The black-headed honeyeaters are back. All winter I’ve been hearing their “peep-peep” call after they fell silent in recent years.
Once they had provided the background sound of my garden, the song also accompanying me along the routes of my favourite walks on the lower slopes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
During the annual bird walks I lead for my local Landcare group, the honeyeaters had also proved a talking point if other birds had failed to show. Even without seeing them, I could point to the honeyeater’s familiar call. There were territorial declarations, songs to attract mates and alarm calls signalling danger.
So common was the black-headed honeyeater, during one Waterworks Valley Landcare walk we came across a pair of birds mobbing a pallid cuckoo who had intent on using them as surrogate parents.
That incident, and others – like a honeyeater once settling on a log right in front of excited children during a Bush Adventures program – had been consigned to memory.
Where had the once ubiquitous honeyeaters gone? They have joined a group of other birds that appear to have vanished from Dynnyrne and South Hobart. These include strong-billed honeyeaters and dusky robins, which is equally worrying.
One in six birds across Australia are listed as endangered, land-clearing and habitat loss, climate change and the impact of invasive species given as reasons. But regarding Tasmanian species there are no simple causes identified because they are vanishing from areas where forest clearance, as with Hobart’s reserves, is not taking place. Certainly die-back in trees because of hotter temperatures and less rain is evident. So could a changing climate be to blame, affecting both the production of birds’ insect food and pollen and nectar? Speculation might be premature but certainly the decline of our birds needs answers.
Consumed by these worries in recent years, I was delighted in late autumn to hear black-headed honeyeaters calling. And within a week or so I could hear the peeping everywhere. The peepers were back.
The species is one of 12 in Tasmania that are found nowhere else on earth. It is often overlooked in the state in favour of more dramatic birds but its endemic status certainly attracts birders from not just the mainland of Australia but those from further afield.
A favourite honeyeater story concerns coming across a group of American birders one afternoon who were headed to the Waterworks Reserve. They had screeched to a halt in Romilly St after the leader of the party, a legendary tour guide from California, Debi Shearwater, spotted a black-headed honeyeater flying across the road.
Cameras with telephoto lenses clicked as the sublime beauty of the honeyeaters came into focus – black head, leaf-green back, silver undersides, and a blue crescent wattle around the eyes.