Cold, dank and grey, even the birdsong was muted during the winter solstice?
My hands freezing, my feet like blocks of ice, on the shortest day of the year I was about to turn back home after an early-morning foray to the Waterworks Reserve when a flash of fiery red caught my attention.
There on the road ahead of me, the tarmacadam still sparkling with frost, stood the tiny figure of a scarlet robin.
There was a time when the sight of a robin would not have been unusual, something to stop me in my tracks. They were common, a part of the landscape of the reserve, like the raven and the currawong. In recent years, however, the scarlet robins along with other small ground-feeding birds had been few and a far between.
The robin demise especially remained a mystery until one evening in summer I saw feral cats scouting the barbeque sites hoping to find left-over food. Over time I started to see more and more cats, including a clan of three large kittens.
As sightings of the cats became regular, the appearance of both scarlet and dusky robins, and superb fairy-wrens, became rarer. About the same time, nature-lovers who spotlight the reserve at night complained that small mammals like bandicoots, potoroos and bettongs could no longer be found.
It appeared the feral cats and possibly moggies that stray from neighbouring homes were to blame.
The impact of cats on wildlife has been known since the first cats were introduced to Australia in the early days of settlement. But it is only in the past few years that the extent of the toll has been revealed.
A team of researchers from Charles Darwin, Deakin and the National University of Australia, in the first robust attempt to quantify the problem on a national scale, came up with an estimate that suggested cats kill more than a million birds every day across Australia.
By combining data on the cat population, hunting rates and spatial distribution, the team calculated that cats kills a staggering 377 million birds a year.
Rates were highest in Australia’s dry interior, suggesting that feral cats pose a serious and largely unseen threat to native bird species. The research was focused on bird species but it is known cats also take large numbers of mammals.
The cat menace at the Waterworks Reserve was finally resolved by the Hobart City Council when the scale of it was brought to the attention of the city’s environmental officials.
I do not see the feral cats anymore but delight in having the birds back. The latest robin I saw was moulting into its fine spring plumage and had a female, less colourful in muted brown feathers with only a hint of a red breast, in his sights.
The next day I could hear the male’s joyous song, a descending thin twitter, coming from the lower branches of a blue gum. It might have been mid-winter, but spring was definitely in the air.