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

 

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

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.

Whipbird mum having a wash

Having a splash

If the coast is clear, the youngster appears.

Juvenile whipbird perched on a bird bath

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

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

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.

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Two juvenile spinebills near the natural pool in the angophora tree

Juvenile spinebills playing, fighting or perhaps play fighting

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 whipbird shirtfronting a juvenile by the angophora pool

Adult spinebill after a celebratory bathe

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

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

Loves and leaves

Yet more lock-down luck.  Company, space, a rambling garden desperately requiring attention, three national parks in walking distance and enough devices to make home learning while working full time quasi-feasible – I already have plenty to be grateful for.  And now, the collared sparrowhawks are back, getting friendly in the neighbour’s pine tree.  They have perfect timing.  It’s just at that point in the lockdown – eight weeks in – when even the most avid homebody/hoarder is running out of distractions.  I’m not saying that trying to get a photograph of the local raptors having sex is my only reason to get out of bed in the morning, but it is a reason.

Morning does seem to be the time for it.  No pictures – this is a family-friendly blog, after all (nothing to do with me being slow on the draw with the zoom lens).  When the sparrowhawks are around, we usually hear them soon after sunrise.  There’s relentless calling from near the top of a tree – mostly, I think from the female.  The male perches, in a diffident kind of way, in a nearby branch.  Then they’re at it, with a brief distinctive flurry of calls.  Afterward, the male shuffles or flaps a distance away on the branch, studiously avoiding eye contact.

The one time I managed to watch the process from go to whoa, afterwards the female chilled out in more or less the same spot high in the pine tree, catching the morning rays, and keeping an eye out for small bird snacks.

Meanwhile, what I think was the male (though this might be a gender stereotype), started attempting some DIY.  Collared sparrowhawks build a shallow nest of stick, high in the canopy, and line it with fresh leaves each year.   This pair seem to be using the same spot in the very top of the neighbour’s tree, notable for its inconvenient lack of a line of sight from my place.

Watching the male gathering construction materials, I’m once again reminded of the limitations of the sparrowhawk’s modest beak and  delicate legs for this kind of building work.  The bird seemed to spend a lot of time eyeing up flimsy looking twigs and then flailing around with its wings in an attempt, mostly unsuccessful, to break some bits off.

 

As you can see, this bird had a red-hot go at getting some twigs from dead branches on one of the usual pine trees.  Eventually, however, the nest-building one of the pair got a bit experimental.  The liquidambar in our front yard – stripped of its leaves by winter, and not so good for ambush hunting – got a visit, solely for construction purposes.

However, some of the neighbour’s shrubs with thin whippy stems and fine needle-like leaves and seemed to be nest-material of choice.

Even so, the process was neither dignified nor ubiquitously successful.  These photographs are both fails.  Photographic fail – frustrated nest builders crashing around in the shrubbery are not an easy capture.  Also, nest building fail – neither of these twigs made it back to home base.  I did, however, see more success on another round of visits to this same bit of greenery the next day.

And they’ve kept at it, with occasional success.

Watching the nest-reno in action has made me reflect on our luck in having these gorgeous critters hanging out nearby – and  on what kinds of habitat create that kind of luck.  Sparrowhawks need tall trees to nest in. This pair (assuming it’s the same one returning each year) nest in one pine tree, and use a sequence of three others nearby as regular hunting spots.  Thanks to lots of greenery, we have loads of undemanding smallish birds on the premises of the right size for raptor snacks – little and red wattlebirds, chicks of the ubiquitous brush turkeys and, of course, loads of bloody noisy miners.

I’ve definitely seen the sparrowhawks devouring birds that we don’t see at our place though – I’m sure they hunt in the national park that’s 500 metres down the hill.  Here’s one of the fledglings from a couple of years ago, chowing down on what I think is a white cheeked honeyeater – I’ve never seen one at our place, but they’re pretty common in the bush not far away.

In the two seasons when they successfully raised chicks, the fledglings seemed to practice short hop flights from one pine to another.  The liquidambar in our yard is an occasionally hunting spot in summer, and I do wonder if the cicadas that appear to feed on its sap in mid-summer offer useful meals for the chicks.

And then there’s the necessity for nest-lining trees with appropriately flimsy branches.

Sparrowhawks are generalists and live all over the place – everywhere except the most arid regions of Australia.  So they’re obviously not too fussy about the finer details of their immediate environment.   They’re pretty low key around people and don’t seem to mind suburbia.  I wonder how much they need the bushland I’m finding so sustaining in lock-down.

The sparrowhawk pair isn’t the only birds aware of the value of this bit of floristic real estate, though.  I’m pretty sure currawongs took some of the sparrowhawk’s nestlings in previous clutches, and I wonder whether the presence of these smart and social predators has kept the pair away for the last three years.  But yesterday a bit of argy-bargy with another of the locals – a family of kookaburras.  I’ve been seeing them around a bit more than usual this winter, surveying the scene from our dawn redwood and the remnants of our long-dead pine trees.

Yesterday I wandered up the drive to see if I could capture any trysts or DIY activity, and there was a cheeky kookaburra in the exact  spot I saw the sparrowhawk chilling in the day before.  And another, on a second favoured hunting perch, further up the tree.  The sparrowhawks were in the vicinity, but as soon as one landed in that pine, the kookas were after it.

Here’s a deeply discombobulated sparrowhawk, catching its breath a few metres away.  A minute later, the kookaburras were back and the pair of raptors hightailed it into the distance.

I feel stupidly anxious about this, for some reason.  Every year about this time, we hear the sparrowhawks and I’m always hoping they’ll hang around and try to raise some chicks again.  For the last couple of seasons we’ve been disappointed.  But this year, silly as it seems, it feels a bit more high-stakes, and not just because we’re stuck at home with near-infinite opportunities for bird watching.  It feels symbolic even.  If this avian couple’s romance and nestbuilding comes to fruition, somehow it signifies that my little family will stay safe here too, safe and sane and together.  And if not… these things somehow seem less assured.

But of course, that’s a nonsense.  Birdwatcher magical thinking.  If the sparrowhawks find a better place to nest, and our trees get a different set of inhabitants, there’ll still be things to do, birds to listen out for, a different family to get to know.

The previous adventures of our local sparrowhawks

Sex, nests and dogfighting

Collared sparrowhawks vs Pacific bazas

Motherhood on a windy day – the sparrowhawk chick grows up

Death and sibling rivalry

Sparrowhawk summer

Battle of the baby birds

Welcome beautiful stranger

Growing up is hard to swallow

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.

 

An ice storm, a flood and eight invisible fish: the fraught tale of a frog pond

hailstones in hand crop long

Water features have everywhere in Berowra this last year.  With half the suburb’s roofs smashed to bits by golfball sized hailstones just before Christmas, an ice-storm followed an hour or so later by torrential rain, lots of those water features were indoors and distinctly unwelcome.  In a suburb that has come to be known over the months of waiting for insurers to come to the party, as “Tarpaulin Heights” we got off relatively lightly, with our indoor water feature making only a cameo one-time appearance.

Inundation was the origin of our new outdoor water feature as well.  Thanks to topography and a inexplicably ruptured stormwater drain – I did fear at one time it was an inexplicably ruptured sewer, so I’m thankful for small mercies – when the rain comes down in Berowra, most of it seems to come through our backyard.

The weather pattern in Australia now, even here on the coastal fringe where the trees are still alive and there is grass, which is sometimes even green, seems to be long dry months punctuated by occasional periods of quasi-apocalyptic rainfall.  So catching some of the run off and making some use of it seemed like a good idea.  And then there’s my fantasies about frogs.

So in December last year, I dug a big hole, downhill from the stormwater drain and uphill from my veggie garden.  Deep holes are not easy to dig on Hawkesbury sandstone.  I was aiming for a depth of no more than 30cm, since I really didn’t want to have to fence my pond, but even 30 cm was a push. I rationalised the shallowness of the hole with reference to the gently sloping edges that would allow the amphibians of my dreams to rest comfortably on the edge of the pond.  Not a very convincing excuse to avoid further shovel work.

releasing fish

I lined the hole with a few centimetres of sand from the local garden centre.  Carpet underlay is sometimes recommended for a layer underneath pond liner but I went an old trampoline mat, since that’s the kind of thing I have lying around in my shed.  Retrospectively I’m not sure that was a great idea.  On top of that I put down rubber pond liner – quite a lot more expensive than vinyl, but not plastic and, in a household full of underused bikes, I figured, quite patchable.  In theory.  Underneath that footlingly small pond is six square metres of heavy duty rubber.

lily leaves late Jan

Nymphoides montana. I think.

Sensible guides to pond making recommend that you set up your fountains and filters properly, then add native plants, give it a week or so and then add fish.   However, a couple of days after setting up the pond with a solar powered aerator, native grasses (Carex fascularis and Schoenoplectus Mucronatus) and pond plants (Marsilea mutica, and if memory serves, Nymphoides montana) I spotted a huge number of wrigglers frisking gaily around their new habitat, and decided we would need to go fish shopping.

Our neighbours had demonstrated their true commitment to biodiversity by not just accepting but actively welcoming the idea of frog mating calls 24-7 outside their bedroom windows.  However, we thought adding a vast number of mosquitoes to the local ecosystem might not necessarily go do down equally well.  We decided to buy two pairs of pacific blue eyes to populate our pond, while we waited for other insect eaters – frogs and dragonfly larvae and the like – to arrive.

Pacific blue eyes are small fish – less than 8 cm in length and usually much smaller – that are keen mozzie eaters but not big enough to devour frog spawn.  They’re locals all up and down the East Coast, inhabiting both fresh waters and estuaries, so not too fussy about water quality.  Our local aquarium shop had a stock of them, though the staff were pretty clueless about which fish were native and which were not, offering us white cloud minnows (originating in China) as a possible alternative.  We took our two pairs of tiny, quasi transparent fish home and Ms 12 and good friend and frog lover from next door carefully introduced them to the pond, taking time to equalise the temperature of the water to minimise shock.

Fish introduction 2 before flood crop

All that happened around midday on December 20, the day of the hail storm and subsequent torrential downpour.  Within hours of settling our blue eyes carefully into our little pond, our backyard looked like this:

Ms 12 was desperately trying to block the exit from the pond, but I think realistically the Pacific blue eyes were halfway to Berowra Creek by this point.  There was much weeping and gnashing off teeth, counterbalanced, on my part at least, by a certain smugness that I hadn’t bought white cloud minnows or gambezi fish or something else that you wouldn’t want to end up in your local waterway.

Of course, what with the water being murky and the fish being small, shy and in essence invisible, we weren’t quite sure if we still had pacific blue eyes or not. Rather than waiting for the mosquito murmuration that would tell us that we didn’t, and with an eye to diminishing the level of weeping, we went back to the aquarium shop for yet another couple of pairs.

That was a nearly a year ago now, and there have been no further sightings of the fish.  The solar powered bubbler carked it in another downpour, along with the rainbow nardoo which I accidentally ripped out while clearing out excess algae during winter months.   But the wriggler count has stayed low and the pond has done pretty well as a habitat.  Not to mention the fabulous opportunity it’s given me to buy new plants (full list at the bottom of the blog)

On the down-side, I’ve been surprised how often I have to top the pond up with water.  Either it has a surprisingly high level of evaporation for a pond in shade much of the day or the logs and rocks I dragged around the yard to make a naturalistic edging have punctured the rubber lining in some mysterious but annoying way.  Perhaps there’s a reason people don’t recommend using old trampoline mats underneath your pond.

One way or another, I have become a pond slave.  I’m constantly ruminating on where I’m going to get my next hit of  non-chlorinated water. The many many hail-holes in our gutters all have a bucket underneath them and I usually have a bucket of tap water off-gassing somewhere around the yard. I have heard rumours there may be better ways of collecting rainwater than this.  Working on it.

Blue banded bee in flight cropped

Blue banded bee on Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells)

It was lovely to see the blue banded bees the visiting koala bells and dragonflies hovering over the water, but we’ve had to be patient with the frogs. The approach you take to getting a frog is a bit like the approach 1950s women had to take to getting a boyfriend – make yourself appealing and wait.  Chytrid fungus is devastating frog populations across the world and if you go and collect frogspawn or tadpoles you can help it spread.  So we waited.

Skinks by the pond closeup

A few months back I heard the distinctive pock of a striped marsh frog in amongst the waterside foliage. I was beside myself with excitement, but after I let the chooks out to freerange for the afternoon, the marshie disappeared.  Troubling. It seemed like having both chickens and frogs might be an impossible dream.

Apricot by the pond 2 crop

Apricot nibbling at the microlaena stipodes lawn.  And possibly frogs.

But by the end of winter, another striped marsh frog was in situ, vamping the local females with the alluring noise of a loudly dripping tap.  Perhaps this male was too large to be wolfed down by the chooks on their visits to the pond for a drink and an insect snack.

And, glory be, last week we spotted a couple of handfuls of tadpoles, huddling at the bottom of the pond near some algae.  I am now officially a frog mumma, as my daughter said.  But I’m not feeling too much eco-smugness.  According to the Australian Museum, the striped marsh frog is an unfussy beast – it likes a pond but even a polluted ditch will do.  Apparently they’ve been found breeding in dog’s drinking bowls.

So no pressure.  The bar has been set low for us as aspiring frog parents. Let’s see how low we can limbo.

Pond in Nov 19

Native plants in and around our pond.

Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells) – blue or pink flowers in summer.

Bacopa monnieri (Brahmi, memory herb) – small white flowers.  Grows in and near water – edible plant.

Carex fascularis (tassel sedge).  Grows in moist to wet soils in part shade, up to a metre high.

Centella asiatica (Gotu kola, pennywort).  Edible plant.  Grows in part shade in moist soils.

Cissus Antarctica (kangaroo vine)    Planted in the drier area around the pond.

Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern).  Grows in moist areas, nice pink new growth.

Finicia nodosa

Hibbertia scandens (guinea flower)   Flowers in shade,

Isolepsis cernua (Live wire) – low growing grass with interesting bright seed heads.

Juncus flavidus (billabong rush)

Libertia paniculata – in moist areas near pond in shade, alongside ferns. White flowers in early spring.

Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife)- growing in drier areas near pond.  Dark purple flowers in autumn.  Dies down in winter.

Marsilea mutica (rainbow nardoo) – pond plant.  Beautiful patterned leaves.

Microlaena stipoides (weeping grass) – grass surrounding pond.  Grows well in shade in damp or dry conditions.

Mazus pumlio (swamp mazus) – grows in moist soil.  White flowers in autumn.

Nymphoides montana – pond plant with beautiful yellow flowers.

Peperomia (native) – native succulent that grows well in shade.

Poa labillardiere (tussock grass) – grown in drier areas around the pond

Schoenoplectus Mucronatus – rush growing in the pond.  Interesting spiky seed pods.

Tetragonia tetragonoides (warrigal greens) – edible plant. Grows very well in damp or dry soil in part shade. Delicious to humans and also chickens.

Tripladeua cunninghamii (bush lily) – grows well in part shade, pink flowers in spring. I  killed it.

Dragonfly dark later

The sacred comes to the neighbourhood

kingfisher in pine tree 2 long bright

I was just nipping back from depositing a small part of our egg mountain with our friends across the road last week, when something odd flew across the drive – something I’d never seen at our place before.  It turned out to be this guy – a sacred kingfisher.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to see a kingfisher here, a kilometre or more and a couple of hundred metres up the hill from the creek.  Possibly because I do regularly see these lovely birds on my paddles in the Hawkesbury – hunting in the mangroves lining Milson’s Point; regurgitating pellets in full view of the expensive holiday homes in Calabash Bay or this young ‘un, hanging out near the public wharf at the questionably named Dusty Hole.

Juvenile kingfisher head cocked

Juvenile sacred kingfisher by Berowra Creek

Though I have repeatedly spotted them in bushland far from decent stretches of water, I managed to convince myself that they were fishing in the local tiny, slightly fetid pools.  But of course, ten minutes of googling gave me the correct answer.  Unlike the smaller azure kingfishers – the sacred mostly eat terrestrial prey – insects, skinks and even sometimes small birds. They rarely actually eat fish: there should be some kind of by-law, right?

Azure kingfisher amended crop

Azure kingfisher chilling out in the winter fog

Our visitor hung out for quite a while in the neighbours’ backyard, giving me the chance to race off for my camera and get into a possibly compromising position with my zoom lens propped up on the fence, pointing in the general direction of their living room windows.  The kingfisher was certainly aware a stalker was watching him from the bushes but didn’t seem too fazed.

Kingfisher looking at me close 2 crop square amended

“What are you looking at? Stalker!”

After my efforts to create bird habitat over the last few years, I felt a bit jealous that this gorgeous creature was choosing to hang out in our neighbour’s back garden.  However, I have to reconcile myself that their densely-planted native garden has the low shrubs these birds like to perch on while they’re waiting to dive down onto their prey in the leaf litter, without the loud woodwork projects, inquisitive chickens, trampoline and horde of neighbourhood kids that ramp up the action in ours.

Kingfisher wings out long amended

A wing stretch from our visiting sacred kingfisher

Sacred kingfishers are surprisingly mobile it seems.  They are the only kingfisher in these parts that is migratory.  Many (though not all) of the birds that live in the southern parts of Australia migrate each each to north Queensland and PNG – it’s a partial migrant like most other Australian migratory birds. I suspect that the local sacred kingfishers – or at least some of them – hang around in the winter.  Peter and Judy Smith (2012), keeping tabs on the arrival dates of migratory birds in Blaxland in the lower Blue Mountains, for over 30 years never saw a sacred kingfisher in the winter, but I’ve seen a couple on the Hawkesbury in the colder months – hanging out in America Bay in April and basking in the late afternoon light by Berowra Creek in July, right in the middle of winter.  Or “winter” as my British friends like to call it.

When I visited Wellington a couple of years ago I was surprised to see something very familiar hunting in a suburban park. A sub-species, Todiramphus sanctus vagans, that looks very very like our locals lives in New Zealand/Aotearoa as well.

NZ Kingfisher lit profile sharp bigger crop better

The New Zealand kingfisher

I started speculating on how the sacred kingfishers got over the Tasman but it seem their range is less about being blown off course on migratory treks than the epic distribution of another bird to which it is closely related – the collared kingfisher .  It’s a one less frequently seen in Australia – found only on coastlines in the northern half of Australia – and never seen at all by me so no pics. I got nothing!  Collared kingfishers (sometimes called the mangrove kingfisher) seem to be less generalist than the sacred, favouring mangroves and the forests immediately behind them – but has an impressive range.

In an article offering a genetic analysis of this species and its descendants in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific islands, Michael Andersen and his colleagues describe as it as “the most widely distributed of the Pacific’s ‘great speciators’. Its 50 subspecies constitute a species complex that is distributed over 16 000 km from the Red Sea to Polynesia” (Andersen 2015).  The sacred seems to be one of the species that evolved from it.  Intriguingly collared kingfishers are no longer a migratory species, but Andersen speculates that “the migratory nature of T. sanctus is an evolutionary vestige of the ancestral Todiramphus lineage still exhibiting the colonization phase” (Andersen 2015).

Kingfisher and branches 4 long

One way or another, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the sacred in our neighbourhood.  After all, I’ve always known you can witness sacred on the water, or in the forest, or in the suburbs.  Not everywhere, but in more places than you would think – as long as you remember to look.  In this case – in the bushes.

Further References

Andersen, Michael, Hannah T Shult, Alice Cibois, Jean-Claude Thibault, Christopher E Filardi, Robert G Moyle (2015) “Rapid diversification and secondary sympatry in Australo-Pacific kingfishers” Royal Society Open Science Feb 2(2)

Debus, SJS (2007) “Avifauna of remnant bushland on the Twee Coast of Northern New South Wales” Sunbird 37(2)

Lindenmayer, David B. , Michael A. McCarthy, Hugh P. Possingham and Sarah Legge (2001) “A Simple Landscape-Scale Test of a Spatially Explicit Population Model: Patch Occupancy in Fragmented South-Eastern Australian Forests” Oikos, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Mar), pp. 445-458

Loyn, Richard H., Edward G. McNabb, Phoebe Macak, Philippa Noble (2007) “Eucalypt plantations as habitat for birds on previously cleared farmland in south-eastern Australia” Biological Conservation 137 533–548

Smith, Peter & Judy Smith (2012) “Climate change and bird migration in southeastern
Australia” Emu – Austral Ornithology, 112:4, 333-342

Kingfisher light against pine background square

Winners and weeds

A sighting in the garden today: brown cuckoo doves.  I’ve seen them here before, startlingly portly long-tailed pigeons, hanging out in the neighbours’ tangle of tall trees.  I spotted at least three today, one futilely hopping from branch to branch, doggedly followed by a stouter fella: I guess it’s breeding season.

I felt tremendously smug when I first saw this rainforest bird above my washing line.  I should have known better, having read Tim Low’s New Nature not so long ago. This is one bird doing alright out in the Anthropocene.  It’s a winner.

Brown cuckoo doves are spreading south from their usual stomping grounds.  I’m not surprised.  If I were a tropical bird, I wouldn’t mind it round Sydney at the moment: third warmest June on record, more than 2 degrees warmer than the longterm average – balmy!

And they don’t mind weeds either.  Apparently they relish regrowth around roads and logged forest, and lantana and wild tobacco suit them down to the ground.  Witness this shot of a cuckoo dove snaffling fruit from our embarrassingly giant large-leafed privet.  Privet tree.  Yes, yes, we are going to kill it off and chop it down – the Round-Up is in the cupboard… But reading Low has given me pause.  When we poison our oversized weed tree, will we lose our nifty rainforest critters too?