I was hoping to make an important announcement at the Waterworks community’s annual lantern parade which each year marks the end of winter.
“The fan-tailed cuckoos are back,” I was hoping to shout to cheers as I sipped a mug of mulled wine.
It was not to be. Usually the fan-tailed cuckoos, my harbinger of spring, turn up towards the end of August but this year they let me down although another early migratory species, the striated pardalote, had already arrived in good number.
I blamed the weather. The migrants need clear skies and northerly winds to steer their course from the mainland. It looked promising in the fourth week of August before a cold snap driven by freezing south-westerly winds closed in.
The migrants were staying put, hunkered down somewhere along their route south and I listened in vain for the early song of the fan-tailed cuckoo – a descending trill – and possibly the arrowed flight of welcome swallows and the tree martins, age-old totems of spring. The swallows – which most years arrive in the first weekend of September – usually herald a flood of travelling birds, including three more cuckoo species and the aptly named summerbird, also known as the black-faced cuckoo shrike.
Days before the end-of-winter celebration held each year in the quarry reserve along Waterworks Road in Dynnyrne, I had been out just after dawn listening for bird song. Even the local, resident birds were in quiet, sombre mood during the cold snap.
Wrapped in the fur-lined denim jacket which days previously I had put away anticipating warmer weather, I sat on a bench in the quarry, casting my mind north to the migrants’ path.
I imagined the fan-tailed cuckoos, beautiful birds with pinkish breasts and grey backs, stranded, holding, hoping for the weather to clear, for favourable winds.
At this time of year it is not unusual to find hundreds of birds of many species sheltering in the coastal scrub of the Victorian coast on the other side of Bass Strait, waiting for favourable winds. In recent years boobook owls have also been seen on the coast, confirming long-held suspicions that these might be a second bird of prey species to cross the strait at night each year, along with swamp harriers.
Clear skies are important for those birds that fly by night, navigating by the stars. By day they use the position of the sun.
The migration, especially the Bass Strait crossing, is long and arduous, and each spring my thoughts in particular are with the smallest of the long-distance travellers, the silvereyes which are known to fly to and from wintering grounds along the Gold Coast. The tiny birds weigh just 10 grams and I wonder how they do it.
As the Waterworks community welcomed winter’s end, the migrants were delaying their own celebration of spring.