The beauty of bird-watching is that, besides the birds, you meet all sort of unlikely people in the most unlikely of circumstances.
It so happened on the first day of the Aussie Bird Count last month when an elderly woman walking the Lower Pipeline track in Dynnyrne stopped to asked me what I was looking at through my binoculars.
“Green rosella,” I said, pointing to a nest box installed at the Fantail Quarry picnic site along the track just below the Waterworks Reserve.
No rosellas were to be seen entering the box, but all the same the walker said that the sight of the box was taking her all the way back to her schooldays maybe 70 years previously.
She mentioned a school project to construct nest boxes in the school grounds of Albuera Street Primary School which, presumably, was then in a little more greener setting than it is now.
“Oh, we had so much fun – and a few bruised and battered fingers from hitting them with the hammer,” she said with a laugh. “And we learned so much about not just birds but nature. I’ve never forgotten these days, and never lost the joy I feel every time I see and hear our lovely birds.”
Conservation organisations like Birdlife Australia – the organisers of the week-long bird count – go to great lengths to inform our schoolchildren about the wonders of nature. The same for generations of teachers who honed their teaching skills, in the elderly ladies’ case, possibly a hundred years ago.
Looking back can be fun but it can also carry a sombre message for the future.
It was not a time and place at Fantail Quarry – with the grey fantails indeed buzzing about our heads – to consider what had been lost to nature in the lifetime of the walker.
It is estimated that in the past 50 years alone nearly 50 per cent of the world’s wildlife has vanished, not only in the many species becoming extinct but the shrinking size of existing populations.
The human population explosion is to blame – with its demand for the world’s natural resources. Farms and industrial and housing development have consumed forest and wetland, and agriculture itself has become an industrial exercise where the wildlife that once found a home on farms has been eclipsed by more intensive farming methods, demanding more and more space and chemicals.
Mirroring the decline in wildlife generally, farmland birds in Europe have suffered a 50 per cent decrease over the past half century. Australia is going the same way.
The decline is being recorded by citizen scientists like those contributing to the Aussie Bird Count to sound a warning to the world that the joys of birds – as experienced by the elderly lady walking the track – will still be there for the schoolchildren of the future.