Out of sight and out of mind, the Bassian thrush has always escaped my attention on Mount Wellington towering over Hobart, where I do much of my birding.
Forays to the mountain, which also carries the Aboriginal name of kunanyi, have been about exotics, endemics. The elusive scrubtit is always on my radar and if this shy species does not come into view on any given day I’m happy to settle for a slightly more common species out of the hard-to-find basket, the strong-billed honeyeater.
Although I’d stumble across Bassian thrushes occasionally, either hearing their simple melody or catching a glimpse of them vanishing into the undergrowth, I often wouldn’t even raise my binoculars. I regarded them much in the same way as another thread in the fabric of the mountain’s forests, the Tasmanian scrubwren, which scampers across tracks, zig-zagging like little brown mice before vanishing between dogwood shoots and fern frond.
My indifference towards Bassian thrushes changed, however, when a friend with an interest in bird photography, Mick Brown, sent me a picture of a pair of the birds he had taken. One thrush carried a worm, the other nesting material. They looked beautiful and I felt a little guilt, shame even, that in the past I had not given them more respect.
Secretive and superbly camouflaged to merge into its leaf-litter domain, the Bassian thrush goes about its business quietly and without fuss. Trekking through the wet forest, you would never know it was there, except for its song which penetrates the dense foliage of such places and fills any open space it can find with a beautiful if understated tune. The song is like sunlight in the forest, brightening dark places, although in my experience this refrain and sun never go together. Other birds might sing of the joy of spring and summer, perhaps finding a sunlit stage on which to perform, even in winter, but the Bassian thrush appears to bask in the overcast and dull, as though golden rays of sunshine represent an intrusion.
The thrush with its unpretentious melody struggling to escape the damp, clinging forest floor, sings a series of falling and rising warbles, without the tendency of its relative, the blackbird, to phrase its notes in a more complex song, repeating phrases in a rhythm. The blackbird sings as humans would, the Bassian thrush song contains a minimum of notes in comparison. A modest song clearly suits a shyer bird, a bird of the shadows, eschewing gardens and lawns.
The Bassian is Tasmania’s only native thrush. It uses the camouflage afforded by its livery to meld with its background. If disturbed it will merely freeze, or move slowly through the undergrowth to a safer spot, without taking to the wing and uttering a blackbird-like, strident alarm call.
When I saw Mick Brown’s picture I decided to hunt not just for the thrushes but their nests. I soon discovered the Bassian thrush nest is how a nest should be; it’s a cliché of a nest, those depicted in children’s books and cartoon illustrations. Rounded in a high cup, the nest is formed of interwoven sticks. Stout and lying flat at the bottom, the sticks becoming twigs nearer the top, bent in a curved shape. Straw is woven around the twigs. Moss decorated the nest I had found, and inside there was more, drier moss and brown hair. The hair appeared to have been collected from a glade where wallabies and pademelons and the other animals of the forest congregated.
The forest was thick and lush around the nest site, without clearings where animals usually feed, so I surmised the birds had flown some distance to find the hair. I couldn’t see which one of the birds had built the nest, but suspected they had both done the work, because the male constantly busied himself with some of the minor detail, attaching the dried and dead, slender leaves of a stinkwood to it at one point.
Blackbirds are reported to invade the territories of Bassian thrushes, expelling the shyer birds. I have anecdotal evidence of my own, of blackbirds replacing Bassian thrushes where their territories overlap.
Bassian thrushes, for those patient enough to search for them, used to be common in the Waterworks Reserve, near my home in southern Hobart. But in recent years blackbirds from adjoining, growing suburbia have moved in and the thrushes are now increasingly difficult to hear and find.
I once enjoyed the song of the blackbird in my neighbourhood. It took me back to balmy, twilight evenings in my native Britain, where the blackbird song is the signature tune of summer. Having discovered the Bassian thrush’s melody, I now find the blackbird’s refrain superficial, a bit like some of the suburbs from which it is broadcast. The Bassian’s quieter song is a lilt for Tasmania’s secret soul.