Christmas Day at Cornelian Bay, and a Pacific gull is tucking into his lunch. Or at least trying to. Seafood is also on the menu for me as I tuck into festive fare at a restaurant on the bay.
I have Tasmanian mussels on the plate, cooked with tomato, dill and vanilla salsa. The gull has still to prepare his meal, cracking open the mussel shell.
The gull had been looking at the forest ravens along the inter-city bicycle track nearby. There the ravens pick up mussels, fly to a great height and drop the shells, so they crack open on the concrete of the cycle track, providing the ravens an easy meal.
The Pacific gull attempts the same trick, only the gull is clearly not as smart as the ravens. The gull, instead of choosing hard concrete, chooses the soft mud of the Cornelian Bay mudflats at low tide. After dropping the shell several times without cracking it open the gull gives up and flies away to find something else for Christmas lunch.
When my family booked the restaurant for Christmas lunch, I hadn’t given the bird-watching possibilities a second thought, although the bay is always a regular stop when I take part in the annual gull survey conducted by Birdlife Tasmania.
With a window table, the passing parade of water birds made a superb spectacle. As I always write, the beauty of birdwatching is that it can be conducted in the most unusual of places. Birds are always about us, visible, audible. They are the backdrop and soundtrack to our daily lives.
And so it went on Christmas Day 2019. A surprise out on the mudflats was a great white egret, a species of heron I rarely see in the south of Tasmania although they are common on the Tamar River in the north.
Watching the lanky egret, with whip-lash long neck which it plunged into shallow water to spear fish, I was reminded of an article I had read in a British newspaper just a few days previously. It said great white egrets usually seen in warmer regions of Europe were now beginning to be seen commonly in Britain because warmer annual temperatures were making the English wetlands more conducive to them.
As I watched the egrets, a more common bird in southern Tasmania, a white-faced heron, sailed by on giant, splayed wings.
In the confines of the restaurant, amid excited yule-tide chatter and the cracking of Christmas crackers, I could not hear the distinctive soundtrack of the wetlands but I knew the far-carrying, piping call of the pied oystercatcher would be ringing out across the mudflats. And suddenly two of these long-legged and long-billed waders arrived, to probe the mud for marine worms and crustaceans.
Christmas day at Cornelian Bay, looking out from the comfort of the restaurant over sparkling waters, fringed with seagrass. An impossibly blue sky, a slight, warm breeze rustling the leaves of the eucalypts along the shore. The mussels were superb. Too bad the Pacific Gull missed out.