All’s well with the world. The tawny frogmouths have returned to their favourite perch after vanishing at the start of spring.
Although I was disappointed at first to discover they had flown away, I knew they would be back. That’s the way with tawny frogmouths, they are birds of routine. Predictable, solid, loyal to both partner and their environment, never straying far from home.
Why I should find that reassuring I don’t know. Maybe it’s this increasingly troubled world in which we live, with the TV news so unbearable some mornings I cannot watch.
So I look for the certainties, the bedrock of a safe and secure city life. The familiarity of the tawnies on their peppermint-gum perch is matched by the daily joke I always expect to see scrawled on a white-board outside my favourite café, and the “batteries while you wait’’ sign that appears at 9am on the dot each morning outside the watchmaker’s business. Life in Hobart is as steady as the ticking of a clock.
The tawny frogmouths, however, use a different measure of time. The sun, or more precisely light and dark, rules their routine. Being nocturnal they sleep by day. I see them standing motionless without a flicker of those eyebrows and eyelids that give them a strangely human appearance, more the look of a grumpy old man than a frog, from which they derive their name because of their wide mouths for catching moths and other insect prey.
Although frogmouths are often confused with owls, they are not closely related, frogmouths being members of the nightjar family.
The pair vanished in early September to fly off somewhere to built a simple, stick-platform nest which is usually wedged in the fork of a tree. I searched high and low, for three months to find it. I knew it would be close by but my daily hunt was in vain.
That’s the way with frogmouths. Their camouflage in which they seem to merge with the bark of trees is so perfect they do not stand out, unless on an exposed branch when their upright stance designed to mimic the structure of a vertical branch gives them away.
So I never saw the pair’s offspring, wild orange eyes amid bundles of scraggy feathers. As only one of the pair – the larger and more greyer male – had returned to the roost I presumed the female might be still in the nesting territory with the young.
The male bird returned in the third week of January when the temperature on the day reached 31c. Despite the heat, I knew summer would soon be a memory. The frogmouths, reading the planets and stars, said plainly the days were beginning to grow shorter and autumn and then winter would soon be on the way.
Summer was done and dusted. The tawny frogmouths told me so.