The winter solstice may be the shortest day of the year but it was long in birdwatching excitement. A bird I rarely see on my home patch turned up on the Lower Pipeline Trail that runs above my home in the Waterworks Valley.
The scrubtit is one of those species birders call LBJs – “little brown jobs” which are small, unspectacular and difficult to identify. Often the lazy birder just moves on to more dramatic fare.
I felt the same on June 21, in a hurry to complete my daily exercise walk before heading off to the Regatta Grounds to see the Ogoh-ogoh go up in flames, in the annual Dark Mofo purification ritual.
As I strode out along the trail, without my binoculars, I saw a little bird silhouetted against the low, weak sun. I presumed it was a common brown thornbill and pressed on until it started to sing, an unfamiliar tune to my ears.
The bird also behaved differently to the thornbill. Instead of flitting nervously among the bare branches of a hawthorn that had lost its summer leaves it perched on a high twig, singing vigorously as though declaring a territory. I could not make out the buff-white breast that in part identifies the scrubtit from not only the thornbill but another similar brown bird, the scrubwren.
The bird was also wagging its tail as it sang, like another bird that displays this behaviour, the satin flycatcher.
An identification was not assured and I soon abandoned my walk to dash home to play a recording of the scrubtit’s song. The trilling refrain confirmed it as a scrubtit, one of the 12 birds found nowhere else on earth other than Tasmania.
The scrubtit has always proven a difficult bird for me to find, and I have in fact never seen it at the place where I do most of my birding, the Waterworks Reserve. I have lost count of the times I have silently seethed when bird photographers – usually birding tourists – have shown me with glee the picture of the elusive bird they have captured at the reserve.
To find the species I usually venture a little further north, to the foothills and then higher slopes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. At the Springs it’s possible to see scrubtits close-up in a spread of young stringybark gums near the car park. What really sets them apart from the thornbills and scrubwrens is a long, almost scimitar beak used to probe alpine plants for invertibrates.
Down at the Regatta Grounds, I focused on the burning of the effigy, which each year features a wild creature threatened with extinction. A few years back it was a masked owl, chosen to highlight vanishing birds. This year it was the Pedra Branca skink, found only on the rock of that name in the Southern Ocean.