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mccnmatt

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March 30, 2019

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estuaries, habitat, juveniles, Native birds, territoriality

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The trouble with the younger generation

Egg the ancient kayak on the way to Joe Crafts Bay

It’s not often that the stars are in alignment for a midweek paddle but occasionally it happens. Children elsewhere, being forced to make music for 48 straight hours; the car (or “kayak transportation device” as I prefer to call it) sitting there unused and no pressing work engagements before 9 am on a Wednesday morning.

Berowra Creek was delightfully quiet, save for a handful of tinnies bearing estuarine commuters towards the wharf and the road to the big smoke roundabout 7 o’clock. I guess that’s rush hour on the Hawkesbury.

Pre-dawn rush at the Berowra Creek ferry

A peaceful river, low tide… time for the shy critters to come out of the mangroves and feast in the mud.

Striated heron getting ready to strike

And … stretch!

Juvenile Striated heron hunting silhouette with catch brightened

Juvenile striated heron with a tiny fish

I go past the mouth of Joe Crafts Bay quite regularly. It’s a magical place, blessed with reflections and rolling fog, and a secret creek filled with darting fish.

Looking to Joe Crafts Bay on a misty day

I’m always expecting to see something exotic there, like the critically endangered Eastern Curlew, visiting Australian coast during the northern winter after an epic migration from Russia and western China. Mostly I see bird-shaped sticks. But on this quiet morning, what I initially suspected to be a stick turned out not one, but two striated herons.

Juvenile striated heron pretending no one is looking

It’s pretty unusual to get a good look at these birds, described on one twitcher website, unnecessarily cruelly I think, as “a dumpy little heron with a large head“. Or if you were really mean you might describe it as a dumpy little heron with a jack-in-the-box neck.

Juvenile striated heron alarmed lightened 2 amended square

Juvenile striated heron with neck stretch

I normally spot striated herons only after I’ve already bugged them enough to burst out of their hiding places in the mangroves and fly off, disgruntled, down the river.

Adult striated heron perching at high tide

They are not given to making a lot of noise and hunt stealthily, perched on a low branch over shallow water or creeping along the shoreline looking for little fish, crabs or crustaceans. Interestingly, they sometimes also fish with bait – dropping a feather or leaf on the water to lure fish to the surface to investigate. These birds seem to be quite smart – researchers have even recorded youngsters playing with bugs, fruit and pieces of wood – perhaps practicing for bait fishing.

But for all their creativity, young herons like most juvenile birds, seem to be a little bit slow on the uptake when they unexpectedly encounter a mammal in a boat. And long may that stupidity continue.

Juvenile striated heron from behind square and lightened

Pensive looking juvenile striated heron

There was also an adult bird on this particular mudflat, clever enough to stay a lot further away.

Adult striated heron, macroryncha subspecies

And while the adult wasn’t incredibly impressed with me being in its territory, it was really very pissed off that it was having to share its patch of low tide real estate with a young heron. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Heron Conservation group – an impressively specialised body – African striated herons are so determined to defend their territory that you only find a couple of individuals in a 13 kilometre stretch of river. Our aggro Aussie adult, true to form, went after the youngster no less than three times while I was watching, chasing it off the prime spots on the mudflat with real venom.

Adult straited chasing juvenile crop long

Adult striated heron chasing off a juvenile off his feeding grounds

Not so the adult could hunt. Oh no. Youngster was finding fine pickings. But having cleared him out, the adult heron did this:

Adult striated heron freezing while white faced heron feeds

Striated heron pretending to be a statue

Nada. Played a game of statues. Or maybe pretended to be a stick for the benefit of nosy kayakers. It’s always pleasing to see birds behaving as expected. Here we see an “adult… freez[ing] when disturbed; standing motionless with their bill… at 45 degrees”

I was surprised to find that the striated heron, shy and retiring as it is, has been described as “one of the more cosmopolitan herons“, which suggests somehow it has well-used hand luggage tucked away in the mangroves somewhere and frequent flyer points. Sub-species (in an attractive range of colours) are found right around the world – from Africa, Madagascar, the islands of the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and South America.

Adult Striated heron walking toe out good pattern

Adult striated heron stepping out

Australian striated herons – both the east coast macroryncha, grey with perhaps a flush of wine colour on its underparts, and the reddish-brown stagnatilis which living in the north west – are a bit fussier than many overseas subspecies, living pretty much exclusively in coastal areas in and around mangroves. That’s quite different to the rarer but to my untutored eye somewhat similar looking black bittern that is found along forested rivers, like the Wyong River where I spotted this one, and even rivers much further inland.

Black bittern on the Wyong River

Juvenile striated heron in the fog

If you’re kind of fussy about where you live, Joe Crafts Bay seems a tremendous place to end up. No wonder the grumpy grownup wants to keep it to himself.

Joe Crafts Bay at its magical best

More adventures on the Hawkesbury

A visit with the eagles of Mooney Mooney Creek

Magic scenes on a cold and foggy day on Cowan Water

The silver river – up Marramarra Creek

Of gods and map readers – into Muogamarra National Park

Two sad islands, three whistling kites – a visit to Barr Island

Burnoff at Bujwa Bay

Alhambra on the Hawkesbury

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mccnmatt

Posted on

November 12, 2017

Posted under

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

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Battle of the baby birds

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

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

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

Female sparrowhawk getting stuck in

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

Dead wattlebird being sized up

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

Sparrowhawk calling for his mate

Mid-meal call

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

Currawong after the sparrowhawk nest

Collared sparrowhaw about to fly

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

Pair of channel billed cuckoos

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

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

Baby brushturkey in the backyard

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

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

Baby brush turkey hanging out with baby Winter the Leghorn

Baby brush turkey being liberated from the laundry

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

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

Baby brushturkey on an early flight

Dad and mound

Eight hours into the vigil on the windowsill

Much mourney Treasure the Sussex and an entourage of brush turkeys

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

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

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

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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

September 22, 2017

Posted under

Backyard birds, Native birds, raptors, Uncategorized

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Welcome back, beautiful stranger

Sparrowhawk square crop old

It shows a certain lack of character and imagination to be keen on raptors, but I can’t help it. I love them anyway. Even the whistling kites and white-bellied sea eagles I clock every single weekend out in my boat on the Hawkesbury give me enough of a thrill to clog up my computer’s hard drive with a thousand pictures of them in every conceivable posture and mood.

So two years ago, when I caught this beauty in my backyard, I was beside myself with excitement. It’s a collared sparrowhawk, one of three species of Acciper found in Australia, along with the very similar brown goshawk and the hauntingly beautiful grey goshawk. So beautiful that on my one and only encounter with one (whilst pegging out the washing) my camera fainted and so in its barely conscious state was only capable of producing a groggy quasi-mystical image of the world’s only pure white raptor.

The divine and impossible to represent grey goshawk

An ordinary, gorgeous juvenile white bellied sea eagle

I know our beautiful visitor in 2015 was a sparrowhawk and not the very similar looking brown goshawk, having been schooled on the key differences. Brown goshawks are slightly grumpier and more threatening looking, with a beetle brow and chunkier legs. Both species, it is said, waggle their tail on landing, but the sparrowhawk does it a tiny bit more rapidly. As my brother, a much more expert bird watcher than I am, points out, this has to be the most arcane and pointless advice for distinguishing two very similar looking birds. “Sorry lads, the video of your tail waggling was slightly out of focus. Can you just circle round and land side by side on that branch again?”

Collared sparrowhawks also have another feature – the absurdly long middle toe of the collared sparrowhawk, used to grip its prey while it systematically plucks them (starting at the vent) and then devours them. It’s moments like these you’re grateful not to be a sparrow or a silvereye, isn’t it?

But is that enough to tell the difference between a goshawk and a sparrowhawk? Both apparently have these long middle toes – the sparrowhawks’ toes are just longer and more delicate.

My bird in flight.

2015 bird: middle toe extends beyond the claw of the two adjacent toes.

Yesterday’s bird

There are other differences too. Goshawks have a rounded tail, and a smaller eye. So is it welcome back stranger… or good to see you, lifer?

Sparrowhawk eye

This year’s bird – a smaller eye?

Sparrowhawk tail

A more rounded tail?

Both the collared sparrowhawk and the brown goshawk are widespread through their range in Australia and New Guinea – they can be found in arid areas as well as woodlands and suburbia. They are one of the few raptors that will perch and hunt in gardens, as I saw today. The fact that they’re partial to a snack on introduced birds like sparrows, starlings and newly hatched chickens (gulp!) may be one reason why they’re considered “of least concern” to people who worry about the current mass extinction event.

But still, they’re not exactly common. Numbers declined from the 1940s through to the 1980s thanks to DDT, although the effect of this insecticide – thinning the shells of eggs – seems to have been less dramatic for them than peregrines and some other raptors. Loss of habitat for the small birds that sparrowhawks like to eat and competition from pied currawongs that will (somewhat implausibly to my mind) attack both adults and chicks are other threats.

It’s been a long couple of years since that last wonderful visit.

But over the last few days there’s been a new sound from the decrepit pine trees that stand (or should I say lean) between our place and our neighbours’. At first I thought it was a whiny juvenile wattlebird begging for a feed – the call was a kind of feeble high pitched kik-kik-kik-kik. And then I saw a creamy coloured bird with wide striped wings and a blunt head, superficially like the “green” satin bowerbirds that hang around here all year round scrounging off my chilli bushes and demolishing my bean plants.

“Green” satin bowerbirds making short work of my Thai chillis

Juvenile or female bowerbirds with virtually no tastebuds

But there’s something distinct and decisive about the way raptors fly. I eventually got a good look as the bird chilled out in the trees, waiting to ambush passing little passerines, which they catch on the wing. I’m really hoping they have a taste for noisy miners.

good sideways distant crop wide

These really are very low-key birds. “Often lives unnoticed in mature-treed suburban parks and gardens” one ornithology site comments about sparrowhawks… “easily overlooked”. Having spent quite a bit of today staring slightly hopelessly into the naked branches for an immobile, unconcerned and well camoflaged bird of prey I can confirm this. “Trusting and approachable“, the Peregrine Trust’s turn of phrase for a collared sparrowhawk, seems like a slightly embarrassing description for a predator.

A gorgeous profile on display. One very chilled out bird.

Accipiter not bothered by an audience

Note the absurdly long middle toe

The grumpy reputation of Brown Goshawk is apparently not just a consequence of their Resting Bitch Face. They’re also apparently quite aggro around the nest. True to form, sparrowhawks are said to be calmer.

Perhaps this parental behaviour will be the solution to my ID problem. There’s a nest made of sticks high in the neighbour’s pine tree, a spot I saw the sparrowhawk returning to several times today. If there’s anything better than grown up raptors in your backyard, it’s a clutch of baby raptors.

Could this be a sparrowhawk nest?

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mccnmatt

Posted on

January 22, 2016

Posted under

Fruit, Insect pests, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Uncategorized, Vines

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Experiments with kiwifruit

Thanks to exhaustive if faintly intrusive matchmaking with a ladder and a paintbrush back in October, we have a bumper crop in the kiwi arbor.

Pollinating kiwifruit

Kiwifruit buds and flowers

The kiwifruit harvest

Four years ago the northern wall of the kitchen was occupied by a dank lean-to, usable only for turning your bike into the kind of rust-bucket that can be safely left overnight at train stations. But we don’t need these kinds of amenities. If you leave your bike unlocked outside the pub in Berowra, it might get taken by a drunk on his wobbly way home, but if it does, the bartender will recognise the miscreant on the CCTV footage and leave a friendly message on the guy’s answering machine to return it in the morning. Even the pelotons of MAMILS leave their featherlight carbon-fibre bikes untethered at the end-of-ride coffee shop.

Blue skies over Berowa

So, with no need for a bespoke bicycle corroding zone, we replaced the corrugated iron over the frame of the lean-to with couple of precociously fruitful Sweetie kiwifruit vines, a low chill variety from Daleys Fruits in Maleny. Last year we had a handful of fruit that the possums seemed enjoy. If they’re planning to eat the whole crop this year they’d better be hungry.

The laden kiwifruit arbor

Who’s been eating my kiwifruit?

Peeping possum looking innocent

I’m feigning disinterest in what happens to my kiwi harvest but let’s be real – the last few years have turned me from a lentil-eating hippie into an antipodean Mr McGregor, the pointlessly enraged gardener who would love to turn Peter Rabbit and his fluffy little brothers and sisters into a delicious warming casserole.

Don’t get me wrong, while I do covet the infinitely soft possum-fur jumpers that vengeful New Zealanders knit from our invasive marsupials, I’m not spending my nights under the kiwi trellis with a gun in my hand. That said, the rugby-league style gum shield I wear overnight to stop me grinding my teeth to dust (expensive, but since it doubles as a contraceptive, probably good value) does date from about the time I started trying to grow fruit in the backyard.

No, I’m taking a less brutal and more scientific approach to harvest-management. I have a control – the fruit I’m leaving untouched on the vine. And I have two intervention groups – there’s the kiwis I’ve picked early, hard as furry brown rocks, and left to ripen in the fruitbowl, and then there’s the bunches I’ve put into protective custody in mesh exclusion bags.

I maintain a cautious optimism that I will get to eat at at least some ripe fruit. This upbeat attitude has nothing to do with early success. While commercial kiwifruit are usually picked unripe and can be kept on ice for two months or more, so far my early harvest has withered slightly but maintained a mouth puckering acidity, as evidenced by our school holiday Ph testing activity.

I can’t seem to kick the habit of growing red cabbages, despite the fact that no one in the house, myself included, really wants to eat them. They’re just so pretty!

Red cabbage abstract

So apart from feeding the leaves to the cabbage white butterflies that my 9 year old keeps in her bedroom as “pets”, what else can you do with leafy brassicas too chewy for coleslaw? Well, you can boil them up and use the purple cooking water as a very cool litmus test.

There’s nothing kids like more than squeezing out half the toothpaste tube, making potions out of bicarb, tomato sauce and milk, or filling every single glass in the kitchen with disgusting viscous liquids. We even ended up with a boys v girls Ph contest – boys obviously preferring alkaline household products, while as we all know, historically girls inevitably favour acids. Including our long-cossetted kiwifruit, which turned our cabbage water a pleasing deep pink.

The results of the purple cabbage litmus tests

Early indications are the mesh exclusion bags aren’t doing much better than the fruit bowl in the protection and ripening caper. I can’t remember a pre-masticated fruit being present when I tied the bag around this bunch. We seem to have a Houdini of the rodent world somewhere on the premises. The outcome so far is not as dismal, at least, as 2014’s doomed attempt at protecting peaches. The mammal and insect pests deployed a pincer movement – rats gnawing a hole in the bags and fruitflies pouring through to finish the job.

Intervention group 1: ripening in the bowl

Intervention group 2: inside the exclusion bag

No, my optimism about getting to wrap my laughing gear around some home-grown kiwifruit sorbet is based on the barely nibbled fruit discarded the ground under the vines. Whatever is chowing down on my crop just isn’t very keen. Perhaps they have a sweet tooth.

How, I hear you ask, can you tell when to harvest your kiwifruit? Well, apparently if you cut one open and the seeds have turned black it’s ready for harvest: its starches will turn slowly to sugar in storage. But there is a more scientific way. Sugar solutions refract light, particularly polarised light, differently from your ordinary tap water. So your go-to-device for measuring sweetness (reported in Brix) is a refractometer. The savvy kiwi farmer picks her fruit at a bit over 6 degrees Brix, it seems. Let’s just hope the brush tailed possums can’t tell their pouches from their polarising light and the satin bowerbirds couldn’t track down a refractometer on ebay.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 31, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, compost, Gardening, Geology, History, natural history, Soil

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Happy International Year of Soils!

1967 photo of the cuttings for the freeway at Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury. http://www.ozroads.com.au/NSW/Freeways/F3/ConstructionInfo.htm

I’m not kidding. The UN has declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. And not before time. Everyone should be preoccupied with dirt. I know I am. What is going in down there, under the ground? Are my veggies growing in podzol or mycelium? Hang on, that’s soil profiles in Minecraft, not in Berowra.

The CSIRO’s recently released Soil and Landscape Grid with its 3 dimensional digital soil attribute maps could resolve most Australian gardeners’ soil questions. In case you were wondering how these maps were developed, let me put you out of your misery:

“The spatial modeling was performed using decision trees with piecewise linear models and kriging of residuals. Fifty environmental covariates that represent climate, biota, terrain, and soil and parent material were used in the modeling. Uncertainty was derived using a bootstrap (Monte Carlo-type) approach to derive for each pixel a probability density function (pdf), from which we derived 90% confidence limits”

More kriging of residuals, I say!

Gags aside, this free online resource shows why Australia needs publicly funded science and why sacking researchers in the CSIRO to bankroll Gina Rinehart’s tax breaks is a major error (if you need more persuading, CSIRO scientists also invented WiFi, Aerogard, the permanent pleat, and the word petrichor, which describes the lovely smell of damp earth after rain).

After reading about the rocks in our neck of the woods, however, I’m not sure we are best placed to fully exploit the sophisticated visualising technologies of the Soil and Landscape Grid. The geology around here is pretty danged boring. Other than the odd lens of shale, mostly on the ridge-tops (that is, under roads and houses) it’s Hawkesbury sandstone all the way down, 40 million years and 270 metres of it. Or at least, all the way down to Berowra Creek where there’s an outcrop of more fertile Narrabeen Group of shales, sandstone and clays here and there.

Cutting through sandstone at Mooney Mooney

The humungous cuttings between Berowra and the freeway, showing millions of years of sandstone deposition

More ridiculously huge cuttings on the freeway

Of course, we’re not alone in our preposterously deep beds of sandstone. They’re on display in the Blue Mountains too, though with a few more layers clay and basalt intrusions to break up the tedium.

Huge sandstone cliffs at Wentworth Falls

Layers of clay amidst the sandstone near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains

The humungous quantities of sandstone across a swathe of the Sydney Basin makes my sentimentality about the disappearing rock faces along the new railway cuttings of the Northern Line even more absurd. After reading about the good exposures of Ashfield Shale between Hornsbury and Beecroft, I’ve become a tiny bit obsessed with capturing the freshly exposed slices of Sydney Basin geology as they are revealed by the diggers and before they’re covered with nasty grey concrete. Wordsworth was mortified by the ugliness of railway cuttings slashing their way through the nineteenth century British countryside. Here am I mourning for disappearing railway cuttings, a slice of geological time revealed and then lost again.

Sandstone profile

A slice of sandstone

The sadness of disappearing sandstone

Busy workers covering it all up

Perhaps I should stop grieving the lost glories of the Pennant Hills trackwork and spend more time worrying about what my garden might be doing to the “quartz rich, nutrient poor” soils of Berowra.

My snake beans are kinda sallow – I reckon they need a side serve of well-rotted chicken manure. But even as I contemplate emptying the compost tumbler, I can’t help but fret about where my vegetable garden sits, perched above the national park with its “rich and distinctive assemblage of species that thrive on poor soils” , “60-80 different plant species growing together on an area half the size of an average house block” (Benson, Howell, McDougall, 1996, 24-5). Benson and Howell in their fascinating Taken for Granted: the bushland of Sydney and its suburbs (Kangaroo Press/Royal Botanic Gardens, 1990) mourn:

“much of Hornsby’s rugged sandstone terrain remained undisturbed until after World War III when the increasing availability of the car and improved building technology made steeper, more remote sites available for housing. As a result, bushland on ridge-tops and upper slopes has been totally destroyed, the bush remaining only where it is virtually impossible to built, and along steep gullies which have become drainage lines. Virtually very catchment system includes some suburban development, stormwater run-off from which contains silt and nutrients. These promote weed invasion of sandstone gullies… in newer areas such at Mt Colah and Berowra [the] invasion is beginning, and the consequences appear inevitable” (108)

And that’s us, in our mid-century twentieth century house, teetering on a steep slope in a fold of the hillside you might otherwise call a creek bed. My painstakingly-made hot compost, my organic sugarcane mulch, the poo from my beloved chickens, all building nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus rich earth – garden alchemy. I’m creating an anthroposol – a human made soil – and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

Yellow podzol? or anthroposol?

Run-off from the garden… sorry, creekbed.

As a homage to the UN’s declaration, I’ve stared in a incomprehending way at a schematic cross-section of Hawkesbury soils, I’ve thought long and hard about our B horizon (by staring even longer at this quite marvellous online introduction to soil classification – thanks again, CSIRO) and I’ve double-checked Minecraft’s definition of “podzolic” with the kids but I’m not sure how far it’s got me.

Maybe this is the chthonic thinking – thinking about the soil and the communities, plant and animal that grow from it – that my friend Kate urges us all to do in her fab blog about the Armidale Community Garden, but it’s not so much grounded me as taken me directly to Hades via the Field of Punishment. This is a special special place of suffering for people who long to understand rocks and dirt but can never remember whether the Devonian comes before or after the Carboniferous, no matter how many times they read David Johnson’s splendid Geology of Australia. And that’s without wrestling with the geopolitics of topsoil loss or the impact of international agribusiness on pesticide residues or the links between soil, country and indigenous chlthonic law…

The only solution to this torment, I feel, is another variant of subterranean thinking: that sense of mindfulness I get sitting in a darkened vehicle with a swag of empty shopping bags, gazing tranquilly at the carefully preserved, sandstone rock exposures in the underground car park of Berowra Coles.

Happy International Year of Soils everyone!