Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

December 17, 2018

Posted under

Backyard birds, breeding, hawks, nesting, predation, Predators, raptors, Uncategorized

Comments

2 Comments

Motherhood on a windy day

Kid with mum distant 2 wide crop

Last year two collared sparrowhawk fledglings made it out of the nest high in our neighbour’s pine tree. This year it was just one. It’s been a lot quieter around here. No squabbling over snacks. No shuffling along branches side by side or pratfalls high in the canopy. No hightailing it after a sibling chasing a feed.

There’s been more adult and parent bonding, though. I rarely saw the adults and offspring together last year. But a few weeks ago, in windy weather, I got to see them hanging out low in the trees by our drive, sheltering from the tossing branches.

The juvenile looked, by turns, absurdly sleek and adult, and fluffy and completely gormless. Mum (or dad) seemed to be wrestling with the same conceptual problem – how grown up is this chick really?

Typically when the sparrowhawks catch a juicy white-faced honey eater or wattlebird chick, they call out, over and over again. I’m not sure if this the dinner bell for partner or offspring, or just triumphant territory claiming. They swiftly pluck the small bird they’ve caught and then gorily and fairly rapidly consume it.

But on this particular day, the adult hawk sat very still, prey gripped tightly, not taking even a bite. The youngster lurked awkwardly nearby, apparently not sure what to do next.

Kid with mum lower

Eventually mum (or dad), probably irked by the local amateur photographer, flew to a higher perch in the trees. But her prey, plucked, pink and gleaming, was still untouched.

Mum with prey 2

She was waiting. Eventually Junior flew up to join her.

Mum and kid with prey 2 story eye glint amended

He still seemed clueless about what she wanted him to do – as indeed I was. I’m willing to have a guess, though.

Adult sparrowhawks start by feeding their young little shreds of meat – the avian equivalent of pulled pork, I guess. I have heard the adults teach the fledglings to catch little birds mid air by dropping little snippets of prepared flesh to them on the wing. This youngster was definitely not in possession of that skillset.

Mum and kid with prey high 3

But I think dad (or mum) was trying to give the not-so-little little one a low-stakes chance to prep the dish for her (or him)self. But it certainly wasn’t happening on this occasion. Young blood had a good look, then stumbled past and took off, not even having a tiny go at flesh-tearing.

Juvenile from behind looking over shoulder crop

To be honest, I’m really pretty worried about this young one. I’ve been working from home a lot lately, and every morning, I hear sparrowhawk calls, and I race up the drive with my camera.

But it’s just the adult I see, calling and calling and calling.

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

Our sparrowhawk summer

The teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

Sex, nests and dogfighting

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 13, 2018

Posted under

Biodiversity, estuaries, fish, predation, raptors, waterways

Comments

6 Comments

The very big fish

Mulloway on the rocks by Joe Crafts Bay

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

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

Sea eagle flapping with fish b&w amend square

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

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

Blue boat

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

Itchy the sea eagle

Pair of white-bellied sea eagles waiting for seafood breakfast

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

Australian raven casing out a great big fish

Raven checking for sea eagle attach

At last, a nibble of mulloway

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

Pair of Australian ravens chasing a sea eagle

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

Sea eagle tearing the flesh of the fish

A nibble of entrail

Planning the next bite

One member of the sea eagle pair eating…

While the other stands guard.

White-bellied sea eagle enjoying mulloway for breakfast

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

Boat off Joe Crafts Bay

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

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

Sea eagle portrait dark background cropped.jpg

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

Other posts about the raptors in our beautiful backyard

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

The world’s fastest bird catches a meal

Three whistling kites, two sad islands

Encounters with the local eagles

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

December 19, 2017

Posted under

breeding, Death, egg laying, Garden trees, nesting, raptors

Comments

7 Comments

Sparrowhawk summer

Adult sparrowhawk telling the kids that dinner is on its way

The sparrowhawks in the bottom of the neighbour’s yard have beaten the odds. Despite the visits of the hungry currawongs and randy cuckoos, two strapping fledglings have emerged from the nest this week.

Two juvenile sparrowhawks trying out their wings

Our days are punctuated by the insistent call of the mother and father hawks telling the teenagers that it’s time to head back to the ridiculously tiny nest for dinner. And the juvenile’s answering pitiful cries, disproportionate to their galumphing size. They’re easily as big as their parents even at this early stage.

Photo of juvenile sparrowhawk with its mouth open

Fledgling sparrowhawk talking back to its parent

And early in the morning, the ding-dong battles between the sparrowhawks and the local mob of sulphur crested cockatoos, that wheel across the valley each day to find the tastiest trees and finest roosting places. The hawks have been watchful but apparently unconcerned by the range of large and small humans arguing, gardening, driving, swimming and playing beneath their nest and, as you can see, endlessly photographing their activities.

But the arrival of a crew of a dozen or so seed eaters in their territory was apparently intolerable. A crested pigeon is the biggest prey sparrowhawks have been known to take, but we’ve seen for ourselves they’re not afraid to send cockies and cuckoos packing. The cockatoos didn’t take off without a bit of argy bargy but in the end the diminutive predators won the day.

The flock retreated off to our place, and relieved their frustration with some light demolition work on the rotting pine tree in our backyard. I assumed it was the parents that did the chasing off, but Stephen Debus, who spent a lot of time hanging out in the Bundaberg Botanical Gardens with a digital camera and a pair of young sparrowhawks, seems to think that the young ones like to chase away bigger birds that they couldn’t possibly eat, everything from egrets, darters and ducks to kestrels and even currawongs, their erstwhile enemies.

A juvenile sparrowhawk watching the demolition work with interest

Cockies in retreat

There’s been an exciting new development in the last couple of days: the littlies are trying their hand with disembowelling. Young nestlings are fed gobbets of freshly plucked bird flesh, straight from mum or dad’s beak, but this youngster was doing his own kitchen prep. It took him a while. Given the eye-claw coordination on display here, it may be a few weeks before this one is hunting on its own. It seems that taking dinner from the talons of parents mid-air (and maybe snacking on cicadas in between meals) is the next step towards independence.

Juvenile ripping a small bird to bits

… but keeping an eye on me at the same time

Fledgling sparrowhawk still aspiring to elegance

From the vantage point of our neighbours’ pool, we’ve watched the fledglings practicing their short haul flights (and awkward landings), whine a lot and bicker over food. In a truly rare sighting, judging from my experience with human children, I even saw one of them give in to his sibling’s relentless complaining and share a meal.

Or maybe what I saw was big sister muscling in on little brother? Sparrowhawks have distinct sexual dimorphism, and apparently any idiot can tell the smaller males from the females. Not this idiot! I look forward to being enlightened by sharp eyed readers.

Oops. Failure to land.

As you can tell from the recent posts in this blog, I have got just a little obsessed by our in-house raptors these last few months. Maybe because our four serial killers have cleared the area of other distraction – the usual “house” birds.

No baby brush turkeys this year (hooray!) and the noisy miners have been mercifully silent. But the gorgeous satin bowerbirds have also been thin on the ground, the newly arrived whipbird disappeared suddenly without leaving a forwarding address, and I’ve heard very few of the chocks and clucks of the wattlebirds that make up the usual soundscape of our neighbourhood.

Red wattlebird in times gone by.

The usual bird visitors enjoying sunset over Sam’s creek

We have about six weeks, it seems, before the young sparrowhawks will disperse, looking for another neck of the woods with the requisite tall trees for nesting and plenty of small gormless birds to ambush from a secret spot in the canopy.

Young sparrowhawk in hunting position

Adult sparrowhawk hiding in the canopy ready to pounce

Will the adults stay after the brood has gone? Will they leave and come back next year? It seems no one really knows much about the movement of these secretive birds, despite their presence all over Australia, in every habitat but the driest of deserts.

And, if our lovely raptors do leave us, will our usual cast of feathered friends – the nectar drinkers, the seed and flower and lerp eaters – return?

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

Debus, Stephen (2012) Birds of Prey of Australia: a field guide, CSIRO Publishing

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

and the latest from our backyard: the teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

September 22, 2017

Posted under

Backyard birds, Native birds, raptors, Uncategorized

Comments

6 Comments

Welcome back, beautiful stranger

Sparrowhawk square crop old

It shows a certain lack of character and imagination to be keen on raptors, but I can’t help it. I love them anyway. Even the whistling kites and white-bellied sea eagles I clock every single weekend out in my boat on the Hawkesbury give me enough of a thrill to clog up my computer’s hard drive with a thousand pictures of them in every conceivable posture and mood.

So two years ago, when I caught this beauty in my backyard, I was beside myself with excitement. It’s a collared sparrowhawk, one of three species of Acciper found in Australia, along with the very similar brown goshawk and the hauntingly beautiful grey goshawk. So beautiful that on my one and only encounter with one (whilst pegging out the washing) my camera fainted and so in its barely conscious state was only capable of producing a groggy quasi-mystical image of the world’s only pure white raptor.

The divine and impossible to represent grey goshawk

An ordinary, gorgeous juvenile white bellied sea eagle

I know our beautiful visitor in 2015 was a sparrowhawk and not the very similar looking brown goshawk, having been schooled on the key differences. Brown goshawks are slightly grumpier and more threatening looking, with a beetle brow and chunkier legs. Both species, it is said, waggle their tail on landing, but the sparrowhawk does it a tiny bit more rapidly. As my brother, a much more expert bird watcher than I am, points out, this has to be the most arcane and pointless advice for distinguishing two very similar looking birds. “Sorry lads, the video of your tail waggling was slightly out of focus. Can you just circle round and land side by side on that branch again?”

Collared sparrowhawks also have another feature – the absurdly long middle toe of the collared sparrowhawk, used to grip its prey while it systematically plucks them (starting at the vent) and then devours them. It’s moments like these you’re grateful not to be a sparrow or a silvereye, isn’t it?

But is that enough to tell the difference between a goshawk and a sparrowhawk? Both apparently have these long middle toes – the sparrowhawks’ toes are just longer and more delicate.

My bird in flight.

2015 bird: middle toe extends beyond the claw of the two adjacent toes.

Yesterday’s bird

There are other differences too. Goshawks have a rounded tail, and a smaller eye. So is it welcome back stranger… or good to see you, lifer?

Sparrowhawk eye

This year’s bird – a smaller eye?

Sparrowhawk tail

A more rounded tail?

Both the collared sparrowhawk and the brown goshawk are widespread through their range in Australia and New Guinea – they can be found in arid areas as well as woodlands and suburbia. They are one of the few raptors that will perch and hunt in gardens, as I saw today. The fact that they’re partial to a snack on introduced birds like sparrows, starlings and newly hatched chickens (gulp!) may be one reason why they’re considered “of least concern” to people who worry about the current mass extinction event.

But still, they’re not exactly common. Numbers declined from the 1940s through to the 1980s thanks to DDT, although the effect of this insecticide – thinning the shells of eggs – seems to have been less dramatic for them than peregrines and some other raptors. Loss of habitat for the small birds that sparrowhawks like to eat and competition from pied currawongs that will (somewhat implausibly to my mind) attack both adults and chicks are other threats.

It’s been a long couple of years since that last wonderful visit.

But over the last few days there’s been a new sound from the decrepit pine trees that stand (or should I say lean) between our place and our neighbours’. At first I thought it was a whiny juvenile wattlebird begging for a feed – the call was a kind of feeble high pitched kik-kik-kik-kik. And then I saw a creamy coloured bird with wide striped wings and a blunt head, superficially like the “green” satin bowerbirds that hang around here all year round scrounging off my chilli bushes and demolishing my bean plants.

“Green” satin bowerbirds making short work of my Thai chillis

Juvenile or female bowerbirds with virtually no tastebuds

But there’s something distinct and decisive about the way raptors fly. I eventually got a good look as the bird chilled out in the trees, waiting to ambush passing little passerines, which they catch on the wing. I’m really hoping they have a taste for noisy miners.

good sideways distant crop wide

These really are very low-key birds. “Often lives unnoticed in mature-treed suburban parks and gardens” one ornithology site comments about sparrowhawks… “easily overlooked”. Having spent quite a bit of today staring slightly hopelessly into the naked branches for an immobile, unconcerned and well camoflaged bird of prey I can confirm this. “Trusting and approachable“, the Peregrine Trust’s turn of phrase for a collared sparrowhawk, seems like a slightly embarrassing description for a predator.

A gorgeous profile on display. One very chilled out bird.

Accipiter not bothered by an audience

Note the absurdly long middle toe

The grumpy reputation of Brown Goshawk is apparently not just a consequence of their Resting Bitch Face. They’re also apparently quite aggro around the nest. True to form, sparrowhawks are said to be calmer.

Perhaps this parental behaviour will be the solution to my ID problem. There’s a nest made of sticks high in the neighbour’s pine tree, a spot I saw the sparrowhawk returning to several times today. If there’s anything better than grown up raptors in your backyard, it’s a clutch of baby raptors.

Could this be a sparrowhawk nest?

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

August 18, 2015

Posted under

Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Recycling, Waste, Work

Comments

10 Comments

Having fun with no money

Palm Beach of a morning

The untimely death of our favourite chicken Shyla has generated unaccustomed scenes of activity in our backyard.

We are not a dynamic household. We are a posse of ponderers and ruminators, hoarders and procrastinators, ever ready with a “let’s not rush into things” or a “perhaps we should pause to examine this problem from all angles”. In a disaster movie, we would be the bit-part characters who are consumed by a rising tide of magma while considering our escape plan from the easy chair with a view of the volcano.

But all that changed this week. Fate intervened, in the form of a generous Hungarian freecycler whose guineapigs had gone to on a better world, leaving behind them the Taj Mahal of pet enclosures.

Sunroof on Colditz, the new chook cage

They say money makes the world go around. But does it really?

Just add up all the things people do for love, or for family, or to be neighbourly or because it seems like it might be a hoot, and all stuff you can grow or swap or get as a hand-me-down or find by the side of the road (or, if you are my boat-building neighbour, at the bottom of the creek). The gift economy may not have its own stock exchange, but things would grind to a halt pretty quickly if all the tuckshop volunteers, weekend soccer coaches and grannies with strollers called it a day.

As Noam Chomsky says in this fab video “We don’t have a capitalist system. No capitalist system has ever survived“.

Freecycle is a case in point. With a trailer and a tolerance for cyberloitering, I reckon in less than three months you could completely furnish a McMansion without spending a cent. Your home would admittedly be rich in bulky exercise equipment, large lamp shades, and clothing for the under threes, but still, the sheer quantity of stuff on offer is impressive.

And that’s without even considering what you can buy with the local currency – the Opera – in Sydney’s community exchange system – bartering with more bling, I guess you could call it.

Our new chook house was miracle of timeliness. Fabulous finds on my local freecycle facebook page are snapped up almost instantly. In fact, even implausible things like half-used bottles of shampoo to be collected immediately from Mona Vale seem to be claimed with surprising speed. The new predator proof run – Colditz, as I’ve provisionally named it – turned up just before we headed off for an out-of-town family weekend. Without the generosity of strangers, our chooks would have been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the newly emboldened feral foxes.

Abby and Snowball considering the problem of Colditz from all sides

And then there was the gift of Dave. Having eyeballed pics of the cage on facebook and figuring it was a shonky wood and chicken wire job of the sort I might cobble together myself, I reckoned if I knocked off work early, RB and I could wrestle it onto the top of our old Subaru Forester. But hearing of our dead-chicken woes, Dave, RB’s workmate and ex-trucker, insisted on driving down from his place on the Central Coast, an hour away, to help us out.

And thank god he did. Turns out our new 3 x 1.5 x 1 metre chook run is has rivets, a steel frame and weighs as much as a Panzer tank. I could no more have lifted one end of it to head height than unicycled to the moon. Dave, on the other hand, had the Hilux, the roof-rack, the reversing skills, the muscles and the shipping-big-things savvy to sort it, no wuckers. Thanks Dave. You are a legend.

Hoping for child labour

But not planning on it

It may not have the casual elegance or aquarium-lid clerestory window of Palm Beach, my own vernacular modernist masterpiece, but Colditz has a number of winning design features – most impressively, a sliding roof to cut down on the lower back pain associated, for inconveniently tall adults, with egg collecting (I’m hoping child labour will make the sliding sun roof unnecessary, but my track record of achieving such outcomes is poor).

What the new coop lacked, however, was a roost. Having googled what the modern chicken requires of a night – apparently, just like in the contemporary bathroom, square is the new round – this is what I came up with. Soft on the feet, in a range of widths for chickens of all shapes and sizes.

It looks disturbingly like bondage equipment. Who would have thought old bicycle inner tubes and a repurposed wooden ladder could be so kinky?

Bondage perch

Closeup of bondage perch

It is possible that the girls prefer something a bit vanilla. Given a choice, they seem find their way back to Palm Beach at dusk, where they can sleep in a egalitarian fashion, all on the same dowdy round perch, without even a whiff of rubber.

But don’t worry, with a bit of discipline, we’ll soon sort that out.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

June 26, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Gardening, Predators

Comments

5 Comments

Nude trees and naughty birds

Who lives in our backyard? How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention.

I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think? “Magpie”. Humans, huh?

Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies. But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction. Well, a lego construction with integral insects. Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away. Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.

That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be. Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round. They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants. If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.

Pied currawong with destruction on its mind

Australian magpie – “I had no involvement in the tree nudity”

And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.

There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg. I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.

The raven’s dream

Australian raven in a fugue… or looking out for newly laid eggs

Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.

I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists. Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious. In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.” I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”. Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”. I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.

Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein? I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money. Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.

Kiwifruit leaves delicately shredded by hungry bowerbirds

And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from. The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.

But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie. Nude trees held no allure for her. She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.

I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds. Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit. I’m hoping she got the best of them. What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.

I hope she’ll be back. I’ll be keeping watch.

Female collared sparrowhawk

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

December 12, 2014

Posted under

Animal pests, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, egg laying

Comments

7 Comments

The Phantom Egg Eater: caught in the act!

At last, after yesterday’s sting operation, I can announce that we have finally exposed the identity of the Phantom Egg Eater.

Was it Luna, so long a marked hen after the damning outcome of her interrogation by the children? Or Andy Ninja, craving not just egg yolk, but a return to her lost youth? Or Treasure, driven to the edge by long days alone in the chicken coop, attempting to hatch offspring from a collection of golfballs?

Luna mugshot 2

Treasure mugshot

Andy mugshot

Or was it Snakey, taking a break from the taste of toxin-laden rats?

Snakey in the trellis 2012

After six months of suspicion and doubt, all of the above have been exonerated.

Yesterday, RB caught the culprit in the act.

It was Colonel Mustard, in the henhouse, with a candlestick. Okay, there was no candlestick. But the resemblance to Colonel Mustard is more than passing.

Hen-house raiding brush turkey

Colonel Mustard

So it seems apt that, in the interest of maintaining a consistent omelette supply to the humans of the household, the Colonel will be getting a taste of his own medicine. Whenever he’s in the Dining Room, or indeed, taking light refreshments in the Billiard Room, the Kitchen or the Abandoned Compost Bin, the canapes will inevitably be that 70s classic “stuffed eggshell with a giant mouthful of spicy condiments“.

Delicious 70s style canape: eggshell stuffed with hot English mustard

Sometime later: a rejected 70s style mustard-flavoured canape

It’s a relief to know that our girls are innocent of Egg Murder. However, I’m not sure if I have the probation officer stripes to successfully rehabilitate the Colonel and potentially the entire brush turkey population of the Berowra Valley National Park, even if I had an infinite supply of Masterfoods’ Hot English Mustard. Plus, I’m not entirely convinced that the Colonel, and indeed Mrs Peacock, Miss Scarlett and other native poultry friends, haven’t got a secret passion for the stuff.

So perhaps it’s lucky that the silly season is coming up. During the festive period I’m hoping my intensive work schedule will involve exhaustive ongoing surveillance of chicken conversation for boastful “I’ve laid an egg” cackles from a strategically chosen location (ie, an easy chair on the back deck). To ensure the achievement of my critical key performance indicators (that is, collection of at least four intact eggs a day), it will obviously be essential to clear my diary of all other commitments to ensure that I am able to respond to The Egg Dance in a timely and flexible way. This zero tolerance approach to policing brush turkey misdemeanours is going to be a productivity challenge but I think we can rise to it.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

November 26, 2014

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Damage caused by chickens, egg laying, pecking order

Andy Ninja, cannibal chicken?

Andy mugshot

A good couple of years after apparently going through the “the change” and only a few months since she was regularly crowing at dawn, Andy Ninja’s back on the lay. They’re not particularly beautiful eggs – sometimes crimped like they’ve been extracted with forceps or she’s stopped for a breather mid-lay; sometimes exceedingly delicate; often broken – but eggs nonetheless. She seems to favour the long abandoned compost bin: quiet, private and less heavily policed by huffy uber-femmes than the nestbox. And thanks to my laziness in the composted-cardboard-shredding department, eggs laid there are even honestly labelled.

Honesty in advertising

At the very same time Andy starts producing her miracle eggs, The Phantom Egg Eater has returned. It’s a suspicious coincidence. The veteran, yearning for the good old days when she trotted up to the house to lay an egg a day, regular as clockwork. The aging chicken willing to do anything to return to those glory days….

…anything… even taking other hens’ eggs… younger hens… pretenders to the throne… taking their lesser eggs and transmuting them, creating… yes!…. my very own marvellous eggs…

Okay, so I had fully worked up a vision of a tormented yet triumphant Andy Ninja, guiltily gorging herself, all to restore faded reproductive glory. But natural justice must be done: I needed proof.

Pastel coloured plastic Easter eggs plus one pastel coloured real one

In the quest to catch the egg eater in the act, I hot footed it to the bottom of the garden at the first triumphant cackle yesterday morning. Andy is just lifting herself off a still-warm mid-life egg. This one’s intact and I’ve stolen it before she has a chance have any kind of peck. She retreats, a picture of innocence. Content of the paragraph

Andy walks straight past the pre-damaged plastic egg in the least favoured laying spot – the old lawn mower catcher under the granny flat. Only used in moments of desperation.

But here’s a plot twist: as soon as Andy leaves the compost bin, Shyla the Australorp moseys in. Is she settling down to lay? No – moments later she reappears, looks around (are any witnesses?), and darts away. So it’s Shyla!

But wait! A minute or two later, Luna the Barred Rock arrives on the scene, ducks into the compost bin, peers about and then pops out again. Nothing to see here.

Oh my god! They’re all at it. It’s like Murder on the Orient Express!

I need a plan.

Someone on a backyard chicken forum recommended a strategy for dealing with egg-eaters: fill a cracked egg with hot English mustard. The culprit will gulp down what it thinks is the yolk and learn its lesson rather sharply.

No English mustard in the house, just a rather toothsome wholegrain French. And no broken egg. So why not cover one of the plastic ones with mustard and do a bit of pre-emptive operant conditioning? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Implausible deployment of the mustard-on-egg strategy

Luna with Mustard Mouth?

Only I forgot: the chooks like to snuggle up to the fake eggs as they settle down to lay, scooting their little plastic treasures from one side of the nestbox to the other if need be. With their beaks. I race down to the henhouse to find Luna and Treasure looking they’ve just eaten their first vindaloo. I do the only thing an empathetic chicken keeper would: given them a cooling slice of watermelon*.

So, chicken tongues soothed. But I’m still no closer to bringing to justice the Egg Eater.

This morning Andy popped out a broken egg, so it’s back to a more standard use of the mustard technique. We still don’t have English mustard so it’s a pretty disturbing looking yolk – if chooks are anything like as smart as animal behaviour researchers say they are they wouldn’t touch it with a 40 foot pole.

This time there’s no sign of repeat offenders panting in the evening breeze. But by nightfall the egg and its condimenticality have disappeared entirely. No shell fragments. No spillage.

Now, it is possible that the hens as a group are very very tidy eaters with a surprising love of spicy flavours. Alternatively, maybe somewhere nearby there’s a diamond python with a serious stomach ache.

Disturbing mustard filled egg – will it fool them?

*Okay, rather suffering from mustard-mouth, Luna and Treasure might have simply been hot, since chickens don’t sweat and it was a steamy old day. Did I mention that chicken breathe using air sac that extend into their bones?!!? Oh yes, I did. Well, they also maintain a consistent temperature by dumping heat into those air sacs (and connected pneumatic bones). Dinosaurs probably did it that way too… according to Mathew J Wedel in “Vertebral pneumaticity, air sacs, and the physiology of sauropod dinosaurs” Paleobiology 29(2) 2003 pp.243-55.

Literally and figuratively cool….

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

June 19, 2014

Posted under

Animal communication, Animal senses, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, chicken communication, natural history, Predators

Comments

3 Comments

Reflections of a ground predator

What noise does a chicken make?

Some people might go for the classic “cockadoodle dooo!” of an rooster at the crack of dawn.

But many people probably come up with something like this: “Buck buck buck buck” (here’s a video example). That’s what chickens sound like to most of us.

In fact, this is a specific type of chicken alarm call. It means “Ground predator! Watch out!“. In this video, there’s a cat on the prowl. However, this call sounds so familiar to us humans, even those of us who are not chicken obsessives, because we are ground predators. So what we think of as “normal chicken sounds” say less about what chickens normally do, and more about the fact that we’re there, and they’re keeping an eye on us.

Chickens make at more than twenty four different calls (check out some of them on this very interesting video), which are not only referential (“aerial predator” “food” and so on) but are uttered differently depending on who’s listening and what’s going on. In fact, they can be quite machiavellian, deliberately “lying” (for instance, some males make a food call to attract females when there’s no food to be had – though since chickens can recognise and remember up to 100 individuals, this is not a good long term strategy!) They are pretty cunning too. In a recent article in Scientific American K-Lynn Smith and Sarah Zielinski explain how researchers resolved a problem: why do roosters frequently call out a warning about a passing hawk even when this might attract the hawk’s attention and put the rooster himself at risk. They found that roosters are very strategic. For instance, they observe that “a male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences”.

To sum up, chickens are smarter than humans usually think (if not always nice), and humans… well, humans are ground predators.