Posted by

Posted on

August 24, 2019

Posted under

Climate change, estuaries, kayaking, national parks, Native birds, natural history, superb lyrebirds, Uncategorized

Comments

The singing and the sea

Bute with shiny landscape tidied When 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.

Epicris longifolia

Smith Creek reflections

White cheeked honeyeater and banksia

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.

Fishermen off Flint and Steel Point

Looking out to sea

Lion Island

Fog near America Bay

Speedboat off Juno Point

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.

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.

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

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!

The green water of Cowan Creek

A superb lyrebird I prepared earlier

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

A winter morning in Cowan Creek

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 1, 2018

Posted under

egg laying, Insects, national parks, Native birds, nesting, Uncategorized

Comments

1 Comment

Things to do with termite nests

Lace monitor in an arboreal termite nest

Happy New Year!

I don’t know about yours, but one of my resolutions for 2018 is to pay a lot more more attention to bugs. Or rather, insects in general, and how they interact with all the other critters around them.

So the year was off to a good insect-oriented start when I took this photo just down the hill from the spectacular lookout at West Head in Kuring-gai Chase National Park.

What’s this little monitor doing as she peeps out of this termites’ nest, a few metres up a gum tree?

What’s her story? And what’s she up to with those termites?

View north from West Head

At first, I thought she might have been after kingfisher eggs or nestlings.

A couple of years ago my bird watching brother told me to keep an eye out for termites nests in trees, pointing out that kingfishers often made the hollows in these “termitaria” to nest in. Since then, I’ve seen plenty of arboreal burrows on my paddles around the Hawkesbury, and occasionally a sacred kingfisher lurking suspiciously nearby.

Kingfisher nest in an arboreal termite nest

Sacred kingfisher hanging out nearby

Many species of kingfishers, including (to my great surprise – I’m not sure why), kookaburras, often nest in termite mounds. I had assumed that birds would choose abandoned arboreal termitaria, but in most cases where animals reuse mounds, it seems, the original builders are still in situ when the new residents move in.

Synchronised kookaburras

Unlike other birds, such as the hooded parrots of Arnhem Land, kingfishers don’t wait to build until the mud of the mound is softened by rain. They do construction the hard way, through sometimes lethal collision flights into outer wall of the nest. Both members of the pair participate in this headbanging activity until a 25 cm tunnel is dug. As you can see in the picture of the burrow above, the tunnel slopes downward a little, to help with keeping the it clear of the young’s faeces. If only dealing with human children’s ordure was a simple as a gently sloping bedroom and hallway, eh? Once the initial tunnel is dug, the kingfisher sometimes leaves the excavation for the termites to tidy up inside, sealing the interior walls of the nest.

New Zealand Sacred Kingfisher

But kingfishers aren’t alone in using termite mounds as a handy place to breed. I’m not quite sure what was using this big nest near Port Stephens. I suspect it’s not kingfishers. Like many Australian birds, they are cooperative breeders, with their youngsters from previous broods helping raise the new babies, but they don’t seem to nest colonially. As these burrowholes or just access points for some insect-eating predator to have a crunchy snack?

Many nest? Or access holes for snackers?

An azure kingfisher – a juvenile?

But back to our termite loving monitor lizard. As a bird-savvy informant pointed out, had my lizard been munching baby kingfisher eggs, the parents would have had something to say about it. In fact, what I saw wasn’t a nest-raid but most likely the aftermath of a hatching.

Another lace monitor in Kuring-gai National Park

Because, as it turns out, lace monitors also lay their eggs in termite mounds, using the warmth generated by the insects to incubate their young. Once the eggs are laid, the lizards lets the termites seal them in, safe from predators in their incubation chamber in the treetops. Or perhaps slightly safer.

No-one seems to research lace monitors – too damn common it seems. But, researchers studying the related Rosenberg Monitors found that females defended the nests for a few weeks after the eggs were deposited. Some hard core conflict was observed:

“The most aggressive fighting observed was between a defending female and a marauder, with females fighting males more than twice their body mass. Both attacker and defender sustained injuries, including dislocated or broken limbs; broken ribs; spinal injuries; and severe bites to head, throat, and abdomen” (Rismiller, McKelvey, Green, 2010).

Baby rosenberg monitors dig their own way out of their natal termite heap, but everyone’s a bit vague about how the baby lace monitors escape their birthplace/prison. Despite the female’s willingness to break a spine or limbs to ensure the safety of their young at the point eggs are laid, herpetologists don’t give goanna mothers a lot of credit for subsequent interest in their offspring. Some researchers think that the mothers come back to dig their babies out of captivity when the right time comes. Others seem to think they just happen to be digging randomly in likely-looking termite mounds when they accidentally happen upon their young (Kirshner, 2007). This sounds all rather implausible to me .

Lace monitor in Wollemi National Park

I’m still not 100% clear about what I saw up a tree at West Head. Was the lizard I spotted was one of the little ones, lolling around in its birthplace after its mysterious liberation. Or a female spending some time hanging out in the nest, having helped her young to freedom? I’m just not sure.

One way or another, one of our common-as-muck goannas was doing its thing in its ordinary, fascinating way. With the help of a multitude of insect Mary Poppinses.

The termetarium from a distance

Further references

Kirshner, D. (2007) Multiclutching in captive Lace Monitors, Varanus varius. Mertensiella (16): 403-421

Rismiller, P.D., McKelvey, M.W., Green, B. (2010) “Breeding phenology and behavior of Rosenberg’s Goanna (Varanus rosenbergi) on Kangaroo Island, South Australia” Journal of Herpetology 44(3):399-408. 2010

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

August 27, 2017

Posted under

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

Comments

2 Comments

Stingray Bay: lost and found

After years of denial, I have finally accepted that I’m a map hoarder.

Though my other half has long been known by the moniker “Map Man”, it’s me that whiles my evenings away at the Lands and Property Information’s map shop, and I’m the one who takes our topographic maps on most of their little outings on the water, snug inside their “Hercules” double zip-lock plastic bags. There have been some unfortunate errors – we have a few maps of dull little patches of agricultural wasteland with a bit of barely navigable waterway in one corner. But despite the ridiculously small slices of this wide brown land that can fit on any given 1:25000 map, they really are quite useful things.

Although possibly less useful – without a compass – in a white out.

Setting out from Appletree Bay

Fog and mist are picturesque, right? “In…mist, the picturesque artist can celebrate obscurity, lack of clarity, indistinctness, that which is veiled… the picturesque tourist is prepared to spend days in fog” (Murray, 2004, 874). Or possibly, not so much prepared to spend days there as trapped there for indefinitely unable to find their way out, as you can see from the baroque twists and turns captured on my phone’s GPS on my last jaunt to Stingray Bay. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to fish it out of its dry bag and consult it for directions!

I often laugh at the giant directional signs you see on the waters edge of the Hawkebury – they really look like they belong by a freeway, not a pristine riverside – but if it hadn’t been for a bloody great sign looming up through the fog, I might still have been floating aimlessly around Cowan Creek days later.

Lost

Fishermen?

Egg and Easter sun

Jellyfish in the fog

I was quite keen, back in April, leaving the boat ramp at Appletree Bay on a high and rising tide, to check out Stingray Bay. It’s a decent step – about sixteen ks, slightly more if you decide to do baffled pirouettes mid-stream – but not an epic yomp. A trip up Smith’s Creek is a good one to do when the tide rising steadily rather than on the turn, since you can go with the flow on at least half the journey, and ride the current on last leg home.

I’d had a pit stop there at Stingray Bay before, on my way further up Smith’s Creek. The Hawkesbury in these parts is a steep-sided sandstone gorge, flooded these last six thousand years with bottle green water, so this is a rare spot where you can get out of a canoe to stretch your legs. You will most likely standing in knee deep water but that’s not so bad, unless you happen to step on the eponymous sting rays. We worry more about sharks, but apparently after blue bottles, stingrays – most likely round these parts the common stingaree – cause the most injuries to beachgoers in Sydney.

They’re not aggressive animals. Richard Wylie, a marine biologist from Monash University, described them as “wonderfully inquisitive and gentle marine animals“. Stingrays give birth to live young and in Yolgnu communities in the far north, stingrays – specifically the mangrove whipray or Gawangalkmirri – were seen as devoted parents, the sort we humans should aspire to be. And while I feel might fret about an encounter with a ray, indigenous communities have long seen them not as a threat but as an important and delicious food source.

But if you do happen to frighten stingrays – for instance, stomping on them while they’re hiding in the sand – you can get a sting from the toxin-bearing barb on their tail. Apparently it hurts like hell. Immersing your feet in hot water denatures the toxin and takes the pain away, apparently, although a lot of people need pieces of barb removed from their wound and sometimes stitches and antibiotics too.

Seagrass and sand in Stingray Bay

I’ve never stepped on a ray, though I have seen them, just once, in the shallows of Calabash Bay in Berowra Creek. But just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you walk around in shallow estuarine waters, it’s best to have footwear and shuffle rather than stride. Fortunately, my bum is usually so numb by the time I stumble out of my kayak that shuffling around stirring up the sand with my protective booties is not so much safety measure as a physical necessity.

I paddled straight over the sting-ray shallows, though, back in April, past yachts barely stirring in the morning mist and moody cormorants staring out at the post-apocalyptic blankness.

Yachts moored in Stingray Bay

Cormorant contemplating the end of civilisation

A pied cormorant – I think suffering from a fishing line wound

Ravens being suitable gothic

Jellyfish in the mist

Slightly rumpled sea eagle

Even at half tide, you can skim safely above the seagrass and on up the creek. There’s a deep swimming hole, and above it, two tiny waterfalls tumbling into a bowl of rocks. Despite my morbid fear of breaking my precious and ancient wooden boat, I even managed to clamber out onto the rocks for a comfort break and a look around. It’s a really lovely spot – a great place to come for a picnic and a splash around in warmer weather.

Egg at the rock garden at the top of the creek

Dawn spiderwebs

Rock orchids

And not a bad place to hang out if you’re a baby fish either. There may not have been any stingrays, but there were certainly plenty of little fishlings when I visited again, in very different weather, last weekend. So very many fishies, swirling away from the paddle like living iron filings toyed with by slightly sadistic magnet… yet so surprisingly difficult for a bumbling amateur to photograph.

The creek at Stingray Bay

Mangrove reflections

Stingray Bay reflections

Many many fish

Stingray Bay certainly looks different (if possibly less picturesque) when you can actually see it.

Looking up Smith’s Creek

Reflections in Stingray Bay

Pied cormorants fishing at Cottage Point

Oyster reflections

And the journey there and back again’s not too hard on the eyes either. Except when you’re paddling straight into the morning sun.

Looking past Cottage Point

Boats at Cottage Point

Dawn through the trees

Little pied cormorant

At Peach Trees

Sandstone escarpment

The cormorants, the escarpment and the sun-touched tree tops might have been perfectly visible and, thanks to months with virtually no rain, the clear green water might have offered a vertiginous view of sandstone slabs sliding into the depths, but not all the mysteries of Cowan Creek were revealed to me on my paddle back to Apple Tree Bay.

Was it that persistent dive-bombing tern that plunked so heavily into the water behind me, leaving only a ripple by the time I spun around to see? Did some underwater creature make that line of bubbles I paddled through on the way past Waratah Bay? Could it have been dolphins? Or more worryingly, a bullshark? Maybe it’s better not to know.

Dawn in Cowan Creek

Mystery bubbles

Water and sky in Stingray Bay

Australian raven at Appletree Bay

But not while you’re navigating!

Bobbin head sign

References

Emma Macevoy (2004) “Picturesque” from Murray, Christopher ed The Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era 1760-1850, Vol 2, Taylor and Francis

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

July 12, 2017

Posted under

egg laying, estuaries, kayaking, national parks, Seasons, Time, Uncategorized, waterways

Comments

5 Comments

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!

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…

Juno Point in a golden dawn

Golden waves off Parsley Bay

Mast and moon

Reflections of Eagle Rock

Oysterfisherman in Porto Bay

Reflections in Porto Bay

Sandstone sculpture

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.

Banksia in flower on Gunyah Beach

Looking from Possum Beach out towards Lion Head

Waterfall onto the beach at Refuge Bay

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

Boats anchored off Parsley Bay

Looking back to the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge

Off Gunyah Beach

Fishermen and Lion Island

Fog in front of Dangar Island

Juno Point

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

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

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

May 9, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Climate change, national parks, Native animals, natural history

Comments

4 Comments

Low tide at Gunyah Beach

“The sea or not the sea?”

That was the question churning through my brain, as I set out for my first solo kayak on the Hawkesbury proper. Let’s be kind and say I’m not a risk taker (there’s a reason I’m fond of chickens). And my canoe is properly vintage, made out of wafer-thin plywood back in the early 70s, and now held together by a rich tapestry of epoxy based products and amateurishly applied fibreglass. Don’t get me wrong – it was the best $100 I ever spent on ebay but our Egg is no ocean-going liner.

Slightly rotten Egg, the day i bought it for $100

Egg being cooked

A rich melange of epoxy products

Replacing the rotten carlin

But setting off on a sunny Saturday morning with a light off-shore wind and a slack tide, I thought my decrepit boat and I might just be able to brave a three kilometre paddle along the widest reaches of the Hawkesbury Estuary, from Brooklyn’s Parsley Bay to Gunyah Beach in Kuring-gai Chase national park.

In Parsley Bay

Map of my jaunt, preserved from harm in a handy ziploc bag

About midway across the 700 metres at the mouth of Porto Bay, I realised the weird rise and fall of the boat was swell, a new and disturbing experience for me as a canoeist. Well, it was either swell or the kayak was being regularly nudged sideways by bull sharks. Either way, I was not happy. It didn’t help that the choppy water was full of floating branches, torn down by last week’s big winds. If the sharks didn’t get me, I’d be turned into a giant vegetarian shishkebab by a surfing pine tree. I was in the ocean, and it was scary.

Storm detritus on Gunyah Beach

Of course, the Hawkesbury “River” is, kinda, the sea – a flooded river valley that has its tidal limit a hundred kilometres or thereabouts from its mouth. Whenever I think about this, I imagine how strange it must have been for the people living on the plains that once stretched out from the current coastline under what is now the surface of the sea, as the ocean crept slowly up, over ten thousand years, claiming the valleys carved out by the river, pushing people before it into the hills. Now that’s really going into the unknown.

Waterfall from a hanging valley

In the end, of course, I made my little paddle with no problems at all, apart from an annoying lack of photographic evidence that there was ever anything to fear. Gunyah Beach (boat access only) even had its own lounge suite on which an unnerved canoeist might rest and recover. I’m pretty sure the contractual obligation white-faced heron had just stood up after a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive as I arrived.

Ah, a comfy sofa.

Everyone’s been on the beach

Contractual obligation white-faced heron

Striated heron http://birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/striated-heron

Low tide in the creek

White cheeked honeyeaters – everywhere!

Stumbling through the mud around the beach-side lagoon, I found myself in a maelstrom of silvereyes and white cheeked honeyeaters. I’ve come to realise binaural hearing is a real asset for bird watching. With one dodgy cochlea I spent half my time whipping my head wildly from one side to the other to work out where the chirping was coming from. In the end taking random pictures of the bushes seemed the best way to avoid permanent neck injury. I was disproportionately pleased with the few photos that worked out. There’s something particularly delightful about the most minor victories over timidity and incompetence, even if you can’t convincingly frame pootling around in boats in your estuarine backyard as some kind of heroic feminist re-enactment of The Old Man and the Sea.