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February 26, 2022

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Backyard birds, feeding fledglings, habitat, national parks, Native birds, Plants that attract wildlife

A day out at the pool with the kids

During most of spring we woke up every morning to the sound of sparrowhawks shagging. But for the last couple of months the alarm clock has been the crack of a whip.

An eastern whipbird pair have been whiling away time in our garden, offering their distinctive antiphonal duet – the male first with his whipcrack, followed up by his mate with a “chu chu”. But they’ve had an extra with them this year – a youngster, with a kind of squelchy call that reminds me a bit of the red-crowned toadlets that I’ve been hearing on the fire trails throughout this soggy soggy summer.

Recently fledged juvenile whipbird

The whipbirds have some interesting child-rearing habits, according to researchers Amy Rogers and Raoul Mulder. They usually lay a couple of eggs. Once the chicks fledge, the parents divide the task of looking after the kids quite formally between them. Each parent looks after one of the fledglings exclusively. You can imagine the therapy bills . There’s an exception – if only one chick survives, then it’s mum who’s in charge. So I guess it’s maternal care we’ve seen as we’ve watched the adult and juvenile slipping in and out of sight around the garden. There’s definitely a whip-cracking male around, but all thee have only been spotted together in the garden once – and I wasn’t there with my camera to catch it, so I question if it ever really happened.

Whipbird chicks spend about six weeks with their parents after fledging, sometimes even hanging around until the next season, and it’s been interesting watching the adult and its offspring interacting, as the young one slowly morphs from its slighty fluffy, brown “I just came out of the nest” look to something more like an adult appearance.

Adult whipbird with a juvenile following it

I think one reason the whipbirds make such regular appearances in our yard is the frightful mess it’s in. We’re not path sweepers or lawn groomers. More stick-pilers, fungus-harbourers and ignorers-of-organic-detritus. My efforts to promote biodiversity are not solely confined to a failure to rake, however. I’ve sunk the value of at least one of the kids’ kidneys into shrubs, vines and groundcovers, some of which have survived. While I have regularly seen the whipbirds in our kiwifruit arbor and the youngster has been spotted leaping about in a demented way amongst the ferns and vines outside our kitchen window, the native violets, which are threatening to overrun the house during this wettest summer in 30 years, seem to be a favoured spot.

Here we see chick watching mum head down bum up in the viola hederacea (you can just see the tail in the lower half of the first picture). Next it’s little one that has its butt in the air, retrieving something invisible but presumably tasty.

Juvenile whipbird watching adult hunting for food

Juvenile whipbird looking for tucker in the native violets

Juvenile whipbird with its find

Despite their furtive habits and preference for the undergrowth, it turns out whipbirds can be pretty assertive under the right circumstances. I was impressed by the use of eye contact in a show-down with one of our many resident brush turkeys over a bird bath.

Eastern whipbird and brush turkey eye to eye

Showdown at the bird bath

Whip bird and brush turkey good crop sized

Eastern whipbird and brushturkey drinking from the same bird bath

Eastern whipbird and brushturkey peaceably drinking

The best time to spot two generations of whipbirds is around lunchtime, at the birdbath. Mum arrives first, has a wash and then a bit of a groom, perched above on some wonga wonga vines.

Having a splash

If the coast is clear, the youngster appears.

Juvenile whipbird taking its turn in the birdbath

Juvenile whipbird and mum nose to nose 2 crop amended small

Juvenile whipbird and mum beak to beak

Awwwwww.

Having watched this scene of filial affection unfolding around the birdbath at home, I was quite delighted to catch what I thought were some similarly touching moments at a pool in a more natural setting.

Brown thornbill in a banksia serrata

Eastern yellow robin

Spinebill feeding from a banksia serrata

Grey fantail – perhaps a young ‘un with a bit of brown on the breast

Lewin’s honeyeater in a banksia serrata

Juvenile spinebill hanging

As a devoted parent, I’m always happy to drive my kids to music lessons… especially if the music teacher’s home happens to be right next to a national park. On a sunny late afternoon during one of these high-speed twitching sessions, I spotted some action high up in a Sydney red gum.

A hollow on top of a horizonal branch seemed to have formed a natural pool which was evidently a magnet for the local birdlife.

Rainbow lorikeet in an angophora

A drink from the loft pool

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Juvenile spinebill hovering

Spinebill drinking

Juvenile spinebills playing, fighting or perhaps play fighting

I could see that there were some juvenile spinebills about, and some adults too. Squinting through my lens I wasn’t quite sure what kind of pool side action was going on up there in the canopy. Perhaps adults giving a tour to youngsters of all the best places to drink and bathe in their forest home? Showing them the ropes in this lofty aquatic environment – explaining the avian equivalent to those “no petting” “no bombing” rules perhaps?

When I got home and had a good look at the photos I found out otherwise.

Adult whipbird shirtfronting a juvenile by the angophora pool

Adult spinebill attacking a juvenile

“Keep away from the pool”

Adult spinebill after a celebratory bathe in the treetop pool

These poolside antics give “competitive dad” a whole new meaning.

Apparently, spinebills can have up to 5 clutches of eggs each year – almost as soon as one clutch are fledged, the parents start making a new nest ready, driving the older juveniles away. And no free pass for the pool it seems!

Much as I love the gorgeous spinebills, for human Sydneysiders with our eyewatering real estate market and clutches of offspring near at hand, somehow the parenting style of the whipbirds feels closer to home.

Adult male eastern spinebill in a hibiscus tree

More birds in our backyard

Cracking the whip in a messy yard

Blood feud in the dawn redwood

Death and sibling rivalry

Growing up is hard to swallow

Blue eyes and biteys

References

K. A. Wood (1996) “Bird Assemblages in a Small Public Reserve and Adjacent Residential Area at Wollongong, New South Wales Wildlife Research, 23, 605-20

Amy Rogers and Raoul Mulder (1996) “Breeding ecology and social behaviour of an antiphonal duetter, the eastern whipbird” Wildlife Research, 1996,23, 605-20

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mccnmatt

Posted on

January 2, 2022

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breeding, mating, Native birds, nesting, raptors

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When too much (raptor) sex is barely enough

Collared sparrowhawk perched in a liquidambar tree

Sparrowhawk lurking in the liquidambar

Over the last couple of months I’ve upped my bird nerd quotient a notch. Having already distressed my teenagers by revealing that the jolly bird calls they were hearing each morning were the sounds of our resident raptors in flagrante, I have taken my prurient interest in the intimate lives of avians one step further. At last I have some good pictures of sparrowhawk sex. If you don’t want to see them, look away now.

Sparrowhawk sex

It’s chatty

In my defense, our resident pair were at it relentlessly for three months. When I say relentlessly, I mean at least four or five times a day. Not so much morning noon and night, more early morning, morning, morning, morning and occasionally late afternoon. It was hard to ignore, although I found my colleagues less intrigued than I expected when I drew their attention to the ambient sounds of bird sex in the middle of zoom meetings.

Because I’m a worrier, even before living through a pandemic, hearing avian coupling for month after month ended up making me feel quite anxious about the reproductive systems of our pair. Why so much sex? One of my Gen X pals suggested drily that perhaps they were very young. Had they failed to produce eggs and were keeping at it until something happened? Or were they just enjoying themselves?? Are sparrowhawks the bonobos of the raptor scene? Strangely, the published literature has failed to help me with this question.

This unrestrained mating duet somehow suggests an element of enjoyment but I’m no doubt anthropomorphising.

A typical “bout” as D.H.Lawrence might have put it, would usually start with the female sitting high in my neighbour’s pine tree calling for her mate. Often she was in possession of some prey, and demonstrated a bit of multitasking by intermittently ripping out its entrails between summons.

Female sparrowhawk calling the male

Sparrowhawk tearing prey

Eventually the male would turn up, perch on a nearby branch and then hop over to engage in some avian sexual congress. My attention during this period was directly primarily towards the snacks. Would the female share a hunk of flesh as a bit of a “thank you” to her partner for, as it were, coming on command?

Sparrowhawk pair after mating

It appeared not. I watched the whole sequence of activities a few times, and while the male would lurk nearby for a while, possibly eyeing up the gobbets of LBB flesh in the claws of its mate, I never once saw the female share the spoils.

Female sparrowhawk with food

On this occasion the female sparrowhawk flew off with a large chunk of uneaten prey (mostly, as you can see, legs). At the time, I was hoping she might be heading toward the nest to feed some hungry chicks.

With no post-coital snacks on offer, the male often ended these encounters by gathering material to renovate the nest. Trying to work out what was going on, I struggled to imagine him somehow inserting these liquidambar leaves around some eggs or wriggly, begging chicks. I began to suspect this pair did not quite know what they were doing.

Sparrowhawk with nesting materials

Despite neighbourhood excitement every time one of the pair flew towards the nest with some prey, it seems that this year there won’t be any sparrowhawk fledglings doing yoga in the trees or playing by the swimming pool. Throughout this cool and rainy La Nina spring, there was mating and there was nest building, but nothing came of it. Perhaps the nest blew away in one of this year’s storms. Perhaps the late appearance of the cicadas meant fewer easy snacks. Perhaps the pair just simply didn’t produce any fertile eggs. All I can say is, they certainly tried.

Come back next year, my lovelies. I might even give you more privacy this time.

More raptor tales from our Berowra backyard

Death and sibling rivalry

The very big fish

Crested hawks for Christmas

Motherhood on a windy day

An eagle in suburbia

The battle of the baby birds

Cartwheels and company: the young eagles

Loves and leaves

Sex, nests and dogfighting

Encounters with eagles

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 31, 2020

Posted under

Backyard birds, breeding, cicadas, competition, Insects, mating, nesting, predation, raptors, territoriality

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Crested hawks for Christmas

Every birdwatcher has a list of sightings they dream about (if that sighting is accompanied by a National Geographic front-cover-worthy picture all the better). For the cognoscenti – sophisticated, proper twitchers – this list seems to feature rare, endangered or hard to spot critters, that may or may not be kind of boring to look at. But for the crass newbie like myself, bling is important. Flashy, that’s how I like my bucket list birds.

For a long time, a decent look at the gloriously multi-coloured (but annoyingly canopy dwelling) spotted pardelote was top of the list. A camping trip to the fabulous Wolgan Valley a couple of years back ticked that box. Worth sweating my way up a hill to look down on the magic of the diamond-bird.

Spotted pardelote

Obviously rainbow bee eaters were on also on the list, until my parents moved to Bingara in on the northern slopes of NSW, a town where grey nomads and bird nerds duke it out for dominance in the local economy.

Pair of rainbow bee eaters

Since then, my top two have both been raptors. There’s the black shouldered kite with its glorious red eye and hauntingly regular presence along highways. I see it often on long road trips, hanging out near boggy pasture land, but getting a photograph seems to require a willingness to pull the hand brake on at high speed in the middle of a major road. I’m not saying I won’t do that, but I’m still working myself up to it. And then there’s the absurdly excellent Pacific Baza.

Stunning golden eye – tick. Dramatic black-and-white belly stripes – tick. Elegant flight, even acrobatic during the mating season – tick again.

And, absurdly, a crest – its nickname is the “crested hawk”. Does it get any better than that? I think not.

I was hugely excited when I spotted what I thought was a baza in our neck of the woods a few weeks ago – zipping past and disappearing into the leafy top of a liquidambar tree. Birds seem to be attracted by a pheromone released by amateur photographers who are not carrying a camera. Certainly that was the case on this occasion. Lacking any visual evidence of the encounter, I figured it was a wish fulfilment sighting. Probably one of the collared sparrowhawks, also stripy chested canopy dwellers. They’ve been back on the scene at our place over the last month or two, hanging out in the top of the neighbour’s pine tree, bragging about their kills and having brief and frustratingly hard to photograph sexual encounters first thing in the morning.

Collared sparrowhawk hiding in the foliage of a liquidambar

But this week – a late Christmas present. My outstanding neighbours Laura and Steve texted to say that the mysterious bird they had previously seen lurking in a melaleuca tree had made at a guest appearance by another neighbour’s pool, and been IDed. It was a Pacific baza.

It’s a miracle that I didn’t get hit crossing the road as I raced over to their place.

Adult Pacific baza

The trip to casualty that could have ensued would have kept my from not just a single baza but a little family – a pair (I think) and a large and whiny fledged chick. Naturally, they were lurking in the very top of the tree, and of course, my skill-set with my flash new camera meant that my career as a natural history photographer is not going to take any great leaps forward.

Adult Pacific baza avoiding eye contact with a juvenile

Blurry as it is, I interpret the body language of the parent here as indicating an unwillingness to provide further snacks. We saw both adults make a few short flights, and at least once definitely offer the youngster some prey. The juvenile whined without interruption, inching along the branch towards the adults, ducking its head and restively half-opening its wings. This parent avoided eye contact and eventually flapped off to a separate spot in the tree. A couple of weeks after they leave the nest, apparently, juvenile bazas stop getting food provided by their parents, so I guess this was what was playing out here. Baby Baza was certainly less than happy.

Juvenile baza (I think) in a huff

To say I was ecstatic to see the family of bazas within 100 metres of my front door would be to underestimate my degree of excitement. But then a troubling thought struck me… would the presence of the bazas harsh the buzz of the sparrowhawk pair that I’d seen canoodling on my side of the street? The pair appeared soon after a fierce storm that tore some big branches in our backyard and might well have trashed a nest somewhere down the road. Would the appearance of the bazas spoil the chance of a late-breaking bit of nest building?

Juvenile baza showing crest and aggro

Like Pacific bazas, sparrowhawks spend a lot of time in the treetops. They’re ambush hunters, lurking in amongst the leaves ready to burst out and pluck small birds from the sky.

Looking for prey

Sparrowhawk hunting from a pine tree

Sparrowhawk ignoring dregs of its last meal

They’ll take sparrows (perhaps unsurprisingly), mynahs and miners, mudlarks and wattlebirds, even birds as big as crested pigeons or crimson rosellas. Here’s a pic I took recently of a sparrowhawk trying to choke down the remnants of a leg of a bird. See the toes poking out of its beak? I watched it pacing up and down on the branch, wiping its beak repeatedly and generally looking a bit agitated. I note that the left over leg remained untouched and I can kind of understand why.

When something gets stuck on the way down

Maybe its not surprising after this kind of experience that a sparrowhawk might want to ring the changes, diet wise. And in fact, sparrowhawks won’t say no to a bug or two. A Canberra study found half of sparrowhawks’ prey, by the numbers, were snails, spiders or insects, with Christmas beetles and cicadas a particular feature. All those insects weren’t too filling – they made up only 2% of the biomass. But still, that interest in insects could them into competition with bazas, which eat fruit, frogs, lizards and snakes, grabbed from the foliage at the tops of trees, but especially like stick insects.

Yet another thing to inspire delight in bazas – an eccentric specialist diet. When I was looking at this critter in the Berowra train station, I wasn’t thinking “if only I ripped that to bits it would make a toothsome snack for my children”. But if I was a baza, I would have been.

Stick insect

However, larger insects are a favourite of Pacific bazas, while sparrowhawks seem to go for nothing bigger than a huntsman or a cicada.

Disappointingly, the bazas have disappeared from the paperbark in Steve and Laura’s drive, for all its proximity to a refreshing backyard pool and ample opportunities for hunting in the tops of tall trees, undisturbed by competition for their favourite phasmids. They’ll probably be nearby – these raptors aren’t migratory and Berowra sounds pretty close to their ideal habitat:

tropical and sub-tropical forests and woodlands, largely within 300km of the coast. In the breeding season they frequent tree-lined watercourses, rainforest, sclerophyll forest and tall woodland, but range widely following nesting to lower ground, when they may visit urban parks and gardens.

One birdwatcher in Queensland followed the reproductive fortunes of a pair of bazas as they nested in a series of different trees within a couple of hundred metres of his house on his property for a decade. So, no National Geographic cover photo as yet but I remain hopeful. 2020 really was a dud year but with the crested hawk in town, who knows what fine things could be in store for us in our backyard next year.

No, don’t look back to 2020 sparrowhawk! Forward, always forward.

Raptor encounters in our neighbourhood

Sex, nests and dogfighting – sparrowhawks set up house in our local pinetrees

Sparrowhawk sibling rivalry – baby serial killers learn to hunt

An eagle in suburbia – a wedgetail on Berowra Creek

The very big fish – sea eagle vs mulloway

References

Briggs, Allan (2018) “Breeding biology and behaviour of a pair of Pacific Bazas ‘Aviceda subcristata’ in central-coastal Queensland over 10 years”. Australian Field Ornithology, Vol. 35, 2018: doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20938/afo35095101.
James, P. (2004). The breeding cycle of a pair of Pacific Bazas Aviceda subcristata in south-eastern Queensland. Australian Field Ornithology 21, 133–140
Olsen, Jerry, Judge, David, Trost, Susan and Stephen Debus (2018) “Diets of breeding Brown Goshawks Accipiter fasciatus and Collared Sparrowhawks A. cirrocephalus near Canberra, Australia and comparisons with other regions and raptors” Corella, 42

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 19, 2017

Posted under

breeding, Death, egg laying, Garden trees, nesting, raptors

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Sparrowhawk summer

Adult sparrowhawk telling the kids that dinner is on its way

The sparrowhawks in the bottom of the neighbour’s yard have beaten the odds. Despite the visits of the hungry currawongs and randy cuckoos, two strapping fledglings have emerged from the nest this week.

Two juvenile sparrowhawks trying out their wings

Our days are punctuated by the insistent call of the mother and father hawks telling the teenagers that it’s time to head back to the ridiculously tiny nest for dinner. And the juvenile’s answering pitiful cries, disproportionate to their galumphing size. They’re easily as big as their parents even at this early stage.

Photo of juvenile sparrowhawk with its mouth open

Fledgling sparrowhawk talking back to its parent

And early in the morning, the ding-dong battles between the sparrowhawks and the local mob of sulphur crested cockatoos, that wheel across the valley each day to find the tastiest trees and finest roosting places. The hawks have been watchful but apparently unconcerned by the range of large and small humans arguing, gardening, driving, swimming and playing beneath their nest and, as you can see, endlessly photographing their activities.

But the arrival of a crew of a dozen or so seed eaters in their territory was apparently intolerable. A crested pigeon is the biggest prey sparrowhawks have been known to take, but we’ve seen for ourselves they’re not afraid to send cockies and cuckoos packing. The cockatoos didn’t take off without a bit of argy bargy but in the end the diminutive predators won the day.

The flock retreated off to our place, and relieved their frustration with some light demolition work on the rotting pine tree in our backyard. I assumed it was the parents that did the chasing off, but Stephen Debus, who spent a lot of time hanging out in the Bundaberg Botanical Gardens with a digital camera and a pair of young sparrowhawks, seems to think that the young ones like to chase away bigger birds that they couldn’t possibly eat, everything from egrets, darters and ducks to kestrels and even currawongs, their erstwhile enemies.

A juvenile sparrowhawk watching the demolition work with interest

Cockies in retreat

There’s been an exciting new development in the last couple of days: the littlies are trying their hand with disembowelling. Young nestlings are fed gobbets of freshly plucked bird flesh, straight from mum or dad’s beak, but this youngster was doing his own kitchen prep. It took him a while. Given the eye-claw coordination on display here, it may be a few weeks before this one is hunting on its own. It seems that taking dinner from the talons of parents mid-air (and maybe snacking on cicadas in between meals) is the next step towards independence.

Juvenile ripping a small bird to bits

… but keeping an eye on me at the same time

Fledgling sparrowhawk still aspiring to elegance

From the vantage point of our neighbours’ pool, we’ve watched the fledglings practicing their short haul flights (and awkward landings), whine a lot and bicker over food. In a truly rare sighting, judging from my experience with human children, I even saw one of them give in to his sibling’s relentless complaining and share a meal.

Or maybe what I saw was big sister muscling in on little brother? Sparrowhawks have distinct sexual dimorphism, and apparently any idiot can tell the smaller males from the females. Not this idiot! I look forward to being enlightened by sharp eyed readers.

Oops. Failure to land.

As you can tell from the recent posts in this blog, I have got just a little obsessed by our in-house raptors these last few months. Maybe because our four serial killers have cleared the area of other distraction – the usual “house” birds.

No baby brush turkeys this year (hooray!) and the noisy miners have been mercifully silent. But the gorgeous satin bowerbirds have also been thin on the ground, the newly arrived whipbird disappeared suddenly without leaving a forwarding address, and I’ve heard very few of the chocks and clucks of the wattlebirds that make up the usual soundscape of our neighbourhood.

Red wattlebird in times gone by.

The usual bird visitors enjoying sunset over Sam’s creek

We have about six weeks, it seems, before the young sparrowhawks will disperse, looking for another neck of the woods with the requisite tall trees for nesting and plenty of small gormless birds to ambush from a secret spot in the canopy.

Young sparrowhawk in hunting position

Adult sparrowhawk hiding in the canopy ready to pounce

Will the adults stay after the brood has gone? Will they leave and come back next year? It seems no one really knows much about the movement of these secretive birds, despite their presence all over Australia, in every habitat but the driest of deserts.

And, if our lovely raptors do leave us, will our usual cast of feathered friends – the nectar drinkers, the seed and flower and lerp eaters – return?

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

Debus, Stephen (2012) Birds of Prey of Australia: a field guide, CSIRO Publishing

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

and the latest from our backyard: the teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 3, 2017

Posted under

estuaries, kayaking, Native birds, waterways

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Meet the Royals

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

Royal spoonbill with breeding plumage

Typical feeding process – swishing from side to side

Feeding takes place in water less than 40 cm deep

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

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

Spectacle Island in the foreground and the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge behind

White bellied sea eagle at dawn over Spectacle Island

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

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

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

The ubiquitous white-faced heron. One of around 20 I saw hunting in the shallows later that morning.

Australian white ibises in their natural habitat

Spoonbill with friendly egret

Australian pelicans on a channel marker at Mooney Mooney

Pelicans shouting at each other crop small

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

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

Spoonbill in July with no visible crest

In full breeding plumage in September

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

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

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

Spectacle island mud flats lines abstract long and thin small

Spectacle Island mudflats at dawn

References

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

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

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

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

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

Spoonbill fishing 3 cropped larger asymmetrical

Perhaps not a beautiful bird but certainly eye catching!

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

July 27, 2017

Posted under

Animal pests, Anthropomorphism, feral animals, migration, Native birds

Flying lawnmowers

There’s aren’t too many workplaces that have their own bird list. Or offices that you can use as a hide for stalking coy marshbirds.

Buff banded rail with raised leg long and skinny

The elusive Buff Banded Rail of Mars Creek

Silvereye at Terry’s Creek

Contemplative red-browed finch

Eastern Rosella spotted on the way to the train station in Berowra

One of the fine kookaburras of suburban Epping

Superb blue wren down by Terry’s Creek

A busy member of a flock of brown gerygones

On the 5 k walk that bookends my train commute from Berowra to Epping, I might see a tree creeper or a figbird, a scrubwren or a fairy wren, a flock of silver-eyes or gerygones or red-browed finches, a eastern rosella or a crew of glossy black-cockatoos. But the twitching doesn’t end when I arrive, because Macquarie University, where I work, is no mean place for bird watching either.

Waterlilies on the lake at Macquarie

Ridiculously cute baby wood ducks?

Purple swamp hen in a thoughtful mood

On occasion I’m asked to explain to prospective “customers” why they should study with us, rather than one of the other fine educational institutions in Sydney. This kind of sales-pitch is not really my strong point – I’m a teacher, not a real-estate agent. I find myself fatally drawn to talk, not so much about the passionate lecturers, the interdisciplinary subjects, the fancy technical facilities or even the light-drenched underground train station with tranquil majesty of a church, but mostly about the parrots. Which, unfortunately, seems to be a niche interest from a teenaged point of view.

Upside down coot horizontal small lighter

So when I found myself surrounded by maybe a hundred birds – magpies, swamp hens and miners mixing it with the galahs and cockies – on my walk home, I wasn’t too surprised. But the long-billed corellas – their red slashed throats and preposterously dangerous looking beaks – were a new one on me. For a start they aren’t meant to be in Sydney at all.

Sulphur crested foreground galahs background

According to my bird book and the Michael Morecombe app on my phone, corellas are birds of the inland and the south. But for all that, there are plenty of of them around the cities of the eastern seaboard these days. So very many in fact that in fact, a corella poisoner has been at work in the Central Coast, killing scores of birds from the flocks that roost in parks on the shores of Lake Macquarie.

A flock of little corellas at Speers Point on the Central Coast

So how did the corellas get to Sydney and Brisbane anyway? One idea, as put about by Martyn Robinson from the Australian Museum, is that corellas moved east from the plains during the drought. But even he agrees that flock numbers have swelled – along with the wild birds’ English vocabulary – thanks to escapees from cages. Long-billed corellas in particular are apparently wonderful talkers.

On the face of it, looking at the huge flocks creaking and wheeling over ovals and golfcourses, this sounds like an unlikely idea. But tracking back through Trove, the wonderful searchable archive of Australian newspapers digitised by the National Library of Australia , it seems that corellas have been going rogue for a long time.

The first reference I find about these birds as pets in New South Wales is a story in 1878 in the Australia Town and Country Journal in about Mr D.E.Dargin bringing them 500 miles overland to join “collected goods of every sort” at the Bathurst Show. And by 1879 we have the first Sydney corella reported missing:

Lost corella jpeg

It’s a fine thought – these long-lived, clever and social birds breaking out of their cages and joining their wild confederates. My friend Rose has a beautiful story about a tame galah passed on to her after its previous human died. She kept it in an aviary outside and most days a flock of wild galahs would land and spend some time on the grass nearby. One bird in particular would always linger by the caged bird after the rest of the flock departed.

Eventually Rose decided to open the aviary door and let the two love birds fly off together into the sunset. Galahs can live for up to eighty years, and while they form permanent pair bonds, they will find a new mate if their partner dies. I like to think of the two of them out there somewhere, enjoying a late-life romance with a side serve of onion weed.

Galahs two heads together corellas background crop

Some people – especially farmers – see corellas as pests. Apparently the long-billed species are a particular blight on ovals and golf courses, thanks to the six inch deep holes they can dig for roots and corms with their spectacular beak. To be honest this habit endears them to me – there’s a fine radical history to the defacing of golf courses.

Dandelion at MQ extreme closeup

There was obviously good eating to be had last week on Macquarie’s sweeping lawns. I wonder, though, if the very oldest parrots that visit the campus still remember the finer pickings from the time, in the sixties, when it was all market gardens, orchards and chicken farms.

Long beaked corella with grass in front of sign long and skinny amend