by a red wattlebird

References

Estiarte, M and Peñuelas, J (2015) “Alteration of the phenology of leaf senescence and fall in winter deciduous species by climate change: effects on nutrient proficiency” from Global Change Biology 21(2) 1005-17
Flexas, J, Loreto, F and Medrano, H. (2012) Terrestrial photosynthesis in a changing environment: a molecular, physiological and ecological approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Gallinat, AS, Primack, RB, Wagner, DL (2015) “Autumn, the neglected season in climate change research” from Trends in ecology and evolution 30(3)
Warren JM, Jensen AM, Medlyn BE, Norby RJ, Tissue DT, (2015) ‘Carbon dioxide stimulation of photosynthesis in Liquidambar styraciflua is not sustained during a 12-year field experiment’, AOB Plants, vol.7, Article no.plu074
Warren, JM, Norby, RJ, Wullschleger SD (2011) ‘Elevated CO2 enhances leaf senescence during extreme drought in a temperate forest”. Tree Physiology 31, 117-30
Worrall, J (1993) “Temperature effects on bud-burst and leaf-fall in subalpine larch” Journal of Sustainable Forestry 1(2)

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 9, 2015

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Backyard birds, Climate change, national parks, Native animals, natural history

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Low tide at Gunyah Beach

“The sea or not the sea?”

That was the question churning through my brain, as I set out for my first solo kayak on the Hawkesbury proper. Let’s be kind and say I’m not a risk taker (there’s a reason I’m fond of chickens). And my canoe is properly vintage, made out of wafer-thin plywood back in the early 70s, and now held together by a rich tapestry of epoxy based products and amateurishly applied fibreglass. Don’t get me wrong – it was the best $100 I ever spent on ebay but our Egg is no ocean-going liner.

Slightly rotten Egg, the day i bought it for $100

Egg being cooked

A rich melange of epoxy products

Replacing the rotten carlin

But setting off on a sunny Saturday morning with a light off-shore wind and a slack tide, I thought my decrepit boat and I might just be able to brave a three kilometre paddle along the widest reaches of the Hawkesbury Estuary, from Brooklyn’s Parsley Bay to Gunyah Beach in Kuring-gai Chase national park.

In Parsley Bay

Map of my jaunt, preserved from harm in a handy ziploc bag

About midway across the 700 metres at the mouth of Porto Bay, I realised the weird rise and fall of the boat was swell, a new and disturbing experience for me as a canoeist. Well, it was either swell or the kayak was being regularly nudged sideways by bull sharks. Either way, I was not happy. It didn’t help that the choppy water was full of floating branches, torn down by last week’s big winds. If the sharks didn’t get me, I’d be turned into a giant vegetarian shishkebab by a surfing pine tree. I was in the ocean, and it was scary.

Storm detritus on Gunyah Beach

Of course, the Hawkesbury “River” is, kinda, the sea – a flooded river valley that has its tidal limit a hundred kilometres or thereabouts from its mouth. Whenever I think about this, I imagine how strange it must have been for the people living on the plains that once stretched out from the current coastline under what is now the surface of the sea, as the ocean crept slowly up, over ten thousand years, claiming the valleys carved out by the river, pushing people before it into the hills. Now that’s really going into the unknown.

Waterfall from a hanging valley

In the end, of course, I made my little paddle with no problems at all, apart from an annoying lack of photographic evidence that there was ever anything to fear. Gunyah Beach (boat access only) even had its own lounge suite on which an unnerved canoeist might rest and recover. I’m pretty sure the contractual obligation white-faced heron had just stood up after a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive as I arrived.

Ah, a comfy sofa.

Everyone’s been on the beach

Contractual obligation white-faced heron

Striated heron http://birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/striated-heron

Low tide in the creek

White cheeked honeyeaters – everywhere!

Stumbling through the mud around the beach-side lagoon, I found myself in a maelstrom of silvereyes and white cheeked honeyeaters. I’ve come to realise binaural hearing is a real asset for bird watching. With one dodgy cochlea I spent half my time whipping my head wildly from one side to the other to work out where the chirping was coming from. In the end taking random pictures of the bushes seemed the best way to avoid permanent neck injury. I was disproportionately pleased with the few photos that worked out. There’s something particularly delightful about the most minor victories over timidity and incompetence, even if you can’t convincingly frame pootling around in boats in your estuarine backyard as some kind of heroic feminist re-enactment of The Old Man and the Sea.

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April 21, 2015

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broody chickens, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, egg laying, natural history

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Brush turkey mathematics

Four hens + eleven teenaged brush turkeys + several decoy eggs in the henhouse = one fresh chicken egg a day. I can’t quite nut out this equation. There are three intractable maths problems here.

One is agricultural-cum-mathematical. Why are three of our pampered pets failing to lay eggs?

The second is at the point where philosophy meets mathematics, along the lines of “how many angels can dance on the head of pin”. Just exactly how many brush turkeys can occupy one suburban backyard? And why are there so damn many of them?

And then there’s the ethological question. Given the apparently infinite number of turkeys, and clear evidence that they are unrepentant egg eaters, why are we enjoying any omelettes at all?

Brush turkeys’ version of the High Line

What with the festival of poultry diseases we have been hosting lately, it’s not a big surprise that only sprightly Shyla continues to lay a regular egg. She’s an Australorp, a new fangled breed, presumably with disease resistance as one of her mod cons, while, say, Treasure with her tedious moulting and brooding, is a Light Sussex, a breed that’s been around since Roman times. I reckon that kind of pedigree is going to her a proclivity to old fashioned things, like the distinctly medieval-sounding fowl pox.

Being Top Chook doesn’t hurt Shyla’s capacity to pump out eggs. She makes sure she gets the best snacks by belting up to the garden gate as soon as she hears me coming and bounding in the air to grab scraps before I get a chance to dish them out.

Shyla prepares to leap

Shyla in mid air

But I’m not sure the other girls are getting quite enough to eat.

Now, I’m not saying that they’re wimps. Even ancient, diminutive Snowball the silky bantam will frighten off nosy megapodes that try to butt in while she’s in the middle of breakfast. But the trouble is, the chooks never sit down for a three course meal. They’re snackers. A few minutes of frenzied eating, and they wander off to nibble grass, have a dust bath, or in Shyla’s case, follow me around hoping I have better treats – say, limp grapes or weevil ridden grain. If that’s not forthcoming she’ll taste-test the wet washing or have a red hot go at pecking my butt.

Treasure and Shyla checking to see if the washing is edible

And then there’s always the possibility that my butt may be worth a peck

Shyla’s certainly not one to let starvation diminish her egg supply. But by the time the other hens realise seconds wouldn’t go astray, it’s a teeny bit late.

Brush turkey waiting in a line

Treasure with a brush turkey entourage

Three of a kind

“I want what she’s having”

Just part of the flock

Treasure’s tucker being eyeballed

No-one is 100% sure why there are so many damn brush turkeys in Brisbane and the northern suburbs of Sydney. “I’m supposed to be the expert on brush turkeys and I still can’t explain why that’s going on,” commented Professor Darryl Jones of Griffith University, talking to the ABC. He reckons numbers in Brisbane have increased by 700 percent in the last 20 years.

In the early 1990s, scientists thought moggies snacking on the unprotected chicks would put a stop to the urban invasion. Nope. The cluey babies will listen out for the alarm calls of just about any old bird, and as long as there’s enough cover they’ve got a chance. Fox and dingo baiting mean grown-up life has been less brutish and short, and the water-wise mulching habits of modern gardeners have made mound building in suburbia extremely convenient. The odd gormless adult bird might be taken by an ambitious powerful owl, willing to have a go at prey “at least 103%” of its own body weight, according to the remarkably precise estimates of scholarly birdwatchers. But let’s face it, these owls are just not powerful enough in the brush turkey execution caper for my liking.

If anyone knows about megapodes it’s Dr Anne “Brushturkey robochick” Göth, working down the road from here at Macquarie University. She’s explored every aspect of the weird story of how brush turkey babies, all on their own, dig their way out of their giant natal compost heaps – “the most nonavian life history you can get among creatures that are still feathered and lay hard-shelled eggs” – and then figure out without any parental guidance what they should eat and what will eat them, not to mention what the hell other brush turkeys look like without a glimpse of their parents or siblings. Its no wonder they have a thing about mirrors.

Dr Göth’s erstwhile colleague up in Queensland, Prof. Jones, comments “fortuitously her arrival [in Sydney] coincided with a marked expansion of populations in the vicinity of the northern suburbs of the city” (2007, 3). Mmmm. Coincidence, eh, Dr Göth? The gardeners and chicken keepers of the north shore are deeply, deeply suspicious. Anyway, whether or not she has been deliberately breeding an evil army of brush turkeys in her secret underground lab, Dr Göth is on the money about the cause of the population explosion in my back garden – the ready supply of chook food.

How many eggs?

Brush turkey trying hard to count eggs

So onto the final maths problem. If there is an apparently infinite number of megapodes in our backyard, how come they haven’t spotted Shyla’s daily egg, sitting there, sometimes all day, next to its plastic companions? Can’t brush turkeys count?

Rumour has it domestic chickens are a dab hand at maths. Three day old chicks can figure out where to go left or right for a bigger pile of edible stuff even when items are added one by one, and each pile is hidden behind a screen. This research by Rosa Rigosa from the University of Padua has been reported in the Telegraph under the headline “Chickens are cleverer than toddlers”. But on my reading, 3 day old chicks should be put in charge of pairing our socks after washing, as they seem to a better grip on arithmatic and object permanence than the adults in our household do.

I have looked and failed to find for research on megapode counting skills. Dr Göth obviously hasn’t started work yet on this critical issue in animal cognition. So I can’t tell if our continuing egg supply is a consequence of brush turkey innumeracy or if they are just lulling us into a false sense of security before brutally snatching away our remaining hope of home grown-protein. I guess we’ll have to see how this one plays out with our convenience sample in the back yard lab.

And if 1000 words on brush turkeys is barely enough for you, why not go read some more?

Goth, Ann and Maloney, Mary. Powerful Owl preying on an Australian Brush-turkey in Sydney [online]. Australian Field Ornithology, Vol. 29, No. 2, Jun 2012: 102-104
Göth, Ann and Uwe Vogel (2002) Chick survival in the megapode Alectura lathami (Australian brush-turkey) Wildlife Research 29(5) 503 – 511 Published: 30 December 2002
Göth, A., Nicol, K.P., Ross, G. & Shields, J.J. (2006). Present and past distribution of Australian Brush-turkeys Alectura lathami in New South Wales – implications for management. Pacific Conservation Biology 12, 22–30