The last of the migrants have slipped away. Summer friends making off without even a goodbye, a cheery shout from the treetops, see you in September.
They are conspicuous by their absence. The summerbirds and satin flycatchers no longer flit among the treetops, and the welcome swallows and tree martins leave clear airspace in park glades and across the surface of the twin reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve where I usually see them hawking insects.
An eerie quiet also descends as we head towards winter as not just the migrants but the resident birds fall mute.
In body and song it is the form of the striated pardalote that I miss most. I could also add soul. Forget the swallow, the traditional harbinger of spring, This is my bird of spring and summer. It’s always around from September to late March.
The pardalotes serenade me during my exercise walk along the road through the reserve each day, before flitting to nest sites buried in the cracks of the sandstone walls that ease the Sandy Bay Rivulet on its course towards the Derwent.
You do not need binoculars to study the pardalote’s sublime plumage, grey on the back, egg-yoke yellow on the throat and breast, with a black and white stripe running across its eye which gives it its striated name. And that incessant song.
Back home after my walk, I still hear them. In my neighbourhood, some striated pardalotes nest in crevices in the foundations of driveways and all breeding season declare ownership of their urban nesting sites. The song is the refrain of summer, sounding as if they are saying “pick-it-up, pick-it-up” or as one of my readers once said, “Figaro, Figaro”.
The striated pardalotes make a big sound for a small bird merely 10 centimetres in length. But without at first noticing it, at the start of autumn the sound slowly dies. From March it is time for the other two pardalote species, the spotted and forty-spotted pardalotes, to be heard.
The more common spotted pardalote is slightly smaller than the migrant and has an even more dazzling multi-coloured plumage, dotted with spots which gives it another name, “diamond bird”. With their striated cousins gone, it becomes more vocal, perhaps in celebration of the departure of the bigger birds, which harass them for nesting sites in the summer months.
I caught sight of my last striated pardalotes in about the fourth week of autumn and wondered where they were off to, what adventures they would have flying to the mainland. It is not known where our pardalotes spend winter but members of the Tasmanian sub-species – which has a diagnostic yellow spot on the wings – have been photographed along the Great Dividing range in the Hunter region of NSW.
The last of the pardalotes, was this their destination? See you in September.