Friday the 13th might be an ominous signal of bad luck but for one of my readers it was a day of pure joy. A pair of grey fantails nesting in her garden – in fact metres from her backdoor – produced two chicks, which went on to grace her property in Sandy Bay with elegant, shuttlecock flight.
This happened 12 months ago and the reader, Jo Bornemissza, is happy to report the nesting fantails returned this season, with the same result, although the chicks emerged not on Friday the 13th, but a few days later.
One of the delights of birdwatching is to find nests in gardens when spring and summer arrives. Better still if prospective parents are first seen scouting for a nest site, and then building the nests.
It gives an idea of the effort that goes into such constructions – they are in fact marvels of engineering – before, in turn, the marvels of avian parenthood come into view.
Nests not only have to be strong enough to provide protection in all sorts of weather, including driving rain and gale-force winds. They then have to provide shelter for a growing brood of young.
Watching the fantails, Jo was even able to describe not only the building process but the materials used. The fantail nest is considered one of the most beautiful. It largely comprises grass woven into a cup shape with trailing, longer stems that form a flat base dangling under the main structure. The grass stems in fact create the impression of, not a cup, but a wineglass.
And as Jo noted, the nest was bound together with spiders’ webs.
Nests of all garden and woodland bird species not only have to be strongly built, they must also be camouflaged to outsmart predators and cuckoos, the latter looking for surrogate parents to rear their own young.
By coincidence, I heard one of the smallest of the cuckoos, the shining bronze-cuckoo, calling in Jo’s garden when she showed me the nest, but it was highly unlikely the cuckoos would discover it hidden in the leafy pisonia shrub framing the back door.
The Sandy Bay nest was the second I had seen this season, after finding a fantail nest on the Pipeline Trail above Gentle Annie Falls in November.
I set out to monitor this one every few days but was disappointed with the outcome. After the birds had completed the structure, they deserted the nest. It was situated close to the trail and I suspect it was subject to disturbance with growing numbers of people visiting the falls location following construction of a new trail to gives a level access to both the falls and the Pipeline Trail south of it.
The Sandy Bay fantails had better luck, proving perhaps it’s not always wise to pay too much attention to FrIday the 13th superstition.