My birthday falls on an auspicious date – September 11th – and ever since the horror of the World Trade Centre attack, to mark my own milestone I have tended to take myself as far removed from the events of 2001 as I can.
No TV, no newspapers, just the wild world and the refrain of birdsong in the woods or the sound of crashing surf.
Last September it was a day enjoying the ocean off Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. In contrast, this year and amid pandemic restrictions on inter-state travel, I braved the snow and chill winds of Cradle Mountain.
Away from the madding crowd, my expectation on the day of my birth has also become modest.
The “gift” I promise myself tends to be the sighting of a rare or unusual bird. At Noosa, it was the eastern whipbird of the tropical rainforest. At Cradle Mountain a less dramatic and showy species, the Tasmanian scrubtit.
The scrubtit falls into a category of what birdwatchers term “the little brown birds”, or LBBs. The scrubtit is smaller than a sparrow and joins the scrubwren and thornbill as being hard to tell apart by the untrained eye.
The scrubtit, though, displays a white breast and a longer curved beak than the largely brown-plumaged other two. It is generally found in the understorey of the rainforest and I rank it alongside the forty-spotted pardalote as the hardest to find of the 12 Tasmanian endemic species. Although I hunted high and low for the scrubtit, I drew a blank. In fact, in the freezing weather there were not many birds about, except for small flocks of black currawongs begging food from tourists.
Cradle Mountain is the domain of birds that favour an alpine environment, although in Tasmania no species can be described as purely belonging to the mountains. In New Zealand they have the world’s only mountain parrot, the kia, and in the mountainous areas of Tasmania we have a parrot that is generally considered a bird of the peaks, the green rosella, although these beautiful birds also come down to sea level.
The bird most associated with the mountains is the black currawong, or “mountain jay” as it is known in rural areas, and some alpine plants like mountain pink berry rely on the currawong to spread their seeds. As with the rosella, the currawong can also be found in some lowland areas.
I spotted both the birds of the peaks but none of the rainforest species in the sassafras bordering Dove Lake or in the towering myrtle-beech trees in a forest known as The Ballroom.
But a trip to the mountains is always rewarding and I got my birthday surprise eventually. Not the scrubtit, but an animal: a wombat on a ramble and I moved aside to let it pass.