River returning

Eucalypt awakening

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted about the river. It’s not that I haven’t been out.  I’ve been up and down the same stretch of Berowra Creek – from my favourite haunts Bujwa Bay to the vine-hung eucalypts at Crosslands – often over the last two years, thankful that this marvellous estuary is at the end of my street.

A cormorant claims Berowra Creek

But paddling the same waters again and again, walking the same trails that loop above and around and down to the river, there’s rarely been something new and remarkable to tell a story about (and in the endless covid work-crunch almost never time to sit down and tell any kind of story to my satisfaction).  ‘

But sometimes, it’s not the new that’s remarkable. Paddling the stretch of river, walking the same firetrails to the same lookouts again and again, sharpens your eyes to small changes in the light or the tide, the movement of mist or ripples or birds in flight.

Spiderweb morning

What do you see when you step into the same river, time after time after time?

The sun advances and retreats with the fog.

Saltmarsh and sun

The big rains come, shifting the sandbars.  One day you see kids playing in the shallows, another day, in the same spot, fishermen casting.

A haunted boat, swaying gently, appears at a mooring

My pictures from these outings deceive me.  Is that the same bay in another season, or perhaps a different line of mangroves in the same early light?

The landscape blurs: sandstone into treescape, mist into bird.

During lockdowns, borders closed, the still river became our local art gallery.

And now lockdown is over, and my pictures of the river are in a real gallery!

They’re on show at The Cottage, a community art space at Brooklyn.  It’s all thanks to the wonderful Ana Rubio at Hornsby Council, who remembered my last exhibition at Hornsby’s Wallarobba Art and Cultural Centre in 2020 and asked me to display my photos as part of a six council public consultation process on Dyarubbin/The Hawkesbury.  A big part of the consultation is a Celebration of Deerubbin from 10-3 on Saturday June 18, with stalls and kids’ activities right by The Cottage.

High contrast bridge

My exhibition “River Returning” is on throughout June – you can come and see it between 10 and 3 on weekends.  I’ll be there much of the time and it would be great to see you!

The prints in this post are all on sale.  They’re giclee art printed on Canson rag, and you can find a pricelist below.

River returning pricelist

  • Eucalypt awakening,     84 x 56.6 cm, $400
  • Cormorants and their shadows   53.23 x 35.9 cm, $180
  • Spiderweb morning, 53.23 x 42 cm, $230
  • Shack on the water 54.24 x 42 cm, $230
  • River Mondrian  59.4 x 39.6 cm, $250
  • Sun fishing  28 x 42 cm, $120
  • Naa Badu walkers 28.94 x 18 cm, $60
  • Mangrove nursery 28.52 x 18 cm, $60
  • Naa Badu boaties  27.7 x 18 cm, $60
  • Mangrove island  28.19 x 18 cm, $60
  • Fishing boat figures 29.72 x 42 cm, $120
  • Heron on Hawkesbury sandstone  54 x 42 cm, $230
  • Three hills  38.82 x 42 cm,$140
  • Bundled boat  42 x 52.38cm, $230
  • Silver eyed boat  42 x 63 cm, $250
  • Blue boat 34.92 x 52.38, $180
  • Salt marsh and sun 59.4 x 39.04 cm, $230
  • Joe Crafts Bay abstract  42 x 28 cm, $120
  • Shadow trees 42 x 28 cm, $120
  • High contrast bridge 53.23 x 32.67 cm,$180
  • A cormorant claims Berowra Creek 84 x 56.07 cm, $400
  • The rower 53.23 x 35.34 cm, $180

If you like a particular image but would prefer it in a different size, do let me know – I can easily get smaller or larger versions printed. Just tell me the size you prefer.

Other prints, from my previous exhibitions on Dangar Island and the Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre in Hornsby, are also available. Check out the “Art and the River” link at the bottom of this page.  You can also follow me on Insta: my handle is mccnmatt.

To order, please email me on nicole.matthews@mq.edu.au and I can pop your print in the post!

Post about my previous exhibition, Dawn on Deerubbin

Art and the river

Hoarding and hope

Heading straight into the grey emptiness where Bar Island ought to be, out on the river last weekend, I felt grateful that the cloud enfolding me wasn’t bushfire smoke.

We live in difficult times.  Rainforests on fire, burning not just in the Amazon but up and down the Australian east coast.  We knew this was coming, we’ve known for a long time.  But it’s hard to believe it’s happening so soon.  Too soon, too close, too damn sad. Unbearable to think about for more than a few moments.

So I headed back to beautiful Marramarra Creek, to salve that ache. What precisely is that feeling?  Not quite solastalgia – the pain of losing a beloved landscape.  Not here, not yet – at least not for me, though I guess the traditional owners of this part of the river feel just that.  For me it’s a different kind of climate grief. The sadness of knowing the time is coming when this beautiful place will be changed, razed.

I find myself returning again and again to the same places, taking very similar pictures of the very same riverscapes.

There’s a comfort in doing something over and over again, repetition with infinite small variations.  A lower tide, raising the oysterbeds.  A jellyfish bloom.  A flush of eucalyptus flowers across the hillside or a flock of honeyeaters swirling their way up river.  The surprising sight of a juvenile sea eagle, quietly sitting in the dappled light of the mangroves

If my instagram feed is a little repetitive, I can console myself that by staying on my home patch at least I’m not spewing out carbon and clocking up the air miles.

Of course there’s another reason to return – “fog bathing”.  Perhaps I could try to get some kind of wellness movement going. Surely time spent lingering on a misty river is just as healing as walks through the most pristine Japanese forest.

And then there’s remembering.  Going back to the same scenes, taking photos over and over, to capture a time and place as you see it in front of you right now.  The same compulsion to hoard pictures as parents have, knowing their toddler will soon be grown and gone.

Of course , the memories you’re harbouring aren’t always good.  Two years ago, for instance, the much anticipated multi-family jaunt to the water-access only campsite at Twin Beaches.  Fine still mornings and fireside yarns.  But also engine failure, unexpected high winds, a swamped coracle and endless bickering over alcohol.  Not to mention screaming, blood and an emergency visit to Hornsby Hospital, to have oystershell fragments with their scary bacterial payload scraped from the ten year old’s feet.  What can I say but when heading out on the Hawkesbury check the weather, pack light and wear shoes!

Marramarra Creek has other memories I can only guess at.  Every time I pass Friendly Island, I ponder on that name and the violence it hints at but hides.

But memories, even bad ones, can also guide you. As I put Bar Island behind me I found the fog stretching out in all directions.  This line of oysterpoles retreating into white, I knew, would take me where I wanted to go.

If we’re lucky, maybe our stash of memories of beautiful places will tell us how to go forward, and maybe even show us a way back.

Other paddles in Marramarra Creek and thereabouts

The silver river

Of gods and map readers

The river that knew

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

Broken bay at low ebb

 

An eagle in suburbia

Even by Sydney’s high standards – a city of four and a half million people surrounded by national parks – Berowra is absurdly well supplied with wide open spaces.

Bute and sunny trees

Upstream in Cowan Creek from Bobbin Head, in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

There’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park on the eastern side of the railway track.  To the west, on the other side of the Berowra creek, Marramarra National Park; to the north Muogamarra, only open to the public on six weekends a year and further, beyond the Hawkesbury, Brisbane Waters, Popran and Dharug National Parks.

Pelican graces distant 2 copy

Pelican grace at the mouth of Mullet Creek in Brisbane Water National Park

To the south, the second smallest and newest of them, Berowra Valley became a national park in 2012, soon after we moved here.  It follows the line of Berowra Creek through the suburbs as far as Cherrybrook.

If you put your kayak in Berowra Creek at the entertainingly named Dusty Hole and paddle upstream, you’re not in the wilderness. On the other side of the park, there’s the horsey country of Berilee and Dural – my go-to place for compost-making – and on this side you’re just a hop skip and a jump from Kuring-gai Industrial Park, featuring Inflatable World, the Steggles chicken factory and a host of timber and roofing suppliers.

But when you’re on the water at dawn, you could be in the middle of nowhere.

White faced heron profile crop

White faced heron hunting in Berowra Creek

 

On a high tide, you can wend your way past the sandstone rock arch quite a way up Sam’s Creek.  For all its outsize weeds and murky water, this does not feel like gully just a couple of ks downhill from the freeway.

Mouth of Sam's creek adjusted

The mouth of Sam’s Creek

Last weekend, I took a favourite side trip, down an alleyway of mangroves to a waterfall amplified by the rains.

Waterfall blurry 2

Waterfall into Berowra Creek

Below the footbridge that crosses Calna Creek, by the boardwalk across the saltmarsh, is a good place to pull in and stretch your legs.  The Great North Walk and the side tracks up Lyrebird Gully meet there, so there’s always a danger of being being forced to listen to an energetic conversation about property prices from the Sunday morning walkers, but skimming across the shallows up Calna Creek you can almost always outpace them.

There’s even a place to camp on the way at Crosslands Reserve, absurdly close to the Hornsby shops.  There’s a hint of civilisation as you pass the run-down convention centre and catch the smell of breakfast bacon, and then you’re back in the fog and the towering eucalypts.

Shiny trees and blue fog past crosslands

 

It’s 18ks, or thereabouts, from the ferry to the rock garden that’s the navigable limit of the creek, and back again.  And in the hours before the scouts stir in their sleepingbags, the creek is ridiculously quiet.  Apart from the inevitable lyrebird, busying itself with car alarm impressions in the undergrowth.

Illuminated trees at Crosslands crop

Illuminated trees by the campsite at Crosslands

But on the way back from the headwaters last weekend, something new.

Wedgie wide

A wedge-tailed eagle in Berowra Creek

A wedge-tailed eagle enjoying the morning sunshine, high above the water.

Of course, there are eagles on the creek every day of the week – on a day out in a boat you’re guaranteed to see the white bellied sea eagles that hunt there, and maybe even hear a few of their embarrassingly duck-like calls.  I saw a sea-eagle last Sunday, as usual, waiting above the water for the mist to clear.

Sea eagle in fog crop tight

White-bellied sea eagle in the mist

And once I saw an osprey by the creek, slightly dishevelled and hungry looking.

But there’s still something special about seeing the largest raptor in Australia hanging at the end of your street.  Maybe the leafy north shore counts as the open forest wedgies favour.  There’s certainly plenty of rabbits to keep them going.

I’ve been reminded this week that Berowra is more like a country town than suburbia. When there’s a car crash, residents come out to redirect traffic.  When your kid falls and grazes their knee walking to school, a passerby scoops them up and drives them home.  Lost keys and wallets speed their way to their owners.  Maybe the eagles have picked up on the rural atmosphere.

Rural enough for rabbits and roadkill, shall we say, but not so much that we’re not murderously anxious about them carrying off our newborn lambs.  With the stories of wedgies poisoned in their hundreds, I’m glad to see them here.  And I’m glad to be here too.

Insect head reflection

More raptor stories from around these parts

Encounters with eagles

Death and good fortune: a peregrine hunting in Cowan Creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

Sex, nests and dog fighting: our family of sparrowhawks get in the family way

Death and sibling rivalry: our baby sparrowhawks learn to hunt

The very big fish

 

 

The singing and the sea

Bute with shiny landscape tidiedWhen you put your boat in at Cowan Creek, you know you’re paddling in the sea.  Yes, there are rocky slopes on every side, and eucalypts and banksias lean over the shoreline.  The rows of hot pink bells of epacris longifolia dangle amazingly close to the waves.

But look over the side of your boat, especially in this big dry, and your gaze falls metres deep into into the crystal clear green water.  It might be called a “creek” but there’s no murky river water here.  Further downstream, where Cowan Creek meets the Hawkesbury proper at Broken Bay, the Pacific meets the horizon and you really know you are in the ocean.

Fishing boat and west head little boy

Fishermen off Flint and Steel Point

Cormorant with fish

Cormorant off Juno Point having a snack

But far above the official mouth of the river – the limit of “flat water sailing” drawn between Juno Head and Flint and Steel Bay – the water is briny.  The tide rolls up the Hawkesbury as far as the Grose River Valley, 138 kilometres from the sea, taking a wedge of salty water upstream.  If Broken Bay, where these pictures were taken, is essentially a marine environment, Cowan Creek is not too much different.

Pixellated yachts

Yachts off Cottage Point

Because of course, the Hawkesbury is a drowned river valley.   The river channel that once wound its way twenty five kilometres to the east, across the continent shelf, has long ago disappeared two hundred metres or more beneath the ocean.  The late Quaternary Marine Transgression that drowned the Hawkesbury started 18,000 years ago and went on for 10,000 years, with the water level peaking just a metre or two above current sea levels.

Paul Boon, in his fascinating history of the Hawkesbury, reports that during that time, sea level rose at perhaps 8-10 metres every millennium, at some times as 40 metres in a thousand years (Boon, 2017, Chapter 3). It‘s hard to imagine what that must have been like for the first people here, the Guringai and Dharug people, moving again and again ahead of the rising tide, away from the coastal flat lands to the hills of the Hornsby plateau.

Side illuminated trees for crop

On the way to Stingray Bay

Even more mindboggling to think, as Boon quietly points out, that over the last few decades sea level has been creeping up by around three millimetres a year. If the CSIRO scientists are right, and I for one don’t doubt they are, sea levels are changing as worryingly fast, if not as fast as the speediest rises in the Flandrian Transgression. On the bright side if I live long enough, there’ll be far more of the upper reaches of Cowan Creek to explore, in an admittedly sweaty and decrepit manner, in my kayak

Pink cloud and cowan creek

Sunrise sky near Cotton Tree Bay

Last weekend’s paddle reminded me of what a special place the Hawkesbury is, a drowned river valley where, after rain, waterfalls tumble off the sandstone straight into the sea.  I was coming back from a jaunt to Smith’s Creek when, heading into a bay to avoid a plague of water skiiers, I heard a lyrebird going for broke.

According to Birdlife Australia, superb lyrebirds are inhabitants of moist forests. I’m sure the one I heard scratching around in the undergrowth by the shore, would soon be heading back to the gullies and the treetops.  But in its distant melange of calls – of satin bowerbirds, kookaburras, currawongs, red wattlebirds and other things I just can’t recognise – was a sound I’d never heard a lyrebird make before.  I’m sure I heard an impression of that paradigmatic bird of the beach – the silver gull.

And that’s the soundtrack of the Hawkesbury estuary, right there,

 

What are your bird call spotting skills like, dear reader?  Can you recognise any other shore birds in this estuarine lyrebird’s song?  If you can spot any extra calls, please let me know!

Other stories from Cowan Creek and thereabouts

A glimpse of a peregrine falcon hunting: death and good fortune in Cowan Creek

Old hands: how Smith’s Creek was nearly Canberra

Stingray Bay – lost and found

The Hawkesbury in winter: the shortest days and how to use them

Broken Bay at low ebb: the troubled history of Hawkesbury oysters

Around the point 2

A winter morning in Cowan Creek

The very big fish

big fish 3 crop long

Mulloway on the rocks by Joe Crafts Bay

I’m a fish idiot.  I see them all the time as I paddle around the Hawkesbury – grey, striped and translucent; foot long granddaddies heaving themselves out of water and hundreds of fry flicking the surface like tiny scaly synchronised swimmers .  But don’t ask me what sort of fish they are, where they hang out, or anything else about them really.  I don’t eat them, or hunt them, or keep them as pets so somehow my brain spontaneously ejects all information about them.

But it was hard to ignore a fish as big as this, splayed out on the riverside rocks near Joe Crafts Bay.  Especially given the spectacle of the local white-bellied sea eagles trying very hard,  but ultimately not hard enough, to carry this giant juicy snack to a convenient spot in the treetops.

Sea eagle flapping with fish b&w amend square

White-bellied sea eagle trying to fly off with a very big fish

This fish was too much even for the second largest raptor in Australia to carry off to eat in peace.  Male sea eagles can weigh as much as 3.7 kilos, females half a kilo heavier, with wingspans of two metres or more.  But this great big fish, I have been assured by expert fishermen, was a mulloway, a giant of coastal waters that can weigh 60 kilos and grow to two metres long.  This one was a tiddler, maybe only two or three feet in length (I guess.  But then I’m the kind of person who has to try two or three lids before successfully covering a saucepan, so I could be wrong).  But the sea eagle still couldn’t wrangle it safely into the trees. Trust me, it tried.  Take off was aborted several times.  And then a boat with some noisy humans came and anchored inconveniently close to this enormous and tempting snack.

Blue boat

The sea eagle flew off, disgruntled.  But it didn’t fly far.  Or more to the point, they didn’t fly far: in fact, there were three sea eagles keeping an eye on this feed – a pair and a youngster I labelled “Itchy”.

The boat moved along, after a while – obviously no other mulloway were coming up from the deep that morning. Before the sea eagles got wise, someone else decided on seafood for breakfast.

The raven and its mate tried to keep the great big fish to themselves, but in the end, might is right on the river it seems.

crows following eagle 2 long cropped

Pair of Australian ravens chasing a sea eagle

I’m not sure if Itchy got a look-in, but the sea eagle pair both got a decent meal, taking it in turns to run the gauntlet of the river-traffic (including a nosy kayaker with a zoom lens).  One bird ate warily while the other stood guard in a nearby tree.

Sea eagle and fish 21 for b&w square

White-bellied sea eagle enjoying mulloway for breakfast

They’d hardly made a tiny dent in the corpse of the mulloway by the time a second boat came along to break up the party.  I’m sure another meal happened later in the day, but I try to be out of the water by the time the roar of powerboat engines drowns out the whizz and plop of yak-fishermen casting.  One less bothersome boatie for the sea-eagles to worry about.

boat off big fish rock

Boat off Joe Crafts Bay

I’m sure this mulloway has a story.  If the white-bellied sea-eagles couldn’t take off with this whopper fish, it’s hard to imagine how they could have caught it and lifted it from the water.  How did this beauty end up, forlorn, on the river-side rocks?  Surely no human fisherfolk would leave such a prize behind?  My fishing friends tell me that the great mulloway, jewels on its back glimmering in the water, is a fish to dream about and pursue – after dark, in the deepest holes in the river.  And good eating too.

Stocks of these big fish crashed by the early noughties, burdened by commercial and amateur fishing.  The minimum catch size for recreational fishing went up from 45 to 70 cm long, so maybe this one was caught but found short of the mark (like most of the mulloway hooked by recreational fisherfolk).  Released, perhaps, already wounded, destined to wash up on shore, breakfast for the ravens and the eagles.

Sea eagle portrait dark background cropped.jpg

Thanks to Denis Crowdy and Peter Doyle for fish identification and mulloway tales.

Other posts about the raptors in our beautiful backyard

Sibling rivalry as the young collared sparrowhawks in our neighbour’s pine tree learn to hunt…

The world’s fastest bird catches a meal

Three whistling kites, two sad islands

Encounters with the local eagles

The Great War and rubbish

Hole pattern abstract

There’s nothing I like better than a scene of elegant industrial decay.  Place that ruin-porn in the tranquillity of the Hawkesbury at midwinter.  What could be finer than a paddle around a rusted out wreck on a still morning, in the company of breakfasting eagles and kites?

What surprised me, back on land, when I dug around to find out more, was the age of this beautiful ruin.  The Parramatta was the very first ship commissioned for the newly formed Australian Navy after Federation.  It was built in 1910, the first of six torpedo boat destroyers to be constructed by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Glasgow.  The destroyer was part of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific during the Great War, hunting enemy ships up the Sepik River in New Guinea, patrolling the waters around the Phillipines, Malayan and the East Indies, and  later, battling submarines in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.

Ladder interior amended crop

The interior of the wreck of the Parramatta

It’s been a very long time since the Parramatta did what she was designed to do. She was taken off to be dismantled in 1929, when my granddad was a toddler.

But in her post-naval career, she’s certainly been reused a few times.   After being decommissioned, she was sold to the NSW Penal Department, along with her sister ship The Swan, and towed to Cowan Creek where each boat was to accommodate 50 convicts. The prisoners were supposed to work on a new road from Bobbin Head to Brooklyn that was to be “the finest marine drive in the whole world”.  The stretch from Windybanks to Bobbin Head was declared a detention area, but in the end, with a change of government and not a single vote in favour of the plan from the Kuring-gai Chase Trustees, the idea of building a road was shelved and the boats were sold again.  Their purchaser hoped (ultimately fruitlessly) to use them as a floating hotel for fishermen.  It’s rumoured they went on to house unemployed men and store water during the Depression, before being towed to the north end of Milson Island and used as a floating sand and gravel pit.

Flowing fog at Milson's Island - the location of the Parramatta is on the right

Looking north past Milson’s Island – the wreck location is near the right of the photo

In the early 1970s, the historical significance of the wreck was began to be appreciated and the bow and stern of the ship were retrieved and preserved for posterity – the stern at Queens Wharf Reserve on the Parramatta River, and the bow at the Garden Island military base in Sydney.  Other bits have been less officially repurposed – all its valuable brass portholes, for instance, have been nicked.

It’s not really clear how the wreck ended up on a mudbank on a bend of the Hawkesbury.  It’s rumoured she and her sister ship The Swan were being towed downriver in a gale in 1934 when they broke away.   The Swan filled up with water and sank twenty metres deep in the river near Little Wobby public wharf, while the Parramatta was stranded in the shallow water amongst the oyster farms below Cascade Creek.

oysterpoles and ship crop

Looking over to Grace’s Shore in Muogamarra National Park

She’s not the only bit of flotsam and jetsam on that bend of the river, though, by a long shot.  I pulled in amongst the mangroves to stretch my legs below the waterfall, to find all manner of rubbish.  A discarded shopping bag was filled with drink bottles, polystyrene, coke cans, bait bags and the odd thong in a matter of minutes.  I even found a functional tupperware container and matching lid, some thing that I almost never see in my own kitchen cupboards.

Parramatta with hills amended

I have no pictures of any of this trash, needless to say.  Unless it’s on the epic scale of Edward Burtynsky’s sublime depictions of industrial landscapes, utterly transformed by excavation and waste, our tide of plastic detritus is nowhere near as photogenic as the rusty bones of our military past.  But it will will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer.

Rust abstract crop

Other local history posts

The Hawkesbury vs the engineers: some history of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge

Canberra on Cowan Creek? The strange and beautiful story of Smith’s Creek.

The ghost freeway: the wildlife and history of Mooney Mooney creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: stories from Peats and Barr Island

Further references

Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history, CSIRO publishing.

The river that knew

Mist and sky above Mooney Mooney Creek better

Looking upriver from the junction with Floods Creek

If I want a quiet morning on the Hawkesbury, my best bet is a paddle up Mooney Mooney Creek.  It’s a jet ski free zone, and that’s a very fine thing. In maybe ten jaunts on various reaches of Mooney Mooney, I’ve seen a handful of kayaks, a few fishermen and one very slow moving yacht.  Unlike Cowan Creek or Patonga, there’s no sandy beaches for frisking about on, and the oysterfarms can be navigational hazard at low tide. But if you prefer hanging out with eagles and herons to spending time with humans in charge of powerboats, Mooney Mooney Creek’s the go.

Azure kingfisher profile crop

An uncharacteristically still azure kingfisher

There are really three Mooney Mooneys, for my purposes anyway.  There’s the upper reaches, a pleasant morning’s paddle if you throw in tranquil tributary Flood Creek, lined with casuarinas and decorated with the blue and green streaks of kingfishers hunting (more on the scenes and ecosystems there in a future post).  The put-in for that trip is where the switchbacking Pacific Highway crosses the river, though if you paddle upstream you pass under the highest bridge in Australia, a symphony in soaring concrete.

Or you can go downstream, towards Lemon Tree Bay and maybe on a low-ish tide, see, on every bend and mudflat herons feasting, and if you’re lucky, spot a wedge-tailed eagle soaring overhead.

Herons in parallel back in focus

White faced herons hunting at low tide

Up there in the headwaters, you’ll often see other kayakers – there are sometimes guided tours to the area – and occasionally people camping, rather naughtily, by the side of the river.  The Great North Walk, that links Sydney and Newcastle, via most of the lovely places along the way including Berowra (of course), flanks the upper reaches of the river and once or twice I’ve heard voices of hikers walking along the track or crossing the suspension bridge that spans the top of Piles Creek.

Snake island backlit 3

Snake Island and Brisbane Water National Park

But I’d prefer to be paddling than driving and I’m a little bit lazy, so I usually put in my boat in closer to home, at Deerubbin, where the freeway crosses the Hawkesbury.  From there I paddle under the freeway and past Spectacle Island, stopping off to check out the Mooney Mooney spoonbill colony, and then upstream.  Once you get past Snake Island and Sailor’s Chest Point, there’s not much sign of human activity, apart from oyster poles.

But there’s plenty going on, even without too many of us humans around.  Last week’s outing was particularly rich in feathery encounters.  A masked lapwing family enjoying a day out by the water by the Mooney Mooney public wharf.

Comedy silver gulls ducking for crabs in the shallows near Spectacle Island.

Silver gull with crab square amend

A sacred kingfisher  in the morning sun near her burrow in an abandoned arborial termite nest.  She got so bored with me clicking away she had a nap.

A striated heron, one of the river side regulars, pretending to be a particularly striking bit of sandstone.

And further up the creek, the predictable but still wonderful sight of a pair of young sea eagles perched amongst the mangroves in the shallow waters of Fox Bay.

The young ones seem to be easier to get close to.  A bit curious and a bit clueless, perhaps, about strange legless creatures that float downstream with the tide.

Even in the peace and quiet, there’s a feeling that all the inhabitants of Mooney Mooney Creek know about us.  They know we’re there – mostly out of sight, maybe, but not entirely out of mind.  The freeway passes just behind the ridge much of the way up the valley. You see it as you pass Snake Island, the trucks and cars  appear briefly, lifted above the rocky escarpment.  Sometimes, further up the creek,  the wind shifts and you can hear the sound of the traffic.

I recently found out that the freeway’s original route went right through my tranquil paddling territory – along Pile Creek, to cross the river south of where the Pacific Highway runs.  Right through kingfisher country.

But someone in the National Parks and Wildlife Service in the late 60s or 70s stood up to the road builders and just said “No”.  No, you can’t build a bloody great big road right through the (then recently established) Brisbane Water National Park.  We’re not having it.  In the words of the surprisingly fascinating “OzRoads” website

This new route had a more expensive bridge and steeper grades than the preferred route but there was nothing the DMR could do about it.

And it’s not often you hear freeway builders say that.  I’d love to  know the full story of who in Parks fought the good fight with the Roads folk.  Everytime I paddle up Mooney Mooney Creek now, I’ll be thinking about them and saying a little thank you.

Sea eagle facing away profile crop

Other paddles from Deerubbin Reserve

Up the Hawkesbury to Bar Island

For the ambitious, further in the same direction to Marramarra Creek

Into the heart of Muogamarra National Park up the winding Kimmerikong Creek

Downriver under the gorgeous if structurally challenged Hawkesbury River Bridge

 

Further references

Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history CSIRO Publishing

 

 

The shortest days and how to use them

The chickens let us know when midwinter’s come.  The fortnight after the winter solstice, no matter how bloody cold it is, the girls start serious egg-laying.  So even as you’re trying desperately to stash four different kinds of hot lemon pickle and a hundredweight of lemon marmalade, as you open the fridge, a dozen eggs roll out.

Lemon preserves cool closeup skinny

I went AWOL from the blog for the last six months, as the observant amongst you might have noticed.  The days just got shorter and shorter.  My garden kept growing and the Hawkesbury streamed uninterrupted to the sea, but time to write about these things just seemed impossible to find.  But now the days are lengthening (and I’ve finished my night classes), all that is going to change!

Eagle flyby long crop

White bellied sea eagle doing a fly-by of Gunyah Beach

The shortest day may have passed but it’s still pretty nippy at 5.30 in the morning when I get out of my lovely warm bed and drive off through the nautical twilight to put my kayak in the water.  When it’s 3 degrees and you have wet feet, the exact moment when the sun touches your frozen toes comes to be of critical importance.

I have a nifty little app on my phone, SunCalc, that shows just where the sun will appear over the horizon on any day of the year.  So I check the tide, and the wind, and then, on a winter morning, figure out where I’ll catch the very first light.  Putting in at Brooklyn and heading for open water is not a bad choice.

I’ve had some lovely paddles from Parsley Bay in the last year.  Quiet jaunts into Porto Bay, a shallow backwater frequented mostly by raptors and oyster fishermen…

Juv sea eagle long

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

And, on a day with hardly any wind, I braved it across to West Head, stopping off at four beaches – Gunyah on the way and Eleanor on the way back; and on the other side of Cowan Creek, Little Pittwater with its tumbling stream and littoral rainforest and Hungry Beach and its a pair of sunbaking sea eagles.

Terns in front of Lion Island cropped closer small

Terns fishing off Gunyah Beach

I was almost bold enough that time to cross the invisible line – “limit of flatwater sailing” – that passes between Juno Point and Flint and Steel Beach, but bottled it in the end, just peeking round the corner towards Pittwater and the open Pacific beyond.

Clouds over the sea long and skinny

And last weekend, coldest it’s been on a Sydney morning in a couple of decades, I set out for Refuge Bay, where the pleasure craft rocked quietly, their skippers sleeping.  But not the kids, slipping away in their dinghies to fish and play under the waterfall on the beach.

And on journey there, what magic scenes!  The open waters of Broken Bay skimmed, concealed, curtained, framed, illuminated, by the fog.

Fishing boat and lion island

Fishermen and Lion Island

If there’s something to be said for the shortest days, it’s the long nights.  You can almost have a sleep-in and still get up before dawn.

Juno head mist dark sky

Sunday afternoon service at the Church of the Double Bladed Paddle

7 degrees at daybreak and good company the evening before: no chance of making it out for dawn this weekend.  So it was the afternoon service for me in the Church of the Double-Bladed Paddle.  Down the end of our street, the Hawkesbury in the golden hour.

Beautiful cirrus sky and skyline

Golden bubble water crop horizontal

A seaplane was parked out front of the ritzy Berowra Waters Restaurant, a few devotees of fine dining lingering over white linen, but otherwise the river was quiet.  Weekenders emptied of their winter visitors, off home to find socks and check homework.  Some stirrings in the sandy creek bed – stingrays? – but no fishermen and hardly a fish.

Some sun worshippers were receiving the blessing of the last rays on the southern shores of Calabash Bay.

And then, a true glimpse of the sacred.  The sacred kingfisher, that is.  I’d suspected they might be found around here, even in the winter.  There was that green flash out of the corner of my eye as I scrambled over the rocks onto Bar Island, and the briefest of glimpses, framed by mangrove leaves, my camera hopelessly buried, one morning in Bujwa Bay.

But this glorious creature showed no inclination to move from his place in the sun, calmly accepting the adoration of passing paddlers.

Sacred kingfisher facing slightly away horizontal crop tighter square

Sacred kingfisher

But even a sacred kingfisher can be profane.  I’m reverently gazing, barely taking a breath, and the big guy takes the opportunity to have a lightning fast chunder.  There’s a  familiar doggo look on his face as he sits there on his sunlit stick recovering.

But you expect veneration anyway, right, mate?  And you’ll get it too.

Sacred kingfisher other side 2 wide tighter

Last winter in Calabash Bay…

Burn-off at Bujwa Bay

The only trouble with living in paradise (apart from the long commute) is combustibility.  Our gorgeous view – mile after mile of incendiary eucalypts.  So the still, dry days and nights of autumn were thick with smoke, not from the big bad one we’re dreading, but hazard reduction burns in the bush all round the town.

Last time I went down to Bujwa Bay, it was the kind of cool and breathless day that must make the Rural Fire Service very very happy.   Mist hovered over the water in a bright line of morning light.  Forty minutes of silent paddling past the sleeping celebrities of Berowra Waters and I was round Oaky Corner and into the sunshine.

In the quiet there was a cryptic crunching noise.   Eventually, I spotted the pair of glossy black-cockatoos hidden amongst at the shore-line casuarinas.  My sense of being some kind of bird whisperer evaporated when, after fifteen minutes fooling around trying to get a decent shot of the cockies, I looked up to meet the eye of a bloody great big white-bellied sea eagle sitting directly above me.  And then, just round the corner, his pal taking in the rays.  They’re not stupid these birds, parked in the sunniest spot on the bay.

Having bonded with the local bird-life, when I heard about the burn-off, I was worried.   What happens to it all when the bush goes up in smoke?

Bujwa bay wide view 2 best small

Egg the kayak entering Bujwa Bay after the burn-off

Drooping bark and grasstrees for crop square

Back-burnt grasstrees at Bujwa Bay

It’s not all bad news.

Harry Rechter describes  birds enjoying a feast during a controlled burn in Brisbane Waters National Park, not so far from here.
“Although fuel loads in the… heath and woodland were high, and flames soared above the tallest trees and shrubs, birds moved easily in front of and above the fire to appear minutes later on the blackened vegetation to feed on less fortunate insects and small lizards”.
I missed the raptors and the insectivores that no doubt turned up at Bujwa Bay at the first sign of smoke, looking for Cajun-style chow. But chances are these blackened grasstrees will be bursting into flower next time I paddle by.  I might see lyrebirds too, raking newly formed clearings.  Ground-feeders and grain-eaters – corellas for instance – return in force after fires have passed.  The little insectivores – thornbills, wrens and robins – that build nests close to the ground don’t miss the scorched canopy, and enjoy the bugs that flourish on the flush of new growth.  The carbonised shrubbery might even give me the chance of catching a blurry LBB or two on film.
Burnt crown and cliff

After the burn-off: partly scorched eucalypts

It’s a nice idea to think that the burn-offs that protect the town are a boon for the local plants and animals too.   And there’s a euphonious catchphrase that goes with that idea: “pyrodiversity begets biodiversity”. Fire incinerates the garden escapes and wakes the soilbank’s astounding store of dormant seeds. If we burn little and often, it’s been thought, we make a mosaic of habitats: patches of open space and newly germinating seeds; places burnt a few years back; and refuges long unburnt, full of craggy trees, hollow logs and dense undergrowth.

Pyrodiversity is popular amongst land management folks, and there’s some evidence that it works, at least in some places.  But not everyone buys the story that the frequent fires that protect people and property suit other critters too. Out in the mallee, near where I grew up, a fire and biodiversity project run by Deakin and LaTrobe universities has been laboriously checking the idea out.

For all the mallee’s underground lignotubers, ready to reshoot after fire, other parts of the ecosystem – large stretches of spinifex grass, for one, that shelter dragons and legless lizards – can take fifty or more years to return after a burn.  All of which makes me feel tremendously guilty about the swiftly abandoned spinifex-covered cubbies that my brother and sister and I used to make in the mallee scrub out the back of our house.  We will never know how many now-extinct species we displaced.

Away from regrets about the trail of ecological devastation I left in childhood and back to burn-off related angst. The research in these arid areas suggests it’s not pyrodiversity that’s important for a species-rich environment but having enough country that’s reached the right stage of maturity since the last fire.  As a person in mid-life, it pleases me to say that older vegetation often seems to sustain more species of birds, mammals and reptiles, including the rare ones. Even birds that like paddocks and open plains prefer unburnt land.  Some reptiles favour recently fired landscapes, but plant communities that haven’t been burnt for a decade or two harbor the richest variety of lizards and snakes.

I tried and failed to find the experts on biodiversity and fire on Hawkesbury sandstone.  But researchers studying both subtropical Queensland and foothill forests in Victoria said similar things.  A varied landscape is important, but

the richness of frugivore, insectivore and canopy forager assemblages is driven by the presence of structurally complex vegetation and old-growth canopy trees, which are more likely to be present in areas that have not experienced fire for a prolonged period of time (Burgess 2016)

Paston and colleagues put their conclusion bluntly: “prescribed fire is of little utility for the broadscale conservation of biodiversity” (2011, 3238).

And it seems, for birds at least, smaller patches of unburnt country won’t really do – it’s larger areas that haven’t seen fire for a while that are rich in species.  One bunch of researchers found that little islands of older habitat surrounded by new growth was grabbed by one or two aggressive predatory or colonial birds, rather than harbouring lots of different critters.  One recent paper, written about arid areas, sum it up:

Our results suggest a shift in current fire management thinking… is needed, away from a focus on creating small, unburnt patches towards preserving large, intact, unburnt areas (Berry 2015 493)

Burnt crown and dark silhouette from distance

What does all this mean for Bujwa Bay?

There was nothing moving in the incinerated trees on the ridgeline as I made my way up the creek at high tide, but then, it was early and damn chilly.  Even the herons had given up on fishing and were huddled in the trees, keeping their feet dry.

But the damp fringes of the mangroves were alive with silvereyes and yellow-faced honeyeaters, and I heard the plunk of a sacred kingfisher diving for breakfast.  Gullies are especially valuable habitats for birds at the best of times.  If they’re protected from fire by burning on the slopes nearby they can be an even better retreat when that big one comes.  The top of the creek was lush and green. I can only guess that the rangers and RFS know what they’re doing.

White faced heron in tree 2 square

Chilly looking white-faced heron

In the light of recent research, Taylor and his colleagues comment dryly “current fire management for avifaunal conservation may require substantial refinement” (Taylor, 2012, 525).

But let’s not fool ourselves.  Around here at least, fire management is not for the avifauna.  It’s for me, and people like me, who choose to live high on a hill, surrounded by the beautiful, burnable bush.

Additional references.  Because the whole thing is really is quite complicated and you might want to check I didn’t get it totally wrong.

Berry, L. Lindenmeyer, D, Driscoll, D. (2015) “Large unburnt areas, not small unburnt patches, are needed to conserve avian diversity in fire-prone landscapes” Journal ofApplied Ecology Vol 52 Issue 2

Burgess, Emma, and Maron, Martine (2016) “Does the response of bird assemblages to fire mosaic properties vary among spatial scales and foraging guilds?” Landscape Ecology March 2016, Volume 31, Issue 3,pp 687–699

Doty, A., Stawski, C, Nowack, J., Bondarenco, A. (2015) “Increased lyrebird presence in a post-fire landscape” Australian Journal of Zoology 63,9–11

Hope Ben (2012) “Short-term response of the long-nosed bandicoot, Perameles nasuta, and the southern brown bandicoot, Isoodon obesulus obesulus, to low-intensity prescribed fire in heathland vegetation” Wildlife Research 39(8) 731-744

Korczynskyj, Luke and Byron B. Lamont (2005) “Grasstree (Xanthorrhoea preissii) recovery after fire in two seasons and habitats” Australian Journal of Botany, 53 509-515

Kelly, Luke T. Andrew F. Bennett, Michael F. Clarke, and Michael A. McCarthy (2015) “Optimal fire histories for biodiversity conservationConservation Biology, Volume 29, No. 2, 473–485

Lindenmayer, David B., Wade Blanchard, Lachlan McBurney, David Blair, Sam C. Banks, Don A. Driscoll, Annabel L. Smith and A. M. Gill (2014) “Complex responses of birds to landscape-level fire extent, fire severity and environmental driversDiversity and Distributions 20, 467–477

Nimmo, D, Kelly, L., Spence-Bailey, L, Watson, S.J. Taylor, R.S., Clarke, M.F and Bennett, A.F. (2012) “Fire Mosaics and Reptile Conservation in a Fire-Prone Region” Conservation Biology 27 (12)

Pastro, Louise L., Christopher R. Dickman and Mike Letnic (2011) “Burning for biodiversity or burning biodiversity? Prescribed burn vs. wildfire impacts on plants, lizards and mammals”  Ecological Applications Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 3

Robinson, Natasha, Leonard, Steven, Bennett, Andrew, Clarke, Michael (2016) “Are forest gullies refuges for birds when burnt? The value of topographical heterogeneity to avian diversity in a fire-prone landscape” Biological Conservation 200, pp.1-7

Sitters, Holly , Di Stefano, Julian, Christie, Fiona, Swan, Matthew, York, Alan (2016) “Bird functional diversity decreases with time since disturbance” Ecological Applications, 26(1), pp. 115–127

Smith, Annabel, C.Michael Bull, Don Driscoll (2013) “Successional specialization in a reptile community cautions against widespread planned burning and complete fire suppression”Journal of Applied Ecology 2013, 50, 1178–118