Some like it hot

After months of tattered leaves and mysterious disappearing fruits, I’ve finally got a small but perfectly formed crop of jalapeno peppers.  Christmas in Anglo Australia traditionally involves pacing around a baking kitchen with novelty oven gloves and lingering anxiety about possible food poisoning, so pickling something hot would seem seasonally appropriate.

I’ve figured out why I have anything to preserve.  Sometime over the last week or two, the robotic clicks and chirrs of the satin bowerbirds have faded out of our soundscape.  I’m not sure where our place fits into satin bowerbird’s cycle of the year.  Does our backyard counts as “open woodland” where according to WIRES bowerbirds move in autumn and winter? Or is our vegetable patch a “territory… occup[ied] year after year” in the spring breeding season….?

One way or another, having kept the overshadowing trees in trim all winter, (with the odd mouthful of chilli leaf, grape vine and mulberries, just to freshen the palate) it seems they’re off to do their fine topiary work elsewhere.  I just hope the spiky sticks that I used to fence in my chilli plants in a vain attempt to protect them from marauders didn’t do any permanent damage to their lovely violet eyes – I’m pretty sure topiary, not to mention collecting and arranging blue pegs, is easier with binocular vision… But do satin bowerbirds have binocular vision…?  That’s a research project for another day…

Bowerbirds: snacking for solar gain

Before the fall

Before the fall: it’s always sunnier on the other side of the fence

The gang’s back.  Loads of satin bowerbirds in the garden at the moment.  I’ve seen a couple of mature males, with their glossy blue-black feathers and gorgeous indigo eyes, but most of the robotic whistles, clicks, churrs and cracks in the trees seem to be the “greens” – juvenile males and females, hanging out in a pack.

I’ve heard grim stories about the antics of bowerbirds in the veggie garden.  Apparently they like to lull the backyard grower into a false sense of security and then swoop in and devastate your greens.  But I’m feeling kind of relaxed on that front.  After the brush turkeys exhumed my long awaited Hass avocado treelet, and my big girls, the young-bloods, the prodigious egg-layers, started lounging around under the baby banana trees, making eyes at my kale and chomping on every “poisonous” rhubarb leaf the moment it unfurled, I’ve decided to go totally Christo.  Every seed, every seedling, every newly planted tuber has its own little  blanket of horticultural fleece.  Anything growing that’s remotely likely to appeal to the poultry palate is swathed in netting.

The one upside of the chooks’ blithe disregard of the garden fence is the complete and total elimination of trad from the veggie patch.  Three months ago our spindly raspberry canes and brave little Nightingale persimmon were drowning in a lush wash of juicy stems and emerald leaves, even as the ground slowly dehydrated around them. But now – nada.  A few stems scattered around, waiting to reroot after the rain but not a leaf to be seen.  It’s all very satisfying.

So it’s not all bad when your flock take to the greenery.  The bowerbirds haven’t got a chance of getting my broadbeans.  But with their leaf-picking ways, they are doing sterling work for the environment.

Brushturkey in liquidambar

Brush turkey roosting in our poor denuded liquidambar

Their latest hang-out is the neighbour’s liquidambar tree – gorgeous and looming, throwing a great long shadow across our ice-box house all autumn. Basking in the sunshine on the other side of the fence, it steadfastly refuses to shed its leaves, months and months after our poor overhung specimen has shivered and shaken off its own.  And then, when the last ruby shreds are about to be blown from its branches, and the winter sun finally promises to warm our August days, the bloody thing starts growing leaves again!

But never fear, Super Satin Bowerbird is here!  I can’t prove definitively that their main objective was improving our passive solar gain but after closely studying these photographs for insights into bowerbird psychology and culinary habits, it certainly looks like it.