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“There’s something going on, I could just feel it in the air.” A Bob Dylan song was playing on the car radio as I drove into the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington for a day’s birding. I could certainly feel something in the air, not the impending drama in the song Lily. Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, more the change in the seasons. Autumn had arrived but you would never know it by the hot, sultry day. An Indian summer had enveloped southern Tasmania and the birds where … [Read more...] about The seasons are a-changing

The magpie wasn’t slow in coming forward, as the expression goes. It tapped on the window of a friend’s home, demanding to be fed. I was in magpie mode on a trip to Launceston. The species might be common across both farm and suburb in Tasmania but they are absent from my neighbourhood in Hobart. Magpies like open, drier country and the wet forests towering over my home in the Waterworks Valley are clearly not to their liking. Not so the bucolic Tamar Valley north of … [Read more...] about Magpies separate friend from foe

The “odd couple” intrigued me all summer. The oystercatcher pair flew to roost each evening on the tin roof of the boatsheds jutting into the Derwent off Sandy Bay Rd close to the casino. They’d vanish each morning but sometimes on my keep-fit walk through Lower Sandy Bay I’d seen them again resting on the roof, even if on high summer days the metal under their feet must have been scorching. One morning, I decided to scan the whole coast going south to see what they got up … [Read more...] about Life’s a beach for ‘odd couple’

The musk lorikeets hustled and bustled at the heart of a bottlebrush, hanging upside down to get at the pollen in the bush’s crimson flowers. During a power walk along the shore of Montrose Bay I had been stopped in my tracks by the cheerful antics and beauty of the lorikeets. When they balanced on thin twigs on the outside of the bush – like tight-rope walkers at the circus - their iridescent plumage shimmered bright green in the late afternoon sun. Power walks are not … [Read more...] about Musk lorikeets a fun-run distraction

Tree martins on a late summer evening dived and dunked into the stippled waters of the twin reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve, sending up golden splashes that reflected the last rays of a dying sun. The sunset provided a backdrop to the martin manoeuvres and, strangely, I recalled an exploding volcano in Iceland I had just seen on television, throwing droplets of molten lava into the air. Tree martins were hitting the water in what is termed “splash bathing” and as they … [Read more...] about Explosion of gold on a summer’s evening