Archives for November 2025

Since the start of spring I’ve been searching for a pair of tawny frogmouths that throughout the rest of the year I see on my daily keep-fit walk. The frogmouths roost in a white peppermint gum in the Waterworks Reserve but come early September they vanish, only to return at summer’s end. Presumably they are off to breed somewhere close by but, even though I have searched high and low over the years, I have never discovered where. When I set out to search, I know that it … [Read more...] about Vain search for master of disguise

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 mid-August I began to hear their song and then saw these cavity nesters entering favourite nesting sites, gaps in the sandstone walls built to channel the Sandy Bay Rivulet … [Read more...] about Feathered barometers track wobbly seasons

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 the refrain of the blackbird bookends the start and end of my day. I was in London, and not Hobart. The blackbird, of course, was imported to Tasmania from Britain in colonial times … [Read more...] about Is it bye bye blackbird in Britain?

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 been rudely interrupted by the arrival of the sleek, elegant sparrowhawk. Although it had arrived silently, in stealth, on darting fight, it had not escaped the sharp eye of the … [Read more...] about Terror in the treetops – hawk on the hunt

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 in Melbourne these muggers have taken over the whole metropolitan area of the city. Where you get miners, there is an absence of smaller more colourful bird species. In Melbourne … [Read more...] about Noisy ‘bogans’ in the neighbourhood