All summer long a grey fantail has sung a lusty, vibrant song from the upper branches of a dogwood tree.
The male fantail has only broken off singing to go in search of flying insects, fluttering about the branches like a demented shuttlecock before returning to its favourite perch.
The fantail is usually known for a sweet song, a descending melody that seems to drop like falling leaves from the canopy. The fantail in question not only sung this tune, along with the tumbling melody there were other notes, more strident and course. There was also a chattering call and tinkling refrain. The grey fantail was reaching deep into its repertoire to impress a potential mate, perhaps borrowing a song or two from other species of birds broadcasting for partners in the woods.
In early spring, the fantail arrived from what I believed to be his wintering grounds on the mainland in a fine, new spring plumage; no doubt moulting into his stunning finery before he had crossed Bass Strait.
The plumage of the fantail is a stunner at the best of times, but in spring it sparkles in subtle tones of steel-blue, grey and black.
On its head it also carries intricate lines of black and white, as though these have been sketched with a pencil. And that shuttlecock tail. When he displays his tail feathers in the treetops, as the fantail pursues insects, the tail mixes parallel stripes of white and black.
All summer long the fantail paraded his finery, and sang his song. I can’t be sure that this bird was in fact a migrant, or was one of the fantails which choose to remain in Tasmania over the winter. His aggressive restlessness, however, indicated he was establishing a new territory, and not merely asserting ownership of one he had held all winter.
With resonant, powerful song this bird had clearly never suffered from stage fright. It refused to sing from the wings, as did a pink robin broadcasting from the shadows along the leafy banks of the Sandy Bay Rivulet.
In the summer months I observed the male several times a week to glean evidence of a fantail family in the woods but a happy ending to summer, the ultimate reason for all that fantail posturing, did not materialise.
I never saw a female nearby. And I never found a fantail nest of grass stems suspended from a low branch, in a bulbous shape with a twisted and then flattened tail which to some eyes can look like a wine glass.
Instead, by late summer, the fantail song had become a duet. Another male fantail from a neighbouring territory had crept closer until it settled on a perch on the other side of the dogwood. The two birds now traded songs as though trying to outdo each other on karaoke night. There was no belligerent, aggressive intent. Like all birds, fantails sing to declare territory and attract a mate. But for both of these birds, it was a mate who never came.