Alarm bells were ringing in the first few weeks of spring when a migrant bird beloved by visitors to the Waterworks Reserve failed to show in big numbers.
I was one of a number of birders eagerly monitoring the sandstone culverts below the car park at the entrance to the reserve where striated pardalotes can always be seen in spring and summer.
The species is dubbed the “tiny bird with the big voice” and its pick-it-up, pick-it-up call usually begins to ring out in the last week of winter when it first arrives from the mainland.
This year the bird was only heard occasionally as spring officially got under way on September 1. Worse, the birds could not be seen flying to and fro to a nesting site.
Each day for three weeks I visited the spot searching for these cavity-nesters, training my binoculars on the cracks in the culverts of the Sandy Bay Rivulet, which the pardalotes use as nesting hollows.
Although I delight in watching the mating rituals of these beautiful little birds each year, the pardalotes were very much on my radar for different reasons. During the winter I had read a report of them being spotted in a remote area of mid-western New South Wales, giving a clue to where they went in winter.
Much has still to be learned about the winter range of our summer migrants, this information usually gained when birds banded in Tasmania during the breeding season are retrieved, either dead or trapped in mist-nets placed by researchers.
Identifying striated pardalotes is made easier because their plumages vary depending on what region they come from. The Tasmanian birds have a distinctive yellow spot on their wings, separating them from various mainland sub-species which have red.
A report from the Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve near West Wyalong in outback NSW revealed pardalotes displaying the yellow spot had been found associating with forms with red dots, which are found year-round in the west and central areas of the state.
Back in Tasmania, the late arrival of summer migrants in September always raises concerns that these birds might actually be in decline. Across Australia bird numbers are falling with one in six species under threat of extinction.
This September, however, there might have been a simple explanation for the dearth of migrants – a period of extremely bad weather, stopping birds in their tracks on both sides of Bass Strait.
I’m happy to report the pardalotes eventually arrived under a snow-capped kunanyi/Mt Wellington on the morning of the AFL Grand Final on September 24. I had checked on the breeding site before heading off to buy a slab for the footy game, and there was a female pardalote, peering from one of the sandstone cavities. She was watching for her mate who had been bringing her nesting material.