Magpies

So, I'm lying awake in the middle of the night. Wide awake because I have jet lag after getting home from Europe. I've already tried a cuppa and a read but I couldn't focus so I go back to bed and listen to the radio.

Radio National entertained me for several hours. One show in particular I want to mention here. Ann Jones presents a program on Saturdays called Off Track and I catch it occasionally and download the podcasts sometimes. Last night I heard a repeat of  her Saturday 5 September program called The colourful life of the Australian Magpie'. In her opening paragraph Ann mentions that the long warble of the magpie in the morning is a most welcome sound to a weary traveller returning from overseas. She's right. Her program was most welcome to this weary traveller, especially the accompanying sound track. The magpie's carolling is indeed glorious.

Daryl Jones has been researching magpies for a long time and Ann Jones chats to him about the territorial behaviours of the birds. He calls them 'very unusual birds' because they defend their patch vocally every day of the year rather than just at breeding time, and a pair can hold the same territory for up to twenty years.

I'll have to pay more attention to the birds in my patch.

Site loyalty

I'm a frustrated naturalist at the moment because I have to go to work. There's a big world out there to explore but work to be done. At least there is the thought that it's a temporary situation, a big advantage of casual work.
A walk at lunch time helps. The lakes at the back of the university are surrounded by a walking track that few people use and that's where I head most days, just as I used to when I was at the campus more often. As is the case when you frequently repeat a particular route I expect to see certain things - plants flowering seasonally, water levels going up and down, particular species of birds - but I must admit that I was surprised yesterday to find the Australasian Grebes nesting in exactly the same place as in previous years. Why that particular square metre of the dam? And then I walked a bit further and looked for the pair of Black-fronted Dotterels that fed on the muddy edge there in the past ... and there they were. It made my day.

Birds on the move

The Yellow Box Eucalyptus leucoxylon ssp. megalocarpa in my garden is covered in dusky pink blossoms, and will be flowering for a while yet as there are lots of buds. The branches touch the ground, and I think that the weight of gum nuts from previous years' flowering could cause branches to break but so far so good. It's very distracting because I can see it from my kitchen and it's outside my study window.
The tree is visited by birds all year round and Red Wattlebirds nest in it each year, but it is in autumn that it becomes a gourmet food palace. It's like a cocktail party or pub crawl-so noisy, as groups of lorikeets and honeyeaters arrive, shout loudly, hustle for position, flit from one tasty area to another, have short noisy conversations with this one or that and then fly off to another party.
Musk Lorikeets are much more numerous this year and are the dominant visitor to my tree. Red Wattlebirds and New Holland Honeyeaters are also prolific, as well as bees and insects. Small flocks arrive, announce their presence loudly, stay for a while, then they're gone.
Why do some birds move quickly from tree to tree and within a tree? It seems to be a wasteful use of energy. Why don't they stay in one tree or even in one clump of blossom until the food there is finished? But no, as I watch they fidget continually. Is it a survival technique? Is it instinctive or learned behaviour to prevent capture by a hawk or a sparrowhawk?

Gang-gangs

My first blog. I've been reading others, lurking on the edges of the lives of other people, looking for bloggers with interests that resemble mine. Now it's time to start my own.

The campus is looking very fresh this morning. After the long dry a rainy weekend has washed the dust off the leaves of the eucalypts, grevilleas and banksias.

Gang-gang Cockatoos are growling as they fly from one flowering tree to another, creating a tremendous amount of debris as they go. They pluck a whole cluster of blossom, hold it in their left foot while they eat and then drop the lot - it seems wasteful.

But I've been pondering on whether the trees actually benefit. In my gardening books I'm advised that most Australian native plants benefit from a good prune, especially a tip-prune when the plants are young. Well, this is exactly what the Gang-gangs are doing to the mature eucalypts. So maybe the smaller honeyeaters pollinate and Gang-gangs prune.