The trilling, far-carrying song of the fan-tailed cuckoo announced to all in the Waterworks Valley in Dynnyrne that the spring was on the way. Snow might still be coating kunanyi/Mt Wellington on a chilly winter’s day but I knew from that morning on the march to the season of warmth and rebirth was inexorable.
The cuckoo, or at least the individual leading the way, came early this year, Thursday, August 9. I keep records of such things and usually the cuckoos are not heard, at the earliest, until a week or so later.
It is either the cuckoo or another harbinger of spring, the striated pardalote, which arrive first from the mainland. These early birds set in motion a strict timetable of arrivals. By the end of August populations of silvereyes and grey fantails start to build up, boosting the number of the two species who have not chosen to migrate and have faced the rigours of the Tasmanian winter.
The next visitor is perhaps the most eagerly awaited, the welcome swallow, which cements the notion that spring really has arrived and we have not had a false dawn, with individual cuckoos and pardalotes sometimes calling into winter, birds which have not left these shores.
I usually happen on the first cuckoos and pardalotes by chance, but I make a determined effort to see the first swallows, always a birding highlight of my year.
The swallows always arrive at the Waterworks Reserve in the first few days of September, and it is a joy see them finally, gliding and swooping over the twin reservoirs in search of the first of the flying insects.
Last year the swallows arrived a little later, into the second week of September and I speculated on what had delayed their journey. Bad weather in Victoria perhaps, or days of wild winds from the south making flight impossible across Bass Strait. It is still not known where our swallows spend the winter, possibly warmer hunting grounds in New South Wales beyond or along the Great Dividing Range.
Once the swallows have arrived, birdwatchers in Tasmania then turn their attention to later arrivals like the other three cuckoo species – the pallid, and Horsfield’s and shining bronze-cuckoos – and the black-faced cuckoo strike, appropriately called the “summer bird” in Tasmania. Dusky woodswallows, among others, follow and traditionally the last bird to arrive is the stain flycatcher, whose harsh, rasping call will not be heard at the Waterworks until the first weeks of October.
My migratory bird search started a little earlier than usual this year when a friend told me he had heard striated pardalotes calling in his garden at Ridgeway. I searched the Waterworks Reserve where the pardalote nest each year in the cavities of historic sandstone walls. I not only looked for the pardalotes scouting nesting sites, as they do at the end of winter, but listened their three-note “pick-it-up” call. I was to be disappointed and would have to wait a few more weeks.