Who lives in our backyard? How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention.
I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think? “Magpie”. Humans, huh?
Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies. But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction. Well, a lego construction with integral insects. Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.
Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away. Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.
That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be. Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round. They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants.  If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.
And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.
There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg. I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.
Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.
I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists. Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious. In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.” I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”. Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”. I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.
Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein? I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money. Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.
And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from. The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.
But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie. Nude trees held no allure for her. She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.
I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds. Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit. I’m hoping she got the best of them. What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.
I hope she’ll be back. I’ll be keeping watch.
