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October 16, 2021

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predation, Predators, raptors, Satin bowerbirds

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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.

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

Male satin bowerbird in a bush with red flowers

Bowerbird with red flower higher tight crop

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”?

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 violaceus” Animal 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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 31, 2020

Posted under

Backyard birds, breeding, cicadas, competition, Insects, mating, nesting, predation, raptors, territoriality

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Crested hawks for Christmas

Every birdwatcher has a list of sightings they dream about (if that sighting is accompanied by a National Geographic front-cover-worthy picture all the better). For the cognoscenti – sophisticated, proper twitchers – this list seems to feature rare, endangered or hard to spot critters, that may or may not be kind of boring to look at. But for the crass newbie like myself, bling is important. Flashy, that’s how I like my bucket list birds.

For a long time, a decent look at the gloriously multi-coloured (but annoyingly canopy dwelling) spotted pardelote was top of the list. A camping trip to the fabulous Wolgan Valley a couple of years back ticked that box. Worth sweating my way up a hill to look down on the magic of the diamond-bird.

Spotted pardelote

Obviously rainbow bee eaters were on also on the list, until my parents moved to Bingara in on the northern slopes of NSW, a town where grey nomads and bird nerds duke it out for dominance in the local economy.

Pair of rainbow bee eaters

Since then, my top two have both been raptors. There’s the black shouldered kite with its glorious red eye and hauntingly regular presence along highways. I see it often on long road trips, hanging out near boggy pasture land, but getting a photograph seems to require a willingness to pull the hand brake on at high speed in the middle of a major road. I’m not saying I won’t do that, but I’m still working myself up to it. And then there’s the absurdly excellent Pacific Baza.

Stunning golden eye – tick. Dramatic black-and-white belly stripes – tick. Elegant flight, even acrobatic during the mating season – tick again.

And, absurdly, a crest – its nickname is the “crested hawk”. Does it get any better than that? I think not.

I was hugely excited when I spotted what I thought was a baza in our neck of the woods a few weeks ago – zipping past and disappearing into the leafy top of a liquidambar tree. Birds seem to be attracted by a pheromone released by amateur photographers who are not carrying a camera. Certainly that was the case on this occasion. Lacking any visual evidence of the encounter, I figured it was a wish fulfilment sighting. Probably one of the collared sparrowhawks, also stripy chested canopy dwellers. They’ve been back on the scene at our place over the last month or two, hanging out in the top of the neighbour’s pine tree, bragging about their kills and having brief and frustratingly hard to photograph sexual encounters first thing in the morning.

Collared sparrowhawk hiding in the foliage of a liquidambar

But this week – a late Christmas present. My outstanding neighbours Laura and Steve texted to say that the mysterious bird they had previously seen lurking in a melaleuca tree had made at a guest appearance by another neighbour’s pool, and been IDed. It was a Pacific baza.

It’s a miracle that I didn’t get hit crossing the road as I raced over to their place.

Adult Pacific baza

The trip to casualty that could have ensued would have kept my from not just a single baza but a little family – a pair (I think) and a large and whiny fledged chick. Naturally, they were lurking in the very top of the tree, and of course, my skill-set with my flash new camera meant that my career as a natural history photographer is not going to take any great leaps forward.

Adult Pacific baza avoiding eye contact with a juvenile

Blurry as it is, I interpret the body language of the parent here as indicating an unwillingness to provide further snacks. We saw both adults make a few short flights, and at least once definitely offer the youngster some prey. The juvenile whined without interruption, inching along the branch towards the adults, ducking its head and restively half-opening its wings. This parent avoided eye contact and eventually flapped off to a separate spot in the tree. A couple of weeks after they leave the nest, apparently, juvenile bazas stop getting food provided by their parents, so I guess this was what was playing out here. Baby Baza was certainly less than happy.

Juvenile baza (I think) in a huff

To say I was ecstatic to see the family of bazas within 100 metres of my front door would be to underestimate my degree of excitement. But then a troubling thought struck me… would the presence of the bazas harsh the buzz of the sparrowhawk pair that I’d seen canoodling on my side of the street? The pair appeared soon after a fierce storm that tore some big branches in our backyard and might well have trashed a nest somewhere down the road. Would the appearance of the bazas spoil the chance of a late-breaking bit of nest building?

Juvenile baza showing crest and aggro

Like Pacific bazas, sparrowhawks spend a lot of time in the treetops. They’re ambush hunters, lurking in amongst the leaves ready to burst out and pluck small birds from the sky.

Looking for prey

Sparrowhawk hunting from a pine tree

Sparrowhawk ignoring dregs of its last meal

They’ll take sparrows (perhaps unsurprisingly), mynahs and miners, mudlarks and wattlebirds, even birds as big as crested pigeons or crimson rosellas. Here’s a pic I took recently of a sparrowhawk trying to choke down the remnants of a leg of a bird. See the toes poking out of its beak? I watched it pacing up and down on the branch, wiping its beak repeatedly and generally looking a bit agitated. I note that the left over leg remained untouched and I can kind of understand why.

When something gets stuck on the way down

Maybe its not surprising after this kind of experience that a sparrowhawk might want to ring the changes, diet wise. And in fact, sparrowhawks won’t say no to a bug or two. A Canberra study found half of sparrowhawks’ prey, by the numbers, were snails, spiders or insects, with Christmas beetles and cicadas a particular feature. All those insects weren’t too filling – they made up only 2% of the biomass. But still, that interest in insects could them into competition with bazas, which eat fruit, frogs, lizards and snakes, grabbed from the foliage at the tops of trees, but especially like stick insects.

Yet another thing to inspire delight in bazas – an eccentric specialist diet. When I was looking at this critter in the Berowra train station, I wasn’t thinking “if only I ripped that to bits it would make a toothsome snack for my children”. But if I was a baza, I would have been.

Stick insect

However, larger insects are a favourite of Pacific bazas, while sparrowhawks seem to go for nothing bigger than a huntsman or a cicada.

Disappointingly, the bazas have disappeared from the paperbark in Steve and Laura’s drive, for all its proximity to a refreshing backyard pool and ample opportunities for hunting in the tops of tall trees, undisturbed by competition for their favourite phasmids. They’ll probably be nearby – these raptors aren’t migratory and Berowra sounds pretty close to their ideal habitat:

tropical and sub-tropical forests and woodlands, largely within 300km of the coast. In the breeding season they frequent tree-lined watercourses, rainforest, sclerophyll forest and tall woodland, but range widely following nesting to lower ground, when they may visit urban parks and gardens.

One birdwatcher in Queensland followed the reproductive fortunes of a pair of bazas as they nested in a series of different trees within a couple of hundred metres of his house on his property for a decade. So, no National Geographic cover photo as yet but I remain hopeful. 2020 really was a dud year but with the crested hawk in town, who knows what fine things could be in store for us in our backyard next year.

No, don’t look back to 2020 sparrowhawk! Forward, always forward.

Raptor encounters in our neighbourhood

Sex, nests and dogfighting – sparrowhawks set up house in our local pinetrees

Sparrowhawk sibling rivalry – baby serial killers learn to hunt

An eagle in suburbia – a wedgetail on Berowra Creek

The very big fish – sea eagle vs mulloway

References

Briggs, Allan (2018) “Breeding biology and behaviour of a pair of Pacific Bazas ‘Aviceda subcristata’ in central-coastal Queensland over 10 years”. Australian Field Ornithology, Vol. 35, 2018: doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20938/afo35095101.
James, P. (2004). The breeding cycle of a pair of Pacific Bazas Aviceda subcristata in south-eastern Queensland. Australian Field Ornithology 21, 133–140
Olsen, Jerry, Judge, David, Trost, Susan and Stephen Debus (2018) “Diets of breeding Brown Goshawks Accipiter fasciatus and Collared Sparrowhawks A. cirrocephalus near Canberra, Australia and comparisons with other regions and raptors” Corella, 42

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

February 24, 2019

Posted under

Backyard birds, evolution, habitat, migration, Native birds, predation, Uncategorized

The sacred comes to the neighbourhood

kingfisher in pine tree 2 long bright

I was just nipping back from depositing a small part of our egg mountain with our friends across the road last week, when something odd flew across the drive – something I’d never seen at our place before. It turned out to be this guy – a sacred kingfisher.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to see a kingfisher here, a kilometre or more and a couple of hundred metres up the hill from the creek. Possibly because I do regularly see these lovely birds on my paddles in the Hawkesbury – hunting in the mangroves lining Milson’s Point; regurgitating pellets in full view of the expensive holiday homes in Calabash Bay or this young ‘un, hanging out near the public wharf at the questionably named Dusty Hole.

Juvenile sacred kingfisher by Berowra Creek

Though I have repeatedly spotted them in bushland far from decent stretches of water, I managed to convince myself that they were fishing in the local tiny, slightly fetid pools. But of course, ten minutes of googling gave me the correct answer. Unlike the smaller azure kingfishers – the sacred mostly eat terrestrial prey – insects, skinks and even sometimes small birds. They rarely actually eat fish: there should be some kind of by-law, right?

Azure kingfisher chilling out in the winter fog

Our visitor hung out for quite a while in the neighbours’ backyard, giving me the chance to race off for my camera and get into a possibly compromising position with my zoom lens propped up on the fence, pointing in the general direction of their living room windows. The kingfisher was certainly aware a stalker was watching him from the bushes but didn’t seem too fazed.

Kingfisher looking at me close 2 crop square amended

“What are you looking at? Stalker!”

After my efforts to create bird habitat over the last few years, I felt a bit jealous that this gorgeous creature was choosing to hang out in our neighbour’s back garden. However, I have to reconcile myself that their densely-planted native garden has the low shrubs these birds like to perch on while they’re waiting to dive down onto their prey in the leaf litter, without the loud woodwork projects, inquisitive chickens, trampoline and horde of neighbourhood kids that ramp up the action in ours.

A wing stretch from our visiting sacred kingfisher

Sacred kingfishers are surprisingly mobile it seems. They are the only kingfisher in these parts that is migratory. Many (though not all) of the birds that live in the southern parts of Australia migrate each each to north Queensland and PNG – it’s a partial migrant like most other Australian migratory birds. I suspect that the local sacred kingfishers – or at least some of them – hang around in the winter. Peter and Judy Smith (2012), keeping tabs on the arrival dates of migratory birds in Blaxland in the lower Blue Mountains, for over 30 years never saw a sacred kingfisher in the winter, but I’ve seen a couple on the Hawkesbury in the colder months – hanging out in America Bay in April and basking in the late afternoon light by Berowra Creek in July, right in the middle of winter. Or “winter” as my British friends like to call it.

Sacred kingfisher in April in America Bay

An overwintering sacred kingfisher in Calabash Bay

When I visited Wellington a couple of years ago I was surprised to see something very familiar hunting in a suburban park. A sub-species, Todiramphus sanctus vagans, that looks very very like our locals lives in New Zealand/Aotearoa as well.

The New Zealand kingfisher

I started speculating on how the sacred kingfishers got over the Tasman but it seem their range is less about being blown off course on migratory treks than the epic distribution of another bird to which it is closely related – the collared kingfisher . It’s a one less frequently seen in Australia – found only on coastlines in the northern half of Australia – and never seen at all by me so no pics. I got nothing! Collared kingfishers (sometimes called the mangrove kingfisher) seem to be less generalist than the sacred, favouring mangroves and the forests immediately behind them – but has an impressive range.

In an article offering a genetic analysis of this species and its descendants in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific islands, Michael Andersen and his colleagues describe as it as “the most widely distributed of the Pacific’s ‘great speciators’. Its 50 subspecies constitute a species complex that is distributed over 16 000 km from the Red Sea to Polynesia” (Andersen 2015). The sacred seems to be one of the species that evolved from it. Intriguingly collared kingfishers are no longer a migratory species, but Andersen speculates that “the migratory nature of T. sanctus is an evolutionary vestige of the ancestral Todiramphus lineage still exhibiting the colonization phase” (Andersen 2015).

One way or another, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the sacred in our neighbourhood. After all, I’ve always known you can witness sacred on the water, or in the forest, or in the suburbs. Not everywhere, but in more places than you would think – as long as you remember to look. In this case – in the bushes.

Further References

Andersen, Michael, Hannah T Shult, Alice Cibois, Jean-Claude Thibault, Christopher E Filardi, Robert G Moyle (2015) “Rapid diversification and secondary sympatry in Australo-Pacific kingfishers” Royal Society Open Science Feb 2(2)

Debus, SJS (2007) “Avifauna of remnant bushland on the Twee Coast of Northern New South Wales” Sunbird 37(2)

Lindenmayer, David B. , Michael A. McCarthy, Hugh P. Possingham and Sarah Legge (2001) “A Simple Landscape-Scale Test of a Spatially Explicit Population Model: Patch Occupancy in Fragmented South-Eastern Australian Forests” Oikos, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Mar), pp. 445-458

Loyn, Richard H., Edward G. McNabb, Phoebe Macak, Philippa Noble (2007) “Eucalypt plantations as habitat for birds on previously cleared farmland in south-eastern Australia” Biological Conservation 137 533–548

Smith, Peter & Judy Smith (2012) “Climate change and bird migration in southeastern
Australia” Emu – Austral Ornithology, 112:4, 333-342

Kingfisher light against pine background square

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 17, 2018

Posted under

Backyard birds, breeding, hawks, nesting, predation, Predators, raptors, Uncategorized

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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.

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.

Mum and kid with prey 2 story eye glint amended

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 13, 2018

Posted under

Biodiversity, estuaries, fish, predation, raptors, waterways

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The very big fish

Mulloway on the rocks by Joe Crafts Bay

I’m a fish idiot. I see them all the time as I paddle around the Hawkesbury – grey, striped and translucent; foot long granddaddies heaving themselves out of water and hundreds of fry flicking the surface like tiny scaly synchronised swimmers . But don’t ask me what sort of fish they are, where they hang out, or anything else about them really. I don’t eat them, or hunt them, or keep them as pets so somehow my brain spontaneously ejects all information about them.

But it was hard to ignore a fish as big as this, splayed out on the riverside rocks near Joe Crafts Bay. Especially given the spectacle of the local white-bellied sea eagles trying very hard, but ultimately not hard enough, to carry this giant juicy snack to a convenient spot in the treetops.

Sea eagle flapping with fish b&w amend square

White-bellied sea eagle trying to fly off with a very big fish

This fish was too much even for the second largest raptor in Australia to carry off to eat in peace. Male sea eagles can weigh as much as 3.7 kilos, females half a kilo heavier, with wingspans of two metres or more. But this great big fish, I have been assured by expert fishermen, was a mulloway, a giant of coastal waters that can weigh 60 kilos and grow to two metres long. This one was a tiddler, maybe only two or three feet in length (I guess. But then I’m the kind of person who has to try two or three lids before successfully covering a saucepan, so I could be wrong). But the sea eagle still couldn’t wrangle it safely into the trees. Trust me, it tried. Take off was aborted several times. And then a boat with some noisy humans came and anchored inconveniently close to this enormous and tempting snack.

Blue boat

The sea eagle flew off, disgruntled. But it didn’t fly far. Or more to the point, they didn’t fly far: in fact, there were three sea eagles keeping an eye on this feed – a pair and a youngster I labelled “Itchy”.

Itchy the sea eagle

Pair of white-bellied sea eagles waiting for seafood breakfast

The boat moved along, after a while – obviously no other mulloway were coming up from the deep that morning. Before the sea eagles got wise, someone else decided on seafood for breakfast.

Australian raven casing out a great big fish

Raven checking for sea eagle attach

At last, a nibble of mulloway

The raven and its mate tried to keep the great big fish to themselves, but in the end, might is right on the river it seems.

Pair of Australian ravens chasing a sea eagle

I’m not sure if Itchy got a look-in, but the sea eagle pair both got a decent meal, taking it in turns to run the gauntlet of the river-traffic (including a nosy kayaker with a zoom lens). One bird ate warily while the other stood guard in a nearby tree.

Sea eagle tearing the flesh of the fish

A nibble of entrail

Planning the next bite

One member of the sea eagle pair eating…

While the other stands guard.

White-bellied sea eagle enjoying mulloway for breakfast

They’d hardly made a tiny dent in the corpse of the mulloway by the time a second boat came along to break up the party. I’m sure another meal happened later in the day, but I try to be out of the water by the time the roar of powerboat engines drowns out the whizz and plop of yak-fishermen casting. One less bothersome boatie for the sea-eagles to worry about.

Boat off Joe Crafts Bay

I’m sure this mulloway has a story. If the white-bellied sea-eagles couldn’t take off with this whopper fish, it’s hard to imagine how they could have caught it and lifted it from the water. How did this beauty end up, forlorn, on the river-side rocks? Surely no human fisherfolk would leave such a prize behind? My fishing friends tell me that the great mulloway, jewels on its back glimmering in the water, is a fish to dream about and pursue – after dark, in the deepest holes in the river. And good eating too.

Stocks of these big fish crashed by the early noughties, burdened by commercial and amateur fishing. T he minimum catch size for recreational fishing went up from 45 to 70 cm long, so maybe this one was caught but found short of the mark (like most of the mulloway hooked by recreational fisherfolk). Released, perhaps, already wounded, destined to wash up on shore, breakfast for the ravens and the eagles.

Sea eagle portrait dark background cropped.jpg

Thanks to Denis Crowdy and Peter Doyle for fish identification and mulloway tales.

Other posts about the raptors in our beautiful backyard

Sibling rivalry as the young collared sparrowhawks in our neighbour’s pine tree learn to hunt…

The world’s fastest bird catches a meal

Three whistling kites, two sad islands

Encounters with the local eagles

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 26, 2018

Posted under

Backyard birds, Biodiversity, Brush turkeys, Climate change, Death, national parks, nesting, predation, raptors, Seasons

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Wildlife reboot: birds 2.0

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

Clamorous reed warbler with nesting material

Male musk duck – a resident here

Moorhen family

The campsite at night

Colours of dusk with hills trees and reeds

Egg and rock view to branch creek at dusk

White faced heron hunting

Good reed reflection and swamp hen cropped

One of many dragonflies

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

One very hot white throated tree creeper

Eastern water dragon

Twerking wombat

A “green” satin bowerbird panting in the heat

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

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

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

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

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

Juvenile collared sparrowhawk with prey

Calling for the missing sibling

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

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

Red wattlebird

Little wattlebird

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

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

Eastern spinebill

Brown thornbill

Lewin’s honeyeater

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

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

Spotted pardelote

New holland honeyeater

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

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

Previous posts about Ganguddy

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

Snakes versus whining teenagers – last year at Ganguddy

More on our sparrowhawk summer

Death and sibling rivalry

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 14, 2018

Posted under

Australian natives, cicadas, citizen science, Garden trees, Insects, Native animals, Plants that attract wildlife, predation

Black princes, redeyes and floury bakers

My brother the twitcher has taught me the secret of finding birds. Tune into sound: let your mind move out from the place where you are standing, into the space above you and all around you and listen.

All this summer, I’ve been listening out for the sparrowhawks. Even lying in bed or sitting on the sofa, we could hear them begging for food or squabbling with the local cockatoos.

But come mid December, white noise and static started interfering with Radio Sparrowhawk. The cicadas had arrived.

This year’s a biggie for cicadas in Australia. Over 350 species of cicada have been described here, though there could be many more – we’re a diversity hotspot for these charismatic insects. And this summer, some of the biggest and noisiest species – the cherrynoses, the double drummers and the razorgrinders – have appeared en masse around Sydney. After maybe five or six years of living metres underground sucking on the tree-sap, the cicada instars crawl out of the earth and shed their exoskeletons for a short and noisy month or so as adults. It doesn’t happen every year. 2013 was a big year for cicadas in Sydney, and before that 2010. And now it’s on again.

Black Prince on a casuarina tree by the edge of Berowra Creek

No-one knows quite what triggers the horde of insects. In fact, no-one knows much about cicadas at all, despite their presence on every continent except Antarctica and their impossible to ignore, earsplitting calls. That long and decidedly boring youth, and the uncertainty about when they’ll re-emerge, makes researching them tricky. Imagine deciding to study the periodic cicadas of North America and then realising your three years as a PhD student would be over long before the seventeen years the critters spend underground was up?

An ex cicada thanks to the local orb spiders

One theory is that by appearing so infrequently and irregularly cicadas could avoid the predators – bird, bats, all sorts of mammals – keen to feast on the insect bounty. Very weird recent work from the US suggests that numbers of predating bird species start to drop around twelve years after the last cicada boom. Could it be that these devious insects are manipulating the beasts far higher up the food chain?

Razor Grinder in our front yard

Double-drummer in Berowra Valley National Park

In some ways, despite its wealth of cicadas, Berowra is less interesting for researchers than bits of Sydney not surrounded by national parks. Australia cities are unusual, it seems, in that they still have cicada species in the heart of suburbia. Silver princesses and green grocers survive in quite urban areas on the east coast. A local researcher (plants by day, cicadas by night) Dr Nathan Emery has been trying to work out how these species have survived, and whether there are others that can cope with city life. He’s set up the Great Cicada Blitz, a citizen science project crowd-sourcing information about when and where various species of cicadas can be found.

I’ve had a great time over the last month wandering around recording the din in our neighbourhood and trying without a lot of success to spot the earbleedingly loud cicadas to add to the Blitz database. The male cicadas’ strategy to collectively produce a chorus so loud it hurts the ears of birds works on humans too, even those with the advantage of being partially deaf already. Apparently even the males cicadas “switch off” the equivalent of their ears (their tympana) to save their own hearing.

Thanks to helpful tips from the experts as they confirm my dodgy IDs, I’m slowly learning how to identify the common species around these parts. Nathan Emery’s nifty little book A Photo Guide to the Common Cicadas of the Sydney Region has been really handy too. It has a lovely introduction from (and is dedicated to) Dr Emery’s scientist dad who took him and his siblings out cicada spotting as kids – inspiration to continue tormenting my offspring with my nerdy passions. And who wouldn’t be nerdy about cicadas – an animal whose wings has in-built nanostructures that literally rip bacteria apart…

Graphical abstract for Aaron Elbourne, Russell Crawford and Elena Ivanova’s 2017 article “Nano-structured antimicrobial surfaces: From nature to synthetic
analogues” Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 508 603-616.
Shouldn’t EVERYTHING have a graphical abstract?

I should also thank the popularity of the big liquidambar in our front yard with the local insects for the chance to improve my cicada identification skills. Adult cicadas like to latch onto thin-barked natives, but if push comes to shove they will feed on introduced trees, and liquidambars seem to be a favourite, of our local population of redeyes at least, although I think I’ve also heard calls from local tibouchina and robinia trees, as well as the local Sydney red and blue gums.

Red eyes in the neighbour’s pittosporum undulatum

A razorgrinder (or a eucalypt) “leaking”

Loads of razorgrinders on a sydney red gum at the edge of Berowra Valley National Park

Though some cicadas don’t seem to be too fussy about the trees they sup from, you have to worry for the next generation. In the last year, 15,000 trees – 3% of the tree cover on private land in Hornsby Shire – disappeared, thanks to a rash of tower buildings replacing the old fibros with rambling jungly backyards that used to hug the railway line. Next gen cicadas popping out about 2023 may find nothing taller than a cordyline to sing from and property developers taking over their traditional role local bloodsucker.

Rough barked tree with cicada shell bettersquare

An exoskeleton clinging to the bark of a tall tree in a local school

I’ve not seen any green grocers or yellow mondays or silver princesses around here. There are double-drummers in the national parks down the road – they don’t do so well in back gardens, needing an expanse of acreage or bushland to survive. And so far we’ve heard at least four species around our yard: razorgrinders, black princes, floury bakers and the locally ubiquitous redeyes.

One of a whole bunch of redeyes high up in a Sydney red gum raining down excess tree sap on me

How do I know the red eyes are one of the most common cicadas around these parts, even before I started collecting photos and audio? Well, that’s the gossip from the local kids.

Cicadas weren’t a feature of my childhood, growing up by the River Murray in South Australia. But they’re a big part of children’s lives around here. Even the common names of the local species are courtesy of kids, which explains why they are named after colours or days of the week and not dead white European men as per normal service!

A razorgrinder, with black and white patterns on its wings

A dead red eye, I think, judging from the heavier black lines at the end of the wing.

My younger daughter (Anonymous Bob as she wants to be known) gave me the low down on what Berowra kids know about cicadas:

“At school in the cicada season, when the teachers aren’t looking, people climb the trees to try to catch cicadas. They climb the big thick trees because that’s where you find them. The main cicada zone is the little mossy grove next to the library. We treat them like exotic pets and look after them, until they want to be free or they die.

Once, there was a little boy. An older boy gave him a cicada to look after – it was sort of like an adoption. But the little boy decided to let him go so he could be free.

Another time, a bunch of kindies robbed a guy of his cicada. It was freshly caught and it had one leg missing, so he was desperate to protect it. They wanted to call it Princess and he wanted to call it Jeffie. They threw a ball at it while it was clinging to his shirt. It nearly fell off and died. And then the kindies started chasing the guy saying “Princess! Princess!” and then they had an attempted robbery but then a teacher came.”

Jeffrey Princess

“It’s fun to look after the cicadas. They’re kinda cute. Most cicada collectors try to find other species because in our school the redeyes are the most common. We find what they eat and take care of them. The cicadas cling onto your clothes which makes them pretty portable pets.”

Red eye at our place

“A while ago we did a thing where we would prank the teacher with cicada shells. At first it was just a joke and then it became a whole fiesta. It became a game and a compulsory activity. Not that the teacher said it was a compulsory activity, we just made it one.

Originally it was just seven cicada shells a day but it ended up with many many many shells from each person. We gathered cicada shells, and every day we would leave cicada shells around the classroom and she would have to find them.”

A very popular grapefruit tree in my neighbour’s garden

“We found the cicada shells everywhere – on plants, on trees, on everything. A few boys were the main gatherers. They did it at school, home, everywhere. They came in with huge plastic bags full: they were the main source of our cicada shells. Sometimes we used white out and sharpies to paint war paint onto the cicada shell to make them unique.

Graphical abstract of cicada exoskeleton on teacher’s key ri

You know how cicada shells have a slit? We slipped that onto the teacher’s key ring and when she found it, she was like “Not again!”. We started making a joke that she was cursed by the demon of cicadas.

At the very end of the year a few of the boys laid the cicada shells in a big love heart on the carpet and put a huge pile of chocolates in the middle and wrote their names on a card with love to the teacher.”

The love for a teacher expressed in the language of cicadas

Maybe there’s another project to be done on cicadas – a children’s natural history of these rowdy, charismatic insects…

Do you have any stories of childhood exploits with cicadas, in Australia or further afield? I’d love to hear them!

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 2, 2018

Posted under

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

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8 Comments

Death & sibling rivalry

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

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

Keeping an eye on little brother or sister

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

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

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

Do the tail feather

And again

…neck roll….

… leg stretch…

… and the headless sparrowhawk

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

Jeering at silly sibling

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

Juvenile sparrowhawk wings raised square

I’m off…

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

Dinner… a white cheeked honeyeater I prepared earlier

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

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

The lucky sibling with significantly less lucky white cheeked honeyeater

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

Keeping an eye out

Juvenile with head turned mouth open amended

My dinner…

All mine…

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

Juvenile sparrowhawk protecting its prey

No time for a hungry sibling

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

Settling in for a good plucking

Closeup of a honeyeater’s insides

Sparrowhawk eating honeyeater

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

Luckless sibling looking on at the feast

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

The backstory of the serial killers in our backyard…

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

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

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

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

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

November 12, 2017

Posted under

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

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Battle of the baby birds

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

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

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

Female sparrowhawk getting stuck in

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

Dead wattlebird being sized up

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

Sparrowhawk calling for his mate

Mid-meal call

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

Currawong after the sparrowhawk nest

Collared sparrowhaw about to fly

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

Pair of channel billed cuckoos

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

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

Baby brushturkey in the backyard

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

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

Baby brush turkey hanging out with baby Winter the Leghorn

Baby brush turkey being liberated from the laundry

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

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

Baby brushturkey on an early flight

Dad and mound

Eight hours into the vigil on the windowsill

Much mourney Treasure the Sussex and an entourage of brush turkeys

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

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

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

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

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 13, 2015

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Insect pests, Permaculture, predation, Recycling, Vernacular architecture, Waste

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8 Comments

How to exploit your termite work force

One of permaculture’s big ideas is makig plants and animals your agricultural labourers. It’s not so much hitching the family Great Dane to the plough as letting your furred and feathered workers, more or less of their own free will, roam through your food forest grazing on weeds and wolfing down snails. Say goodbye to tedious annual seed-raising, planting and hoeing: your self-reliant plants will look after themselves and keep an eye on each other, shading and nitrogenating and breaking wind (if you know what I mean).

Food forest chlorophyll collective

Treasure in the food forest

Sometimes it works. Our tamarillo, banana, monstera and tumeric plants have formed a chlorophyllerous collective. We have tip-pruning possums, chickens that mow the lawn and do the weeding, rat-catching diamond pythons and bandicoots on a search and destroy mission for curl grubs. This week I even had a local katydid offering to supervise the manufacture of my home-grown pesto.

Katydid critiquing the quality of the olive oil in the homemade pesto

Unfortunately some of the local flora and fauna seem to have skipped crucial pages of Bill Mollison’s permaculture classics. My custard apple tree, for instance, appears to need assistance to shed its leaves in a timely manner. Really, has it come to this? I spend my precious hours of leisure depilating fruit trees?

Meanwhile in the kiwifruit arbor, lacking both enthusiastic pollinators and RoboBees (yep, New Zealand has them), we’re having to take a prurient interest in the sex lives of our male and female kiwifruit vines. To be honest, my child labourers were about as useful as the diffident insects. I’m baffled. How could standing on the top of a ladder tickling plant reproductive organs with paintbrush fail to entertain?

Custard apple leaves waiting to be plucked

Male kiwifruit

Female kiwifruit

Past it custard apple leaf

Child labour 1

Baby sweetie kiwi

Termites at work in the kiwifruit planter

The sorry state of my home-made kiwifruit planters remind me of another insect labour fail. Termites. What can a permie do with them?

Thanks to our hippie ways, our place is a kind of termite nature reserve, where wood-eating insects can flourish, peacefully ingesting fruit trees and vernacular architecture, without fear of retaliation. It seems, when they tired of consuming ad-hoc structures made of discarded bed bases, they like to break it up by devouring whole stands of artichokes as a kind of palate cleanser.

Termite eat artichokes – who knew? Last year’s gorgeous silver leafed statement in the outdoor room is this year a soggy larvae-infested hole in the ground.

Before the termites struck

Architectural artichokes

Last year’s artichoke crop… sniff

But let’s not lose faith in our insect workforce! We need to reframe this problem. Bill Mollison once consoled someone tending a denuded garden: “You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficit“. Thinking along these lines let’s put it this way: we don’t have a termite problem: we have a woodwork surplus.

When we first arrived here six years ago, we were puzzled by the gratuitous decking around the washing line and the apparently pointless wooden walkway that took you there. Our neighbours said they’d scratched their heads as they watched this expensive folly being nailed together.

The mystery was illuminated by the lingering damp patch by the garden gate. Somewhere between the fig tree and the passionfruit vine, roundabout where the sewage line runs down from the house, there was a persistent and troubling damp patch. RB wanted to investigate. Having experienced the delights of sewage tumbling through another backyard and with a terrifying vision of a poo fountain raining down on my veggie patch, I implored him to leave it to the professionals. But I made the error of leaving him unattended one day after work.

Thankfully I was spared the realisation of my nightmare of e-coli amongst the asparagus. It turns out our damp patch was an old storm water drain, busted through when the some new and exciting toilet was installed in the house. As one does, rather than repair the drain and desoggify the garden, our predecessors just built a walkway over the swampland. What with the convenient supply of moisture, this wooden path has been a fine buffet for the termites over the years.

“What the hell is this decking for anyway?”

Thanks to our cellulose loving friends, a short stroll to hang out the laundry had become as fraught with peril as a high-wire walk between two sky scrapers. Collecting a clean pair of undies from the line carried the ever-present risk of a broken ankle or at least the embarrassing prospect of a plank snapping under your weight, a reminder that you may have had too many marinated artichokes on your pasta lately. Yes, I could have fixed it properly with some decent hardwood or a load of treated timber. But that just wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the thing. Instead, it’s become steadily more raddled looking, thanks to running repairs with a random selection of timber found by the side of the road.

But even with my love of hammers and heavy rubbish, I finally had enough. The walkway had to go. Even in 35 degree heat, the demolition job was a highpoint of my weekend. There’s little more viscerally satisfying than ripping something to bits with your bare hands, even if it has been fatally weakened by termites first.

Much missed Shyla on the old walkway

Evolution of a raised bed

The once and future termite buffet

But what to do with the hardwood footings, cemented and bolted in place? Digging them up would be tricky work, haunted by the ever-present risk of a spade through the sewage pipe. And then it came to me in a blinding flash: with a bit of help from our termite tenants, moist soil heaped up onto wood frames would do the job for me.

So now the erstwhile walkway is a (very very slightly) raised bed, fenced in by scraggy aviary wire: yet another addition to the carceral complex that is our garden. As I water the cucumbers and the cherry tomatoes, I’ll be helping our Willing Workers on Organic ~~Farms~~ Backyards, the termites, demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics.

It’s been a long time since I sat through high school physics. Things might well have moved on in the inexplicable post-Newtonian world. But I can say with absolute confidence that, in our yard at least, there continues to be “a natural tendency of isolated systems to degenerate into a more disordered state”.

If they weren’t disordered in the first place, the termites, the possums and the brush turkeys would pretty soon make them that way. Good work if you can get it, lads!