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Donald Knowler

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Bronzewing delivers truck-load of woe

September 18, 2020 Don Knowler

I awake at dawn to what sounds like a truck reversing. The “truck” is beeping an alarm designed to warn pedestrians it is moving backwards.
Only this beeping seems to go on forever. It pulsates from dawn until the sun rises beyond the wattles and gums at the end of my garden, and then all morning and sometimes into the afternoon.
The beeping drives me mad.
I know its source. It’s not a truck at all, of course. It’s just the mating, territorial call of the brush bronzewing pigeon, one that has very inconveniently set up home in the bush near my garden fence.
When I point out the reverberating sound to neighbours, they say it doesn’t sound like a truck reversing at all. They look at me, as though I’m mad. But a few days on they curse me for pointing it out to them; it’s driving them mad as well.
I now know from experience this will continue all spring until the male bronzewing making the penetrating, incessant call finds a female and settles down to breed. No use looking for him, and trying to shoo him on. This pigeon is cunningly camouflaged to blend into the bush even though it is relatively large, about the size of a town pigeon.
If I do get a chance to glimpse the bird, I might blot out the call for a minute and study its beautiful plumage, mixing blues, greys and russet browns, with a distinctive yellow forehead. It also has bronze iridescent feathers in its wings, which gives the species, and a near-relative, the common bronzewing, its name.
These are the only pigeons native to Tasmania, although there is an introduced dove, the spotted turtle dove which seems to be taking over the Hobart suburbs.
Both the native pigeons are common in the forest surrounding Hobart, although the common bronzewing is easier to spot because it favours open countryside, especially the grassy areas of the Waterworks Reserve.
The common bronzewing also has an agreeable call, a gentle, echoing hum which sounds like someone blowing across the top of a beer bottle.
Like most bird-lovers, I’m very sensitive to bird calls and I’ve had problems with the dawn chorus in the past. Last year it was the territorial call of a striated pardalote which used the acoustics of my car port to broadcast its song, even though it nested in a neighbour’s garden. That went on for about eight weeks through the spring and summer, for seven hours a day. Another time it was native-hens mating at the end of my lawn.
As for the bronzewing’s truck-reversing call, if only the common bronzewing had moved in, with its beer-bottle song. Such a gentle sound might have induced sleep instead of waking me at the crack of dawn.

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