River returning

Eucalypt awakening

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted about the river. It’s not that I haven’t been out.  I’ve been up and down the same stretch of Berowra Creek – from my favourite haunts Bujwa Bay to the vine-hung eucalypts at Crosslands – often over the last two years, thankful that this marvellous estuary is at the end of my street.

A cormorant claims Berowra Creek

But paddling the same waters again and again, walking the same trails that loop above and around and down to the river, there’s rarely been something new and remarkable to tell a story about (and in the endless covid work-crunch almost never time to sit down and tell any kind of story to my satisfaction).  ‘

But sometimes, it’s not the new that’s remarkable. Paddling the stretch of river, walking the same firetrails to the same lookouts again and again, sharpens your eyes to small changes in the light or the tide, the movement of mist or ripples or birds in flight.

Spiderweb morning

What do you see when you step into the same river, time after time after time?

The sun advances and retreats with the fog.

Saltmarsh and sun

The big rains come, shifting the sandbars.  One day you see kids playing in the shallows, another day, in the same spot, fishermen casting.

A haunted boat, swaying gently, appears at a mooring

My pictures from these outings deceive me.  Is that the same bay in another season, or perhaps a different line of mangroves in the same early light?

The landscape blurs: sandstone into treescape, mist into bird.

During lockdowns, borders closed, the still river became our local art gallery.

And now lockdown is over, and my pictures of the river are in a real gallery!

They’re on show at The Cottage, a community art space at Brooklyn.  It’s all thanks to the wonderful Ana Rubio at Hornsby Council, who remembered my last exhibition at Hornsby’s Wallarobba Art and Cultural Centre in 2020 and asked me to display my photos as part of a six council public consultation process on Dyarubbin/The Hawkesbury.  A big part of the consultation is a Celebration of Deerubbin from 10-3 on Saturday June 18, with stalls and kids’ activities right by The Cottage.

High contrast bridge

My exhibition “River Returning” is on throughout June – you can come and see it between 10 and 3 on weekends.  I’ll be there much of the time and it would be great to see you!

The prints in this post are all on sale.  They’re giclee art printed on Canson rag, and you can find a pricelist below.

River returning pricelist

  • Eucalypt awakening,     84 x 56.6 cm, $400
  • Cormorants and their shadows   53.23 x 35.9 cm, $180
  • Spiderweb morning, 53.23 x 42 cm, $230
  • Shack on the water 54.24 x 42 cm, $230
  • River Mondrian  59.4 x 39.6 cm, $250
  • Sun fishing  28 x 42 cm, $120
  • Naa Badu walkers 28.94 x 18 cm, $60
  • Mangrove nursery 28.52 x 18 cm, $60
  • Naa Badu boaties  27.7 x 18 cm, $60
  • Mangrove island  28.19 x 18 cm, $60
  • Fishing boat figures 29.72 x 42 cm, $120
  • Heron on Hawkesbury sandstone  54 x 42 cm, $230
  • Three hills  38.82 x 42 cm,$140
  • Bundled boat  42 x 52.38cm, $230
  • Silver eyed boat  42 x 63 cm, $250
  • Blue boat 34.92 x 52.38, $180
  • Salt marsh and sun 59.4 x 39.04 cm, $230
  • Joe Crafts Bay abstract  42 x 28 cm, $120
  • Shadow trees 42 x 28 cm, $120
  • High contrast bridge 53.23 x 32.67 cm,$180
  • A cormorant claims Berowra Creek 84 x 56.07 cm, $400
  • The rower 53.23 x 35.34 cm, $180

If you like a particular image but would prefer it in a different size, do let me know – I can easily get smaller or larger versions printed. Just tell me the size you prefer.

Other prints, from my previous exhibitions on Dangar Island and the Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre in Hornsby, are also available. Check out the “Art and the River” link at the bottom of this page.  You can also follow me on Insta: my handle is mccnmatt.

To order, please email me on nicole.matthews@mq.edu.au and I can pop your print in the post!

Post about my previous exhibition, Dawn on Deerubbin

Art and the river

Warbling in lockdown

Kayak on still river water at dawn with reflections showing the sky

Six weeks into a Sydney lockdown.  Everyone confined to their homes with occasional outings for food and exercise no more than a few ks away.  I feel super lucky that this bit of Dyarrubbin still falls within the 10 k radius I’m allowed to stray from my house. Berowra Creek, at the end of my street, is super quiet at the moment, the houseboats rocking empty at their moorings, jet-skis banished – only the locals heading out in ones or twos for some fresh air.

It seems fitting that the “feature wildlife” of my escape to the river last weekend was also a local – Sydney’s only endemic bird, origma solitaria, the rockwarbler.

These little birds are only found within 250 km of Sydney, hopping around mostly on Hawkesbury sandstone, though I’ve hear they also pop up on the limestone and granite, where it is to be found.  Their range on the coast extends from Mollymook  to Raymond Terrace, and they can be found as far west as Orange and in the north can be found up in the beautiful Coolah Tops National Park, according to the CSIRO Australian bird guide favouring “exposed, dissected rock outcrops…from coast (including sea cliffs) to high plateaus  of the ranges” (2017, 340).

Rockwarblers are not uncommon – despite their restricted range they’re flagged as of least concern, conservation-wise – though they don’t appear to inhabit cities like Newcastle, Sydney or even Wollongong or Nowra.  On my noodling 12 k paddle last weekend I spotted one pair busily feeding and nestbuilding on rocks by the waterside, and then, having tuned my ear to their high pitched calls, spotted another pair doing much the same, on the return journey.

I don’t see them on every trip out but I’ve observed them behind golden beaches on Cowan Water and in rocky bays near Dangar Island, and even in one of the spots  at Berowra Creek with the most foot traffic, at Washpool Creek where the Great North Walk meets the estuary.

The rockwarbler is an unremarkable looking little bird – “a small, plump, dark brown-grey bird with a cinnamon-tinged face and forehead, a dull white throat speckled black, reddish-brown underparts”, almost the definition of the LBB – but has some interesting habits.  It makes pendulous domed nests that hang in darkened overhangs and caves in the rocky terrain it prefers – apparently its common name used to be “hanging dick”.  Who says all folk wisdom  needs to be kept alive, eh?

I spotted my first rockwarbler for the day collecting what looked like nest material – roots and possibly spider webs  in the exposed root system of toppled trees on the shoreline. She flew off intermittently into a group of boulders behind some casuarina trees – I couldn’t get a clear shot of the crevice she seemed to be returning to, so no photo of a hanging dick, for which you might well be grateful.

Despite all this, I’d like to get a glimpse of a nest – the description in Birdlife’s online site have a hard core goth appeal:

Made from grasses and plant fibres and coated with spider webs, [the nest] is attached to a rocky overhang or roof of a cave by spider webs, which the bird hammers into place with its bill. They are then covered with saliva to hold them in place

You can see in these pictures that the spot I saw my first pair of rockwarblers has been a important place for humans as well as non-human animals for thousands of years.  The soil here is thick with oystershells, left by the custodians of this country over the centuries, and now woven into the earth in scores of places right along the shores of Berowra Creek.  Everywhere you look around here there’s a midden.

Rockwarblers look a little bit like northern hemisphere robins and seem to have a similar outgoing personality – “confiding” in the words of the CSIRO blue bird book.  This bird and its mate, that soon arrived on the scene, didn’t seem particularly disturbed by a kayaker loitering nearby with a camera, and I managed to drift quite close while they scoured the rocky shore for largely invisible food.

I’ve read that rockwarblers are primarily insect eaters although Carol Probert has reported seeing nectar drinking in some she watched in the Blue Mountains. No evidence of this here but there seemed to be plenty to eat.  This pair traversed the rocks briskly, picking mysterious things from amongst the moss, and even dipping beaks into the little bowls comprised of previously-opened mollusc shells on the rocks.  I’m not sure  if the rockwarblers were scrounging for critters that had found a home in these tiny rockpools.

There were plenty of insects about in the lee of the rocks, but i didn’t see any of the birds I watched that morning snatching a snack from the air, despite the temptation.

What I did see – once with each pair of birds – was what I think were nuptial gifts – one bird feeding the other snack, perhaps with romantic intentions.  I stress I did not witness any subsequent feathered intimacies but with birds you blink and you’ll miss it, so that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot!

Here’s pair number one, coming beak to beak.

And the second pair

I think I can see a insect leg sticking out from the crumb in the beak of the bird with the tuft of feathers on its back.  I guess these scenes could have been adults feeding juveniles, which look similar to the grown-up rock warblers, only paler in colour, but I didn’t hear any pitiful calls from the recipients and given the time of year – roundabout the beginning of breeding season for many birds – a romantic gesture seems a bit more likely.

The rockwarblers were pretty friendly to me but also to the other little birds hopping around the nest area, particularly a family of variegated fairywrens that seemed to follow them as they hopped about round the edge of the water.  The warblers kept their feet mostly on rock, the wrens mostly flitting from twig to twig in undergrowth nearby. If there’s dietary competition between these little birds, it’s a very friendly one.

In fact, I suspect this was more like the mixed-flock foraging that have been noticed in many parts of the world in wintertime, when different species of small insectivous birds move around feeding as a group.  Maybe the rockwarblers’ hopping stirred up some flying insects for the wrens to eat?  Some researchers have found that variegated wrens, sometimes hang out with “friends” from other species whose territory overlaps with their own, sharing the defense of that territory, travelling and foraging together. This benefited the wrens a lot – they “spent more time foraging, were less vigilant [and] had greater first-nest fledging success” (Johnson, 2018, 821).  I wonder if the wrens were as friendly as this with my rockwarblers?

The atmos not so friendly amongst the waterbirds feeding nearby.  I watched a whitefaced heron repeatedly asserting dominance over a striated heron on a sequence of estuarine patches, as I trekked back the put-in.  Berowra’s ubiquitous waders are higher up the pecking order than ubiquitous lurkers it seems.

And then, just as I turned the corner to the marina, high over all, the alpha local of these lands.   A wedgie soaring silently, surveying its domain.

 

References

Davis, William M and Recier, Harry “Winter mixed species foraging flocks in acacia woodland of Western Australia” Corella, 2002, 26 (3), 74-79
Menkhorst, Peter; Rogers, Danny; Clarke, Rohan; Davies, Jeff; Marsack, Peter; Franklin, Kim The Australian Bird Guide, 2017 CSIRO Publishing
Probets, Carol ; Palmer, Grant ; Fitzsimons, James “Nectarivory in the Rockwarbler ‘origma solitaria’ Australian field ornithology, January 2019, Vol.36, p.34-35
Smith, Peter ; Smith, Judy “Re-use of a rockwarbler ‘origma solitaria’ nest over a 13-year period” Australian field ornithology, 2012-06-01, Vol.29 (2), p.77-82
Other locals in our backyard

An eagle in suburbia

Even by Sydney’s high standards – a city of four and a half million people surrounded by national parks – Berowra is absurdly well supplied with wide open spaces.

Bute and sunny trees

Upstream in Cowan Creek from Bobbin Head, in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

There’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park on the eastern side of the railway track.  To the west, on the other side of the Berowra creek, Marramarra National Park; to the north Muogamarra, only open to the public on six weekends a year and further, beyond the Hawkesbury, Brisbane Waters, Popran and Dharug National Parks.

Pelican graces distant 2 copy

Pelican grace at the mouth of Mullet Creek in Brisbane Water National Park

To the south, the second smallest and newest of them, Berowra Valley became a national park in 2012, soon after we moved here.  It follows the line of Berowra Creek through the suburbs as far as Cherrybrook.

If you put your kayak in Berowra Creek at the entertainingly named Dusty Hole and paddle upstream, you’re not in the wilderness. On the other side of the park, there’s the horsey country of Berilee and Dural – my go-to place for compost-making – and on this side you’re just a hop skip and a jump from Kuring-gai Industrial Park, featuring Inflatable World, the Steggles chicken factory and a host of timber and roofing suppliers.

But when you’re on the water at dawn, you could be in the middle of nowhere.

White faced heron profile crop

White faced heron hunting in Berowra Creek

 

On a high tide, you can wend your way past the sandstone rock arch quite a way up Sam’s Creek.  For all its outsize weeds and murky water, this does not feel like gully just a couple of ks downhill from the freeway.

Mouth of Sam's creek adjusted

The mouth of Sam’s Creek

Last weekend, I took a favourite side trip, down an alleyway of mangroves to a waterfall amplified by the rains.

Waterfall blurry 2

Waterfall into Berowra Creek

Below the footbridge that crosses Calna Creek, by the boardwalk across the saltmarsh, is a good place to pull in and stretch your legs.  The Great North Walk and the side tracks up Lyrebird Gully meet there, so there’s always a danger of being being forced to listen to an energetic conversation about property prices from the Sunday morning walkers, but skimming across the shallows up Calna Creek you can almost always outpace them.

There’s even a place to camp on the way at Crosslands Reserve, absurdly close to the Hornsby shops.  There’s a hint of civilisation as you pass the run-down convention centre and catch the smell of breakfast bacon, and then you’re back in the fog and the towering eucalypts.

Shiny trees and blue fog past crosslands

 

It’s 18ks, or thereabouts, from the ferry to the rock garden that’s the navigable limit of the creek, and back again.  And in the hours before the scouts stir in their sleepingbags, the creek is ridiculously quiet.  Apart from the inevitable lyrebird, busying itself with car alarm impressions in the undergrowth.

Illuminated trees at Crosslands crop

Illuminated trees by the campsite at Crosslands

But on the way back from the headwaters last weekend, something new.

Wedgie wide

A wedge-tailed eagle in Berowra Creek

A wedge-tailed eagle enjoying the morning sunshine, high above the water.

Of course, there are eagles on the creek every day of the week – on a day out in a boat you’re guaranteed to see the white bellied sea eagles that hunt there, and maybe even hear a few of their embarrassingly duck-like calls.  I saw a sea-eagle last Sunday, as usual, waiting above the water for the mist to clear.

Sea eagle in fog crop tight

White-bellied sea eagle in the mist

And once I saw an osprey by the creek, slightly dishevelled and hungry looking.

But there’s still something special about seeing the largest raptor in Australia hanging at the end of your street.  Maybe the leafy north shore counts as the open forest wedgies favour.  There’s certainly plenty of rabbits to keep them going.

I’ve been reminded this week that Berowra is more like a country town than suburbia. When there’s a car crash, residents come out to redirect traffic.  When your kid falls and grazes their knee walking to school, a passerby scoops them up and drives them home.  Lost keys and wallets speed their way to their owners.  Maybe the eagles have picked up on the rural atmosphere.

Rural enough for rabbits and roadkill, shall we say, but not so much that we’re not murderously anxious about them carrying off our newborn lambs.  With the stories of wedgies poisoned in their hundreds, I’m glad to see them here.  And I’m glad to be here too.

Insect head reflection

More raptor stories from around these parts

Encounters with eagles

Death and good fortune: a peregrine hunting in Cowan Creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

Sex, nests and dog fighting: our family of sparrowhawks get in the family way

Death and sibling rivalry: our baby sparrowhawks learn to hunt

The very big fish

 

 

The very big fish

big fish 3 crop long

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”.

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.

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.

crows following eagle 2 long cropped

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 and fish 21 for b&w square

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 big fish rock

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.  The 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

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.

Sparkly trees distant amended fixed

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.

Moon jelly with sparkly tentacles crop

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.

Smoky sunset with sparkles crop

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.

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 smoke from berilee at sunset

Burnoff sunset over Berowra Creek

The river that knew

Mist and sky above Mooney Mooney Creek better

Looking upriver from the junction with Floods Creek

If I want a quiet morning on the Hawkesbury, my best bet is a paddle up Mooney Mooney Creek.  It’s a jet ski free zone, and that’s a very fine thing. In maybe ten jaunts on various reaches of Mooney Mooney, I’ve seen a handful of kayaks, a few fishermen and one very slow moving yacht.  Unlike Cowan Creek or Patonga, there’s no sandy beaches for frisking about on, and the oysterfarms can be navigational hazard at low tide. But if you prefer hanging out with eagles and herons to spending time with humans in charge of powerboats, Mooney Mooney Creek’s the go.

Azure kingfisher profile crop

An uncharacteristically still azure kingfisher

There are really three Mooney Mooneys, for my purposes anyway.  There’s the upper reaches, a pleasant morning’s paddle if you throw in tranquil tributary Flood Creek, lined with casuarinas and decorated with the blue and green streaks of kingfishers hunting (more on the scenes and ecosystems there in a future post).  The put-in for that trip is where the switchbacking Pacific Highway crosses the river, though if you paddle upstream you pass under the highest bridge in Australia, a symphony in soaring concrete.

Or you can go downstream, towards Lemon Tree Bay and maybe on a low-ish tide, see, on every bend and mudflat herons feasting, and if you’re lucky, spot a wedge-tailed eagle soaring overhead.

Herons in parallel back in focus

White faced herons hunting at low tide

Up there in the headwaters, you’ll often see other kayakers – there are sometimes guided tours to the area – and occasionally people camping, rather naughtily, by the side of the river.  The Great North Walk, that links Sydney and Newcastle, via most of the lovely places along the way including Berowra (of course), flanks the upper reaches of the river and once or twice I’ve heard voices of hikers walking along the track or crossing the suspension bridge that spans the top of Piles Creek.

Snake island backlit 3

Snake Island and Brisbane Water National Park

But I’d prefer to be paddling than driving and I’m a little bit lazy, so I usually put in my boat in closer to home, at Deerubbin, where the freeway crosses the Hawkesbury.  From there I paddle under the freeway and past Spectacle Island, stopping off to check out the Mooney Mooney spoonbill colony, and then upstream.  Once you get past Snake Island and Sailor’s Chest Point, there’s not much sign of human activity, apart from oyster poles.

But there’s plenty going on, even without too many of us humans around.  Last week’s outing was particularly rich in feathery encounters.  A masked lapwing family enjoying a day out by the water by the Mooney Mooney public wharf.

Comedy silver gulls ducking for crabs in the shallows near Spectacle Island.

Silver gull with crab square amend

A sacred kingfisher  in the morning sun near her burrow in an abandoned arborial termite nest.  She got so bored with me clicking away she had a nap.

A striated heron, one of the river side regulars, pretending to be a particularly striking bit of sandstone.

And further up the creek, the predictable but still wonderful sight of a pair of young sea eagles perched amongst the mangroves in the shallow waters of Fox Bay.

The young ones seem to be easier to get close to.  A bit curious and a bit clueless, perhaps, about strange legless creatures that float downstream with the tide.

Even in the peace and quiet, there’s a feeling that all the inhabitants of Mooney Mooney Creek know about us.  They know we’re there – mostly out of sight, maybe, but not entirely out of mind.  The freeway passes just behind the ridge much of the way up the valley. You see it as you pass Snake Island, the trucks and cars  appear briefly, lifted above the rocky escarpment.  Sometimes, further up the creek,  the wind shifts and you can hear the sound of the traffic.

I recently found out that the freeway’s original route went right through my tranquil paddling territory – along Pile Creek, to cross the river south of where the Pacific Highway runs.  Right through kingfisher country.

But someone in the National Parks and Wildlife Service in the late 60s or 70s stood up to the road builders and just said “No”.  No, you can’t build a bloody great big road right through the (then recently established) Brisbane Water National Park.  We’re not having it.  In the words of the surprisingly fascinating “OzRoads” website

This new route had a more expensive bridge and steeper grades than the preferred route but there was nothing the DMR could do about it.

And it’s not often you hear freeway builders say that.  I’d love to  know the full story of who in Parks fought the good fight with the Roads folk.  Everytime I paddle up Mooney Mooney Creek now, I’ll be thinking about them and saying a little thank you.

Sea eagle facing away profile crop

Other paddles from Deerubbin Reserve

Up the Hawkesbury to Bar Island

For the ambitious, further in the same direction to Marramarra Creek

Into the heart of Muogamarra National Park up the winding Kimmerikong Creek

Downriver under the gorgeous if structurally challenged Hawkesbury River Bridge

 

Further references

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

 

 

Stingray Bay: lost and found

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

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

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

Egg going into the mist

Setting out from Appletree Bay

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seagrass and sand

Seagrass and sand in Stingray Bay

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

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

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

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

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

Buoy with plain blue background

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

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

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

But not while you’re navigating!

Bobbin head sign

References

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

Meet the Royals

Spoonbill looking back good portrait 2 wideTo be honest, I’m a republican more than a monarchist, but over the weekend I met one set of royals I have some time for: Royal Spoonbills.  They carry off the ceremonial garb beautifully without raiding the public purse for grog or helicopter rides, and their landed estates are mostly mud, swamps and reed beds, as opposed to, say 20 million acres of Britain’s finest arable land.

Royal Spoonbills are not uncommon birds – their conservation status is secure across much of Australia, and they can be found not just in rivers and coastal mudflats but  also in temporary inland waterways during times of flood, wading through shallow water, feeling for fish, crustaceans and aquatic insects with their vibration-detecting spoon-shaped beaks. They’ve also made it to New Zealand, where their numbers seem to be increasing.

But I’ve only seen them on two occasions in my weekly outings on the Hawkesbury, at the same time – early morning an hour or two after low tide- and in the same spot, in the mangroves near the shambling boatyards in Mooney Mooney.  It’s place with a splendid outlook but it won’t be appearing on the front cover of Vogue’s Marina and Oysterfarm magazine.  Unless they’re doing a special spread on “2017’s best retro refits for your partially sunken houseboat”

Sea eagle at dawn long small

White bellied sea eagle at dawn over Spectacle Island

The perpetually roar from the freeway, the piles of maritime junk and even the unchained dog wandering round the quayside didn’t seem to bother the herons, the pelicans or the spoonbills.  The tidal mudflats fringing Mooney Mooney and the nature reserve at Spectacle Island  across the way must make for good pickings, and the stands of mangroves by the boatyard a safe place to nest, over the water.

I’m pretty sure this is a regular hang-out for them.  Spoonbills living near the coast are sedentary and often use the same nests from year to year.  My failure to spot them over the intervening period is, I suspect, more to do with cluelessness about the best tide time to catch them, rather than a sign they wander around a lot.

Like darters, they breed in colonies with other waterbirds.  The first time I saw this group (or to use the proper collective noun, bowl) of spoonbills, in September last year, they were in the company of another wader I’ve rarely seen on the Hawkesbury, an egret. And this time, as well as the ubiquitous white-faced herons feeding en-masse on the mud flats at dawn and then later in the shallows, there were a flock of the much maligned white ibises – or “bin chickens” as urban Australian call them disparagingly – hunting in amongst the mangroves down the way.

Pelicans shouting at each other crop small

Apparently this is a male pelican (in breeding colours) chatting up a likely female!

I read that juvenile spoon bills have even been spotted grooming other species of waterbirds.  Shortsighted?  Or just very very friendly?

This time there was no sign of the spoonbills’ breeding plumage, a 20cm long crest of feathers on the back of the necks of both males and female (although the crest on female, like their legs and beak, is apparently shorter than the males’).  October to April is said to be the breeding season, so I must have caught them, last time, just before they paired up and started thinking about the next generation.  It’s probably lucky I didn’t catch them any later in the year, since it seems they’re very sensitive to disturbance when they’re on the nest.

Birds do seem to be more chilled around a photographer gliding along in a canoe than someone stumbling in the undergrowth with a camera.  It is pleasing to have this observation, made on the water over the past three years, confirmed by a recent paper, entertainingly called “Up the Creek with a Paddle”.  According to its authors, Hayley Glover, Patrick-Jean Guay and Michael Weston, the FID (flight-initiation-disturbance) distance of royal spoonbills is 23 metres if you are in a canoe, versus 55 metres if you’re on foot.  Mind you, driving up to birds in your car is also scientifically vindicated way of getting (slightly) closer to them before they make a break for it, but unless you want your SUV bobbing in the water next to the Mooney Mooney houseboat, perhaps not such a good idea in this instance.

Guay, Glover and Weston, having presumably spent quite some time running loudly (with a tape measure) through the reeds towards a range of species and then ramming them (carefully and scientifically) with canoes, recommend a “set back” from waterbirds for boaties of about 90 metres*. Which is a long way, even if you have a good zoom on your camera.  But I think, at least for the next few months, I’ll give the spoonbills a wide berth and let them raise their babies in peace.

Spectacle island mud flats lines abstract long and thin small

Spectacle Island mudflats at dawn

References

Glover, Hayley K., Guay, Patrick-Jean and Weston, Michael A.  (2015) “Up the creek with a paddle; avian flight distances from canoes versus walkers” Wetlands Ecological Management,  23:775–778

Guay, Patrick-Jean; McLeod, Emily M; Taysom, Alice J and Weston, Michael A. Are vehicles ‘mobile bird hides’?: A test of the hypothesis that ‘cars cause less disturbance’. The Victorian Naturalist, Vol. 131, No. 4, Aug 2014

McLeod EM, Guay P-J, Taysom AJ, Robinson RW, Weston MA (2013) “Buses, cars, bicycles and walkers: the influence of the type of human transport on the flight responses of waterbirds”. PLoS ONE 8:e82008

Mo, Matthew (2016) An apparent case of interspecific allopreening by a Royal Spoonbill Platalea regia. Australian Zoologist: 2016, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 214-216.

  • Glover, Guay and Weston are undoubtedly bird lovers and did their research with the greatest sensitivity and care.  I just always find it funny / slightly disturbing to read about the things animal researchers sometimes do to expand the range of human knowledge.  Most poignant I’ve read in recent times: releasing migrating songbirds into a planetarium and allowing them to try to navigate by the stars…

 

Spoonbill fishing 3 cropped larger asymmetrical

Perhaps not a beautiful bird but certainly eye catching!

Mother-of-millions takes to the waves

Mother of millions cabin close up crop small

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

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

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

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

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

Mother of millions side and rope better cropped small

The shortest days and how to use them

The chickens let us know when midwinter’s come.  The fortnight after the winter solstice, no matter how bloody cold it is, the girls start serious egg-laying.  So even as you’re trying desperately to stash four different kinds of hot lemon pickle and a hundredweight of lemon marmalade, as you open the fridge, a dozen eggs roll out.

Lemon preserves cool closeup skinny

I went AWOL from the blog for the last six months, as the observant amongst you might have noticed.  The days just got shorter and shorter.  My garden kept growing and the Hawkesbury streamed uninterrupted to the sea, but time to write about these things just seemed impossible to find.  But now the days are lengthening (and I’ve finished my night classes), all that is going to change!

Eagle flyby long crop

White bellied sea eagle doing a fly-by of Gunyah Beach

The shortest day may have passed but it’s still pretty nippy at 5.30 in the morning when I get out of my lovely warm bed and drive off through the nautical twilight to put my kayak in the water.  When it’s 3 degrees and you have wet feet, the exact moment when the sun touches your frozen toes comes to be of critical importance.

I have a nifty little app on my phone, SunCalc, that shows just where the sun will appear over the horizon on any day of the year.  So I check the tide, and the wind, and then, on a winter morning, figure out where I’ll catch the very first light.  Putting in at Brooklyn and heading for open water is not a bad choice.

I’ve had some lovely paddles from Parsley Bay in the last year.  Quiet jaunts into Porto Bay, a shallow backwater frequented mostly by raptors and oyster fishermen…

Juv sea eagle long

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

And, on a day with hardly any wind, I braved it across to West Head, stopping off at four beaches – Gunyah on the way and Eleanor on the way back; and on the other side of Cowan Creek, Little Pittwater with its tumbling stream and littoral rainforest and Hungry Beach and its a pair of sunbaking sea eagles.

Terns in front of Lion Island cropped closer small

Terns fishing off Gunyah Beach

I was almost bold enough that time to cross the invisible line – “limit of flatwater sailing” – that passes between Juno Point and Flint and Steel Beach, but bottled it in the end, just peeking round the corner towards Pittwater and the open Pacific beyond.

Clouds over the sea long and skinny

And last weekend, coldest it’s been on a Sydney morning in a couple of decades, I set out for Refuge Bay, where the pleasure craft rocked quietly, their skippers sleeping.  But not the kids, slipping away in their dinghies to fish and play under the waterfall on the beach.

And on journey there, what magic scenes!  The open waters of Broken Bay skimmed, concealed, curtained, framed, illuminated, by the fog.

Fishing boat and lion island

Fishermen and Lion Island

If there’s something to be said for the shortest days, it’s the long nights.  You can almost have a sleep-in and still get up before dawn.

Juno head mist dark sky