The clocks had gone back, darkness fell earlier and all of a sudden I felt a chill in my bones, and a flock of departing summer visitors, striated pardalotes, could feel it too.
As I contemplated the looming winter, the pardalotes were on their way back to the mainland, travelling as far north as the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, if not further. All spring and summer their incessant “pick-me-up” triple-syllable song had bounced across my garden and through my home and now there was silence.
Until the clocks go back, autumn always arrives quietly, almost imperceptibly. There’s no fanfare as in spring, when the sun suddenly shines strong and hard, burning snow off kunanyi/Mt Wellington and enticing the eucalypts and wattles into maroon new leaf. And just in case we don’t notice the warming days, the birds announce the new season with strident, powerful song.
Now, with the frenzy of breeding over, there’s a near-silence in the days before Easter, a drop in temperature at night that has us glancing towards the log pile, and looking at winter fashion in the shops.
Something deep and primeval might warn of the approach of winter, an emotion that cannot be readily defined, but the movement of the birds towards the north gives it definite shape, along with the turning of the leaves on deciduous, garden trees into the colours of gold and copper. And that eerie silence, and stillness in the air.
The welcome swallows, the tree martins, the cuckoos and black-faced cuckoo-shrikes have vanished from our skies. And populations of grey fantails and silvereyes are diminished, as about half their number choose to cross Bass Strait.
Although all these species might be classed as “summerbirds” – to use the Tasmanian name of the black-faced cuckoo-shrike – my own barometer of the seasons is always the beautiful, if pugnacious striated pardalote.
My records show it is always the first to arrive among the woodland birds, sometimes as early as mid-August.
The striated pardalotes are one of three members of the pardalote family found in Tasmania, but the only one to migrate. The other two are the very common spotted pardalote and the rare forty-spotted pardalote.
The spotted, or “diamond bird”, is considered the most beautiful of the family, but my favourite remains the striated pardalote, with its white eye-stripe and lemon-yellow feathers on its upper breast.
It’s still not known where they go in winter but Mike Newman writing in the latest Birdlife Tasmania newsletter says photographers on the Great Dividing Range in the Hunter Region of NSW have detected at least four sub-species of striated pardalote, including the Tasmanian one, which has a diagnostic yellow spot on its wing.
A challenge for the future is to map the distribution of sub-species to find out more about their movements.