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mccnmatt

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May 13, 2016

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

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Delta bravo!

Kylie’s Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park

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

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

Diamond Head and Watson Taylor Lake

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

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

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

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

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

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

South Brother Mountain in dawn light

Up a shallow side creek towards the lake

South and Middle Brother from the northern shore of the lake

A side view of the levees beside the Camden Haven River

Paddling dead casual-like towards the river mouth

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

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

Island in the delta

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

“Clumping” white-breasted woodswallows

Woodswallows peeping

Woodswallow grooming

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

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

Spangled drongo

The rarely sighted fungus faced thornbill

Crested terns sticking their tongues out at me.

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

White bellied sea eagle in a river-side casuarina

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

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

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

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

More adventures on New South Wales’ coastal lagoons

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

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

Encounters with eagles on Budgewoi Lake

Moonlit night on Kylie’s Beach

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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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April 3, 2016

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Death, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, pollution, Predators, Uncategorized, waterways

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Death and good fortune on Cowan Creek

Since reading the poetic prose of H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald’s story of how training Mabel the goshawk carried her through wild sadness that followed the death of her beloved father, it’s been all about the raptors around here.

Easter at Speers Point meant ospreys relaxing in the late afternoon sun.

Osprey with eye gleam for crop horizontal

And yesterday, on Cowan Creek, the contractual obligation white bellied sea-eagle.

Juvenile white-bellied sea eagle

“Peach Trees” – or peregrine corner

Sandstone patterns in Yeoman’s Bay

White-faced heron hunting at Yeoman’s BAy

Then, just when I’d resigned myself to a pleasant if uneventful paddle after three hours on the water, there was an explosion of action right off my bow. Two birds in an aerial battle, tumbling and squabbling over a kill. The loser flew off, disgruntled; the death-dealer pulled up in the bright morning sunshine on a branch over the river, and waited for me to get out my camera.

Peregrine falcon in profile with prey

Peregrine staring straight at the camera

Peregrine gripping a dead galah and looking for rivals

A new bird! One I thought I’d never seen on any waterway. A peregrine falcon.

It turns out I had seen these birds before, long ago and far away – a pair tussling with ravens over a ledge to nest on at Malham Cove in Yorkshire. Cliffs (or, if they are hard to find, skyscrapers) are one of the essential requirements of this beautiful raptor. RB reminded me that peregrines used to nest in the ventilation towers of the tunnels under the River Mersey and high up in the Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the enormous red sandstone building I could see from my desk during my decade as a Scouser.

Peregrines may be the most widespread bird in the world, living on every continent except for Antarctica and on many islands (although strangely, considering its status as a bird watching paradise, not New Zealand). Its name is derived from the Latin for “the wanderer” although only five of the nearly twenty subspecies – those breeding in the northern Arctic – really migrate very far.

For all their capacity to adapt to life in the city – eating feral pigeons and nesting in highrises – peregrines are widespread but not really common. Since they mostly prey on smallish birds, themselves often insect eaters, falcons bioaccumulate pollutants. The use of organochlorines in insecticides like DDT devastated their numbers in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s there were no peregrines in the Eastern US and the birds were declared an endangered species. Numbers have bounced back, in Australia and elsewhere, although they are still classed as “rare” here. And recent work in Europe and Canada has observed a new chemical – flame retardants – turning up in the blood stream of peregrine chicks.

Peregrine mid-dinner, beak covered in feathers

Once peregrines find a good nesting site, it’s a keeper. Apparently, a falcon skeleton found at the back of a cliff-top eyrie in Tasmania has been carbon dated at 19,000 years, which makes that spot the oldest known bird’s nest. As I noodled along the northern shore of Cowan Creek, I’d admired the 100 metre high cliffs of Looking Glass Spur, eucalypts halfway up the face finding impossible footholds in the sandstone. I wonder if my falcon and its mate have a scrape there, high above the expanse of the estuary. Peregrines don’t eat fish but hunting grounds by water offer the space for their deadly turn of speed.

I feel less disappointed by my failure to spot the raptor’s stoop or to capture the battle on film after I figured out what I was watching. The fastest animal in the world, dropping on its prey at nearly 400 kilometres an hour. That poor bird clutched in its talons -maybe a galah, the favoured meal of the big-footed Australian “macropus” subspecies – never had a chance.

Peregrine eating a galah

Peregrine falcon’s tongue on display

I watched for twenty minutes, as she plucked and dismembered her meal, unperturbed by the rowdy parade of jet skiiers, cruisers and powerboats. Galah feathers drifted down from her branch, making a delicate trail of death across the bottle green water.

For a few dodgy moments, I thought the gobbets of galah might be joined by flotsam from my shattered craft as Egg was washed perilously close to oystershell sharpened rocks. And, if I had the Bond-style rocket launcher I’ve often fantasised about while ploughing through powerboat wakes on sunny Sunday mornings, fragments of several jet skis.

Peregrine falcon plucking its prey before eating it

Peregrine falcon “macropus” showing off its huge feet

Trail of feathers from the plucked galah

Remnants of the plucked galah

I’m guessing my peregrine was a “she”. Females are a third bigger than the tiercels – the males – but I didn’t have the chutzpah to hurl a swiss army knife up the tree for scale. The two mid-air combatants looked well matched – two males or two females. Definitely not a pair. Since peregrines mate for life – up to 20 years – and often hunt cooperatively, it would seem to be unwise from the point of view of domestic harmony, anyway, to bicker over food.

In fact, Derek Ratcliffe describes exactly what I saw: “feet-grappling over disputed food items” which happens, he says, “at food-territory boundaries during the non-breeding season” (1993, 201). It seems these battles are nearly always between birds of the same sex, although sometimes peregrines fight with other crag-loving birds as well. RB remembers peregrines in springtime at the cliffs at Creagh Dhu, attacking ravens, stooping then zooming straight up to the heights to do it all over again. Sometimes pairs of peregrines will even take on the great golden eagle over rare and valuable real estate.

So maybe there’s more than one pair of peregrines on that beautiful bit of country. Perhaps I’ll see this magic bird again, or her mate, or her rival, until I’m as blase about a peregrine strike as a whistling kite soaring on a thermal. But yesterday, as I took my four hundred photographs while the peregrine peaceably disembowelled its meal, showing the equanimity that makes them the favoured hunting falcon, I felt truly blessed.

Peregrine in front of branch staring at me crop

Peregrine falcon watching the watchers

More stories about raptors in Berowra’s backyard (and mine):

The beautiful white morph of the grey goshawk in Bluetongue’s back

A hunting collared sparrowhawk in Nude trees and naughty birds

The whistling kites of Bar and Peat Islands in Two sad islands, three whistling kites

The many white-bellied sea eagles of the Hawkesbury and Lake Macquarie in Encounters with eagles

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March 30, 2016

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Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, Seasons, Uncategorized, waterways, Weather

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The silver river

Mist and silver river … somewhere behind there is the Wreck of the Parramatta

Deerubbin – the Hawkesbury proper- doesn’t normally look like this: not when I’m there, anyway. I’m used to the view out our back window: the valley full of fog, the hilltops islands in a foamy sea.

Mist over Sam’s Creek

You know the fog will be spilling across the highway as you swoop down from the ridgeline before dawn. But when you reach the freeway bridge that stretches half a mile across the Hawkesbury, the wind picks up and the mist is gone.

But not this Sunday. The cloud was down and the river was silver.

Fisherman in the mist

Misty sun above Grace’s Shore

Peat’s Crater with silver gulls for scale

Looking towards Grace’s Shore

I’ve wrestled with this mist before.

I can say with confidence it’s not freezing fog, hail fog or upslope fog. For all the salt in the air, it’s not coastal fog – moisture condensing over cool water – not with sea temps a balmy 24 degrees. And is it valley fog? Damp cool air might slide down the hills in the night… but Sunday’s haze followed midnight downpours not clear skies.

Having thought about it rationally and analytically, I can only conclude that this was magical fog, sent to stop me paddling all way to the secret heart of this part of the Hawkesbury, Marramarra Creek.

Mist over over mangrove saplings for horizontal shorter

Big Bay

Mangroves in Big Bay at high tide

Skies over Big Bay

I’ve nearly made it there before, as far as Big Bay, with its great lagoon full of mangroves and the riverbed chocabloc with critters. No houses on the ridgelines, no way in except by water. In the 1830s a surveyor’s wife didn’t think much of it: “these dreary solitudes might serve for the abode of a misanthrope so utterly are they secluded from all approach and so entirely destitute of all comfort”. But I’m longing to paddle all the way to the source of the creek, through country with an indigenous past even I can read.

But this time it wasn’t just the fog and the march of time that stopped me. The birds were in on it too, perching photogenically on the wayside oyster poles, feathery sirens luring me away from my upriver odyssey.

Sirens on oyster poles

Demure crested tern

Pelican and boat

Pelican in flight

Small pied cormorant pretending it’s a gull

Pied cormorants on oyster poles

So I’ll have to come back to Marramarra. Maybe next time I’ll bring our full flotilla of mismatched craft and camping gear and stay overnight halfway up the creek in the old orange orchard. The noisy kids should to scare away the temptations of the sirens… and, of course, the silvery silence. So perhaps I’ll follow Odysseus and bring some ear plugs too!

Striated heron hunting on Bar Island

Milson Island in the mist

Egg returns past Bar Island

Looking north on the Hawkesbury from near Deerubbin

Related posts – other paddles on the Hawkesbury from Deerubbin Reserve

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: a paddle from Deerubbin to Bar Island

Of gods and mapreaders: a trip up Kimmerikong Creek in Muogamarra National Park

A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn: paddles up Mullet Creek and around Dangar Island

Broken Bay at low ebb: a short jaunt around the oyster beds near Spectacle Island at the end of Mooney Mooney Creek.

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mccnmatt

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March 25, 2016

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Backyard chickens, chicks, Climate change, Death, egg laying, raising chickens, Seasons

Happy Easter from Morgan the syncretic leghorn

We have pommie chooks! Or from somewhere north of the equator, anyway. I’m not sure how they managed to make the perilous transcontinental journey before their cute fluffy butts made it to our place at a week old, but somehow they must have dodged border control.

4 fluffy butts horizontal crop

How do I know our feathered friends come from the far north?

Well, here in Sydney, we’re past the equinox and the nights are drawing in. We may have had a February that smashed heat records, 1.3 degrees C above the longterm averages. But it’s hours of daylight that tells chickens when to get laying (thanks to that sort-of-third eye) and the days are getting shorter. Even as the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it is, nonetheless, autumn.

And yet my chooks have decided to start laying. Just in time for spring with its baby bunnies, and peeping chicks, and Easter eggs, and its celebration of rebirth and renewal. In the northern hemisphere, that is.

Cleo the Barred Rock

Tigress the Barnevelder

Abby the grown up Barnevelder

Cyan the Australorp

I love Easter. Most religious festivals are a delicious mish-mash of stuff from the Big Book and whatever else people were into at the time. But with Easter the syncretism is really out there, bouncing around with its ears pricked up, laying coloured eggs in the spring greenery. After witnessing the pre-Good Friday panic by shoppers terrified by the prospect of a day without ready access to a new packet of Cocopops, the nice young guy at the checkout reckoned we might add a zombie apocalypse to the usual combo of vernal equinox, Passover, and frenzied confectionary consumption. As he pointed out delicately, Jesus did after all, come back from the dead.

Baby Morgan last October

Morgan with adoptive mother Treasure, five months ago

In the midst of this cultural mash-up, it seems appropriate that it’s Morgan the flighty leghorn, named after a Welsh enchantress in an Arthurian legend, who has marked the occasion of the (deeply seasonally inappropriate) Christian festival of rebirth with the gift of her first lovely white eggs.

A muddled pagan blessing to egg eaters, one and all.

Morgan and Treasure these days

Morgan and Treasure chowing down

Morgan checking it all out

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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

March 7, 2016

Posted under

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

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Thinking like a bird

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

Eastern water dragon

Alley-oop

Upside down glossy black-cockatoo

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

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

Grey butcherbird makes a rare appearance in the backyard

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

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

Pair of galahs

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

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

Magpie in spring

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

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

Nuzzling sulphur crested cockatoo

Lovebirds

What are you looking at?

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

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

Little Wattlebird on alert

Little wattlebird in the backyard

Juvenile grey butcherbird

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

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

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

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

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

Long beaked corellas giving me a funny look long.jpg

Long billed corellas giving me a funny look

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

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February 19, 2016

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Anthropomorphism, Geology, national parks, Soil, Uncategorized, waterways

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Alhambra on the Hawkesbury

The last few times I passed by Bujwa Bay, on my way downriver from Berowra Waters, it was shrouded in mist.

On the way to Bujwa Bay

Mist blowing out of Bujwa Bay

A misty morning on Berowra Creek

But last Sunday, in the golden light of late afternoon, there was a revelation.

I’m familiar with the Hawkesbury’s sculpture parks and sandstone art galleries. But the fact that Berowra Creek had well preserved fragments of an ancient Moorish fortress – well, that was news to me.

The “sculpture park” on the northern shore of Long Island, the Hawkesbury

River rainbow, in Berowra Creek

Honeycomb formations in a cave above Bujwa Bay

Sandstone art gallery in Smith’s Creek

When I went home and told RB I’d seen something very like the famous stucco inscriptions of the Alhambra on a estuarine cliffside at the end of Berowra Waters Road, his comment was “You’re barking!”. And he’s probably right.

Honeycomb weathering in sandstone on Bujwa Bay

After all, the Alhambra is an artistic jewel, a masterwork of European Islam, preserved over the centuries after the Moors themselves were driven first into the mountains and then out of Spain altogether. Its delicate carved plasterwork miraculously survived Christian conquerors, dodgy architectural restorers, squatters and tourists. And the sandstone of Bujwa Bay is just, you know, rock.

“The sea” in the Alhambra

Stucco inscriptions

The Alhambra from a distance

Stucco and tile in the Alhambra

Stucco inscription at the Alhambra

But I’ve been reading about “thing power” and it’s given me a whole new angle on inanimate objects. “Thing Power!” – sounds like a killer bathroom cleaner that will sort out all the disturbing life-forms, named and unnameable, in your shower cubicle.

But according to Jane Bennett, its “a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new [that] buzzes within the history of the term ‘nature’ ” (2010, 118). Electrons, microbes, minerals, waste, all busily making and shaping things, inside, around, through, against and despite humans and their fancy-pants plans. She reckons things and people rub along or against each other in a pattern that’s “not random or unstructured, but conforms to the strange logic of vortices, spirals and eddies” (2010, 118).

Alveoli weathering in sandstone

Stone lacework on Bujwa Bay

Kooky as it sounds, this is not a bad description of how the Bujwa Bay Alhambra came into the world, according to a paper coauthored, in a way that pleases my penchant for magical thinking, by a geologist from Granada, home of the famous palace.

Honeycomb weathering like this happens in all sorts of porous rocks, around the world – from Antarctica to Jordan – and maybe even on the surface of Mars. It might seem like hollows would form in weaknesses in the rock, but it’s not necessarily so. Blistering heat, frost, chemical weathering and rain are all in the frame – with maybe a little help from the odd patch of algae or lichen. But mostly it’s about salt and wind.

Salty water – in this case from seaspray – seeps into the rock and crystallises, making tiny fractures. If there’s plenty of water, salt crystals forms on the outside surface to form efflorescence, a mineral flowers blooming on a cliffside or a cellar wall or a garden fence. But the real damage is done deep in the rock.

According to Rodriguez and friends, once a depression is formed in the rockface, wind eddies and swirls inside the concave parts of the stone. Faster breezes mean more evaporation and a super-saturated salt solution, meaning more salt crystals and more fretted stone. Eventually the rockface becomes lacework, without any intervention by a rock lacemaker.

Alhambra rocks 1 crop long

The other name for honeycombed rock is alveoli. It’s stone with lungs. Made of mineral flowers. Not alive (or mostly not alive – sorry algae) but doing complicated and beautiful things.

Not immortal, invisible, unfathomable. In fact, as fathomable as the waters of Bujwa Bay at low tide, that is, knee deep to a heron. Just exceedingly hard to grasp.

And that’s not just me banging my head against a corroding brick wall of “Salt weathering: a selective review” – the geologists are still bickering over exactly how it works. In Bennett’s (possibly slightly loopy) words, it’s vital matter, “hard to discern… and, once discerned, hard to keep focused on. It is too close and too fugitive, as much wind as thing” (119). Or perhaps, in this instance, both wind and thing.

A crab wondering what I’m on about, on a beach near Bujwa Bay

References

Jane Bennett 2010 Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press

Eric Doehne (2002) “Salt Weathering: a selective review” from Natural Stone, Weathering Phenomena, Conservation Strategies and Case Studies. Vol 205, 51-64, Geological Society Special Publication

Carlos Rodriguez-Navarro, Eric Doehne,Eduardo Sebastian (1999) Origins of honeycomb weathering: The role of salts and wind, GSA Bulletin; August 1999; v. 111, no. 8; p. 1250–1255

Huinink, H. Pel, L, Kopinga, K. 2004 “Simulating the growth of tafoni” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 29 1225-33

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February 11, 2016

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national parks, Native birds, snakes, Uncategorized, waterways

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Snakes vs whining teenagers

Tiger snake curled face crop long This is what people who hate camping think it’s all about, right? I suspect spiders, high winds and rowdy neighbours also make that list. Yep, a big tick next to them too – it’s all to play for when you camp in the summertime in Wollemi National Park.

But Ganguddy, or Dunn’s Swamp, to give its inaccurate and charmless non-indigenous name, was just as marvellous this January as it was when we first visited this time last year.

Ganguddy in early dawn light

Dew on some kind of orchid?

Lichen on native cyprus

Dawn at Ganguddy

Purple flower

Leptospermum flowers

Strange club shaped lichens

Dusk at Ganguddy

View from the pagoda lookout

Yes, there were more reptiles – lethal and benign – but to balance it out, there was also less torrential rain. At no point this year did it seem likely that the full set of adult campers, each clinging to a leg of the kitchen-gazebo, would take off and fly over the pagoda rock formations like a quartet of grubby Mary Poppinses. It rained, but not inside any of the tents. And the whining teenagers weren’t my delightful children but the feathered offspring of the camp ground locals.

“Feed me!”

“Where are you?”

Juvenile noisy friarbird wants a snack

It seems a bit unfair for such giant children to be demanding food, although Gisela Kaplan in her fascinating book “Bird Minds” suggests some evolutionary advantages to having hungry teenagers hanging around. Apparently adults noisy friarbirds only feed the young’uns for three weeks after fledging -hard to believe this galumphing one was so close to being a fluffster.

But you can see where all that food goes. You reckon your adolescent’s feet are big? What about junior purple swamphen‘s clodhoppers?

Juvenile purple swamp hen with giant feet

Adult swamp hen feeding the hungry bairns

Unhygenic as it sounds, the drop dunny seemed to be a particularly popular spot for a snack. The baby grey fantails spent a lot of time looking deliberately cute there in order to get a feed. If you were still uncertain about the superiority of the earth toilet, this little guy is a clincher I reckon.

Juvenile grey fantail hanging around the drop toilets

“I’m hungry”

“Please feed me – I’m cute!” – juvenile grey fantail

The white-browed scrubwren also enjoyed loitering out around the toilets. I didn’t see any juveniles, but then this one looked so stern, perhaps they were there but just too nervous to beg for tucker.

Grumpy looking white browed scrubwren

The suspiciously touselled looking eastern yellow robin – a juvenile perhaps – had worked out that the best place for tucker is definitely the barbecue.

Eastern yellow robin having a picnic

Eastern yellow robin

I’m not sure if the adult reed warbler had gone into head down, bum up, to feed some chicks, or if it was just going to extreme lengths to avoid facing the long-lensed papperazzi. I was rather pleased when after two years of trying I finally got a picture of one, without even having to visit the Rylstone Guns and Ammo for a flame thrower to thin out that pesky, snap obscuring habitat.

Reed warbler nest

Reed warbler

And, miracle of miracles, I found an azure kingfisher without ADD. I reckon I can put away my paddle now – 18 months of kayaking have not been in vain.

Kingfisher on stump 2 instagram square.jpg

At last – a sluggish azure kingfisher

The invasive gambezi minnows that fill this reservoir – built in the 30s as a water supply for a concrete works – seem to be an optimal snack size for the kingfishers – I saw plenty of them, along with a randy musk duck, the ubiquitous Eurasian coots and a pair of Nankeen night herons that alighted, mockingly, in the trees opposite the campsite, just after it got a tiny bit too dark for a decent photograph. But there was nothing larger – no whistling kites, for one. Judging from the frustration level of the fisherman in our party and the track record of these mosquitofish of outcompeting native rivals, I suspect there weren’t many more substantial meals to be had (on the bright side, possibly thanks to the fish, there weren’t too many mosquitos making meals of us either).

Musk duck courtship display

Musk duck tail on display

With all these LBBs – and all the fast moving ones I didn’t get a decent shot of – busy flocks of brown thornbills high in the canopy, white-throated tree-creepers spiralling their way up the tea trees, the baffling grey strike-thrush, the white-eared honeyeaters darting around in the dew drenched dawn – I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the snake that sidled through the camp site or or the one slithered along the ironstone tops. Let’s hope the top predators were more successful at catching the flighty little buggers* than I was.

Rock formations near the dam

Currawongs at the camp site

Tiger snake on ironstone?

Red bellied black snake in the campsite

Sandstone and lichen

More sandstone and lichen

Silhouettes of the camp site trees

Dawn over “Swallow rocks”

*Okay I know red-bellied blacks mostly eat frogs, which is why they were down by the reedbeds near the camp. But I bet they don’t object to the odd gormless yellow robin if it’s available.

* * *

There’s more info about the history and geology of Ganguddy in my previous post from here: In other sandstone country

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February 5, 2016

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History, kayaking, national parks, Uncategorized, waterways, Work

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A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn

I have a weakness for bridges. Romantic trysts just happen to be arranged with the backdrop of the world’s first iron bridge. Multiple crossings of the gorgeous Severn Suspension Bridge are absolutely essential for that work trip. And in pride of place of the mantlepiece, of course, is a railway poster of the famous cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that my paddles lately all seem to end up under what it pleases me to call Brooklyn Bridge. That’s not its real name, mind, but since it starts on Long Island and takes you through the thriving metropolis of Brooklyn (population 744) I think I can get away with it.

Brooklyn bridge and stone pillars plus boat.jpg

There was that morning jaunt from Parsley Bay, past the oyster leases and beneath the swooping welcome swallows, to the top of Mullet Creek, where the Newcastle trains disappear into the Woy Woy tunnel, once the longest tunnel in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on on some beautiful railway journeys in my life – from Montreal to New York in winter, past above-ground swimming pools frozen like giants’ ice-cubes; from southern Thailand to Bangkok, looking out at the richest of tropical orchards woven into the jungle; between snowcapped mountains and sea on the West Highland line to ~~Hogwarts~~ Mallaig. But I reckon this journey along Mullet Creek, not a place that will ever be immortalised in the baby names of the rich and famous, is my favourite. There’s something about a railway line that leaves roads far behind, forging its own way along the empty shore.

Sunrise at Brooklyn

Looking back at the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge and Long Island from the mouth of Mullet Creek

Freight train going up Mullet Creek

“You looking at me?” – pelican at Parsley Bay

If you ask the driver, you can get off near the top of the creek at Wondabyne, the only station sans road access in Australia. Every now and then, you see people jumping off the train and straight into a tinnie, zooming off to the shacks on the other side of the river before their fish supper gets cold.

For a few years in the late nineteenth century, while the first Hawkesbury River bridge was being built, if you were travelling north by train from Sydney, you would disembark at Long Island, board the double-decker paddleboat the General Gordon, and steam off to Mullet Creek Station, then just north of Wondabyne. Now people hop off here to do part of the Great North Walk – a 250 kilometre walk from central Sydney to the beautiful beaches of Newcastle – or to wander up to Pindar Cave. Judging from the smorgasborg of rusted out craft I saw in the shallow water at the top of the creek, it’s also a place where people take their boats to die.

White jellyfish in Mullet Creek

Barnacles on a wrecked ship in Mullet Creek

A boat that may well be beyond repair

Then there was this weekend’s jaunt, downriver from Deerubbin Reserve – a popular spot, right by the freeway, to fish or have a picnic for those who find the perpetual roar of traffic reassuring. With the ever present possibility of a quick exit, I guess it’s ideal for the heavily pregnant or those who find their relatives a bit hard to take. But I can’t really bag people for their passion for the internal combustion engine since I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of a paddle underneath (count ’em) three great big bridges.

Sunrise over Long Island

Three bridges in early morning light: the freeway bridge, the Pacific Highway bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge

Hawkesbury River Bridge in dawn light

This weekend’s jaunt took me past Spectacle Island Nature Reserve, under the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge, natch, and around Dangar Island, swished along smartly by the current and the falling tide.

Have you ever been bored enough in an airport to try walking the wrong way up a moving footpath? Trying to paddle across the current to get to one of the beaches on the eastern side of the island was a bit like that. It all seemed a bit too hard in the end, so I went where the river wanted to take me, downstream, floating just above perilous rocky reefs by off Bradley’s Beach and veering round the seagrass beds.

Sailing boats north of Dangar Island

Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge at dawn

White boat, blue hills at Kuring-gai National Park

And then through the sailing boats, swaying and tinkling like expensive marine windchimes, to Sandy Bay, the best place in the world to be homeless. The folks whose setup I saw there – a tarp flanked by a beached ramshackle boat and a solar panel – had no-one for neighbours but a horde of blue soldier crabs. There was no sign of the human residents, but I now know what it’s like to be a celebrity, thousands of beady eyes watching and waiting on your every move.

Quite a few people live rough around Brooklyn. “Good caves, a shower at Brooklyn Baths and walking distance to the bottle shop”, as RB commented with unseemly enthusiasm. In the Depression, apparently, lots of people came to live in these parts for just this reason – shelter and a bit of space for chooks or a veggie garden. I didn’t see a chicken run in Sandy Bay but Brooklyn does seem to have some kind of common flock, judging from these good looking fellas that we met down by the marina a while back.

Egg at Sandy Bay

Chickens on the commons at Brooklyn

A floating barn at Parsley Bay

Thousands of blue soldier crabs watching me

Blue soldier crab

I reckon the Hawkesbury estuary is Sydney Harbour through the looking glass – a parallel flooded river valley, bordered by bush instead of multimillion dollar apartments. If the Harbour has its iconic Bridge, the Hawkesbury has its own engineering marvel – nearly three times as long, resting 50 metres and more deep in soft black mud.

The modern bridge is the second one to cross the river here. The old bridge, finished in 1887, was the last link in the railway that spanned four colonies, connecting Queensland to South Australia.

Sir Henry Parkes, on the day of the bridge’s official opening, pronounced: “In this great system of material arteries which we completed today, we see the crimson fluid of kinship coursing through all the iron veins” (Sharp, 2001, 4). Apparently the other grandees were a bit more underwhelmed by the prospect of a federated Australia, bound together with railways. Nonetheless, the day after, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was headline was “United Australia”

Bridge silhouette 1

At the time it was built, the old bridge was the longest in Australia and had the deepest footings in the world – 180 feet below the high water line – though they still didn’t reach solid ground.

The Union Bridge Company from New Jersey won the contract to build it (on a pin-jointed truss system, as I’m sure you want to know), giving Brooklyn, the railway town that was set up to house the workers, its American name. The tender being won by an American company was one in the eye for the old country, though it pleases me in some strange way that the riveted steel for the spans was made by Arrol Brothers in Glasgow, who also worked on the bridge across the Firth of Forth.

The Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge from Long Island

The old Long Island Railway station

White faced heron checking out the engineers’ work on the new bridge

But the original Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge didn’t last. Its piers, filled with rubble instead of solid concrete, fractured under the weight of the trains that crossed here, the only bit of duplicate track on the line. The piles were starting to crack in the 30s, but the problem only came to light when a US railway geek doing a bit of light recreational reading of an engineering textbook spotted that the piles weren’t built to the original specifications. The death knell of the old bridge, though, was the extra rail traffic of the war.

The piers of the old bridge remain, like golden castles guarding the river.

The footings of the 1887 Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge. Or castles as I like to call them.

I’ve had a great time reading the fantastically detailed history of the building of the new bridge by Major-General Albert Cecil Fewtrell, the Chief Civil Engineer of the NSW railways, who supervised its completion.

There’s some entertaining reading between the lines. When it came to putting the metal spans onto the concrete footing, it seems some fool had a plan to float the 1,600 tonne metal spans over to the pilings at water level and then haul them out with giant cranes perched on the piers. But Major-General Fewtrell soon sorted them out:

“Consideration had been given early to the proposal to float out the spans at low level … The decision [was made] to revert to the high level method of floatation following the return of the Author from active service in 1943” (Fewtrell, 1946, 27)

The cuttings made for the construction docks for the 1946 bridge, and the boat that’s now doing bridge repairs.

The prep they did for the task of floating the massive spans from the construction docks – the cuttings still visible on the north shore of Long Island – onto the concrete pilings at high tide also gives you a sense of the guy.

A large board, representing the land and water at the site of the new bridge, was laid down in the southern tunnel. Model piers were accurately fixed in position in the “stream,” and miniature spans, pontoons, and equipment were used so that the men could practice in detail movements and prepare for emergencies.

Don’t you want to play with those 1/32 scale tiny cranes and miniature pilings? I really really do.

Fewtrell thought that everything had gone swimmingly. But the new bridge, the bridge that was supposed to last 200 years, is crumbling. After years of delays, just this last week, work started on repairing the concrete footings and its rusting reinforcing steel. When I paddled past, there were huddled men in high vis jackets and mysterious icons dangling from the bridge deck – all the signs that a new engineering miracle is about to begin. And I’m sure it’ll happen.

But at this stage, once again, I reckon it’s Hawkesbury River 1: human engineering 0.