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Strolling through my local reserve I was stopped in my tracks by the rasping call of what I regard as the most beautiful bird of the woods, the satin flycatcher. It was not just the weather – hot and sultry – that told me we were heading into summer after a savage winter that seemed to linger well into spring. The flycatcher heralds the summer season and is traditionally the last of the migrants to arrive from the mainland, in my experience reaching Tasmania in about the … [Read more...] about Satin flycatcher puts the seal on summer migration

It doesn’t take much to bring back the birds. Just a neglected space and a few pairs of willing hands will do the trick to create a home for our feathered friends. A year or so ago the enthusiastic members of the Waterworks Landcare Group took a long, hard look at an overgrown quarry on their patch and decided it would make an ideal nature reserve. Although it was merely an idea, a project to provide a little variety to the volunteers’ monthly tree-planting and … [Read more...] about Quarry a mine of bird delights

A waif of a bird we will call “tawny” was lying bedraggled on the cold surface of a suburban street. A waif being attacked by ravens. A bird bereft, a pathetic bundle of feather and bone. Awaiting the cruel fate of raven beak. Or the wheels of a car. A baby tawny frogmouth had somehow become separated from its mother; lost, alone and in peril. A jogger discovered the bird on Waterworks Road in Dynnyrne and delivered it to a local wildlife carer. The carer in turn … [Read more...] about Rescued ‘Tawny’ flies into the night

Tasmanian birdwatchers who traditionally gather on the state’s mudflats at this time of year to await the return of migratory shorebirds have been staggered to discover that one of the long-distance travellers has just broken the world record for avian non-stop flight. A bar-tailed godwit making the southward journey along the East Asian-Australasian migratory flyway has been clocked flying non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand. The bird covered around 12,000 kilometres in 11 … [Read more...] about Flying feat by some distance

“Donny, there’s twitching within,” said Richard Flanagan when he signed a copy of his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North during its launch a few years back. Sure enough, when I read the Booker Prize-winning work, I found the central character Dorrigo Evans doing a spot of birdwatching in the Midlands where the early part of the novel is set. As Flanagan wrote, Dorrigo “would smell damp bark and drying leaves and watch the clans of green and red musk lorikeets … [Read more...] about The sounds of silence