A green rosella let out an anguished squawk and the birds of the neighbourhood knew there was danger in the air. Not just any threat, the menace of the collared sparrowhawk, the most feared predator of the treetops.
A dreamy, sultry spring morning on the deck of a friend’s home at Dodges Ferry had been rudely interrupted by the arrival of the sleek, elegant sparrowhawk.
Although it had arrived silently, in stealth, on darting fight, it had not escaped the sharp eye of the rosella.
A truncated alarm call, short and sharp because the rosella wanted to dive for cover as quick as possible had trumpeted the menace.
Moments earlier the black wattles, she-oaks and melaleuca surrounding the deck had rung to the songs of spotted pardalotes, silvereyes and New Holland honeyeaters, along with the varied song of the green rosella.
Now there was a silence that hung in the air until, after a minute or two, the sparrowhawk realised it had been rumbled and moved on to fresh killing grounds.
The sparrowhawk and a close relative, the brown goshawk, are exceedingly beautiful birds but they are seldom seen because they like to keep to the shadows, attacking smaller prey by ambush instead of swooping on them from a great height, as with other members of the hawk family.
The collared sparrowhawk is smaller than the brown goshawk but carries a similar plumage of finely barred russet chest, and grey on the back and head. The collared sparrowhawk also has an extensive patch of russet feathers at the back of the neck, from which it derives its name. The bird I saw at Dodges Ferry was a female, considerably bigger than the male, with a more muted colour to her plumage.
The female brown goshawk is bigger still, about the size of a magpie.
A trip to the drier woodland of Dodges Ferry had been a welcome change from my visual window on the world of birds, the wet forests surrounding my home in the Waterworks Valley. There were birds of the drier country like noisy miners and little wattlebirds, although the green rosella is also found in my garden.
Under a hot sun, recovering from too many beers the night before, my friend and I had revelled in the bell-like version of the rosella song not often heard, and the sweet chattering of this male.
The rosella, judging by the bright yellow of its breast, was an older male with the experience gained over six or seven years to be attuned to the secretive and deadly ways of the sparrowhawk.
After the sparrowhawk’s appearance, and the rosella’s warning, it took a good half an hour for the birdsong to return, service resuming as normal in the interplay between the garden’s bird species.