For more than 20 years I have watched the breeding cycle of welcome swallows at the Waterworks Reserve but the chain of events looks like being broken this year.
The BBQ hut in which the swallows build their mud-cup nest has been removed to facilitate engineering works at the reserve and I fear the swallows will lose their innate memory of this site when the works are completed after the breeding season has ended in late summer.
Swallows tend to return to the same nest site each year and in the years I have been watching the Waterworks swallows I have presumed that the nest has been occupied by successive generations of the same family.
Over the years, the wooden, high rafters of BBQ site no 2 has proven an ideal swallow summer home.
Remarkably, the swallows have only been disturbed once by weekend revellers using the hut. Last year, the resident swallow family only managed to produce young from one of the two clutches of eggs they usually lay, but another swallow family used the abandoned nest late in the summer and produced offspring of their own.
After they first appeared in the first days of September, the two swallow families with a memory of this site engaged in aerial battles over where the hut had stood, apparently unaware that this vital piece of real estate had been demolished. The swallows flew in circles, confused, contemplating the loss of their home. And I shared their disappointment, realising I’d miss the seasonal monitoring of their coming and going, their nest building, their rearing young and teaching the fledglings to fly.
Although considered a harbinger of spring, the swallow is not the first of the migrants to arrive, as I wrote recently. I always hear the song of the fan-tailed cuckoo first but this year the cuckoo was beaten to Tasmanian shores – or at least the Waterworks Reserve – by another cross-Bass Strait migrant, the striated pardalote which arrived on August 5th. Like many of our inter-state migrants, the wintering grounds of both the welcome swallow and the striated pardalote remain a mystery. In the pardalote’s case, bird photographers in New South Wales have photographed the Tasmanian sub-species of the striated pardalote on the Great Dividing Range in the Hunter Region, inland from Newcastle. There are five sub-species of these tiny birds , measuring a mere nine centimetres, and the Tasmanian ones are easily identified by a diagnostic yellow spot on the wing feathers.
After first hearing the pardalote’s familiar “pick-it-up” three note call, I found them scouting nesting sites in the sandstone walls of the Sandy Bay Rivulet calverts below the BBQ site.
Birding has its consolations and the loss of the swallow’s nest is in a strange way my gain. I have a new family to “adopt” during the spring and summer months.