Our trip to Australia has provided the opportunity to feed another of my obsessions, birdwatching. Birdwatching is a hobby wherein one attempts to locate, identify and observe different species of birds. It is a bit like stamp collecting in that you collect, on a life list, all the birds you’ve been able to accurately identify. I am a lister but that’s not my passion. I like to study information about a place I’ll be visiting and set my search image for the birds I might see. In addition to a spectrum of those possible, I usually identify a dream bird; a spectacular looking bird that will probably be difficult to find and will be satisfying when seen. Identifying a new bird is a rush, possibly similar to scoring a goal in a soccer game. It is a wonderful challenge; spot a movement, get your binoculars on it; check what you see against the birds you know to expect. Or collecting the identifying features like color and size and bill shape and then looking quickly through a book to try to find something that looks like what you saw and hopefully having a chance to look again. Australian birds include numerous spectacularly large and colorful birds including the following that I have seen: Rainbow Lorikeets, Australian King Parrots, Crimson Rosellas and Sulfur-crested Cockatoos. Each of theseidentifications was a fantastic experience. Should I say awesome? Sulfur-crested Cockatoos are large white parrots with a tuft of lemon-colored feathers on the crest of their heads. They also have a blaze of yellow under their spread wings. We first saw them in the Botanic Gardens near Sydney Harbor. People feed them bread and get them to perch on their shoulders. I find this practice disturbing but more on that later.
This past weekend we saw Sulfur-crested Cockatoos “in the wild” in the Blue Mountains. You can imagine how conspicuous a white bird was against forests of lush green trees. On Sunday we were walking in the Blue Mountains and came upon two Crimson Rosellas, large parrots with red heads and upper bodies, blue wings and tails, sitting just in front of us perched in a tree. The four of us were the only people there.
It was a heart stopping moment! Serendipity rewards the prepared mind. Mary and Cyndi found them but I knew who they were! Later in the day we saw the King Parrots, at a greater distance than the rosellas but we were easily able to identify them. The females are mostly bright green while the males are green with orange upper bodies. I didn’t see my dreambird for the trip to the Blue Mountains, a male superb fairy wren. He is a tiny bird mostly black with iridescent sky blue markings on his head, face and wings. Several people were kind enough to tell us where to look but we were not lucky. For me, a dream bird is a talisman, something to look and hope for. I want to see it (well I want to see any birds I can find) but I look carefully for it and I see many expected and unexpected birds as a by product of this focused observation. Oh, and the Rainbow Lorikeets we’ve seen just in walking around Randwick (the suburb of Sydney where we’re staying) including around a dozen at a time at a birdfeeder that is on my walk from the flat (apartment) to the lab every morning and evening. These guys live up to their name. The impression they give in flight is mostly bright green but at rest you can see they have blue heads, green wings and backs, red chests and scattered patches of bright yellow. A truly spectacular bird! As I’m writing this I heard a lorikeet and looked out to find one eating from blossoms right outside the lab window! In addition to the spectacularly colored birds we’ve seen many birds that are mostly black with white markings, Magpies, Magpie larks, Pied Currawongs, New Holland Honeyeaters and Red Wattlebirds.
Another important byproduct of this searching for birds is that it focuses your attention on the physical and natural environment. Watching birds over the years has helped me to develop deeper insight into ecology and adaptation than I ever learned in a class or from a book. BUT the book and classes gave me the terms and the framework that helped my accumulating experience of nature lead to understanding. The plants in Sydney remind me of my experiences in south Florida; palm trees, flowering trees and bushes. The profusion of flowering plants here is arresting and there are many different types of birds adapted to eating from those flowers directly or eating the insects that gather at the flowers or eating the fruits that the flowers ultimately become. You may be familiar with hummingbirds that we see in the US. No hummers here but the honeyeaters and their relatives do the nectar harvesting as well as eating insects. The parrots also seem to favor the flowers. This morning (Tuesday) there were at least 10 Rainbow Lorikeets in a flowering tree outside the window near my desk in the lab. The tree has just come into full flower. We noticed the lorikeets were not at the feeders I mentioned. Possibly they’ve switched to this tree while the flowers are just right for their taste. This reverie reminds me of another amazing experience we’ve had here. Observation of 100s of flying foxes both at a distance and up close. Flying foxes are a type of very large bat. Now, before you shiver and say no thanks I’ll skip this part. Let me tell you a bit about mammalian evolution. The earliest mammals were insect eaters. They were around at the same time as the dinosaurs. The mammals ate insects while the dinosaurs ate plants and other animals (mostly non-insects). Thus there was little competition. One explanation for the evolution of bats was the large numbers of available insects at night. In time the bats diversified and some specialized to feed on fruit that some of the insects were feeding on. The evolution of flowering (and fruit making) plants came along as the bats were diversifying. [I ask the indulgence of those who read and recognize inaccuracies produced by my over-simplification of this bit of evolutionary history]. Anyway, compared to the more familiar bats, the fruit eaters have large eyes and ears and a longer snout correlated to feeding in the daylight or twilight at the beginning and end of the day. Thus the name flying foxes. I had seen videos of flying foxes but seeing them “in the flesh” was really exciting. We went out to dinner at a restaurant on the water at a place called Wollomoloo (there’s music in some of the place names here) and at dusk, while we were having a glass of wine, we saw large black bird-like shapes along the horizon on the other side of the water. “Those are the fox bats” Cyndi said. Later in our visit to Sydney we spent time at the Botanic Gardens which is also on the water and discovered that the bats we saw from the restaurant had been going to roost in the trees of the Botanic Gardens. The trees in the gardens are full of flying foxes hanging upside down from the branches! The common name of this type is Grey-headed Flying-foxes. To a naturalist interested in animals this profusion of bats would seem a good thing; an opportunity to study them up close. We spent some time watching them interact. Screeching at each other and changing position; maybe based on dominance? Very interesting. But as we strolled through the gardens we became aware of how many bats were present; at least multiple hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand. A handout and a conversation with a volunteer revealed that this was way too much of a good thing. Apparently the natural habitat of these bats elsewhere in New South Wales had been disturbed, possibly by development for hotels or other living spaces for people so the bats were forced to move and discovered the Botanic Gardens. Probably they were spread over a much greater area previously but now they are highly concentrated in one small area. Their presence has already destroyed some very old trees. So according to a handout I picked up “the Royal Botanic Gardens has been given a licence by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service to use non-harmful methods to discourage the bats from roosting” there.
Studying animals as a hobby as well as a profession makes me feel close to nature and makes me conscious of the effects we humans have on the natural environment. Feeding bread to birds in the Botanic Gardens leads to exciting experiences and photographs for the people providing the bread. However, feeding this way is unnatural behavior for the birds and may make them dependent, result in crowding that can spread disease amongst the birds and result in pest birds that might even have to be destroyed! The Blue Mountain region includes a national park and is similar to the Adirondacks in New York in that people’s homes and recreational areas are scattered around protected natural areas. There’s a not so positive tension between our love of other animals and the beauty of a seaside or lakeside view and how our actions may effect those animals, that seaside or lake shore. I think it is important to think about as well as feel our connection to nature.
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