I travelled north on a birding excursion last month and was immediately confronted by the great north-south divide.
This had nothing to do with prejudice real or imagined against southerners or where a proposed Tassie footy team should be based, in Hobart or Launceston.
Instead of a divide, this was more of a debate about whether the yellow-throated honeyeaters in the north sing a different song to those in the south.
Listening to a chortling, chuckling yellowthroat at the Tasmanian Arboretum just outside Devonport I had to agree that this northern bird sounded remarkably different to the members of the species I hear daily in the garden of my home in Hobart.
I had spread my wings to travel north for an “Evening with the Birds” sponsored by the Central North Field Naturalists group. It was good to meet a new band of enthusiasts in a location I’d always wanted to visit and also to help contribute valuable bird data for the reserve.
The gathering of about 50 birders was split into five groups and my party was led by one of the volunteers at the arboretum, Philip Milner, who was interested to hear of my observations about the yellowthroat when we first heard one calling not five minutes into the two-hour walk through part of the botanic garden’s 66 hectares. He said the yellowthroat was noted for its wide variety of calls and it was quite possible that there were regional accents.
Birdsong is only partly instinctive, inherited through the genes. Species are gifted with the ability to sing a certain way but the actual songs have to be learned from parents.
I learned this from a bird song expert, David Stewart, when I joined him on a bird-recording expedition a few years back. He was producing a CD, Australian Bird Songs – Tasmania, and wanted to use some songs and calls of mainland birds he already had in the can.
He soon discovered the mainland recordings were different to the local ones, a grey butcherbird recorded in the Northern Territory appearing to sing a totally different song to the ones we heard in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
So it’s highly likely the Devonport yellowthroats have their own distinctive accent, and the same could be said for another of the endemic birds we heard in the treetops, the green rosella.
The endemic birds, however, were not the highlight of the 27 species my group recorded during the evening and those spotted by the other groups. We might have “ducked out”, to use the parlance of the twitching fraternity, with the satin flycatcher and Bassian thrush but our group could triumphantly claim a pink robin along the banks of the Don River.
And to cap it all a sharp-eyed birder in our party found a blue-winged parrot roosting in a blackwood just as the light began to fade.