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Optimism for the year ahead

February 2, 2019 Don Knowler

A young shining bronze-cuckoo ushered in a new year of birdwatching when I went on a birding excursion to the Waterworks Reserve on the first day of 2019.
The cuckoo was not what I had expected because I had in mind the birds that I usually associate with summer, the satin flycatcher, the black-faced cuckoo shrike and the dusky woodswallow among them.
The four species of cuckoos visiting Tasmania are also summer visitors but I’m not a fan of the cuckoo family.
At this time of year I always live in dread when I go out birding of seeing cuckoo young being fed by surrogate parents. Worst of all is finding tiny scarlet robins and black-headed honeyeaters being bullied and harassed for food by the young of pallid cuckoos, which have grown twice the size of their “parents”.
When I came across the bronze-cuckoo I expected to see possibly thornbills or blue wrens in attendance. Because of their smaller size, the bronze-cuckoos – which are only about 16cm in length – tend to target smaller species, especially those with domed nests which pose a bit of a struggle for the far larger pallid and fan-tailed cuckoos.
The young bronze-cuckoo, however, had already learned to feed itself and from its perch was leaping into the canopy above its head to feast on caterpillars among the leaves.
My new year’s bird count follows one I learned when I lived in the United States in the 1980s. American birders traditionally conduct a survey on the first day of January, or one a week earlier, the Christmas bird count. In some places, like New York’s Central Park, they do both in typical Big Apple super-enthusiastic fashion. I joined these excursions during the several years I lived in the city and have great memories of the experience even if they were conducted in the dead of winter with snow on the ground.
The US and Australian festive counts are markedly different not just because of the seasons they occur in. Although the American one counts winter populations of birds, it also serves as a holiday get-together for birders. Bird lovers doing Australian surveys tend to operate alone, as I did, and have far more citizen-science intent. The New Year surveys are used to plot the progress of the breeding season and lists of birds spotted in the holiday period are also accompanied by counts of young birds on the wing.
On this score there was no shortage of young birds being fed by their parents.
Two juvenile black currawongs demanded food from their parents which had been scrounged from a family having a BBQ and deeper in the woods a forest raven chick was doing the same.
In the human world, the New Year brings not only resolutions but hope and optimism about the coming 12 months. And the sight of young, fluffy birds with outsized Donald Duck-beaks also brings the promise of birds in our lives in the summers ahead.

On The Wing

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