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Dancing on the Edge of the World

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Quarry a mine of bird delights

November 14, 2020 Don Knowler

It doesn’t take much to bring back the birds. Just a neglected space and a few pairs of willing hands will do the trick to create a home for our feathered friends.
A year or so ago the enthusiastic members of the Waterworks Landcare Group took a long, hard look at an overgrown quarry on their patch and decided it would make an ideal nature reserve.
Although it was merely an idea, a project to provide a little variety to the volunteers’ monthly tree-planting and weed-clearing duties, the plan bore fruit earlier this month when what is now termed Fantail Quarry took flight.
And it proved a celebration not just for the volunteers. About 20 bird species came to call, including a green rosella checking out one of four nesting boxes which have been erected at the site.
The quarry is situated along the Lower Pipeline Track which links Romilly St in South Hobart to the Waterworks Reserve. In the early 1800s it produced sandstone blocks for a cottage on Stoney Steps Rd just above it, and possibly some of the older cottages along Waterworks Rd, most of these lost during the Black Tuesday bushfires of 1967.
From late Victorian times, the quarry became a neglected space but it had the raw material for a nature reserve – mature gums and silver wattle, with an understorey of dogwood and blanket bush. All it need was a general spruce up, the clearing of fallen dead trees and the planting of new ones. Trees were provided by Hobart City Council, as were the nest boxes of various sizes, including one designed specifically for bats. The council has also provided tables and benches at the site and there are plans to have an information panel naming and describing the birds resident in the quarry and the wet forest surrounding it.
Among a checklist of about 60 birds are most of Tasmania’s 12 endemic species, along with birds also found on the mainland, including such colourful species as the scarlet robin, the superb fairy-wren and, of course, the grey fantail after which the new reserve is named.
The reserve and surrounding forest is also rich in mammals – pademelons, Bennett’s wallabies, potoroos, and brush and ring-tailed possums and even the occasional echidna.
Although a fantail fluttered by during the launch, the focus was on the green rosella checking out the biggest of the nesting boxes. The box, though, also attracted interest from an eastern rosella, a less common bird along the PIpeline Track. Eastern rosellas favour drier woodland nearer the coast and their arrival is providing an added spectacle at the new reserve.
The green and eastern rosella species engaged in a brief contest over the nesting box before flying away and the Fantail Quarry volunteers were left to speculate which of the species will eventually win out.

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