It’s all about the young koels in our yard at the moment. We have at least two of them hanging around the back yard, begging for food and slowly destroying the mental health of their red wattlebird adoptive parents. Well, I hope for their sake there are more than one set of parents doing the provisioning.
While I’m still hearing koels begging endlessly, I have a suspicion that the parents are trying to back off from supplying food. As a parent of teenagers I can certainly empathise. Wattlebirds normally feed fledgelings for two or three weeks after leaving the nest. The soundscape of our yard started to be dominated by the pleas of the koel youngsters around mid-January, so I think the parents’ patience is starting to wear pretty thin. I’m pretty sure that the koels are trying to push that envelope though.
I watched this rather grown-up looking chick sitting on a branch to beg relentlessly for at least half an hour without attention. It whined and shuffled, whined and groomed.
It seemed to despair of getting any attention at one point and started rummaging around for its own tucker. Clearly this flaccid flower didn’t cut the mustard.
Eventually the relentless moaning did result in a couple of snacks.
While waiting …. and waiting, and waiting… (I was almost as impatient as the koel for this fledgeling to get a feed…) I spotted a second youngster lurking nearby. It looked a bit skinnier and its plumage a bit patchier and at first I wondered if it was a younger chick, hogging the attention of the exhausted parents. But usually female koels only lays a single egg in a nest – which make sense since the chick heaves competitor eggs and hatchlings out. Sometimes, it seems, koel females will return to lay an egg in a sequence of different nests so perhaps this second youngster was being fed by a different harried parent. I feel kind of relieved on their behalf.
One way or another, all that whining seems to be getting less of a response this weather. So our backyard koel chicks are having to forage for their own food. This nugget looks kind of unappealing, though perhaps no worse than the spider that I saw mum or dad retrieving a couple of weeks ago.
Our neighbour’s bangalow palm seems to be a favourite foraging ground.
Perhaps the temptations of the palms are a bit too great. Last week, I watched a youngster beg from a branch near our back verandah for a while. No parental attention was forthcoming, and I thought it had given up, as it went surprisingly silent for quite some time, hunching and looking pensive. Then this happened:
I think this mysterious fruit must have been stashed in the bird’s crop, . Certainly this same koel was stacking away the berries at an extraordinary rate on its visit to the bangalow palm, so the idea that it was tucking it away for a later snack seems pretty plausible. Having read a bit about the way birds use crops – a muscular pouch in the oesophagus that stores food – I am now tremendously jealous. What a terrific idea! Why the hell don’t humans have one? I suppose blokes can use beards, although that’s a visually disturbing alternative.
Koels – noisy, whiny parasites – get a bit of a bad rap around here, but I can’t help admire them – their chutzpah, their gorgeous feathers, and their admirable capacity to never, it seems, go hungry.
