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November 12, 2017

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Biodiversity, breeding, Brush turkeys, Death, egg laying, mating, Native birds, nesting, predation, raptors

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Battle of the baby birds

Male sparrowhawk taking off with prey. Photo by Josh Matthews.

There’s a festival of death going on in our neighbourhood at the moment.

Several times a day, amongst the robotic clicks of the bower birds and the squawks of the wattlebirds, there’s an insistent high pitched chittering call, often accompanied by the din of freaked out noisy miners. I’m not 100% sure of its ethological or evolutionary significance, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a signal for me to drop everything and dart up our drive with my camera. One of the resident pair of collared sparrowhawks – probably the male – has caught some small clueless bird and is perched in our neighbour’s radiata pine steadily eviscerating it.

Female sparrowhawk getting stuck in

“Beak? Yuk” – see above the hawk’s head

Dead wattlebird being sized up

He rips off the feathers and flings away less tasty bits (check out the beak mid-air above) all the while, often with his mouth full, calling out “Dinner’s up!” to his mate.

Sparrowhawk calling for his mate

Mid-meal call

For the last few weeks she’s been spending much of her time in a the nest at the very top of another decrepit pine tree in the yard of next house along the way. Sometimes he flies up to the nest with tasty chunks of flayed bird flesh in his claws, but I’ve also seen her fly in to the designated “disembowling” perch to join him a few times. Occasionally, she seems to sneak away to do a little light hunting herself. Risky, though, leaving the nest unattended.

Currawong after the sparrowhawk nest

Collared sparrowhaw about to fly

There’s the pied currawong I saw hopping surreptitiously through the branches, warily inching towards the nest, until it was chased off by the indignant parents as it was virtually peeping over the side. And the pair of cacophonous channel billed cuckoos I caught flapping around the neighbour’s garden a few weeks ago – apparently they sometimes parasitise collared sparrowhawk nests.

Pair of channel billed cuckoos

But I will be deeply unimpressed if the chicks that come out of that nest are bloody channel billed cuckoos, for all my secret admiration of those giant hornbill beaks and strapping crucifix silhouettes.

Because the sparrowhawks seem to have rid our garden of the plague of baby brush turkeys.

Baby brushturkey in the backyard

A whipbird seems to have taken up residence this spring. Needless to say, I don’t have a photograph despite being nearly eye to eye with the noisy bugger once or twice. So, tiptoeing round my backyard trying to catch a clear shot, I heard a scrabbling in the leaf litter. “Ah, a baby brushturkey” I thought sagely.

And then it struck me… I haven’t seen a single baby turkey in our backyard this year. Not one! Last year, they were sleeping on top of the predator proof cage or standing outside in the daytime, gazing longingly at our flock of little baby chooks. The year before one wandered into our pocketsized laundry and spent eight hours pacing the two foot long windowsill, failing to notice and thus escape through through the wide open door. But this year… nada.

Baby brush turkey hanging out with baby Winter the Leghorn

Baby brush turkey being liberated from the laundry

Collared sparrowhawks (unlike their lookalikes brown goshawks – so similar that it’s altogether possible they could be our resident raptors) catch most of their prey in flight, bursting out of their lurking places in the foliage to grab little birds on the wing. But the baby brush turkeys that previously haunted our place do fly, right from the day they dig themselves out of their hatching place in their father’s mound of decomposing leaf litter, and start their life of unnaturally early independence.

So maybe the sparrowhawks have been catching them on those very first short flights from mound to chicken yard.

Baby brushturkey on an early flight

Dad and mound

Eight hours into the vigil on the windowsill

Much mourney Treasure the Sussex and an entourage of brush turkeys

Just a few of the even dozen visiting in the last few years

I don’t hate brush turkeys, but I do hate a having dozen brush turkeys hanging out in my backyard, sexually assaulting my chickens, nicking their food and, given half the chance, eating their eggs. So the idea of generations of sparrowhawks breeding happily in the neighbour’s trees and keeping the local population to manageable levels is extremely appealing.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between the familiar sound of chainsaws and the plague populations of brush turkeys in Brisbane and the northern suburbs of Sydney over the last few years. No dingoes, fewer foxes foxes thanks to baiting, and nowhere much for the local raptors to nest in suburbia these days, the tallest trees victims of fears about bushfires and death-dealing or at least car-damaging falling branches.

But today my endless blurry photos of the neighbourhood raptor nest brought good news: what seems to be a creamy ball of fluff snuggling up to its mum in the distant collection of sticks that is the sparrowhawk’s nest. Bring on the next generation of brush turkey assassins!

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September 23, 2017

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kayaking, national parks, Native birds, Uncategorized, waterways

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The river that knew

Mist and sky above Mooney Mooney Creek better

Looking upriver from the junction with Floods Creek

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

An uncharacteristically still azure kingfisher

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

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

White faced herons hunting at low tide

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

Snake Island and Brisbane Water National Park

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

Royal Spoonbill in breeding plumage

Looking upriver from Deerubbin past Milson’s Island at dawn

A rather pedestrian freeway bridge but looking pretty in the fog at dawn

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

Plover chicks running awy parents framing square

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

Silver gull with crab square amend

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

Sacred kingfisher in a tree looking better crop

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

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

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

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

Under the Peat’s Ferry freeway bridge

The freeway runs just behind the skyline

Sandstone sculptures

Looking downstream towards Mooney Mooney marina

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

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

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

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

Other paddles from Deerubbin Reserve

Up the Hawkesbury to Bar Island

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

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

Downriver under the gorgeous if structurally challenged Hawkesbury River Bridge

Further references

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

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mccnmatt

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September 22, 2017

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Backyard birds, Native birds, raptors, Uncategorized

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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?

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May 13, 2016

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

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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

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Posted on

April 3, 2016

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

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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

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Posted on

November 12, 2015

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

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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.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 26, 2015

Posted under

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

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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

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 4, 2015

Posted under

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

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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.

Greater egret coming in to land

Greater Egret hunting in Budgewoi Lake

Wallarah Creek

Striated heron

Casuarinas in Wallarah Creek

Scary paperbarks

Existential graffiti channelling the thoughts of the strangled cormorant

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 23, 2015

Posted under

kayaking, national parks, waterways

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Paper roads, private rivers

Sea eagle at Mangrove Creek

It’s been a long time since I have had a close encounter with a tinny. Perhaps it’s being on the river for the winter sunrise, but I’ve been finding myself all alone on the water for weeks now.

Which is mostly – in fact, almost entirely – a good thing. But rattling down the road to Mangrove Creek last weekend, I began to have doubts. Could I hear the sound of duelling banjos in the distance? Was I about to make an unplanned appearance in the sequel to Deliverance? (This is not a film to select as a fundraiser for your local canoeing club, by the way)

What was it that was freaking me out? Was it the bags slung over the heads of the traffic lights as I crossed an abandoned stretch of the Pacific Highway? The rubble-flanked track plunging down the escarpment into the rainforest, a lyrebird breaking cover the only thing on the road for miles around? The isolated tumbledown houses, walled in by rusted-out cars and half-drowned boats? The total lack of mobile coverage? Or the large signs at every turnoff: “Private property! Keep out, city slickers, or you WILL be disembowelled!”

Yep, that’s it: that nasty feeling that I might be chased, possibly at gunpoint, off someone’s private land. This particular stretch of river – owned by the Crown like most tidal waterways, surrounded on all sides by national parks and serviced by public roads – is particularly tricky to access. Glenworth Valley, for instance, a patch of acreage between Popran Creek and the National Park of the same name, offers pony riding, quad bikes and guided kayak tours to cashed up visitors (and very nice they are too, I’m sure). But if you want to launch your own craft from there that’ll be $50, thank you very much. Maybe as a nation-building project we should institute publicly funded zip lines so kayakers can hurtle directly from the towering if unprofitable sandstone rockfaces in the national parks to the miles and miles of marketable creeks below.

Casuarinas besides Cabbage Tree Creek, a tributary of Popran

Gnarled vine in a secret valley by Cabbage Tree Creek

Back to Popran Creek

Almost decent picture of a shy azure kingfisher

Alien spores.

Mysterious cutting. Possibly paid for by your $50 launch fee.

It’s not getting any better, either, in NSW anyway. The current state government is selling off thousands of Crown roads – paper roads as they’re sometimes called, since they exist mostly on maps – sketchy unformed tracks or riverside reserves, sometimes illegally fenced off, across private land. But flimsy and flyaway as they might sound, paper roads are routes in to rivers and other wild places to anglers, bushwalkers and kayakers. And they’re being erased from the map, to the faraway ker-ching of cash registers. Perhaps that was the noise I heard in the distance, not red-necks with banjos, after all.

Possibly because Shooters and Fishers’ Party hold two seats in the NSW Upper House, anglers get a once-over at the Crown roads put up for sale before they go. Perhaps we need to set up a Canoeists, Backpackers and Assorted Outdoor Types With No Aspirations to Kill Things Party to get a gander too…. Mmmm, thinking about it, maybe the CBAOTNAKT already exists…

Contractual obligation white-faced heron in the mist on Mangrove Creek

But, without the comforting presence of my local CBAOTNAKT Member of Parliament in a kayak beside me, I was distinctly on edge last Sunday as I parked up next to a semi-collapsed shed largely supported by a jumble of discarded oil cans, non-functional bicycles and rolls of ancient carpet ideal for concealing the bodies of trespassers. Did this private dump signify total indifference or was it the rural property owner’s equivalent of the pile of discarded undergarments on the bedroom floor, mess in a place so private you expect no other eyes on it at all? With the valley under a blanket of mist, I hoped I wouldn’t find out.

Stumbling on an apparently abandoned riverside caravan park in the fog didn’t reassure me either. We all know desolate motels and the like are the optimal spot for a horror movie – leaving aside sororities full of nubile sophomores, of course (I think I’m fairly safe on that front). There was a spooky stillness about the place.

And then some ducks took off with a clatter and the channel changed. A pair of kingfishers chased each other, squeaking and swerving in and out of the mangroves’ eves and old blokes in shorts appeared out of kitchen doors, morning coffee in hand, to have a natter and a tinker with the outboard.

I love to watch the day unfurl from its cocoon of mist. A silence shared with a white-bellied sea eagle; the hunting herons and the whirling swallows apparitions in the cloud. Then the fog parts and the first wattle-blossom catches in the morning light. Before you know it, the blue river is dazzling and it’s time to go home.

White-bellied sea eagle fluffed up in the morning mist

White-faced heron making its exist

Welcome swallow and ghost

Early wattle on Mangrove Creek

The last of the mist rising off Mangrove Creek.

As I paddled the last few hundred metres to the car, I saw figures on the shore, and my heart sank. I don’t know I was more afraid of aggrieved landowners demanding a handful of cash or a mob of ferals threatening to slash my tyres.

It turned out to be a trio of local teenage boys not old enough to have a licence, filling in their long, long, long country Sunday with a walk along the river. They were much more sheepish to find an adult in their hangout zone than I was to be there. And I remembered: when you’re a kid, you have no private property – everything belongs to someone else.