A sooty oystercatcher uttered a high-pitched whistle from a layered bed of sandstone below the Bellerive Esplanade.
I was undertaking what a previous visitor to this shore, Charles Darwin, had described as one of his “pleasant excursions” in the vicinity of Hobart Town.
Darwin was not specifically looking for birds, as I was on a glorious mid-summer morning, but no doubt he would have seen the oystercatchers and heard their call, along with a white-faced heron fossicking with them on the corrugated sandstone rocks.
Although famous for his observations of wildlife which largely formed the basis for his ground-breaking theories on evolution, Darwin in Hobart appeared more interested in geology. Hobart rock formations tend to dominate the thoughts laid out in his dairies compiled during the 10 days he spent in Hobart Town after his ship, the Beagle, had docked in the fledgling port in 1836.
There are several locations in the Hobart area where walkers can literally follow in Darwin’s footsteps, and I was attempting my third after sampling Darwin walks in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington and along the Derwent at Lower Sandy Bay.
On my walk along what has become the Darwin Trail created by the Clarence municipality I was less interested in dolerite, sandstone and mudstone than the birds, mammals and reptiles flying and scurrying across sand and rocky outcrop, and through the dry eucalypt and she-oak woodland.
Oystercatchers and stately herons, squawking wattlebirds and noisy miners, scurrying blue wrens and scarlet robins, I am sure Darwin would have seen them all.
The Clarence walk extends for 12 kilometres starting on the waterfront where the steam ferry taking Darwin from Sullivan’s Cove to the newly named Bellerive docked.
To this day black-faced and little pied cormorants stand to dry their wings on the Huon pine pilings where the ferries were tied up, and I am sure, in 1836, the silver gulls would have fluttered about, begging for food as they do today at the fish punts.
Darwin, though, was noting that the Eastern Shore had the same igneous rock, dolerite, he had located on the opposite shore of the Derwent, and similar strata of sandstone, but he was more interested in the mudstone he found, speculating in his dairy that it contained fragments of eroded rock and seashells which might have been deposited there in an ancient ice age.
Darwin’s observation on his excursion not only recognised the sheer age of the rocks he observed – the Triassic rocks of Second Bluff east of Bellerive were laid down 240 million years in the past –he also recognised ancient glaciation in other rock formations.
It all went into the mix of his exploration of geology and natural history which introduced the science of evolution, explored in his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species published in 1859 long after his return to Britain.