The most beautiful of bird of spring, the satin flycatcher, kept me waiting this year before I finally tracked it down. It’s the last of the summer migrants to arrive, usually from the middle of October but it eluded me at first.
I searched and searched in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington where I usually hear and see them. October passed and we were well into November before I heard the familiar “churring” territorial call and the sweet, melodic song. It was far from my usual patch. At the time I was tramping a trail on Maria Island with a group of fellow passengers from the Odalisque III, a tourist vessel plying the shores of the East Coast.
Birds were more of a backdrop on this trip. The destination during the day had been an historic farm once inhabited by Viv and Hilda Robey. The farm is one of a handful that are both a part of Maria Island history and folklore, along with the main convict administration centre and barracks and the isolated probation station that dot the largely pristine landscape of a substantial island 20 kilometres in length.
When our party alighted from a tender on the shore of Shoal Bay, under the gaze of a white-bellied sea eagle, the flycatcher was the first bird pointed out to us by tour guide Peter Marmion. It was a male with steel-blue head and back, silver chest and belly, and crest which gives it a distinctive shape, even when it is hidden in shadow in its preferred habitat of the gum and wattle canopy.
A rich array of birds revealed themselves along the five-kilometre hike to Robeys farm, the isolated farmhouse intact on a slight rise. In what would have been its garden, fire-tailed finches scampered through the undergrowth and green rosellas called overhead.
At such times when history and birds collide, I always imagine myself back in those far-flung days.
The Robeys, who carved the farm out of the bush and lived there for 40 years until the 1960s, would have heard those very same bird calls and songs we were hearing on this late-spring morning, amid the bleating of their 700 sheep and 40 head of cattle.
Time really had appeared to stand still. The porch appeared as if the Robeys had just left the farmhouse. There were shoes and boots lined along the wooden railings and farm implements resting against the farmhouse wall
The inside was empty save for an ancient armchair with springs sticking through the torn fabric of its seat but the kitchen at the rear of the farmhouse gave a hint of someone preparing to bake bread with sticks ready to feed the twin ovens.
And all the while welcome swallows swooped around the homestead chasing flying insects. Timeless. And it appeared at any moment the indomitable Robeys would appear.