Don Knowler

A bird in the hand is better than a bird in the bush, as the saying goes, and I had a wry smile on my face, looking at a forty-spotted pardalote in the cup of my palm. I had set off to find the forty-spot, which is confined to just a few stretches of gum woodlands in Tasmania, and here I was holding a bird retrieved from the mist-net used to catch it. The location was north Bruny Island, the main stronghold of the pardalote, and my services had been enlisted by a … [Read more...] about Forty-spotted pardalote

Far away, the Summer Olympics in Rio were in progress but a little closer to home I revelled in my own version of the green and gold. The silver wattles – closely related to the golden wattle, the Australian floral emblem which inspires our sporting colours – had burst into flower somewhere between the exploits of our swimmers and the start of the athletics program which followed. And like an Aussie athlete striking gold, I had my own triumphant moment when I caught … [Read more...] about Green rosella

Like the dusky robin, another Tasmanian endemic species to fly back in time is the Tasmanian scrubwren. It might appear an unobtrusive, nervous little bird – quick to flee from approaching footsteps on a mountain trail – but its buzzing alarm call echoes back to a time when it aided and abetted those most feared in the fledgling colony. The scrubwren made its home among the bushrangers, the murderers and thieves who terrorised Tasmania’s citizens in the Victorian era. The … [Read more...] about Tasmanian scrubwren

A tiny scrubtit, so small it could dance in the palm of your hand, had found its place in the sun. In the dim and dank world of the fern glade the scrubtit had emerged from the shadows and found a warm rock on which to perform a merry dance. This was the male's territory of fern frond and tumbling stream and he wanted the world to know it. The scrubtit, barely 10cm long, is one of Tasmania’s forgotten birds, easily overlooked as nature lovers go in search of more … [Read more...] about Scrubtit

Echoing the title of the Coen brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men, Tasmania can be no country for the lazy birdwatcher. At least as far as the Tasmanian thornbill is concerned. The thornbill not only falls into the category of difficult to identify, LBBs (little brown birds), but its identification is compounded by a remarkably similar mainland species also found in Tasmania, the brown thornbill. To separate them requires time and patience, although if the birder … [Read more...] about Tasmanian thornbill