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The welcome swallows have vanished, after the slow fade of summer. One minute the swallows are fluttering, swooping and gliding through Hobart’s parks and then they are gone, virtually overnight. During the summer months I grow so used to seeing them that they become part of the motion and fabric of the city. And then too quickly as autumn arrived they were no more, and something vital appeared to be missing. It’s not that I actually record the date of their departure, as I … [Read more...] about Swallows fade with the summer

A juvenile yellow-tailed black cockatoo called from the garden, demanding food from its parents. I lie on my bed engrossed in a book and I must confess I couldn’t be bothered to go to the window to view the cockatoo family, let alone put on shoes to go out into the garden.  Parties of black cockies had been coming and going all week, criss-crossing the sky above my home, uttering their melancholy song – which some describe as an Irish lament, a “keen” – as they passed … [Read more...] about Familiarity breeds contempt

I might have named the backwaters of the Huon River “swan lake” after the black swans that I find there but I have another name for an expanse of water where wildfowl gather. I call the waters of Lake Barrington in the north of the state “duck pond” because of the large number of Australian wood duck I always see there.   After paying closer attention to black swans this year, I have also been looking anew at the wood duck, another waterbird that is so common it goes … [Read more...] about Beauty in the hunter’s sights

I received a phone call from the Mercury during the late summer asking me if I could identify a young bird that had been photographed by staff photographer Sam Rosewarne. When the image arrived I could not only name the species positively but the precise location where the picture was taken. It just so happened that I had been monitoring the very nest that had produced the youngster. I had to confess that if I hadn’t seen the chick in question grow from a grey, downy … [Read more...] about Sparrowhawks at home in the suburbs

Rain lashed against my bedroom window but that was not to deter me from the annual Birdlife Tasmania shorebird count. I checked my phone before leaving and there was no message to say the count had been called off, so I was on my way. The organisation has been counting birds around Tasmania’s shores for half a century and this data has already proven invaluable in assessing shorebird numbers, and drawing up strategies for their protection. I was determined to play my part. … [Read more...] about Count on a shore thing