A late-summer setting sun gives the grass a silky sheen at the Waterworks Reserve in Hobart. Insects that during the height of the day, the height of the sun, would be invisible, suddenly assume a shape within their own shadow, even if they are mere dots dancing on a gentle breeze.
Swallows chase them, the welcome swallows presenting a larger shape, larger than life, etched against the golden sun sinking to the west.
The insects move swiftly, if jerkily. They are no match in darting flight of their hunters. The predators glide and turn, swoop and dive, wings flickering. Then on closed wings their flight stalls, as if stopping in mid-air. They float and snatch at the flying insects struggling to outfly them.
Evening at the Waterworks Reserve and it’s magical, a fairyland. I’ve flown out of the homo sapiens realm to sit and watch the avian world all about me. I love the reserve that hides below the towering kunanyi/Mount Wellington above it. I go there at least four times a week, on power walks to keep fit in body, or a slower walk with birding binoculars to keep fit in mind. The best time for the brisk walks is winter, with snow sometimes under foot, The best time for birding is spring, to hear birdsong just after the summer migrants have arrived from the mainland, or late summer evenings when the migrants are preparing to leave. Among them the welcome swallows.
I sit there in the shade of an BBQ hut, at the confluence of where mankind and nature’s worlds meet. The hut at BBQ site no.2 in the Waterworks Reserve is normally a place for family gatherings but welcome swallows also visit the cool, sheltered space during the summer months. And nest there.
It all makes for a marvellous spectacle. Excited children dashing to and fro, clutching toys and balloons, to be fed snags and ice-cream. Welcome swallow parents coming and going with food for their young, just above human heads. Two worlds colliding, in stark contrast but meshing all the same.
My passion, and field of study, is the urban and suburban environment, that space where the human and natural world come together in time and place.
BBQ site No.2 is symbolic, a metaphor, for where parallel lives meet to each’s mutual benefit. The BBQ huts provide shelter for not just revelers in the reserve but creatures of the wild. And in return for being allowed to share this space, the swallows snap up all the flying insects, including mosquitoes, that could spoil the day.
The BBQ site might have a family connotation but, ironically, I usually go alone to the Waterworks Reserve for a time out, and solitude, from the rigours and emotional ties to my own family life. I am, however, constantly drawn into the families of others. Sometimes I bump into people I know at the reserve (not unusual in a small city like Hobart) and I am drawn into their craic and chat. The best times, however, are reserved for when the humans have departed, or failed to show during the quieter moments of the week. That’s when I join the swallow family, if not exactly by invite, but tolerated as the swallows get down to the hard yakka of rearing a family of their own.
The hut has been known to nesting swallows for as long as I can remember – 21 summers in fact – and I can never recall them being disturbed, or even harmed, in their domestic duties, just a metre or so above the comings and goings, and to-ing and thro-ing of the BBQ-quers. It’s clear that the people booking the BBQ site enjoy being part of swallows lives, too.
Each year a nest is built, or rebuilt on the foundations of a previous one, with beakfuls of mud gathered from the edge of the twin lakes forming the heart of the reserve, and in my latest year of swallow engagement, 2021, it was adorned with the lining of white feathers gathered from two feral ducks in residence in the reserve.
Two young were produced that year, and during the course of the latter part of summer I made it my business to check on their progress, with more time at hand at hand without the shifts I had done in the past as a freelance editor.
A visit to the reserve became the highlight of my day, and I timed it to enjoy the best spectacle mother nature had to offer in terms of mellow light from a setting sun, and the heightened activity of the birds before sunset.
Some nights I’d even take a beer, my silent, casual contemplation in marked contrast to the frenzied activity in the hut.
One night proved to be more special than others, and it will remain in my memory forever. It’s a recollection seared by the rays of a golden sun turning to magenta and then purple. The soft sun to the west, sinking rapidly behind kunanyi/Mt Wellington, gave light and shade contours to the woodland dropping down towards the southern lake, on whose embankment the hut stands. Eucalypts and wattles in shades of dark and light green, yellow sunlight sparkling on mini-waves created across the reservoir by a warm, slight breeze.
From the shade of the hut, I watched the welcome swallows hunting over the twin lakes with chitter-chatter calls.
The angle of the sun highlighted arrows of shape and form like a torch beam picking out flying bats in the night. Round and round the swallows swept until they had enough insects in their beaks to bring back to the nest.
A pass, outside the hut, and then a sweep through the hut itself without stopping, as though checking for danger, a goshawk possibly lying in ambush on the hut’s roof beams. As they passed, the young would utter a begging-for-food twitter through giant yellow open beaks and in a flash the swallows would be back, flying smack-bang into the side of the nest, grabbing it tightly. Their long forked tails were wedged along the contours of the tapering, lower part of the nest to maintain balance, the birds cemented there momentarily to thrust food into the open beaks. As soon as one of the parents had arrived, they would drop from the nest, turn in mid-air and be gone with a rapid pounding of the wings. The young were tiny at first, just thin beaks jutting above the nest rim when the parents arrived but they soon swelled in size, until their heads, blunt like oversized thumbs, wrestled for space in the nest’s confines. You could clearly see them attaining distinctive swallow markings, a trace of blue on their heads and the russet chests of their parents.
Soon they were out of the nest, perching on the beams supporting it and without days they were spreading their wings, practising flight and were off, encouraged by the parents. This is a crucial time for young birds, dropping to the ground on unsteady weak wings but these two made it first time. In uncertain flight they were led by their parents to a perch on a wire fence along the embankment guarding the lower reservoir. They continued to be fed from there until they were truly on the wing, and being taught to hunt for themselves, following parents in pursuit of insects.
At one moment a forest raven came by observing the feeding activity, and no doubt the vulnerability of the young birds. The parent swallows swooped at the raven and with protesting caws it finally drifted off in slow flight. All the while the two young, still sporting outsize-Donald-duck beaks which made it easier to identify from the parents when they were cast in shadow by the setting sun, were obvious to the drama. Parents swooping and harrying, twittering, and the swallow young merely sitting there, more intent on watching flying insects all about them.
The young swallows jerked their heads in the direction of the insects, upwards, downwards in cartoon-strip exaggerated motions. They appeared as Walt Disney would create them, with the stroke of a pen and not from feather and bone.
The siblings, out there on the wire, oblivious to the brutal gaze of the raven, displayed the virtue, innocence and inexperience of all life new to the world. They were like all children, especially those excitedly rushing about BBQ hut No 2 when the sun was a little higher earlier in the afternoon.
Like the children discovering the Waterworks Reserve, the young swallows too would return in summers to come.