Around midnight, preparing to go to bed after a night of sport on the television, a
weird and wonderful sound drifted through the open windows from the garden.
A soft, deep, continuous, ooo-ooo-ooo rhythm.
I knew what it was immediately. A tawny frogmouth, although it was the first time I
had heard it in my garden. A new species for my garden checklist, bringing the total
to 57 species. It’s taken 25 years to clock this number but all the same it
demonstrates how rich is our city in birdlife, considering my home is situated not
more than three kilometres from the central business district.
By coincidence the arrival of the frogmouth came at the start of the Aussie Bird
Count from October 19-25 and although I was out in the garden with binoculars,
notebook and pen just after dawn I knew I could never get even close to my total
number of birds clocked over the years. Many of the rarer species on my list had
only made fleeting appearances from time to time.
The one-off sightings had included a male pink robin in sparkling spring plumage
eyeing me through the window of my study, and a beautiful firetail spied on my
garden fence while I was on the phone and by chance looking out of the kitchen
window.
An olive whistler, more likely to be found in dense, wet rainforest on kununyi/Mt
Wellington also made an appearance in a more muted plumage than its near cousin,
the golden whistler, which in summer can be seen or heard most days.
Eight of Tasmania’s 12 endemic species have also visited my garden from time to
time, including the four honeyeater species found nowhere else on earth.
And among the Tasmanian cohort, successive families of the flightless native-hen, or
“turbo-chook” have literally made my garden their home, rearing fluffy black chicks
most years.
I also include birds spotted merely passing overhead. To expect wedge-tailed and
sea eagles to land in the garden would be asking too much, although smaller raptors
like the white and brown goshawk come to call.
And I must not forget the white-faced herons which arrive at my long pile each
spring, just as a food source, metallic skinks, are emerging from winter hibernation.
Although the Aussie Bird Count – at first called the backyard bird count – can now
include any space with birds in its 20-minute surveys, it still largely concentrates on
the home patch. The garden has long been overlooked as a vital habitat for
threatened birds, especially considering that one in six Australian birds is
endangered. The results provide an important snapshot of Australian bird
populations.
Last year. 64,000 participants recorded five million birds and the 2026 tally has
beaten that record, with 6,020,009 birds counted.
And among all these species is my tawny frogmouth.