Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

May 13, 2016

Posted under

Geology, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, Uncategorized, waterways

Comments

2 Comments

Delta bravo!

Kylie’s Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park

It’s lucky that travelling in reverse is just as easy as going forwards in Egg, my decrepit wooden kayak (currently held together with duct tape), because lately my paddles seem to be taking me back in time. Back to old haunts and old holiday snaps, but also really really far back into the geological past.

When I took this photo of beautiful Kylie’s Beach in Crowdy Bay National Park in 2011, for instance, I wasn’t thinking “My, what a fine example of a barrier dune system in a wave dominated estuary!”

Diamond Head and Watson Taylor Lake

And this snap from North Brother Mountain, taken on the same trip five years ago, demonstrates that I wasn’t paying enough attention to geomorphology at the time. It’s not a bad shot of the 100,000 year old Pleistocene sand barriers that protect Watson Taylor Lake from the crashing waves of the Pacific. But, in retrospect, I should have given the picturesque tree on the right the flick, and made sure I squeezed in a view of the mouth of the Camden Haven River.

Because, for the New South Wales anyway, this is a pretty special place. As you can see in the pic below by a more geologically literate photographer, enfolded in the lake is a classic river delta – a rare sight in this part of the world. It’s a mini-Mississippi, sloughing off its sediment as it flows into stiller waters, leaving muddy banks along the way and a cluster of little islands at river’s end.

Watson Taylor Lake. Bias, Gene. watsontaylorlake.jpg Pics4learning July 2004. 9 May 2016 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>.

Sad to say, I didn’t notice all this deposition and composition as I paddled down Camden Haven Inlet at dawn, skimming over the seagrass and the sand. Even when I got stuck in the mud – sorry, fluvial sediment – right in the middle of the lake. At high tide. Next to a bunch of knee deep swans. Sometimes I reckon I’m not the sharpest knife in the knifeblock.

Black swans smirking while I try to get afloat after running aground in the middle of the lake

It was only back at camp at Kylie’s, over a first reviving brew-up, when I stumbled on Rod’s Northern Rivers Geology blog with its intriguing story of the missing coastal deltas of New South Wales that I figured out what I’d seen.

South Brother Mountain in dawn light

Up a shallow side creek towards the lake

South and Middle Brother from the northern shore of the lake

A side view of the levees beside the Camden Haven River

Paddling dead casual-like towards the river mouth

Thinking back, I realised I’d been somewhere very similar just a few weeks ago, in another one of the New South Wales’ magical coastal lagoons. Where Dora Creek – home of freakish panda-snakes – empties into Lake Macquarie, the very same levees march, both sides of the river, far out into the open water.

Dora Creek doesn’t have mangrove topped islands at its mouth, like the Camden Haven. Perhaps their beginnings were washed away by the waves that scoot across five kilometres of open water to scare the hell out of unwary kayakers. In the same way storms, waves and the East Australian Current sluice river sand and sediment out into the Pacific or up the coast, leaving barrier beaches in place of river deltas all along the Eastern seaboard.

Island in the delta

But in the sheltered estuary of Watson Taylor Lake I got to enjoy all the rare pleasures of a river delta. Mosquitoes, for instance. More than I’ve encountered anywhere, even my backyard, locally famous for its blood buffet and chubby and contented microbats. With the mozzies come the mozzie eaters.

“Clumping” white-breasted woodswallows

Woodswallows peeping

Woodswallow grooming

I stopped to take pictures of the wood swallows, but in fact, this little beach, at the very end of the Camden Haven’s levees, had almost as many birds as it had bugs. Honey-eaters in an array of colours: brown, striped and yellow-faced. Noisy friarbirds, mobs of them, bursting from the casuarinas to wheel and chatter. Wagtails and fantails. Crested terns chilling out away from the surf. A drongo (I’m not being insulting – it’s a gorgeous bird). Not to mention a special treat – the rarely sighted fungus-faced thornbill.

Egg on “bird watching beach” near the mouth of the Camden Haven River

Spangled drongo

The rarely sighted fungus faced thornbill

Crested terns sticking their tongues out at me.

And, as I wended my way through the maze of islands with the help of the handy map in my Paddlers Guide to NSW, an unflappable young sea eagle, rising majestically above the cloud of biters. It takes a genuine love of raptors to continue taking snaps while half a dozen mosquitos are sucking on your eyelids.

White bellied sea eagle in a river-side casuarina

Juvenile white bellied sea eagle

But as RB just reminded me, if Australia’s eastern coast is wanting for river deltas now, it’s not always been so. It was an enormous braided river delta, like the Amazon or the Ganges that laid down the golden Hawkesbury sandstone, a couple of hundred metres thick, right across the Sydney Basin, 230 million years ago.

Perhaps this is an approach to marketing I can put to the NSW Tourist Board. “Volcanos! Dangerous megafauna! Epic braided river deltas! Go back far enough in time, and New South Wales has it all!!”

Reflections of North Brother Mountain on my way back to the put in at Camden Inlet

More adventures on New South Wales’ coastal lagoons

Geomorphology and dawn reflections on a midwinter lagoon at Myall and Narrabeen Lakes

A paddle across scary Lake Macquarie to see the snake-pandas of Dora Creek

Encounters with eagles on Budgewoi Lake

Moonlit night on Kylie’s Beach

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

April 16, 2016

Posted under

kayaking, Native birds, Uncategorized, Waste, waterways

Comments

4 Comments

What do you get if you cross a snake with a panda?

The geometric art on the Australasian darter’s back

Things I learned from last weekend’s paddle from Lake Macquarie’s Shingle Splitters’ Point to Dora Creek:

1. When kayaking on the largest permanent salt water lake in the southern hemisphere, always remember fetch. Fetch can defined as the distance of open water over which wave-creating winds blow. Where does the word “fetch” come from, I hear you ask? From the cries of sinking kayakers as they disappear behind the white tops: “Fetch the emergency services!”

(Don’t be deceived by the apparent smoothness of the lake surface here – once the wind picked up I was too busy thinking about staying afloat to take any pictures)

Heading across Lake Macquarie from Shingle Splitters’ Point

2. The lyrics of Kenny Rogers’ immortal song “The Gambler” don’t just apply to card sharks, but also amateur bird photographers. “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done”.

Because the few seconds you spend checking to see if that wildly optimistic over-the-shoulder shot caught the hunting osprey mid-dive, will be ones in which the hungry raptor wheels around and splashes down again, right next to your boat. And flies off before you can get the lens cap off your camera.

Departing osprey

Darter near Brooklyn

Female darter near Marramarra Creek

Male darter by Milson Island

Male Australasian darter at Apple Tree Bay

Male darter at Speers Point

3. While adult Australasian darters are the most sinuously elegant of birds, poetry in snake-like motion, their offspring are actively disturbing.

Juvenile darters near the nest

Closeup of the absurd faces of juvenile darters

What is it about these baby darters? They’re very very fluffy. Like a gorgeous soft baby panda. A delightfully fluffy decapitated panda with the head of a snake. A sweet duo of snake-panda in a nest white-washed with guano. And they didn’t think much of me either.

Juvenile darter expressing themself through the medium of guano

In South America, they’ve found are darters in the fossil record that weighed 17 kilos – more than eight times as heavy as these not-insubstantial characters. Just imagine how unnerving it would be in a kayak under that humungous reptilian chick when it let fly.

There’s no danger of modern darters – anhinga to give them their formal name – vanishing like their massive forebears. Like humans, darters like deep, still water not choked with vegetation, as long as there are overhanging trees to nest and perch on. And they don’t mind introduced fish like carp and perch, so they’re doing better than birds that prefer marshy wetlands or are fussier about their diet.

A few weeks back, my brother and I watched with a fine male hunting from the shore of Lake Macquarie in the golden light of the late afternoon. Even after the bird vanished below, we could follow its progress by the tiny fry that leapt from the water. The sinuous head reappeared moments later, a fish impaled on its beak. It took him a few goes, but finally he managed to flick it into the air and gulp it down.

Male Australasian darter trying his wings by Lake Macquarie

Darter skewering a fish

Darter about to fling a fish in the air

Male Australasian darter with a fish impaled on its beak

I’ve seen plenty of snake birds, as they’re sometimes called, over the last couple of years as I’ve paddled around the lower reaches of the Hawkesbury and the rivers and lagoons along the Central Coast. Familiarity hasn’t dulled my enthusiasm for them – the males geometric abstracts, the females russet in the sun, their elegant necks holding poses as striking and absurd as those of modern dancers. But I’ve never seen the young ones before.

Darters breed erratically, it seems, whenever and wherever conditions are good. They will fly long distances – up to 2000 ks in the non-breeding season – and will nest inland when floodwaters linger. Maybe the stretch of Dora Creek where I saw them is a regular breeding spot. In one fecund tree I saw two empty nests, along with two brim full of snake-pandas and guano. Or perhaps the vacant real estate belonged to other waterbirds, since darters seem to like to nest in company. Down the river, egrets, cormorants and partly-fledged juveniles were hanging out on a branch together, not far from this perturbed looking male with his runaway egg.

Casuarina with four waterbird nests

Male Australasian darter on the nest with a runaway egg

Partly fledged juvenile Australasian darters

Greater egret in a suburban front yard by Dora Creek

One way or another, the younger chicks seem to prefer intimacy to solitude, finding comfort, as they crouched in their absurdly flimsy nest, in the softness of their siblings’ breasts and the predatory encircling of each others’ snakey necks.

Three darter chicks snuggling crop tighter

Juvenile Australasian darters snuggled together in what remains of their nest

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

April 3, 2016

Posted under

Death, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, pollution, Predators, Uncategorized, waterways

Comments

9 Comments

Death and good fortune on Cowan Creek

Since reading the poetic prose of H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald’s story of how training Mabel the goshawk carried her through wild sadness that followed the death of her beloved father, it’s been all about the raptors around here.

Easter at Speers Point meant ospreys relaxing in the late afternoon sun.

Osprey with eye gleam for crop horizontal

And yesterday, on Cowan Creek, the contractual obligation white bellied sea-eagle.

Juvenile white-bellied sea eagle

“Peach Trees” – or peregrine corner

Sandstone patterns in Yeoman’s Bay

White-faced heron hunting at Yeoman’s BAy

Then, just when I’d resigned myself to a pleasant if uneventful paddle after three hours on the water, there was an explosion of action right off my bow. Two birds in an aerial battle, tumbling and squabbling over a kill. The loser flew off, disgruntled; the death-dealer pulled up in the bright morning sunshine on a branch over the river, and waited for me to get out my camera.

Peregrine falcon in profile with prey

Peregrine staring straight at the camera

Peregrine gripping a dead galah and looking for rivals

A new bird! One I thought I’d never seen on any waterway. A peregrine falcon.

It turns out I had seen these birds before, long ago and far away – a pair tussling with ravens over a ledge to nest on at Malham Cove in Yorkshire. Cliffs (or, if they are hard to find, skyscrapers) are one of the essential requirements of this beautiful raptor. RB reminded me that peregrines used to nest in the ventilation towers of the tunnels under the River Mersey and high up in the Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the enormous red sandstone building I could see from my desk during my decade as a Scouser.

Peregrines may be the most widespread bird in the world, living on every continent except for Antarctica and on many islands (although strangely, considering its status as a bird watching paradise, not New Zealand). Its name is derived from the Latin for “the wanderer” although only five of the nearly twenty subspecies – those breeding in the northern Arctic – really migrate very far.

For all their capacity to adapt to life in the city – eating feral pigeons and nesting in highrises – peregrines are widespread but not really common. Since they mostly prey on smallish birds, themselves often insect eaters, falcons bioaccumulate pollutants. The use of organochlorines in insecticides like DDT devastated their numbers in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s there were no peregrines in the Eastern US and the birds were declared an endangered species. Numbers have bounced back, in Australia and elsewhere, although they are still classed as “rare” here. And recent work in Europe and Canada has observed a new chemical – flame retardants – turning up in the blood stream of peregrine chicks.

Peregrine mid-dinner, beak covered in feathers

Once peregrines find a good nesting site, it’s a keeper. Apparently, a falcon skeleton found at the back of a cliff-top eyrie in Tasmania has been carbon dated at 19,000 years, which makes that spot the oldest known bird’s nest. As I noodled along the northern shore of Cowan Creek, I’d admired the 100 metre high cliffs of Looking Glass Spur, eucalypts halfway up the face finding impossible footholds in the sandstone. I wonder if my falcon and its mate have a scrape there, high above the expanse of the estuary. Peregrines don’t eat fish but hunting grounds by water offer the space for their deadly turn of speed.

I feel less disappointed by my failure to spot the raptor’s stoop or to capture the battle on film after I figured out what I was watching. The fastest animal in the world, dropping on its prey at nearly 400 kilometres an hour. That poor bird clutched in its talons -maybe a galah, the favoured meal of the big-footed Australian “macropus” subspecies – never had a chance.

Peregrine eating a galah

Peregrine falcon’s tongue on display

I watched for twenty minutes, as she plucked and dismembered her meal, unperturbed by the rowdy parade of jet skiiers, cruisers and powerboats. Galah feathers drifted down from her branch, making a delicate trail of death across the bottle green water.

For a few dodgy moments, I thought the gobbets of galah might be joined by flotsam from my shattered craft as Egg was washed perilously close to oystershell sharpened rocks. And, if I had the Bond-style rocket launcher I’ve often fantasised about while ploughing through powerboat wakes on sunny Sunday mornings, fragments of several jet skis.

Peregrine falcon plucking its prey before eating it

Peregrine falcon “macropus” showing off its huge feet

Trail of feathers from the plucked galah

Remnants of the plucked galah

I’m guessing my peregrine was a “she”. Females are a third bigger than the tiercels – the males – but I didn’t have the chutzpah to hurl a swiss army knife up the tree for scale. The two mid-air combatants looked well matched – two males or two females. Definitely not a pair. Since peregrines mate for life – up to 20 years – and often hunt cooperatively, it would seem to be unwise from the point of view of domestic harmony, anyway, to bicker over food.

In fact, Derek Ratcliffe describes exactly what I saw: “feet-grappling over disputed food items” which happens, he says, “at food-territory boundaries during the non-breeding season” (1993, 201). It seems these battles are nearly always between birds of the same sex, although sometimes peregrines fight with other crag-loving birds as well. RB remembers peregrines in springtime at the cliffs at Creagh Dhu, attacking ravens, stooping then zooming straight up to the heights to do it all over again. Sometimes pairs of peregrines will even take on the great golden eagle over rare and valuable real estate.

So maybe there’s more than one pair of peregrines on that beautiful bit of country. Perhaps I’ll see this magic bird again, or her mate, or her rival, until I’m as blase about a peregrine strike as a whistling kite soaring on a thermal. But yesterday, as I took my four hundred photographs while the peregrine peaceably disembowelled its meal, showing the equanimity that makes them the favoured hunting falcon, I felt truly blessed.

Peregrine in front of branch staring at me crop

Peregrine falcon watching the watchers

More stories about raptors in Berowra’s backyard (and mine):

The beautiful white morph of the grey goshawk in Bluetongue’s back

A hunting collared sparrowhawk in Nude trees and naughty birds

The whistling kites of Bar and Peat Islands in Two sad islands, three whistling kites

The many white-bellied sea eagles of the Hawkesbury and Lake Macquarie in Encounters with eagles

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

March 30, 2016

Posted under

Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, Seasons, Uncategorized, waterways, Weather

Comments

5 Comments

The silver river

Mist and silver river … somewhere behind there is the Wreck of the Parramatta

Deerubbin – the Hawkesbury proper- doesn’t normally look like this: not when I’m there, anyway. I’m used to the view out our back window: the valley full of fog, the hilltops islands in a foamy sea.

Mist over Sam’s Creek

You know the fog will be spilling across the highway as you swoop down from the ridgeline before dawn. But when you reach the freeway bridge that stretches half a mile across the Hawkesbury, the wind picks up and the mist is gone.

But not this Sunday. The cloud was down and the river was silver.

Fisherman in the mist

Misty sun above Grace’s Shore

Peat’s Crater with silver gulls for scale

Looking towards Grace’s Shore

I’ve wrestled with this mist before.

I can say with confidence it’s not freezing fog, hail fog or upslope fog. For all the salt in the air, it’s not coastal fog – moisture condensing over cool water – not with sea temps a balmy 24 degrees. And is it valley fog? Damp cool air might slide down the hills in the night… but Sunday’s haze followed midnight downpours not clear skies.

Having thought about it rationally and analytically, I can only conclude that this was magical fog, sent to stop me paddling all way to the secret heart of this part of the Hawkesbury, Marramarra Creek.

Mist over over mangrove saplings for horizontal shorter

Big Bay

Mangroves in Big Bay at high tide

Skies over Big Bay

I’ve nearly made it there before, as far as Big Bay, with its great lagoon full of mangroves and the riverbed chocabloc with critters. No houses on the ridgelines, no way in except by water. In the 1830s a surveyor’s wife didn’t think much of it: “these dreary solitudes might serve for the abode of a misanthrope so utterly are they secluded from all approach and so entirely destitute of all comfort”. But I’m longing to paddle all the way to the source of the creek, through country with an indigenous past even I can read.

But this time it wasn’t just the fog and the march of time that stopped me. The birds were in on it too, perching photogenically on the wayside oyster poles, feathery sirens luring me away from my upriver odyssey.

Sirens on oyster poles

Demure crested tern

Pelican and boat

Pelican in flight

Small pied cormorant pretending it’s a gull

Pied cormorants on oyster poles

So I’ll have to come back to Marramarra. Maybe next time I’ll bring our full flotilla of mismatched craft and camping gear and stay overnight halfway up the creek in the old orange orchard. The noisy kids should to scare away the temptations of the sirens… and, of course, the silvery silence. So perhaps I’ll follow Odysseus and bring some ear plugs too!

Striated heron hunting on Bar Island

Milson Island in the mist

Egg returns past Bar Island

Looking north on the Hawkesbury from near Deerubbin

Related posts – other paddles on the Hawkesbury from Deerubbin Reserve

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: a paddle from Deerubbin to Bar Island

Of gods and mapreaders: a trip up Kimmerikong Creek in Muogamarra National Park

A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn: paddles up Mullet Creek and around Dangar Island

Broken Bay at low ebb: a short jaunt around the oyster beds near Spectacle Island at the end of Mooney Mooney Creek.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

February 19, 2016

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Geology, national parks, Soil, Uncategorized, waterways

Comments

9 Comments

Alhambra on the Hawkesbury

The last few times I passed by Bujwa Bay, on my way downriver from Berowra Waters, it was shrouded in mist.

On the way to Bujwa Bay

Mist blowing out of Bujwa Bay

A misty morning on Berowra Creek

But last Sunday, in the golden light of late afternoon, there was a revelation.

I’m familiar with the Hawkesbury’s sculpture parks and sandstone art galleries. But the fact that Berowra Creek had well preserved fragments of an ancient Moorish fortress – well, that was news to me.

The “sculpture park” on the northern shore of Long Island, the Hawkesbury

River rainbow, in Berowra Creek

Honeycomb formations in a cave above Bujwa Bay

Sandstone art gallery in Smith’s Creek

When I went home and told RB I’d seen something very like the famous stucco inscriptions of the Alhambra on a estuarine cliffside at the end of Berowra Waters Road, his comment was “You’re barking!”. And he’s probably right.

Honeycomb weathering in sandstone on Bujwa Bay

After all, the Alhambra is an artistic jewel, a masterwork of European Islam, preserved over the centuries after the Moors themselves were driven first into the mountains and then out of Spain altogether. Its delicate carved plasterwork miraculously survived Christian conquerors, dodgy architectural restorers, squatters and tourists. And the sandstone of Bujwa Bay is just, you know, rock.

“The sea” in the Alhambra

Stucco inscriptions

The Alhambra from a distance

Stucco and tile in the Alhambra

Stucco inscription at the Alhambra

But I’ve been reading about “thing power” and it’s given me a whole new angle on inanimate objects. “Thing Power!” – sounds like a killer bathroom cleaner that will sort out all the disturbing life-forms, named and unnameable, in your shower cubicle.

But according to Jane Bennett, its “a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new [that] buzzes within the history of the term ‘nature’ ” (2010, 118). Electrons, microbes, minerals, waste, all busily making and shaping things, inside, around, through, against and despite humans and their fancy-pants plans. She reckons things and people rub along or against each other in a pattern that’s “not random or unstructured, but conforms to the strange logic of vortices, spirals and eddies” (2010, 118).

Alveoli weathering in sandstone

Stone lacework on Bujwa Bay

Kooky as it sounds, this is not a bad description of how the Bujwa Bay Alhambra came into the world, according to a paper coauthored, in a way that pleases my penchant for magical thinking, by a geologist from Granada, home of the famous palace.

Honeycomb weathering like this happens in all sorts of porous rocks, around the world – from Antarctica to Jordan – and maybe even on the surface of Mars. It might seem like hollows would form in weaknesses in the rock, but it’s not necessarily so. Blistering heat, frost, chemical weathering and rain are all in the frame – with maybe a little help from the odd patch of algae or lichen. But mostly it’s about salt and wind.

Salty water – in this case from seaspray – seeps into the rock and crystallises, making tiny fractures. If there’s plenty of water, salt crystals forms on the outside surface to form efflorescence, a mineral flowers blooming on a cliffside or a cellar wall or a garden fence. But the real damage is done deep in the rock.

According to Rodriguez and friends, once a depression is formed in the rockface, wind eddies and swirls inside the concave parts of the stone. Faster breezes mean more evaporation and a super-saturated salt solution, meaning more salt crystals and more fretted stone. Eventually the rockface becomes lacework, without any intervention by a rock lacemaker.

Alhambra rocks 1 crop long

The other name for honeycombed rock is alveoli. It’s stone with lungs. Made of mineral flowers. Not alive (or mostly not alive – sorry algae) but doing complicated and beautiful things.

Not immortal, invisible, unfathomable. In fact, as fathomable as the waters of Bujwa Bay at low tide, that is, knee deep to a heron. Just exceedingly hard to grasp.

And that’s not just me banging my head against a corroding brick wall of “Salt weathering: a selective review” – the geologists are still bickering over exactly how it works. In Bennett’s (possibly slightly loopy) words, it’s vital matter, “hard to discern… and, once discerned, hard to keep focused on. It is too close and too fugitive, as much wind as thing” (119). Or perhaps, in this instance, both wind and thing.

A crab wondering what I’m on about, on a beach near Bujwa Bay

References

Jane Bennett 2010 Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press

Eric Doehne (2002) “Salt Weathering: a selective review” from Natural Stone, Weathering Phenomena, Conservation Strategies and Case Studies. Vol 205, 51-64, Geological Society Special Publication

Carlos Rodriguez-Navarro, Eric Doehne,Eduardo Sebastian (1999) Origins of honeycomb weathering: The role of salts and wind, GSA Bulletin; August 1999; v. 111, no. 8; p. 1250–1255

Huinink, H. Pel, L, Kopinga, K. 2004 “Simulating the growth of tafoni” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 29 1225-33

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

February 11, 2016

Posted under

national parks, Native birds, snakes, Uncategorized, waterways

Comments

9 Comments

Snakes vs whining teenagers

Tiger snake curled face crop long This is what people who hate camping think it’s all about, right? I suspect spiders, high winds and rowdy neighbours also make that list. Yep, a big tick next to them too – it’s all to play for when you camp in the summertime in Wollemi National Park.

But Ganguddy, or Dunn’s Swamp, to give its inaccurate and charmless non-indigenous name, was just as marvellous this January as it was when we first visited this time last year.

Ganguddy in early dawn light

Dew on some kind of orchid?

Lichen on native cyprus

Dawn at Ganguddy

Purple flower

Leptospermum flowers

Strange club shaped lichens

Dusk at Ganguddy

View from the pagoda lookout

Yes, there were more reptiles – lethal and benign – but to balance it out, there was also less torrential rain. At no point this year did it seem likely that the full set of adult campers, each clinging to a leg of the kitchen-gazebo, would take off and fly over the pagoda rock formations like a quartet of grubby Mary Poppinses. It rained, but not inside any of the tents. And the whining teenagers weren’t my delightful children but the feathered offspring of the camp ground locals.

“Feed me!”

“Where are you?”

Juvenile noisy friarbird wants a snack

It seems a bit unfair for such giant children to be demanding food, although Gisela Kaplan in her fascinating book “Bird Minds” suggests some evolutionary advantages to having hungry teenagers hanging around. Apparently adults noisy friarbirds only feed the young’uns for three weeks after fledging -hard to believe this galumphing one was so close to being a fluffster.

But you can see where all that food goes. You reckon your adolescent’s feet are big? What about junior purple swamphen‘s clodhoppers?

Juvenile purple swamp hen with giant feet

Adult swamp hen feeding the hungry bairns

Unhygenic as it sounds, the drop dunny seemed to be a particularly popular spot for a snack. The baby grey fantails spent a lot of time looking deliberately cute there in order to get a feed. If you were still uncertain about the superiority of the earth toilet, this little guy is a clincher I reckon.

Juvenile grey fantail hanging around the drop toilets

“I’m hungry”

“Please feed me – I’m cute!” – juvenile grey fantail

The white-browed scrubwren also enjoyed loitering out around the toilets. I didn’t see any juveniles, but then this one looked so stern, perhaps they were there but just too nervous to beg for tucker.

Grumpy looking white browed scrubwren

The suspiciously touselled looking eastern yellow robin – a juvenile perhaps – had worked out that the best place for tucker is definitely the barbecue.

Eastern yellow robin having a picnic

Eastern yellow robin

I’m not sure if the adult reed warbler had gone into head down, bum up, to feed some chicks, or if it was just going to extreme lengths to avoid facing the long-lensed papperazzi. I was rather pleased when after two years of trying I finally got a picture of one, without even having to visit the Rylstone Guns and Ammo for a flame thrower to thin out that pesky, snap obscuring habitat.

Reed warbler nest

Reed warbler

And, miracle of miracles, I found an azure kingfisher without ADD. I reckon I can put away my paddle now – 18 months of kayaking have not been in vain.

Kingfisher on stump 2 instagram square.jpg

At last – a sluggish azure kingfisher

The invasive gambezi minnows that fill this reservoir – built in the 30s as a water supply for a concrete works – seem to be an optimal snack size for the kingfishers – I saw plenty of them, along with a randy musk duck, the ubiquitous Eurasian coots and a pair of Nankeen night herons that alighted, mockingly, in the trees opposite the campsite, just after it got a tiny bit too dark for a decent photograph. But there was nothing larger – no whistling kites, for one. Judging from the frustration level of the fisherman in our party and the track record of these mosquitofish of outcompeting native rivals, I suspect there weren’t many more substantial meals to be had (on the bright side, possibly thanks to the fish, there weren’t too many mosquitos making meals of us either).

Musk duck courtship display

Musk duck tail on display

With all these LBBs – and all the fast moving ones I didn’t get a decent shot of – busy flocks of brown thornbills high in the canopy, white-throated tree-creepers spiralling their way up the tea trees, the baffling grey strike-thrush, the white-eared honeyeaters darting around in the dew drenched dawn – I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the snake that sidled through the camp site or or the one slithered along the ironstone tops. Let’s hope the top predators were more successful at catching the flighty little buggers* than I was.

Rock formations near the dam

Currawongs at the camp site

Tiger snake on ironstone?

Red bellied black snake in the campsite

Sandstone and lichen

More sandstone and lichen

Silhouettes of the camp site trees

Dawn over “Swallow rocks”

*Okay I know red-bellied blacks mostly eat frogs, which is why they were down by the reedbeds near the camp. But I bet they don’t object to the odd gormless yellow robin if it’s available.

* * *

There’s more info about the history and geology of Ganguddy in my previous post from here: In other sandstone country

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

February 5, 2016

Posted under

History, kayaking, national parks, Uncategorized, waterways, Work

Comments

3 Comments

A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn

I have a weakness for bridges. Romantic trysts just happen to be arranged with the backdrop of the world’s first iron bridge. Multiple crossings of the gorgeous Severn Suspension Bridge are absolutely essential for that work trip. And in pride of place of the mantlepiece, of course, is a railway poster of the famous cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that my paddles lately all seem to end up under what it pleases me to call Brooklyn Bridge. That’s not its real name, mind, but since it starts on Long Island and takes you through the thriving metropolis of Brooklyn (population 744) I think I can get away with it.

Brooklyn bridge and stone pillars plus boat.jpg

There was that morning jaunt from Parsley Bay, past the oyster leases and beneath the swooping welcome swallows, to the top of Mullet Creek, where the Newcastle trains disappear into the Woy Woy tunnel, once the longest tunnel in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on on some beautiful railway journeys in my life – from Montreal to New York in winter, past above-ground swimming pools frozen like giants’ ice-cubes; from southern Thailand to Bangkok, looking out at the richest of tropical orchards woven into the jungle; between snowcapped mountains and sea on the West Highland line to ~~Hogwarts~~ Mallaig. But I reckon this journey along Mullet Creek, not a place that will ever be immortalised in the baby names of the rich and famous, is my favourite. There’s something about a railway line that leaves roads far behind, forging its own way along the empty shore.

Sunrise at Brooklyn

Looking back at the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge and Long Island from the mouth of Mullet Creek

Freight train going up Mullet Creek

“You looking at me?” – pelican at Parsley Bay

If you ask the driver, you can get off near the top of the creek at Wondabyne, the only station sans road access in Australia. Every now and then, you see people jumping off the train and straight into a tinnie, zooming off to the shacks on the other side of the river before their fish supper gets cold.

For a few years in the late nineteenth century, while the first Hawkesbury River bridge was being built, if you were travelling north by train from Sydney, you would disembark at Long Island, board the double-decker paddleboat the General Gordon, and steam off to Mullet Creek Station, then just north of Wondabyne. Now people hop off here to do part of the Great North Walk – a 250 kilometre walk from central Sydney to the beautiful beaches of Newcastle – or to wander up to Pindar Cave. Judging from the smorgasborg of rusted out craft I saw in the shallow water at the top of the creek, it’s also a place where people take their boats to die.

White jellyfish in Mullet Creek

Barnacles on a wrecked ship in Mullet Creek

A boat that may well be beyond repair

Then there was this weekend’s jaunt, downriver from Deerubbin Reserve – a popular spot, right by the freeway, to fish or have a picnic for those who find the perpetual roar of traffic reassuring. With the ever present possibility of a quick exit, I guess it’s ideal for the heavily pregnant or those who find their relatives a bit hard to take. But I can’t really bag people for their passion for the internal combustion engine since I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of a paddle underneath (count ’em) three great big bridges.

Sunrise over Long Island

Three bridges in early morning light: the freeway bridge, the Pacific Highway bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge

Hawkesbury River Bridge in dawn light

This weekend’s jaunt took me past Spectacle Island Nature Reserve, under the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge, natch, and around Dangar Island, swished along smartly by the current and the falling tide.

Have you ever been bored enough in an airport to try walking the wrong way up a moving footpath? Trying to paddle across the current to get to one of the beaches on the eastern side of the island was a bit like that. It all seemed a bit too hard in the end, so I went where the river wanted to take me, downstream, floating just above perilous rocky reefs by off Bradley’s Beach and veering round the seagrass beds.

Sailing boats north of Dangar Island

Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge at dawn

White boat, blue hills at Kuring-gai National Park

And then through the sailing boats, swaying and tinkling like expensive marine windchimes, to Sandy Bay, the best place in the world to be homeless. The folks whose setup I saw there – a tarp flanked by a beached ramshackle boat and a solar panel – had no-one for neighbours but a horde of blue soldier crabs. There was no sign of the human residents, but I now know what it’s like to be a celebrity, thousands of beady eyes watching and waiting on your every move.

Quite a few people live rough around Brooklyn. “Good caves, a shower at Brooklyn Baths and walking distance to the bottle shop”, as RB commented with unseemly enthusiasm. In the Depression, apparently, lots of people came to live in these parts for just this reason – shelter and a bit of space for chooks or a veggie garden. I didn’t see a chicken run in Sandy Bay but Brooklyn does seem to have some kind of common flock, judging from these good looking fellas that we met down by the marina a while back.

Egg at Sandy Bay

Chickens on the commons at Brooklyn

A floating barn at Parsley Bay

Thousands of blue soldier crabs watching me

Blue soldier crab

I reckon the Hawkesbury estuary is Sydney Harbour through the looking glass – a parallel flooded river valley, bordered by bush instead of multimillion dollar apartments. If the Harbour has its iconic Bridge, the Hawkesbury has its own engineering marvel – nearly three times as long, resting 50 metres and more deep in soft black mud.

The modern bridge is the second one to cross the river here. The old bridge, finished in 1887, was the last link in the railway that spanned four colonies, connecting Queensland to South Australia.

Sir Henry Parkes, on the day of the bridge’s official opening, pronounced: “In this great system of material arteries which we completed today, we see the crimson fluid of kinship coursing through all the iron veins” (Sharp, 2001, 4). Apparently the other grandees were a bit more underwhelmed by the prospect of a federated Australia, bound together with railways. Nonetheless, the day after, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was headline was “United Australia”

Bridge silhouette 1

At the time it was built, the old bridge was the longest in Australia and had the deepest footings in the world – 180 feet below the high water line – though they still didn’t reach solid ground.

The Union Bridge Company from New Jersey won the contract to build it (on a pin-jointed truss system, as I’m sure you want to know), giving Brooklyn, the railway town that was set up to house the workers, its American name. The tender being won by an American company was one in the eye for the old country, though it pleases me in some strange way that the riveted steel for the spans was made by Arrol Brothers in Glasgow, who also worked on the bridge across the Firth of Forth.

The Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge from Long Island

The old Long Island Railway station

White faced heron checking out the engineers’ work on the new bridge

But the original Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge didn’t last. Its piers, filled with rubble instead of solid concrete, fractured under the weight of the trains that crossed here, the only bit of duplicate track on the line. The piles were starting to crack in the 30s, but the problem only came to light when a US railway geek doing a bit of light recreational reading of an engineering textbook spotted that the piles weren’t built to the original specifications. The death knell of the old bridge, though, was the extra rail traffic of the war.

The piers of the old bridge remain, like golden castles guarding the river.

The footings of the 1887 Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge. Or castles as I like to call them.

I’ve had a great time reading the fantastically detailed history of the building of the new bridge by Major-General Albert Cecil Fewtrell, the Chief Civil Engineer of the NSW railways, who supervised its completion.

There’s some entertaining reading between the lines. When it came to putting the metal spans onto the concrete footing, it seems some fool had a plan to float the 1,600 tonne metal spans over to the pilings at water level and then haul them out with giant cranes perched on the piers. But Major-General Fewtrell soon sorted them out:

“Consideration had been given early to the proposal to float out the spans at low level … The decision [was made] to revert to the high level method of floatation following the return of the Author from active service in 1943” (Fewtrell, 1946, 27)

The cuttings made for the construction docks for the 1946 bridge, and the boat that’s now doing bridge repairs.

The prep they did for the task of floating the massive spans from the construction docks – the cuttings still visible on the north shore of Long Island – onto the concrete pilings at high tide also gives you a sense of the guy.

A large board, representing the land and water at the site of the new bridge, was laid down in the southern tunnel. Model piers were accurately fixed in position in the “stream,” and miniature spans, pontoons, and equipment were used so that the men could practice in detail movements and prepare for emergencies.

Don’t you want to play with those 1/32 scale tiny cranes and miniature pilings? I really really do.

Fewtrell thought that everything had gone swimmingly. But the new bridge, the bridge that was supposed to last 200 years, is crumbling. After years of delays, just this last week, work started on repairing the concrete footings and its rusting reinforcing steel. When I paddled past, there were huddled men in high vis jackets and mysterious icons dangling from the bridge deck – all the signs that a new engineering miracle is about to begin. And I’m sure it’ll happen.

But at this stage, once again, I reckon it’s Hawkesbury River 1: human engineering 0.

Work starts on repairing the Brooklyn Bridge

Number 7 pier – the tricky one to get into place

Signal near the new bridge work

The elaborate connections between the pier and the span of the new bridge

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

November 12, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, estuaries, Geology, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, waterways

Comments

7 Comments

Old hands

I know I live on, walk on, paddle through, someone else’s country. Guringgai country, and sometimes Darug lands, since Berowra Creek, or so I read, is a boundary line between people of the coast and river people. Sometimes, I venture north of the Hawkesbury – Deerubbin – into Darkinjung country. I try hard to remember that I’m an uninvited guest in this land, and that I know next to nothing about it. Because it’s important to know what you don’t know, if you know what I mean.

But sometimes what you don’t know jumps out and smacks you in the eye. It happened out on the water, on Smith’s Creek, a couple of weeks ago.

I love the “road signs” of the waterways

Smith. It’s a joke name, isn’t it? The sort of name you use to check into a hotel for a dirty weekend with a person who isn’t the one you’re married to. A name white guys use to be anonymous. “Yes, I’m John Smith and so is my wife”.

I’m sure Smith’s Creek is named after a really very important Smith. After all, at one time at the turn of the twentieth century, Kuring-gai Chase – specifically the bit of bushland between Smith’s Creek and Cowan Creek – was considered a possible location for the capital of the new Commonwealth. Magnificent scenery and handy for getting back to Sydney, what? You have to wonder whether the sandstone escarpments of Kuring-gai National Park would have been quite such an amenable environment for roundabouts as Canberra. All in all, I’m very glad it didn’t happen. Aside from everything else, I don’t think I could handle a close encounter with Cory Barnardi at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning.

So, as I say, there I was in “Smith’s” Creek, blessedly free of conservative crusaders and, indeed, showing little sign of human life at all. In Apple Tree and Stingray Bay, the power boats were moored silently in rows like roosting birds. Nothing stirred.

Silent boats at dawn in Apple Tree Bay

Dawn stillness on Cowan Creek

Fog on the hillside

Looking back towards Berowra

Boat and water

Tree on sandstone

As I slipped with the tide towards Deerubbin, not a jetboat in sight, a wave of love passed over me for the sport of rugby. More specifically, a feeling of warmth for the thrilling final of the 2015 Rugby World Cup, broadcast to the sports fans of Australia at 2am the night before. What a fine influence sport is on the nation! How it improves the tone of the place! All those worn out rugby fans, tucked up in their beds, or snuggled down in their bunks, dreaming of triumph or of despair, but more to the point, not, as yet, starting up outboard motors.

Looking north towards the Hawkesbury

While the rugby fans were sleeping I paddled, more or less, back to Berowra, swaddled in fog that rolled down the valleys, smudging the pictures of my weekly sea eagle (curse it). They slumbered on as I turned the corner into Smith’s Creek following the great big signs on the shoreline, papped some peeved looking cormorants, tried and failed to see any sign of rays in the sands of Stingray Bay. In the stillness, I felt as if I was in a dream myself as I passed along sandstone cliffwalls, rippled and rainbowed, that slide down and down into the bottle green water, and beneath the smooth-barked gums that butt their way into solid rock a metre or two above a tideline line of oystershells.

Peeved pied cormorants

“Smith’s” creek on the day after the rugby final

The sports lovers were still sleeping when I had my magic moment – the one you wait for every trip – when moon and raptor met in the bright morning light. So for all their shiny cruisers and thrumming engines, the rugby fans would have been no good to me at all if Egg the ancient kayak had drifted away, as it very nearly did, while I tried to find that damn whistling kite in what seems, through a zoom lens, like a very very big sky. That would have been me, stranded in sparkling knee-deep water, with a ten k swim through the bobbing jellyfish, all the way home.

Whistling kite and moon

Having a rest in the shallows of Smith’s Creek

Jellyfish and photographer

It wasn’t until I got back and uploaded my photos that I saw, in the corner of a picture, the ochre hand prints on the golden rock. Who put them there and when? I really don’t know. Maybe someone not so long ago – the indigenous rangers of Guringgai take loads of school kids out to see the hundreds of carvings and paintings that are all over the park. I bet a bit of print making happens here and there. Could it be one of the people of West Head slain by smallpox – no accident it seems – just a few years after the convicts arrived? Surely not. Someone in the time in-between, making their mark on country. Still here, though many people were forced far away, as far as Yorta Yorta country, on the borders of Victoria.

I just don’t know. Those hands told me, at least, to remember that I don’t.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 26, 2015

Posted under

estuaries, kayaking, maps, national parks, Native birds, waterways

Comments

8 Comments

Of gods and map readers

I’m running out of map!

It’s not a real cartographic apocalypse – a Ken Loach-influenced Dr Who episode in which all the world’s maps are stolen away by some evil alien civilisation heavily invested in NavMan shares. But after a year with my canoe, there’s not much unexplored territory on this part of the Hawkesbury. I’ve nearly done with the alchemy of my Saturdays: transmuting ink on paper into trees and water and mist.

White bellied sea eagle flying through the mist

Milson’s Island, escarpments behind lit up by the dawn

Near Marramarra Creek

Misty trees in Muogamarra

Tinny in the morning mist off Bar Island

Looking up the Hawkesbury River

Maybe it’s my fading memories, but as I paddled just after dawn from Deerubbin to Kimmerikong Creek, I kept thinking of the west coast of Scotland. Something about morning fog: the sea eagles appearing and vanishing; mist spilling over the ridgelines and pouring down the slopes like an evanescent avalanche.

I remember my first view of Glen Coe through the bus window, RB naming each hill as we passed. What a gift, I thought, to know a place like this so very well.

Glen Orchy hills from Rannoch Moor

Buachaille Etive Mor in Glen Coe

Aonach Eagach

Peanmeanach from An Stac

Loch Lomond

Peanmeanach

The Cuillin on Skye from Arasaig

I was at a disadvantage this Saturday: I forgot my map, carefully folded into its extra large, double-sealed “Hercules” zip lock bag and left on the kitchen table. Google Earth is one of those things that prove we really do live in the future. And RB is always complaining about how rubbish Australian mapmakers are compared to the unsurpassable Ordinance Survey. Even so, I still think maps make us into gods.

With a map you know what’s going to happen next: what’s beyond the next hill or around the next corner. Geological maps and navigational charts are even better – you see into the depths of ocean or stare right through the surface of the earth. Short of being an X Man with laser eyes or clairvoyant powers, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

If you’re going to claim someone’s country or rewrite its history, of course, a map is a magnificent weapon.

Bar Island

Great Cormorant near Bar Island

The whistling kite of Bar Island

Of course, the untraversed parts of the map are the tricky ones, a little bit too far away from a put-in, further than the old easy jaunts. So it’s through known country to the unknown: past the Whirlpool of Death and Bar Island’s grumpy whistling kite, beyond the verdant urine-fertilised fields of warrigal greens at Back Beaches, though not quite as far as Ant Hill Point (saving that excitement for a really slow weekend). Just when you feel you are truly in the wilderness, with only cormorants for company, you turn a corner and there’s a line of houses that look like they’ve been helicoptered in from deepest suburbia. I half expected to hear a solar powered leaf blower or hedge trimmer.

Just across the other side of Berowra Creek, Muogamarra Nature Reserve is deliberately kept something of a secret. It’s only open to the public six weekends of the year, in early spring. There is a field station there, and in the water of Kimmerikong Bay scientists have been testing those Qx resistant oysters I regaled you about a couple of months back. The reserve was originally declared in the 1930s to protect the many rock carvings, hand stencils, scarred trees, middens and grinding grooves there: this is a landscape long and intimately known. However, I guess National Parks are trying to stop this particularly lovely part of Hawkesbury sandstone with its 14 mammal species (including tiger quolls!), 900 plant species and 140 varieties of birds from being “known” in a biblical sense; that is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

Threatening sign

Grey spider flower

Boronias of some sort

Isopogon

Some sort of leptospermum

Red spider flower

I hear that Cowan, the town that sits on the edge of Muogamarra, had a crime-wave a while ago. Since no-one locks their cars, a street’s worth of gps’s disappeared in a single night. A sign was put up in the window the general store: if all the missing devices turned up outside the community hall there’d be no need to call the police. Everyone got their Tom Toms back. This story gives you a hint of how the people of Cowan might view the official regulations preserving the sanctity of Muogamarra. Since I was an incomer from Berowra, a good six kilometres away, however, I figured I was safer keeping my feet in my canoe as I wound my way through down Kimmerikong Creek, deep into the reserve.

The creek, looping from the cliffside on one side of the valley to the escarpment on the other, looks nothing like it does on the map, but exactly as it does from space, the shroud of mysterious grey mangroves slowly falling back as you paddle upriver, exposing the glint of the creek to a satellite’s view.

Mangroves at the base of Kimmerikong Bay

Grey mangroves again – or are they river mangroves

New muddy baby mangroves

Grey mangroves and the northern side of the Kimmerikong Creek

Bottom of the cliffside in Kimmerikong Creek

Grey mangroves at half tide

Google Earth may have imaged the mangroves of Kimmerikong Creek to its satisfaction but I know I haven’t captured it to mine. Somehow my wan photographs of these flooded forests fail to catch the sense of invisible ferment, mysteries hidden between the hoary tree trunks and their reflection, the hush that hints at unknown things slowly emerging. I imagine a wading Ent, striding and squelching towards me through the mire, hairy-legged with pneumatophores and flanked by an bevy of miniscule leaping fish, wearing a National Parks and Wildlife uniform and demanding payment of that $3,000 dollar fine.

No Ents this time, though, and no bird photos either. I heard, I think, maybe 138 species of bird as I ducked and crashed through the overhanging branches, and didn’t see even one. Perhaps I need to get up even earlier – 4 am? 3 am? – to capture the mangrove’s magic, as The Goat the Wrote does in his stunningly beautiful photos. The stalwarts of the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic can paddle all night, so why can’t I? 111 kilometres in a one day – with that kind of stamina the folds of the map would open up like a flower. Ant Hill Point here I come!

I’ll have to work on it. This time there was no bonk, but the pied cormorants of Milson’s Passage looked on pityingly as I swirled downriver through the tidal race, kermit-armed, back home to my plans and my maps.

Inquisitive look from a little pied cormorant

The way back to Milson’s Passage

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 4, 2015

Posted under

anthropocene, Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, Waste, waterways

Comments

10 Comments

Encounters with eagles

May I present this week’s sea eagle?

Sea eagle and a view of Budgewoi Lake

Sea eagle retreating to a pole to eat its fish

As yet on my estuarine adventures, I haven’t seen a score of sea-eagles on a single morning (although I can imagine a battalion of them, flying in formation), but an encounter with an eagle has become as much a regular feature of my kayaking expeditions as the ubiquitous white-faced heron. Those cryptic little passerines in the riverside scrub are hard to spot even if you’re not short sighted and half deaf. So three cheers for the white-bellied sea eagle “large and conspicuous” “easily sighted when… soaring… in search of prey“. Haliaeetus leucogaster, you are the middle aged canoeist’s friend.

There was the eagle we saw battling it out with a pair of whistling kites over fishing rights on a fabulous family excursion across the Hawkesbury from Brooklyn, across the surf-line and up the Patonga River. According to Wikipedia, sea eagles harass smaller raptors like kites in hopes of stealing their prey. Not today, Josephine. This eagle was bested by the lowly kite, unwilling to relinquish a top notch fishing spot. I need to listen to my own advice to my students – don’t believe Wikipedia!

Sea eagle about to launch

Sea eagle soaring in for fish

Whistling kite defending its ground

White bellied sea eagle beats a retreat

Whistling kite aka archaeopteryx

Whistling kite coming in for the kill

Whistling kite hunting in Patonga Creek

An eagle even made a guest appearance on a modest little paddle down the end of our street. This was one mellow raptor, its apparent indifference to poorly coordinated amateur photographers splashing around trying to get a good shot belying its rep as a “shy and easily disturbed species“. Ruth, my companion on the water that day, had seen a sea eagle, earlier, on the very same bare branch, while bushwalking along the ridge above. Same bird or just a popular perch?

Sea eagle at Berowra Creek

An eagle eye

Casuarina forest on the edge of the salt marsh on Berowra Creek

Berowra Creek in morning mist

Board walk through the saltmarsh near Berowra Creek

Pied cormorant about to be eaten by a shark

Since the rule for my stolen Saturday morning paddles is no more than half an hour in the car, I’ve frequently had this very thought as I spot yet another sea eagle. Same bird? Am I being stalked by just one glorious if persistent raptor who’s somehow taken a fancy to my little craft, charmed perhaps by its avian-friendly name? Or is the Hawkesbury awash with sea eagles?

Even the Department of Environment in its definitive run down on Haliaeetus leucogaster doesn’t seem super sure. Their guesstimate of 500 pairs across the whole country is based on a one for every 40 kilometre of Australian coastline would pretty much mean that all the eagles in my photos are the same dude (or dudette – the females are larger but I find it’s kind of hard to tell if a bird is small or if it’s just far away).

Either way, I’m 100% sure this week’s eagle is a new one, since I saw it at the start of a paddle down Wallarah Creek, seventy ks north of here. The creek wends its quiet way through bushland past the Wyong North sewage treatment plant to Budgewoi Lake. What with my burgeoning interest in taking blurry pictures of distant bird-life, it seems I will be spending more and more time hanging around sewage farms – they seem to be the go-to venue for the would-be twitcher.

White-bellied sea eagle struggling with a supersized meal

The Budgewoi eagles seem a bit more coy than the Berowra locals, as you can tell from this dodgy pic on my maxed out zoom. Or maybe it’s just that this sea-eagle didn’t want to share her supersized snack.

Which, after observing the consequences of fraternisation with humans for other birds I saw on my way up Wallarah Creek, is probably a good thing.

Pied cormorant strangled by a fishing line

Female australasian darter tangled up in fishing line

Up until recently, it was thought that carelessly discarded bait, hooks and line were the big killers of waterbirds, and there have been some efforts made to make sure fisherfolk dispose of their scraps in the rubbish rather than leaving them lying around – not such a big ask really. Some have even argued for the use of biodegradable line and hooks that will rust away (eventually).

But efforts to get fishermen to clean up their act have had surprisingly little impact on the number of waterbirds being injured or killed by fishing tackle. In fact, research by academics and wildlife rescue organisations in South Australia and New South Wales suggest that the vast majority of birds that get entangled or hooked – often pelicans, but also plovers, gulls and stilts – get caught up when they are close to people actually fishing.

After my trip up Wallarah Creek I can see why. As I passed riverfront houses with their landing slips and jetties I saw pelicans lounging on back lawns and an excited egret being thrown small fry by a local. Even the striated heron, normally shy, flew off in the direction of human habitation, not the other way. The birds around here are familiar with humans, their tinnies, their by-catch and, unfortunately, their fishing lines.