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August 31, 2019

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Australian natives, Bees, Brush turkeys, Chickens as cultivators, Damage caused by chickens, Death, Gardening, native grasses, Natives for shade, Permaculture, Recycling, Uncategorized, Waste

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Murder, imprisonment and native grasses

This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing. In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to.

When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the backyard. Note, I don’t say lawn. Which is fine by me, since an array of weeds offer much better nutritional resources for chickens than a monocultural sward.

So a sequence of domestic fowl have enjoyed the delicious mix of trad, ehrharta, buffalo grass, couch, and a plethora of other greens as a supplement to their laying mash and scratch mix. The trad went first. Chickens absolutely love this horrid weed and have scratched out every shred, producing the fabulously golden yolk that are a definitive feature of your happy free-range egg. For a while the other grasses held on, but, over a few dry winters, as our flock grew to six chooks and an apparently infinite number of semi-resident brush turkeys, the greenery eventually lost the fight.

Treasure being shadowed by a flock of brush turkeys

Xena and Treasure enjoying an increasingly denuded backyard

Peak brush turkey

Perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t have a lot of pictures of the muddy home farm during this “trench warfare” period. And I have absolutely no pictures of the traumatic events that followed. It’s taken me nearly a year to get up the gumption to write about it.

Very cute baby brush turkey hanging out with our chicks a couple of years back

Until November last year, the many brush turkeys hanging around the backyard were an annoyance but nothing more: scratching up seedlings, stealing eggs and making free with the chickens’ dinner. The baby brush turkeys liked to huddle up to our newly hatched little chicks. The older turkeys also seemed to like hanging out with the flock but were easily spooked by them. It only took boss chook Treasure giving a funny look to have the brush turkeys scatter or even flap away. But that all changed last spring.

A large male brush turkey started hanging around, pursuing and doing his best to mount the chickens. One day we noticed that several of the girls’ combs were bloodied, and concluded it was the work of this nasty animal. The neighbours had spotted the sex predator too. There were rumours of pet birds being attacked all up and down the street.

Concerned, we decided to keep the girls in Colditz, the steel-framed predator-proof cage for a day or two, rather than letting them roam the yard as usual. The next day I was working from home, and by the afternoon, seeing no signs of the turkey and feeling sorry for the poor chooks pacing up and down in their constrained night quarters, like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, I decided to let them out for a few hours. I went back to my computer.

If you are easily upset, now is the time to look away.

Male brush turkey extreme closeup

Late that afternoon I heard a pitiful squawking and rushing down to the yard. All of the chooks were bleeding copiously from their scalps and two of our poor girls were mortally wounded, with huge slashes through their backs and terrible gouges to their heads. Then we heard pitiful sounds from the last of our neighbour’s free-range chooks. We jumped across the fence to rescue it, but too late – its eye had been pecked out. All three birds died soon after.

Needless to say I was inconsolable.

The only way I could atone my guilt was to make the surviving chickens a safe place to stay. So that Saturday, in a frenzy, I pulled together an implausible collection of wire, wood from futon bases, half an aviary, parts of a picket fence, innumerable pieces of bamboo and that old standby, trampoline netting, to make a 8 square metre covered run adjacent to Colditz. The run featured Palm Beach as an elevated hangout zone and egg laying area, perches at a range of heights and diameters and its own personal orange tree.

The chooks were safe, and over the next few weeks slowly recovered from their head wounds. But they weren’t happy.

So over the festive season, I had another crack, making an extension the same size again, which admittedly did involved purchasing a couple of steel droppers and a box of screws. Otherwise, I was extraordinarily pleased I was able to make the “outdoor room” entirely from rubbish I scrounged from the side of the road.

The outdoor room, featuring cot railing and an indoor clothes hanger feeding hatch

Now the chooks were secure in their generous run, an unworthy thought came to me. The scorched earth of the backyard, without a single blade of grass and denuded of every remaining seed, was now perfectly prepared for something I’d long aspired to have – a backyard full of native grass. The kids had started expressing a longing for a little bit of soft lawn to walk on, and I was keen to take on the challenge. Buffalo, kikuyu and ehrharta outcompete native grasses, but thanks to the chooks, I doubted there was a single weed seed left on the premises.

It was time.

Griffin weeping grass from Native Seeds

Seeds before being raked in

I decided to mostly use microlaena stipoides, weeping grass, a fine bladed grass that tolerates shade and enriched soils and, once established, copes with minimal watering. I ordered a couple of hundred grams of a hybrid microlaena called Griffin weeping grass, a low growing variety bred by the Department of Botany at the University of New England.

My first sowing was in early summer – the best time for this variety – warm enough for a speedy germination and not so hot it’s impossible to keep the seed bed moist. I raked in the seeds – they shouldn’t be buried more than 1 and a half centimetres deep – and covered them with the veggie nets that I usually use to protect seedlings from bowerbirds, chickens and possums that aren’t trying too hard.

The Great Berowra Storm of Christmas 2018 treated us relatively kindly ( two broken skylights is a pretty good outcome from golf ball sized hail) but did significantly undermine my efforts to even distribute those rather expensive grass seeds. But I guess the torrent saved me watering for a few days, as well as reminding me why we needed grasses and their root systems to stop our topsoil flowing away on those occasions when our yard becomes a tributary to Berowra Creek. On hot days when we didn’t experience a climatic apocalypse, I did get out the hose for the first month or two – microlaena needs to be kept moist until its root system is sorted.

December 20 last year – note the veggie net covered in hail

Giant hailstones that turned Berowra into “Tarpaulin Heights”

Microlaena and poa labillardieri

In the light of its inpropitious beginnings, the microlaena has done pretty well, coping with the chooks snacking on it a couple of days a week. That brutish brush turkey has never returned (I suspect foul play given his cruel behaviour to most of the hens in the street) but we like to let them roam when we can keep an eye on them. And the native grass has remained beautifully green through yet another very dry winter. In the picture above, alongside the weeping grass, you can see my low-skill terracing with fallen wood and another native grass, poa labillardiere. The aim is to redirect any storm water into our new pond (more on that another day)

So after two days of drenching rain, I decided this afternoon to sow another packet of griffin weeping grass, filling the gaps scoured by last December’s floods. Yet more trampoline netting has been hauled out of the shed to protect the newly spread seed from the chooks on their weekend perambulations.

Even if I’m slightly nervous of what they might do to my baby grasses, I’m grateful to our girls. Without their commitment to scratching and salad, we would never have got this far, and certainly not without reaching for roundup or something equally scary. I hope I can return the favour by keeping them safe (if not always happy) and feeding them plenty of greens.

Microlaena and stepping stones

More stories of life, death and gardening from our backyard

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

Andy Ninja’s great escape

Chicken TV: the make-over show

DIY by subtraction: the kiwifruit arbor

The phantom egg eater: caught in the act

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mccnmatt

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August 10, 2019

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compost, Death, Gardening, Permaculture, Recycling, Soil, Waste

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Scientifically hot: in which I fall in love with the Berkeley method of composting

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Particularly when you are seeking revenge against a tree. Given the pace of their lifestyle, you have to drag it out for those guys to really feel it.

So how better to punish a seed-strewing, bat-choking, weedy cocos palm than – not simply chopping it down – but committing it to a doom of eternal proximity to rotting horse shit?

How to torment a cocos palm: shower it with shite

What a red-letter year it has been for composting. The year when I discovered the Berkeley method. It sounds like natural form of contraception and it is hot, but it’s better than that because it works. Time after time after time.

I have thought I had achieved the giddy heights of hot composting before, long ago when Treasure the white Sussex was queen of the chicken run, freaking me out by regularly supping from my vat of compost tea.

The much missed Treasure and her dangerous drinking habits

In those days I was convinced that the way to fast, weed free compost was my trusty tumbler, still the first destination for our kitchen scraps and chookhouse bedding. The tumbler certainly steams when you crack it open to add the week’s potato peel and apple cores, and not just on these winter mornings.

But I guess, like so many other lovely things, you don’t necessarily know whether you’ve really hot-composted, until you actually experience it Then you realise that on all those previous occasions when you thought what you were doing was pretty hot, you were wrong, and in reality it was all distinctly tepid.

Chickens looking for worms in my now-cool heap

Ingredients for my first heap: leaves, ash, straw

First “brown” layer

Layering leaves and manure

Another layer

Covering a pile with palm fronds

So what is the Berkeley method of hot composting and how do you get some of that good stuff?

The Berkeley method involves making a big heap of compost – at least a metre tall and a metre wide – all at once, using layers of high nitrogen (“green”) and high carbon (“brown”) ingredients.

I’ve used a a range of different “browns” – liquidambar and bamboo leaves, pine needles, sugar cane hay from the the chook cage (with its own little payload of nitrogenous ordure) and even cardboard boxes ripped up into small pieces. This is a soothing activity to do in front of television and the only part of compost-making I can get my children have anything to do with).

Berkley method heap 2 featuring lots of bamboo leaves

I usually try to sneak in some partially-rotted “warm” compost from my tumbler as a “green” layer low down in the heap just to keep our household waste systems from being overrun with biomass. As a small household, we don’t really produce enough veggie scraps all at once to create the bulk materials needed for the Berkeley method. Other people use thin layers of lawn clipping but we have chooks so we don’t have any need for lawn mowing. That’s an understatement really – for much of the last three years our backyard has looked like the Somme.

My mainstay for “greens” is, ironically, distinctly brown – vast quantities of equine ordure, acquired at $1 a bag from the horsey country on the other side of the Berowra Waters Ferry. I’m pretty sure my ten or fifteen bucks, left in an honesty box by the front gate, ends up in the pocket of a shovel-fit teenager, which gives me a warm glow. You could get the same amount for free in another farm down the road if you had a trailer and good upper body strength.

It’s a fun weekend outing – I particularly enjoy coming back across on the ferry with the windows down, suffusing the palatial surroundings of the marina and its smattering of Hollywood celebrities with the fruity ambience of a stable.

The always picturesque Berowra Waters Ferry

But if your idea of a good time doesn’t involve intimate encounters with 150 kilos of horse manure, there are other options. Not carnivore poo though. Just in case you happen to live near a zoo and were thinking of a midnight raid for high nitrogen materials, Robert D. Raabe, Professor of Plant Pathology, Berkeley, in his detailed account of hot composting, reminds us that tiger and lion shit are not worth the effort.

In my first few heaps I also added some wood ash after each layer – it‘s high in potassium, can correct acidic soils and since our wood-burner produces loads of it I’m always trying to think of uses for it. There’s also a kind of wedding like gaiety to hurling handfuls of white powder over the mountain of poo which I really enjoy.

I think I got a bit carried away on my last batch of compost, though, as I discovered when my youngest did a science experiment: broad beans growing in three different soil types. My newly made compost was literally off the scale on the Ph test. My vegetables are probably suffering but I suppose at least I now have a convenient lime-rich place for disposing of fresh corpses.

Super-alkaline ash-rich compost

The science experiment in action

Each layer of your heap should be watered as you build it, til the whole thing is about as damp as a squeezed out sponge. If it’s especially wet or hot weather you can cover it to stop it from drying out or getting soaked. As you can see in the piccies above, I roofed my first Berkeley heap with palm fronds, partly to keep my heap from getting too dry and partly just to continue to torment the spirit of the evil tree they were hacked from. None of my subsequent heaps have had a cover, though, and they seemed to turn out just fine.

To be honest, while there are lots of really complicated rules for hot composting – for instance, this article gives a mind bogglingly detailed run down on the carbon-nitrogen ratios of a range of composting materials. But in my experience, a rough and ready mix of about equal quantities of “greens” and “browns” just seems to work.

Then after you’ve built your heap, you just leave it for about five days. All the while you are at work – sitting in meetings, shuffling paper or cruelly inflicting post-structuralist theory on innocent undergraduates – that aerobic bacteria is doing its thing. It’s a curiously comforting thought.

Chooks cleaning up the last few weed seeds

Then you turn your heap. The aim of Berkeley method hot composting is to create a friendly environment for the right kind of bacteria and fungi – the ones that like plenty of air. They work quickly, produce plant nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium and even smell pretty good (trust me on this). Over the first few days after you build your compost pile, a sequence of different bacteria go to work – first the psychrophilic, then the mesophilic, and finally, once the heap gets to about 37 degrees celcius, the thermophilic. Once the pile gets up to between 55 and 70 degrees, the heat kills off weed seeds and most insects (and some bacteria too). But the thermophilic bacteria quickly use up all the degradable materials unless the heap is turned.

But how do you know if your heap is hot enough? Here’s the advice of one permaculture site: “as an simple guideline. if you can put your arm into the compost up to the elbow, then it is not at 50 degrees Celsius, and is not hot enough”. If the idea of a forearm coated in hot shit doesn’t appeal to you, you can also use a cake thermometer. But perhaps not on the same day as the school bake sale.

I don’t bother with thermometers. After the allotted number of days, I just dig into the guts of the pile. If steam comes pouring out, creating a sort of horse-poo sauna for the shovel wielder, things are cooking. Best not to turn your heap in your PJs or your ballgown,though.

I’m not so sure about white stuff you can see in the picture on the right. According to the University of Illinois‘ composting boffins, this is actinomycetes – “a higher-form bacteria similar to fungi and molds” which feeds on the woody bits in the pile and helps make well cooked compost smell earthy. Robert Raabe, Dr “Afraid of lion poo”, thinks it’s a good sign in hot compost. But it usually turns up in an nonaerobic pile so this pic indicates that while my current heap is hot it probably have been turned a bit earlier.

As the old joke says “What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener? Two weeks”. Still, with a turn over and a bit of oxygen, I reckon my compost will get back on track. A perfect heap might require that horse do-do up to the elbow but a pretty good heap seems to be manageable without that level of commitment.

My technique for turning the pile is quite primitive – kind of like knocking down a stinky sand castle. I dig into the steaming centre of the pile, shovel the hottest part of the heap to one side (up against the remains of the tortured ex-cocos palm). Eventually the undercooked layer above caves in in a satisfying way. I do that a few times, so the outside part of heap is in the middle, ready to heat up again.

Somtimes when I’m tending my compost heap, I feel like I’m channelling the spirit of a brush turkey dad, as he scratches his big pile of mulch around, keeping the temperature just right for his clutch of eggs.

Brush turkey bloke tending his nest

Having turned your heap, you let the heat build up for a couple of days and then you turn it over it all again. And then again every two days or even once a day if you ever get over-excited. That goes on for about two weeks. The write up of the Berkley method in the University of California’s Vegetable Research and Information Center (my kind of place) stresses that “outdoor exercise is an added benefit” of hot composting.

For a kayaker, all that shovelling is not bad thing at all, leaving aside the fabulous pile of compost you get at the end of the three weeks of relentless digging. It’s hot composting and hopefully you get hotter in the process of making it. Truly, there is no downside.

Some other posts about gardening experiments

My attempts to grow luffa…. no it doesn’t come from the sea!

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

The ginger family stole my brain!

DIY by subtractions: the kiwifruit arbor

From battery to backyard: the story of our rescue chickens, Dusty, Crumpet and Ruff

Turning our garden into whipbird habitat by making a mess

References

Antonella Anastasi, Giovanna Cristina Varese & Valeria Filipello Marchisio
(2005) Isolation and identification of fungal communities in compost and vermicompost, Mycologia, 97:1, 33-44

Yan Guo, Jinliang Zhang, Changyan Dengand Nengwu Zhu (2012) Spatial Heterogeneity of Bacteria: Evidence from Hot Composts by Culture-independent Analysis Asian-Australian Journal of Animal Science Vol. 25, No. 7 : 1045 – 1054

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mccnmatt

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January 28, 2019

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Backyard birds, mating, Native birds, Satin bowerbirds, Uncategorized, Waste

The bowerbird bachelors

You know life has been intense when an incident from the backyard in spring doesn’t make it to the blog until the tailend of summer. Our backyard re-enactment of “The Bachelor” had to be at least four months ago because satin bowerbirds only do their courtship routines from April for September. The bowerbird dating show was a while ago now, but it was a truly memorable occasion.

A couple of times in the past we’ve found some blue items – pegs, bottle tops – in the bottom of the garden, collected together and rearranged over a period of days in a mysterious and seemly significant way. But this time the assemblage was visible from our back verandah. We had ringside seats for the show.

Though he was decked our in the iridescent black of a mature male – something that only happens when satin bowerbirds are at least seven years old – our bachelor seemed to be new at this. There was no signs of a bower per se, just his collection of pretty objects in an unsalubrious corner of the garden. I spent a day on the deck “working from home”, watching him shuffling them around. The milkbottle/yellow leaf combination seemed to be a particular favourite.

Satin bowerbird with milk bottle trophy

A dangerous blue toy

A favourite combo – yellow leaf and milkbottle

After quite a bit of this faffing around, he had a visit from a female.

Female satin bowerbird comes to look around

Cue bending, twisting, flapping of wings, along with some impressive eye bulging.

Courtship behaviour of the satin bowerbird – bowing

Flapping…

…and eye bulging

Well, impressive to me but possibly not to the visiting female. I know it’s anthropomorphic but this face screams “get me out of here!”

“I’m a satin bowerbird… get me out of here!”

And indeed, within minutes, a second male arrived on the scene, having surveyed the situation from afar. He had a look around, somewhat dismissively it appeared, and then abruptly flew off with the female in tow. I almost heard him muttering out of the corner of his beak “C’mon babe”.

Second male looking on from the distance

Second male not very impressed by our bachelor’s display

Our bachelor, thwarted, seemed to decide that inadequacies in his collection of blue objects was the key problem. My kids had helpfully (if problematically from a plastic waste point of view) scattered some colourful gee-gaws around the back patio. Our guy seemed concerned that one of the “house” wattlebirds might have an eye on the azure ornaments that were key to his sexual success. It was on.

Showdown between bowerbird and wattlebird

“Mess with my blue things and I mess with your foot!”

One distinctly irked bowerbird

Having put the little wattlebird firmly back in its box, our lovelorn male returned with additional trinkets to pimp his bower. But to no avail.

More courtship display

Unimpressed female bowerbird

There were other visitors that afternoon, but despite sustained and prurient interest, I saw no signs of sexual congress and the next day there was no repeat performance although the blue objects remained in their inauspicious arrangement by the woodpile.

However, a couple of weeks later the abandoned pile of treasures received another inspection from a “green” – presumably a young male who hadn’t yet earned the glossy violet-black feathers of a grown-up.

Juvenile male pimping the bower

“And these sticks should go… there!”

He seemed to be practising his courtship display, favouring golden twigs rather than the milk-bottle/leaf combo. He had that eye-bulge down pat already though. I wonder if we will see him back – perhaps in the mottled black-and-green plumage – for the next season of the Bowerbird Bachelors.

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September 19, 2018

Posted under

estuaries, jellyfish, Uncategorized, Waste, waterways

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A ghostly tide in Calabash Creek

It’s true what they say: you can’t step into the same river twice. Especially if that river is really an estuary, briny water moving up and down between the mangroves.

Last time I was in Calabash Bay, back in February, it was full of stingrays. The bigger rays were over a metre from head to tail, the smallest a quarter of that size, sliding along the silty creek bed bottom at a surprising speed as I wrestled with the manual focus on my camera.

Little black cormorant

The entrance to Calabash Bay

Stingray in Calabash Creek

Upper reaches of Calabash Creek

But this Sunday, in the golden hour, I floated alongside a parade of hundreds of thousands of jellyfish. Not the jelly blubbers that gather in the bends and eddies of the Hawkesbury proper, orange and beefy and disturbingly solid under the paddle. These were moon jellies, aurelia aurata, diaphanous as mermaids’ undergarments, their shadows on the sandy bottom more substantial than themselves, tumbling and drifting downstream.

A flock of moon jellies

Moon jelly and reflection

Moon jellies flaunting their horseshoe shaped gonads

Stinging tentacles on display?

They’re common enough, moon jellies. They’re easy to see and easy to study because they like to hang out where we humans do. Harbours and jetties give them somewhere to latch onto in the polyp phase of their intriguing two part life cycle. And blooms of millions of the medusa form – like the one I saw this weekend – are not unusual either, especially in enclosed and not too salty waters, where the nutrient level is high, the oxygen level low and predators are few. But I’d never seen so many moon jellies in one place before, and never seen them here. Perhaps the stiff south easterly breeze and a rising tide blew them implausibly high into the tree-lined reaches of Calabash Creek.

Burns creek during a burnoff

Maybe it was a coincidence, but along with the mysterious tide of jellyfish, Calabash Creek and the trees and rocks that flanked it were draped with garish green algae. The creekbed and mangrove roots were coated in it and dried mats of it hung like fragments of ripped clothing from low branches. Water quality is much better in the Hawkesbury these days, but it seems like Calabash Bay is a hotspot for algal blooms, both toxic and less so, thanks to sewage outfalls upstream and a legacy of nutrients from earlier, dirtier days buried in the sediment.

Whatever the cause, the creepy drapery and the feeling of being entirely surrounded by slowly moving, half-invisible jellies lent an otherworldly feel to these quiet waters.

Whitefaced heron in a monochrome landscape

Dried mats of algae looking like torn clothes

Algae draped over a rock

Baby mangroves

So I guess I can’t say for sure whether you get to step in the same river twice. My feet never went near that water. They were tucked up in the canoe with no chance of touching ghostly jellies, stinging tentacles or strangling slime.

Burnoff sunset over Berowra Creek

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August 10, 2018

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History, kayaking, landscape photography, national parks, Uncategorized, Waste

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The Great War and rubbish

Hole pattern abstract

There’s nothing I like better than a scene of elegant industrial decay. Place that ruin-porn in the tranquillity of the Hawkesbury at midwinter. What could be finer than a paddle around a rusted out wreck on a still morning, in the company of breakfasting eagles and kites?

The rear of the Parramatta and the slopes below the M1

Rivets and rust

Oystershells of rust

White bellied sea eagle with breakfast

Fisherfolk with fish

What surprised me, back on land, when I dug around to find out more, was the age of this beautiful ruin. The Parramatta was the very first ship commissioned for the newly formed Australian Navy after Federation. It was built in 1910, the first of six torpedo boat destroyers to be constructed by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Glasgow. The destroyer was part of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific during the Great War, hunting enemy ships up the Sepik River in New Guinea, patrolling the waters around the Phillipines, Malayan and the East Indies, and later, battling submarines in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.

The interior of the wreck of the Parramatta

It’s been a very long time since the Parramatta did what she was designed to do. She was taken off to be dismantled in 1929, when my granddad was a toddler.

Native rock orchids… I think!

A mangrove growing through the hull

But in her post-naval career, she’s certainly been reused a few times. After being decommissioned, she was sold to the NSW Penal Department, along with her sister ship The Swan, and towed to Cowan Creek where each boat was to accommodate 50 convicts. The prisoners were supposed to work on a new road from Bobbin Head to Brooklyn that was to be “the finest marine drive in the whole world”. The stretch from Windybanks to Bobbin Head was declared a detention area, but in the end, with a change of government and not a single vote in favour of the plan from the Kuring-gai Chase Trustees, the idea of building a road was shelved and the boats were sold again. Their purchaser hoped (ultimately fruitlessly) to use them as a floating hotel for fishermen. It’s rumoured they went on to house unemployed men and store water during the Depression, before being towed to the north end of Milson Island and used as a floating sand and gravel pit.

Flowing fog at Milson's Island - the location of the Parramatta is on the right

Looking north past Milson’s Island – the wreck location is near the right of the photo

In the early 1970s, the historical significance of the wreck was began to be appreciated and the bow and stern of the ship were retrieved and preserved for posterity – the stern at Queens Wharf Reserve on the Parramatta River, and the bow at the Garden Island military base in Sydney. Other bits have been less officially repurposed – all its valuable brass portholes, for instance, have been nicked.

The back of the Parramatta

Hypnotic ripples

Mangrove saplings

It’s not really clear how the wreck ended up on a mudbank on a bend of the Hawkesbury. It’s rumoured she and her sister ship The Swan were being towed downriver in a gale in 1934 when they broke away. The Swan filled up with water and sank twenty metres deep in the river near Little Wobby public wharf, while the Parramatta was stranded in the shallow water amongst the oyster farms below Cascade Creek.

Looking over to Grace’s Shore in Muogamarra National Park

She’s not the only bit of flotsam and jetsam on that bend of the river, though, by a long shot. I pulled in amongst the mangroves to stretch my legs below the waterfall, to find all manner of rubbish. A discarded shopping bag was filled with drink bottles, polystyrene, coke cans, bait bags and the odd thong in a matter of minutes. I even found a functional tupperware container and matching lid, some thing that I almost never see in my own kitchen cupboards.

Parramatta with hills amended

I have no pictures of any of this trash, needless to say. Unless it’s on the epic scale of Edward Burtynsky’s sublime depictions of industrial landscapes, utterly transformed by excavation and waste, our tide of plastic detritus is nowhere near as photogenic as the rusty bones of our military past. But it will will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer.

Rust abstract crop

Other local history posts

The Hawkesbury vs the engineers: some history of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge

Canberra on Cowan Creek? The strange and beautiful story of Smith’s Creek.

The ghost freeway: the wildlife and history of Mooney Mooney creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: stories from Peats and Barr Island

Further references

Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history, CSIRO publishing.

Mangroves through the bones of the Parramatta

The escarpments above the wreck

Metal textures

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 15, 2018

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, fruit trees, Garden trees, Recycling, Waste

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Sweet dreams, baby avocado

It’s hard to love a plant with a death wish. I’m on my third generation of spindly unwell looking avocado trees now and it’s starting to get old.

It’s hard to believe that a plant that springs spontaneously from seeds carelessly cast into the compost could be so very hard to keep alive. Pretty much all the other trees I’ve sourced from the prompt and knowledgeable online nursery Daley’s Fruits have taken off without a hitch, but after several years of abject failures I’m starting to feel like the Avocado Angel of Death.

Or maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s my naughty chickens. My avocados need protection, by which I don’t mean armed body-guards, though I’m not saying I haven’t considered that.

Apricot the Sussex playing the innocent

Futon base protection for my nashi pear

New growth on the nashi pear

I planted a low-chill nashi pear a few years ago in a perilous location, right next to the giant trampoline that is the social hub for all the neighbourhood kids. It’s going gangbusters, despite the ever present danger of being crushed by pre-teen gymnasts and the surrounding scorched earth environment created by the chooks. The enclosure I made for it out of the slats of a bed base found by the side of the road, for all its “chook-house tolerances”, is still going strong.

The bed-gate

Winter and the neighbour’s chicken, Big Jenny.

Shima and Apricot creating a scorched earth environment

And the gate constructed from a surplus-to-requirements Ikea bed continues to serve its purpose of keeping all but the most determined and agile chickens out of my bush tucker garden.

Who knew bedroom furniture could be the key to a flourishing food forest?

With these sleep-related successes in mind, I decided to turn to a wooden cot, long stashed under the house, into surrounds for my two poorly looking avocado trees. You often see cots like this by the side of the road during the council cleanup, so this is a project for everyone, even those without anklebiters.

My suite of tools

With the addition of a handful of mismatched screws and a small number of shelf brackets I bought on an over-excited visit to the hardware shop many moons ago, I was able to put two surrounds together from one cot in my dining room in the space of a few hours. Warning: do check the dimension of your door frames before trying this at home.

Surround 1 done and about to start on number 2

Brackets at the base of the surrounds, screws at the top

The first surround featured the rather stylish cot head and foot, spliced together with the cot base (cut in half). The four panels for the other were made by bisecting the two sides of the cot. With a modicum of creativity, I was able to use the holes already drilled in the frame and a few self-tapping screws. The only time I needed a drill was to add the slightly unglamorous pieces of hardwood across the top, which I included to ramp up the degree of difficulty for ambitious or athletic chickens (Winter the escape artist leghorn, I’m looking at you!) to fly inside. Those with fatter or more docile chickens might not want to bother with this addition.

The nice thing about repurposing existing furniture if your carpentry skills are as impaired as mine, is that you can rely on the expertise and functional set-square of the person who put together the joints in first place. So the finished surrounds look fairly regular, despite my inadequacies with a tape measure.

And so far, despite a giant tree being hacked down more or less over the top of them, the surrounds seem to have done the job. The chickens have done their level best to squeeze between the slats but haven’t quite figured out how. The avocado roots are no longer being ripped from the ground on a daily basis in the search for invisible but delicious invertebrates, and the trees are (perhaps overly optimistically) producing new leaves.

“There’s gotta be a way in somewhow”

“If only i had a longer neck”

On my past track record, it seems highly likely that these avocadoes are still doomed, but at least I’ve done my best to put their troubles to bed. Sleep well, little trees!

The two cot-surrounds in place

New growth

The girls having a dig

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April 16, 2016

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kayaking, Native birds, Uncategorized, Waste, waterways

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What do you get if you cross a snake with a panda?

The geometric art on the Australasian darter’s back

Things I learned from last weekend’s paddle from Lake Macquarie’s Shingle Splitters’ Point to Dora Creek:

1. When kayaking on the largest permanent salt water lake in the southern hemisphere, always remember fetch. Fetch can defined as the distance of open water over which wave-creating winds blow. Where does the word “fetch” come from, I hear you ask? From the cries of sinking kayakers as they disappear behind the white tops: “Fetch the emergency services!”

(Don’t be deceived by the apparent smoothness of the lake surface here – once the wind picked up I was too busy thinking about staying afloat to take any pictures)

Heading across Lake Macquarie from Shingle Splitters’ Point

2. The lyrics of Kenny Rogers’ immortal song “The Gambler” don’t just apply to card sharks, but also amateur bird photographers. “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done”.

Because the few seconds you spend checking to see if that wildly optimistic over-the-shoulder shot caught the hunting osprey mid-dive, will be ones in which the hungry raptor wheels around and splashes down again, right next to your boat. And flies off before you can get the lens cap off your camera.

Departing osprey

Darter near Brooklyn

Female darter near Marramarra Creek

Male darter by Milson Island

Male Australasian darter at Apple Tree Bay

Male darter at Speers Point

3. While adult Australasian darters are the most sinuously elegant of birds, poetry in snake-like motion, their offspring are actively disturbing.

Juvenile darters near the nest

Closeup of the absurd faces of juvenile darters

What is it about these baby darters? They’re very very fluffy. Like a gorgeous soft baby panda. A delightfully fluffy decapitated panda with the head of a snake. A sweet duo of snake-panda in a nest white-washed with guano. And they didn’t think much of me either.

Juvenile darter expressing themself through the medium of guano

In South America, they’ve found are darters in the fossil record that weighed 17 kilos – more than eight times as heavy as these not-insubstantial characters. Just imagine how unnerving it would be in a kayak under that humungous reptilian chick when it let fly.

There’s no danger of modern darters – anhinga to give them their formal name – vanishing like their massive forebears. Like humans, darters like deep, still water not choked with vegetation, as long as there are overhanging trees to nest and perch on. And they don’t mind introduced fish like carp and perch, so they’re doing better than birds that prefer marshy wetlands or are fussier about their diet.

A few weeks back, my brother and I watched with a fine male hunting from the shore of Lake Macquarie in the golden light of the late afternoon. Even after the bird vanished below, we could follow its progress by the tiny fry that leapt from the water. The sinuous head reappeared moments later, a fish impaled on its beak. It took him a few goes, but finally he managed to flick it into the air and gulp it down.

Male Australasian darter trying his wings by Lake Macquarie

Darter skewering a fish

Darter about to fling a fish in the air

Male Australasian darter with a fish impaled on its beak

I’ve seen plenty of snake birds, as they’re sometimes called, over the last couple of years as I’ve paddled around the lower reaches of the Hawkesbury and the rivers and lagoons along the Central Coast. Familiarity hasn’t dulled my enthusiasm for them – the males geometric abstracts, the females russet in the sun, their elegant necks holding poses as striking and absurd as those of modern dancers. But I’ve never seen the young ones before.

Darters breed erratically, it seems, whenever and wherever conditions are good. They will fly long distances – up to 2000 ks in the non-breeding season – and will nest inland when floodwaters linger. Maybe the stretch of Dora Creek where I saw them is a regular breeding spot. In one fecund tree I saw two empty nests, along with two brim full of snake-pandas and guano. Or perhaps the vacant real estate belonged to other waterbirds, since darters seem to like to nest in company. Down the river, egrets, cormorants and partly-fledged juveniles were hanging out on a branch together, not far from this perturbed looking male with his runaway egg.

Casuarina with four waterbird nests

Male Australasian darter on the nest with a runaway egg

Partly fledged juvenile Australasian darters

Greater egret in a suburban front yard by Dora Creek

One way or another, the younger chicks seem to prefer intimacy to solitude, finding comfort, as they crouched in their absurdly flimsy nest, in the softness of their siblings’ breasts and the predatory encircling of each others’ snakey necks.

Three darter chicks snuggling crop tighter

Juvenile Australasian darters snuggled together in what remains of their nest

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 19, 2016

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anthropocene, estuaries, History, kayaking, Native birds, poisons, pollution, Waste

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In praise of sewage

“Cockle Creek? Ooo, I wouldn’t put in there” my sister’s mate, the local, said “They’ve been dumping heavy metals in that spot for years! And there’s the sewage farm up the river as well. I’d steer well clear”.

I muttered to my sister as we walked away “What do you think? Are you worried about heavy metals and sewage?”

“Nah! Let’s do it!”

Sunrise on Lake Macquarie

The power of poo. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing a lot about it from my fabulous friend and colleague, Cath Simpson, at this very minute writing a documentary for Radio National full of plops and splashes.

Thanks to some bad experiences with cholera and typhoid, we modern city dwellers generally a bit iffy about human excrement. But the bacteria that dwell in and on us – our own personal ecosystems – seem to be quite critical to human health. While I’m a huge fan of the toilet, poo is not all bad. If you have a nasty case of Clostridium difficile, for instance – an infection that kills 30,000 Americans every year, often older people in hospitals who have had their bacterial ecosystems depopulated by antibiotics – a “faecal transplant” from a healthy donor is might well be your best chance of a cure.

If the much of Western world, with its convenient superphosphate fertiliser and cow-pat free central heating, has been a bit “ew” about excrement, one sub-culture has held the faith. Bird watchers have never lost confidence in the value of ordure.

Painterly pied cormorant fishing in Lake Macquarie

When Birdlife Australia asks “where’s your favourite birdwatching spot?”, do you choose an offshore island, fringed with white sand? the lush splendour of the tropical rainforest? Or choice number three, a sewage treatment plant? And you guessed it, the first comment is a ringing endorsement of the glories of the Alice Springs Sewage Ponds.

So I wasn’t really surprised at the new and exciting birdlife I saw up Cockle Creek in amongst the drowned computer monitors, abandoned bridge footings and Impressionist riverscapes subtly enhanced by a discreet discarded tyre.

Old bridge footings in Cockle Creek

Impressionist style river scene, with car tyre

So many striated herons I got bored of taking photos. White-cheeked honeyeaters. Orioles. Black faced cuckoo shrikes. White breasted woodswallows, showing off their 80s batwing styling. Double-banded finches with their neat dress shirts, black ties and cummerbunds.

Juvenile striated heron

Adult striated heron fishing

Why are sewage treatment plants so great for birds? Well, wetlands are a particularly threatened habitat – a third of Victoria’s wetlands have been drained over the last two hundred years, for instance – and old-style sewage ponds offer alternative places for birds to feed and rest, especially during droughts. With plenty of nutrients, the settling ponds of sewage treatment plants actually offer more invertebrate snacks than natural wetlands, and sustain a greater range birds. Christopher Murray’s research in Victoria has found that newer treatment plants – the dynamic sounding “activated sludge” facilities – that take up less expensive real estate than old-fashioned waste stabilisation ponds (and smell better) are less appealing from a waterbird’s point of view.

Up Cockle Creek to the sewage plant

Double banded finch

White-breasted woodswallows

White-breasted woodswallows “clumping”

Reflections

If the news on sewage plants is pretty good, I’m not so sure about the heavy metals. Cockle Creek really has been a dumping ground for cadmium and lead, among other things, from the smelter in Boolaroo, on and off for more than a century. There’s black slag from the plant tucked away in all sorts of unexpected places around the lake shore and lead, zinc, mercury and cadmium lurk in the creek’s sediment, 70 centimetres deep.

The smelter closed down in the noughties and the site is still being “remediated” for housing. Previous “abatement” strategies seemed to involve scraping off a few centimetres of topsoil and (after most of the local pre-schoolers were found to have worryingly high levels of lead in their blood) urging kids to “Wash wipe and scrape – you’ll be right mate!”. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the streets closest to the “The Sulphide” were rented out on the strict condition that the household should have no children or pets.

There’s a giant Bunnings there already, though, amidst the rubble. Perhaps the logic is that the visiting DIYers are heading home to put a mallet through an asbestos wall, so where’s the harm in throwing in a spot of bonus lead?

Old servo appearing in many local wedding photos

Gorgeous old buildings in Boolaroo

Bunnings in the “Sulphide” smelter site

The local birds seem to be doing okay, though. A pair of ospreys nest at the top of a Norfolk pine at Speers Point, where Cockle Creek flows into Lake Macquarie, and this last year they’ve had chicks. Osprey are locavores and since they’re at the top of the food chain, anything toxic in the fish they eat ends up in their chicks. Eventually. It takes a while for our endlessly updated array of contaminants – from DDT to teflon, fire retardants and hypertension medications – to make it into the bloodstream of the baby raptors.

Osprey with fish at Speers Point, Lake Macquarie

Osprey with fish

Osprey in the nest

I’ll be back to Cockle Creek for sure, to see what the local sewage has in store for me. Trying to tread lightly, and hoping not to feel too much lead and mercury squelching between my toes…

References

Murray, C. G. & Hamilton, A. J. (2010). Perspectives on wastewater treatment wetlands and waterbird conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 47(5), 976–985. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010.01853.x

Murray, C. G., Loyn, R. H., Kasel, S., Hepworth, G., Stamation, K. & Hamilton, A. J. (2012). What can a database compiled over 22 years tell us about the use of different types of wetlands by waterfowl in south-eastern Australian summers? Emu: Austral Ornithology, 112(3), 209–217. DOI: 10.1071/MU11070

Murray, C. G., Kasel, S., Szantyr, E., Barratt, R. & Hamilton, A. J. (2013). Waterbird use of different treatment stages in waste-stabilisation pond systems. Emu: Austral Ornithology. DOI: 10.1071/MU12121

Murray, C. G. & Hamilton, A. J. (2012). Sewage ponds a refuge for wetland-deprived birds. ECOS, 175. http://www.ecosmagazine.com/?paper=EC12418

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 13, 2015

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

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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!

Baby brush turkey investigates the construction site

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 4, 2015

Posted under

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.