Tapping on the window, fluttering against its panes, a tiny brown bird was making a nuisance of itself when I had work to do at the keyboard in my study.
Just a sparrow I’m thinking, common around my home. I pulled the curtains shut so it could not see its reflection, a common cause of birds attacking windows. The reflection is seen as a “rival” on their territory.
I went back to my writing. The disturbance continued. Looking again, I could see it was not a sparrow at all. Something more exotic. Far from the common introduced garden species, this had all the attributes of a robin, not a male clothed in bright red breast, but a female for a juvenile in rich brown plumage.
Taking a closer look I could see it was a pink robin, displaying two parallel bands of beige wing feathers on a generally brown plumage, as the females and juveniles do.
Excitement was now in the air. It was only the second pink robin spotted in the garden, following a striking male a couple of years back, staring at me one morning through this very same window.
Abandoning my writing project, I found myself with a birding mystery to unravel. Was this a female or young male, the latter more likely to strike the window and offering the possibility that pink robins might actually nest in my garden this coming breeding season.
And why in my garden, a suburban habitat I’d consider unsuitable for these rainforest birds?
The beautiful pink robins are usually found in deep, fern-lined gullies but they are known to leave breeding territories in autumn. Juvenile males especially leave locations where they were born to stake out territories of their own.
I’ve never seen a male outside of the forests where I usually find them in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington but on one or two occasions I have observed what I previously thought were females along the Hobart Rivulet in South Hobart. These could well have been juvenile males yet to grow pink feathers – actually the colour is magenta – on the breast.
Females or males? Whatever, it was good to welcome the little bird to the garden. I soon attached a sheet of paper to the outside of the window so the bird could not see its reflection or what might appear a clear space to fly through.
The day the robin came represented what birders call a “wave” of sightings, when birds of many species either travel together on migration or gather to exploit a good source.
A silver bottlebrush in my garden rich in insects and seeds was also rich in bird life. Silvereyes, crescent honeyeaters, grey fantails and a lone spinebill honeyeater dipping its scimitar beak into autumn-flowering “Ned Kelly” grevillea nearby.
A pink robin spreading its wings was in good company.