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June 28, 2015

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Backyard birds, estuaries, Native animals, waterways

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Waterbirds of the Wyong River

White faced heron

Adult white faced heron showing lanceolate plumes (absent in juveniles) on the back

White faced heron hunting shrimp

White faced heron with shrimp

Today, further adventures in Quaternary estuarine geology – a paddle along the lower reaches of the Wyong River, where it meets Tuggarah Lake. With a brief stop at Lake Macquarie to photograph this heron hunting, that makes two young and lovely coastal lagoons in one day. And both fine places to be a waterbird. After my recent insensitive remarks about coastal lagoons being fed by underwhelming little creeks, I’m a bit surprised we didn’t have any unfortunate upending incidents today. The mighty Wyong River is forgiving. And generous with darters.

Female Australasian darter

Male Australasian darter

And egrets, both intermediate and great. I’ve got a feeling there’s one of each here. Despite the name, the sure fire way of distinguishing them isn’t size, but a dark line that runs from the base of the beak beneath the eye. The great egret’s commissural line runs behind its eye, the intermediate’s stops short just below. But I still think you’re great, mate, despite your middle-of-the-road name and your meagre eye liner.

Intermediate egret

Great egret. I think!

Looking east on the Wyong River

Closeup of an intermediate egret looking a bit grumpy

On the bank amongst the ducks, doing its best to be invisible, a clueless young black bittern. Obviously it wasn’t listening when its parents gave it the talking to about bitterns hiding coyly in the riverside rushes.

Looking towards Tuggerah Lake from the Wyong River mouth

Juvenile black bittern

And of course, the contractual obligation pelican on a post. Thanks your offerings, this sunny Sunday, Wyong River.

Pelicans on the Wyong River in late afternoon

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June 26, 2015

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Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Gardening, Predators

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Nude trees and naughty birds

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

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

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

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

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

Pied currawong with destruction on its mind

Australian magpie – “I had no involvement in the tree nudity”

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

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

The raven’s dream

Australian raven in a fugue… or looking out for newly laid eggs

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

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

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

Kiwifruit leaves delicately shredded by hungry bowerbirds

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

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

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

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

Female collared sparrowhawk

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June 23, 2015

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

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Midwinter lagoon

Bombah Broadwater in the gloaming

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

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

The Hawkesbury estuary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pelican landing on Bombah Broadwater

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

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

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

Surfers floating over the relics of yesterday’s lagoon

Narrabeen Lake

Black swans in Narrabeen Lagoon

(Little?) Black cormorants

Intermediate egret in Narrabeen Lagoon

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

Dusk on Bombah Broadwater

Looking west at dawn on Bombah Broadwater

Canoeists in the gloaming

Eric the Egret on the Bombah Point Ferry

Glorious Angophora

Reflections on the tea-brown waters of Myall Lakes

Still morning on Two Mile Lake

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

The sound of the midwinter lagoon, all around me.

Little black cormorants murmurating

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

References

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

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mccnmatt

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June 12, 2015

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

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Autumn in terminal decline?

Red wattlebird in our Japanese maple

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

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

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

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

Rainbow lorikeets in the bare liquidambar

Liquidambar leaf pattern

Red liquidamba leaves

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

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

Illuminated liquidambar leaves

The leafy and the leafless

Liquidambar experiencing artificial lighting “long days”

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

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

Fall leaves of dawn redwood

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

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

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

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

Little wattlebird doing something mysterious with a maple leaf

Sulphur crested enjoying liquidambar seeds

Mooned by a red wattlebird

References

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

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May 25, 2015

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fruit trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them

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Streets paved with oranges

Standard oranges as street trees

Growing up on the Murray River in South Australia, I know a bit about oranges.

Each morning, the schoolbus drove past row upon row of grapevines and fruit trees, taking us (reluctantly) to class with kids from Berri, the next town along, with its juice packing plant, cannery and stinky wine makers. We played “baby jesus” under the mandarins and grapefruits on my auntie and uncle’s citrus block. And of course, I’ve surveyed the great, flat sweep of the mallee from the viewing platform of that mighty SA landmark, The Big Orange.

But growing up, I never witnessed fruit trees quite like the ones on the Amalfi coast.

The Italians could teach lawn-loving Anglo Australians something about growing food. In fact – thinking about the fertile backyards of the first generation migrants that lived in my grandfather’s neighbourhood in Adelaide, backyards crammed full of loquats, olives, tomatoes and apricots – they already have.

My vibrant and delicious little Freemont mandarin. What is it doing in a garden when it should be promenading in the street?

Even from the train, we could see that every scraggy patch of dirt between the tower blocks on the southern fringes of Naples had its well tended veggies and caged fruit trees. Fennel, broccoli and artichokes found a place between holiday villas and upmarket boutiques on the vertiginous slopes of gobsmackingly gorgeous Positano.

And the mid-winter streets of Sorrento were lined with laden oranges, glowing under the streetlights as the well-heeled townsfolk celebrated the Epiphany – La Befana – in their passegiata finery.

What a grand notion! Fruitful city streets; boulevards and avenues of lemons or pears or mangos! Why doesn’t every city and town look like this? Okay, it might take gun-toting fruit police patrols to keep the street trees looking good for the tourists. Will I lose any shred of PC respectability if I say… it might just be worth it?*

The volcanic sands of mid-winter Positano

Vertiginous veggie patches of Positano

Captive citrus trees in Positano

*Obviously, I don’t mean this. Nor, just to clarify, do I support Switzerland’s strategy of recruiting, via conscription, geranium police, a cadre whose mission is to guarantee a consistently high standard of floral displays on balconies throughout the summer months. In case you were wondering.

Yes to geraniums, no to the vicious geranium police.

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May 22, 2015

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Animal communication, Backyard birds, Native animals

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The secret lives of big bold bug-eating birds

Australian magpie with hairy caterpillar

In my fantasy life, my garden is filled with the delicate calls of rare and tiny birds that feed exclusively on cabbage white butterflies, flies and mosquito larvae, and pause in their labours only occasionally (at times of the day with particularly flattering light) to perch photogenically directly opposite my back deck.

My real backyard, however, like the rest of Australian suburbia, is awash with great big, loud, gallus beasties: cockatoos, kookaburras, magpies and of course the damned brush turkeys. Seems like there’s more of them here in Sydney than ever before.

They may be common as muck, these big bold birds, but they’re not to be sneered at. They have their own mysteries. How do breeding magpies meet and pair off? Why are kookaburras so faithful to their mates? How do cockatoos select whose timber house they’re going to rip to shreds?

To be fair, if the bird-life in suburbia is fairly predictable, bird watchers are pretty bog-standard as well. I love this comment, in an article marvelling at the speed with which bird atlases are compiled, while more unglamorous animals – favoured by God, perhaps, but not necessarily by citizen scientists – live and die in obscurity.

“Ornithology… was a totally useless subject, the amateur’s field par excellence, largely ignored by even non-utilitarian academics. No one entered it expecting to be given money and no one, for sure, had ever emerged with any. Yet… it was here that organised natural history was to accomplish its greatest feats…. its secret lay in numbers. Birds had a breadth of appeal that no other branch of natural history could rival” (Allen, cited in Adam, 2010, 11)

I’m cultivating LBB habitat and an interest in beetles. In the meantime, there’s still the challenge of trying to figure out what the “obvious fauna” (Wilks, 2010, 288) are up to in my backyard.

For instance, what’s going on here?

Arriving

Eating kookaburra

Posing kookaburra

Laughing kookaburra

Departing kookaburra

Was there was a stash of sausages in this hollow in the pine tree to put that big smile on this kookaburra’s dial? If so, they must have been those tiny party saveloys since she kept coming back for more.

Actually, kookaburras don’t subsist entirely on barbecue left-overs or snakes. Insects make up a big part of their diet, and like magpies, they normally find food on the ground, dropping onto prey from a perch above so they don’t have to do any aerial acrobatics toting that great big kingfisher beak.

Given that birds usually feed in the leaf-litter, or in the sky, or in the canopy – they don’t usually mix it up – I’m not 100% sure this was actually snacking. Like cockies and magpies, kookaburras are have stable, even “traditional”, territories guarded by the same breeding pair for years and years (Legge, 2010, 48). And cackling away together isn’t the only way that kookaburra clans – pair-bonded breeding couples and their older offspring “helpers” – mark out their turf. They also stake their claim with some mid-air show-offery.

Kookaburra family resemblances

Sarah Legge describes one such bit of border policing, a “bellyflop display”: “a single bird flies from a perch to another tree 5-20 metres away in a graceful swoop that ends with a flared landing on the lip of a hollow. It pauses there momentarily, then swoops back to its original perch”.

Sounds pretty familiar, though I didn’t see a rival posse of bellyfloppers in action today. Maybe my kookaburra was getting in shape for a big flopping battle down the track. Or maybe she was really was scarfing saveloys…? Without photographic evidence, who can say…?

The most delicious tree in Berowra

Cockatoo macerated tree

Another of this week’s mysteries: what makes this poor benighted tree the most delicious in the neighbourhood?

After our recent visits by black cockatoos, I wondered if that this scarified specimen might be host to wood boring larvae that are said to appeal to the yellowtail palate. I’ve come to suspect that proper ornithologists share the bird watching punter’s lack of interest in bugs, since descriptions of cockatoos’ preferences are ubiquitously vague – the sites I’ve consulted all comment tersely that yellowtails like “some insects”. Thanks for the detail, guys.

Yellow tailed black cockatoo

Yellow tailed block cockatoos flying

Mind you, maybe this vagueness is a result of the fact we’re all so “meh” about bugs we can’t even be bothered giving them names. David Wilks notes, for instance, that a survey of just four types of eucalypts in Western Australia recently identified more than two thousand species, most of them unknown (Wilkes, 2010, 288). I reckon we’re well overdue for a PR campaign to sell us on cute, quirky and cuddly bugs. And there is one! Manu Saunders is trying to spark up a month long celebration of “Arthropod April” … though thinking about it, we may need “Arthropod August” as well…

If I couldn’t identify the mystery larvae, I had no trouble working out the true culprit in The Mystery of the Tortured Tree:

Sulphur crested cockatoo illuminated

Not eating, chucking

Is this sulphur crested cockie digging out one of those 2,000 species of unnamed critters? Does the bark of this specimen have a particularly good mouth-feel, that buttery consistency that just says “bite me“? Or is this just the local flock‘s agreed upon spot to hang out and have a beak manicure?

Okay, there’s no bird identification challenge here, but I reckon there’s still plenty of secrets to be told in big boofy bird psychology.

Sulphur crested cockatoo eating a tree… with added bug?

References

Adam, Paul (2010) “The study of natural history – a PPP” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

Kaplan, Gisela T. (2004) The Australian Magpie: the biology and behaviour of an unusual songbird, CSIRO Publishing

Legge, Sarah (2004) Kookaburra: King of the Bush, CSIRO Publishing

Recher, Harry F. (2010) “A not so natural history: the vertebrate fauna of Sydney” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

Wilks, David (2010) “A hotbed of biodiversity? A natural history of the Ku-ring-gai council area” from Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds) The Natural History of Sydney, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

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May 14, 2015

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Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Seasons

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Let them eat light!

Green and orange for closeup real crop horizontal

It’s persimmon season, but, natch, nothing doing on my little Nightingale tree, despite a grand show of weird naked-looking flowers in the spring. Two fruits nearly made it to the finish line, but the possums got there first.

Gorgeous as the golden fruits are reputed to be as they hang on the leafless trees, 2016, I have decided, will be the year of picking green. The persimmons may well be mouth-puckeringly unripe but as human overlord of this place, I insist that it is I who will enjoy their high-tannin nastiness, and not some upstart marsupial.

In fact, my tree is an old fashioned astringent persimmon: the fruits need to be “bletted” to go super soft and sweet. This can happen far from fruitflies and other critters, deep in the pantry, in the comforting darkness of a paper bag, with only an ethylene-emitting banana for company. I have days when crawling in next to the banana to be bletted myself sounds like a good gig.

In theory, me and my persimmons can hole out for a few weeks in an undisturbed corner and it should work out delectably for both of us.

Persimmon flowers last spring

Leaf shadows

Nightingale persimmon tree

But, really, I don’t care! Harvests mean nothing to me! A barren tree is a beautiful tree.

For now, it’s all about the komorebi, a Japanese word I encountered for the first time a few days ago in the marvellous nature blog, Mildly Extreme.

Because who needs food when you can have sunlight filtering through though autumn leaves?*

Love those leaves…

*but thank god for the Freemont mandarins

*Love those leaves… but thank god for the Freemont mandarins…

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May 9, 2015

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

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Low tide at Gunyah Beach

“The sea or not the sea?”

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

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

Egg being cooked

A rich melange of epoxy products

Replacing the rotten carlin

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

In Parsley Bay

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

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

Storm detritus on Gunyah Beach

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

Waterfall from a hanging valley

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

Ah, a comfy sofa.

Everyone’s been on the beach

Contractual obligation white-faced heron

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

Low tide in the creek

White cheeked honeyeaters – everywhere!

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 2, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants that attract wildlife

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Timber!

Black cockatoo on the top of the tree cropped further

We’ve had a mob of at least fifteen yellow tailed black cockatoos hanging around in the last few days, mewing like strangled cats and being chased around by magpies and (I think) even noisy minors. We get the yellow tails quite often around these parts, especially in the winter-time, thanks to the large and sickly but apparently tasty radiata pines that loom over our place.

A male yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a pine cone in the neighbours’ yard

Yellow tailed cockatoo tucking in

Silhouette of a yellow tailed black cockatoo

The rule in Hornsby Shire is you can cut down a tree that’s within three metres of the foundations of your house. If only there was some special by-law where the council chops down the tree for you for free if you can’t slip a paperback book between a towering pine and your bathroom. One of these days I’ll be communing with nature and the nearest treebole will swell just that tiny bit further and burst straight through into the shower cubicle. That fresh piney smell with not a cent spent on disinfectant.

Two of the less prepossessing pines in our yard

This tree is cold and wants to be inside

It’s been very very very windy in Sydney lately, and quite a few people have been unfortunate enough to experience that piney odour, quickly followed by plenty of refreshing indoor rain. We’ve been pretty lucky, but we’ve spent a lot of time staring anxiously out the window at various ominously swaying monumental specimens. When I lived in Brisbane I used to be a bit judgey about the lawn to tree ratio in most peoples’ yards. But if cyclones start creeping their way down the coast I may have to reconsider.

Female yellow tailed cockatoos and a male peeping out of

Yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a dead tree at our place

Black cockatoo angel

Yellow tailed black cockatoos are doing pretty well on the east coast, including urban areas, no doubt thanks to their penchant for pines. But apparently they often struggle to find nesting sites, preferring hollows in trees a century or more old. They seem to like our senescent radiatas, and spend time perched high on the various dead branches voguing. I hope, when we finally save enough shekels to pull down the extensive array of dangerous trees in our yard, we still see them.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

May 1, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Bandicoots, Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Rats, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

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Bandicoot in the Sacred Garden

The sacred garden – but does it feature a coy bandicoot?

Is it just me, or does this sound like the title of an atrocious 1970s Australian erotic film? Admittedly I’ve never heard a bloke describe their wedding tackle as any kind of marsupial. Is this a failure of the national imagination? Possibly.

Anyway, the “sacred garden” is not as lewd as it sounds – it’s the name our eight year old has given the veggie patch that shelters beneath the frame of our ancient trampoline.

I’m not quite sure why she views it as a holy site. It could be the shape. In the organic gardening world, it seems, circles, mandalas and spirals have some mystical life-giving power that doesn’t flow through your old fashioned rectangular plot. I’m skeptical, but at this stage in our death-match with the brush turkeys I’ll take any advantage I can get. From chook dome to remodelled tramp to recycled children’s bicycle wheels, there are no corners here.

Chicken dome and sacred garden

The late great Andy Ninja checking out the sacred garden

Upcycled bicycle wheels protecting radishes

Broccoli and sorrel under a fan in the sacred garden

And the Mandala of Aviary Wire does seem to have worked its magic on my brassicas, despite extreme flimsiness. Having been abandoned by the side of the road after a rich and full life getting between bouncing children and broken ankles, the trampoline net is more a spiritual than a physical barrier to aerial raiders, held in place by optimism and zip ties. But to date, my newly planted garlic – positioned, of course, in a protective ring around the broccoli – has remained in the ground and my crop of red mustard and baby bok choi, while small, is perfectly formed.

It’s not looking so good on the broad bean front, despite a lavender and rose geranium mulch that makes the chook dome smell like a seniors’ underpants’ drawer. I’d like to think a benevolent long-nosed bandicoot is squeezing in under the wire to snaffle the curl grubs amongst the asparagus crowns. But I suspect that in reality I’m hosting rodents with keen insights into the politics of eco-nationalism. “When you go in and take the beans, Rupert, make sure you leave a cone-shaped hole. That way the marsupial-loving hippie will never dare leave rat poison out again.” If only I owned an infra-red video camera with a motion sensor I might find out for sure – or at least collect some footage of hirsute visitors for that retro Ocker erotica.