Dancing on the Edge of the World
Everyone has a story about birds. They are all about us and are our contact point with nature. The birds I see are usually in an urban environment and so I concentrate on these in my writing. I don’t pretend to be an expert but birds of the city and suburb are also the ones that most people identify with, the species you do not need a compass and binoculars to seek out. A scarlet robin singing in a garden is just as exciting as a swift parrot in an ancient forest and is worth just as many words in my On the Wing writings, which appear weekly in the Sunday Tasmanian.
By Don Knowler
I arrived back in Hobart from a holiday in Europe at the start of the month feeling the cold. The striated pardalotes were feeling it, too, because they had delayed nesting. The migratory pardalotes are the first migrants to arrive at the end of winter and the first to scout nest sites. On cue in … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
By Don Knowler
The spectre if a silent spring loomed when I listened in vain for the beautiful, lilting song of the blackbird. The metaphor that draws on the title of Rachel Carson’s acclaimed book on environmental destruction was not entirely apposite. It was not spring, it was autumn and I was far from where … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
By Don Knowler
A green rosella let out an anguished squawk and the birds of the neighbourhood knew there was danger in the air. Not just any threat, the menace of the collared sparrowhawk, the most feared predator of the treetops. A dreamy, sultry spring morning on the deck of a friend’s home at Dodges Ferry had … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
By Don Knowler
There’s no hiding place from the thugs and standover men of the Melbourne underworld. Not thugs as such, but bogans. And for underworld, read understorey, the “hood” of the bullying noisy miners. The anti-social activities of the miners are known in Hobart, too, but according to the Age newspaper … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
By Don Knowler
“What’s this bird, this falcon, that everybody’s steamed up about?” asks Humphrey Bogart as private eye Sam Spade. I could say the same thing about the breeding peregrine falcons that for 30 years have been captivating people on the busy streets of Melbourne. By coincidence after visiting the … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
By Don Knowler
Birdwatchers each spring trudge out to mudflat and saltmarsh in search of the “Cinderellas” of the bird world - the migratory shorebirds that usually hide from view in inaccessible and sometimes remote wetlands. The shorebirds, also termed waders, turn up on Australian shores in late August and … [Read More...]
Filed Under: On The Wing
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