Blue eyes and biteys

Brown cuckoo dove eye

The glamorous eye of the brown cuckoo-dove

We’ve had a visit from some old friends this week: a gorgeous pair of brown cuckoo-doves. who each took a constitutional around our patio before reconvening for an exhaustive mutual preening session above the chicken run.  They’re rainforest birds, but don’t mind wandering away from damp gullies in search of tucker – fruit, mostly, along with seeds and the occasional flower blossom.  You’ll often find them in disturbed areas and roadsides, feeding off weeds like lantana and wild tobacco, so what with the great swathes being carved, legally and illegally, through East Coast bushland, they’re doing better than many other forest loving critters these days.

And they are expanding their range as well.  Back in the day, Sydney was the southernmost point you’d reliably find a cuckoo-dove.  No longer.  Just a continuation, I guess, of the species’ earlier journeys from the north, where several close relatives still live. In fact, the amboyna cuckoo-dove of Indonesia  and the Sultan’s cuckoo-dove of Sulawesi were considered part of the same species only a couple of years ago when I last wrote about these portly visitors.

Cuckoo dove looking back from water crop

Brown cuckoo-dove quenching its thirst in our bird bath

I’m not sure what attracted them to our place, now we’ve executed the humungous broad leafed privet that used to lure them here.  The fruit-bearing natives we’ve planted to replace this nasty weed – lillypillies, blueberry ash, koda, bolwarra, native gardenia, small leafed tamarind, brush muttonwood – are all too teeny to offer snacks of any significance.  I spotted the cuckoo-doves innocently drinking from the bird bath but I suspect they may also be implicated in the overnight disappearance of the fruit from our mulberry tree.  Though since I chose to plant the mulberry right next to our washing line, maybe that’s a good thing.

Cuckoo dove long tail amend

For me, cuckoo doves are all about those beautiful blue eyes, though their exceedingly long tails are also a feature, helping them with fruit nibbling acrobatics, and at one time  earning them the name pheasant-tailed pigeon.  But as far as science is concerned, they’re mainly interesting for their body lice.

Cuckoo pair grooming 2 amended cropped

A female brown cuckoo-dove being groomed by its mate

Normally, it seems, parasites co-evolve with their hosts.  A family of lice tend to be found only on one family of birds (and in fact, each species of lice normally exclusively hang out with one species of bird).  But the Ischnocera – the family of louse that this pair are trying to remove from each other, in a rather romantic manner – can be found on all manner of birds – not just pigeons and doves, but also pheasants, quails, partridges and indeed megapodes.  Though not apparently our local megapode, the brush turkeys, or “the bloody bloody brush turkeys” as they are usually referred to in our household.

But if cuckoo-doves brought their own personal payload of body lice with them when they moved south to Australia, they also do a fine job of cleaning up some other pesky insects –  fruit flies.  Along with ripe fruits, cuckoo-doves gobble up loads and loads of larvae.  One researcher went so far as to say that vertebrates like brown cuckoo doves are the “natural enemies of fruit flies” (Drew, 1987, 287), words to bring joy into the heart of a sub-tropical gardener.  But further reading crushes these dreams.  Yes, cuckoo-doves, (along with rats) made a huge dent in the fruit fly population.  But unfortunately, they did so in the course of eating most of the available fruit.

I guess, then, its lucky I’m hooked on the looks of our frugivorous visitors, and I’m not banking on them for pest control.

Gorgeous eye closeup for amend

The blue eyes of the brown cuckoo-dove

Additional references

Drew, A. J. I. (1987) “Reduction in Fruit Fly (Tephritidae : Dacinae) Populations in their Endemic Rainforest Habitat by Frugivorous Vertebrates” Australian Journal of Zoology 35 283-8

Gibbs, David (2001) Pigeons and Doves: a guide to the pigeons and doves of the world, Bloomsbury Books

Gosper, Carl and Gosper, Dennis (2008) “Foods of Pigeons and Doves in Fragmented Landscapes of Subtropical Eastern Australia” Australian Field Ornithology, 25, 76–86

Johnson, Kevin, Weckstein, Jason, Meyer, Mathys (2011) “There and back again: switching between host orders by avian body lice (Ischnocera: Goniodidae)” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2011, 102, 614–625

Day of the Dead Bugs

It’s a pity the internet isn’t scratch and sniff.  The citrus flowers were splendiferous this year – the place was suffused with perfume for weeks.  And now there are lots of baby fruit on the trees – not only on the lemon, mandarin, oranges and grapefruit down in the veggie garden but even on the limes and the kumquat suffering in pots by the back door.

But there’s a nasty smell taking over the garden these days. The stinkbugs are back.

I’ve spotted bronze orange bugs in the garden before but never quite got around to doing anything about it.  I’ve gone for a bit of a Darwinist approach with insect pests in the past.  Organic Tough Love, we might call it.  “Deal with it!  I’m busy!” has worked okay with the Eureka lemon and the Freemont mandarin (and the ruby grapefruit seems to be doing alright too).  But the poor baby blood orange has only grown about 5 cm since I planted it, thanks to sooty mould and aphids (… okay, thanks to neglect).  The one mature fruit tree that was here when we arrived has been smothered by potato vine, scratched by chooks, starved of water and fertiliser, permanently shaded and, of course, parasitised by the odd citrus bug.  No wonder we’ve only seen 3 rather unpleasant oranges in the last 5 years.

So, bugs, it’s time.

There’s something of a 60s Bond film about these pics – I think it’s the Chromakey background.  But maybe it’s also the general Bondishness of stink bugs.  You can imagine a cable car zipping up to their citadel at the top of the lemon tree.  And 007 would need any number of secret weapons from Q’s underground lab to deal with that nefarious blinding spray.  There’s Sean Connery converting a dapper hat into an oxygen mask before fighting off the green and orange horde.

No fancy equipment for Uncle Harry and I when we set out on our mission this morning, just protective glasses, ill fitting rubber gloves and a trug of boiling hot waterNo-one lost an eye, though by the time the bucket was filled with colourful corpses we both smelled atrocious and Harry had a mysterious brown stain on his beetle-pinching fingers.

Despite being a vegetarian for a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d make much of a Buddhist.  Meat-loving Harry felt guilty about the citrus beetle death toll whereas I wielded the seccateurs gloating “Die, bugs, die!!”.  While I was up a stool lopping the most heavily infested branches off the lemon tree (it needed a haircut anyway), I spotted a Halloween-themed scene which made me feel less unnaturally ghoulish.  I particularly like the bit of fly viscera splattered on the right hand side of the frame: Spidey was obviously scuttling from the scene of the crime.  We killed a lot of bugs today but at least we didn’t paralyse them, regurgitate stomach acid onto them and then suck their corpses dry.

Although strictly speaking, if you could face a meal of stinkbug entrails, this probably would probably be a more sustainable alternative to death by washing up liquid. On that funereal note, enjoy All Soul’s Day, folks.  Let’s hope we don’t see any stinkbugs returning from the grave.

It’s not easy eating greens

Maybe it’s a careless-vegetarian-with-low-level-iron-deficiency thing, but I’m often hankering after greens. Thankfully, the green leafies seem to be one of the few foodgroups to which brushtailed possums, rats, bandicoots, brush turkeys and chickens – the non-human beneficiaries of my most of my horticultural efforts – all seem relatively indifferent.  When things were very barren in the yard recently, my sorrel plant, a marvellous perennial that, with the deep taproots of a potential weed, soldiers on with minimal attention, was munched by something with a sophisticated palate for citrus flavours and a high tolerance of oxalic acid.  Occasionally some beastie has a light snack on my other trusty standby, the rainbow chard, but on the whole my favourite  greens seem immune to animal predation.

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Having failed to grow them from seed, the Warrigal greens I bought from Daleys have been a cracker.  They’ve threaded their way through a garden bed that, with only a couple of hours sun a day, has pushed the envelope for even shade tolerant plants like Davidson’s plum, macadamia and callicoma serratifolia.  Andy Ninja regularly scratches her way through that neck of the woods, grubbing for remnants of trad, but she hasn’t managed to loosen the Warrigal greens from their moorings, and we’ve had it in everything from lasagne to dal to quiche without any visible dent appearing in the supply.  Rumour has it that they self-seed prodigiously, so there’s promise of more next year.

During a couple of La Nina years we had watercress soup on the menu for about 18 months on the trot thanks to a semi-shaded spot near the chook run: boggy in torrential downpours but otherwise ordinary garden soil.  A soft spot for umbrelliferous flowers and the aphid eating critters they attract, and a lazy habit of chucking decrepit parsley plants under my fruit trees as mulch has meant that Italian parsley pretty much dominates the seed bed in the herb garden and food forest around the back door.  Whenever the moisture level and the temperature is right, a new generation surges forward underneath the potted makrit lime and the Cavendish banana and even between the paving stones.

I had rocket doing the same in the veggie patch a couple of years ago, until I put the kibosh on it by over-zealously collecting the contents of the papery pods.  I must have been indulging in some herbal fantasy of seed saving, and so I have feral rocket no more.  At least for the moment.  Because of the tedious necessity to earn a living, I’m never on top of the weeding, and as the years pass I’ve started to recognise the seedlings of my favourite plants wherever they appear so I can “edit” the garden rather than, in that hateful bit of business-ese, attempting to “grow it”.

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However, a particular favourite has proven to a more difficult proposition.  I love bok choi and all its cousins, but especially the look and taste of red bok choi, an F1 hybrid that’s really a luscious purple, a perfect match for the “house” beans, Purple King; the salad enriching Giant Mustard and the beautiful but apparently impossible to grow purple brussel sprouts.

I have spent far too much time, money and mental energy over the last three years trying to produce an anemia-busting harvest of bok choi.  In year 1, following the gospel of Jackie French, I tried to shelter my precious cruciferous greens in a guild of fellow travellers, with limited success.  In year two, I went for a guerilla strategy – my choi germinated under the cover of the great hairy leaves of my zucchini.  I was optimistic but the cabbage whites were not so easy to fool.  But I have made a break-through, thanks to a “chuck all the seeds in the bottom of the packets together and hope for the best” approach.  Coriander!  So impossible to grow in Sydney, always starting so well and then going to seed before you’ve even got a garnish out of it.  But apparently, you can keep the barn door closed (to moths? where is this metaphor going?) even if your coriander has bolted.  The bok choi that grew in amongst my incorrigible coriander was completely untouched.  So under the shelter of brush turkey-thwarting hoops of wire and the modest veil of a rather tattered veggie net, in goes bok choi and sacrificial coriander along with the aragula and the mizuna, the watercress and the daikon.  If I can crack this one, the purple brussel sprouts are next!