Mother Mountain: The Symphony of Birdsong (1)

The merry, descending song of a grey fantail, the two-note whistle of the spotted pardalote … the symphony of birdsong on Mount Wellington one afternoon recently seemed a world apart from the human dialogue a little earlier at the Respect The Mountain forum at the Hobart Town Hall.

Although I was moved by the passion and emotion expressed at that meeting in support of the mountain’s natural values, I needed to hear it from the mountain herself, in the call of the birds, and the murmur of the wind in rock crevice and eucalypt canopy.

The mountain’s “voice” had previously been recorded in a diary I compiled over a calendar year and in what promises to be a momentous year in the modern history of Kunanyi the Tasmanian Times is giving me the opportunity to publish it week by week.

Like a mysterious and magical sorcerer, Mother Mountain holds wind and rain, and fire, in her power, conjuring them up or banishing them seemingly at will.

She holds me in her spell, too, and not a day goes by when I do not look up at her from my home in Dynnyrne, trying to judge her mood. Will she be angry, or benign, and how will she shape my day, as she shapes the lives of all who live within her grasp?

So strong has been the pull of the mountain that for a year I ventured there virtually every day. I defied blizzard and storm, mist and rain and even the hottest day ever recorded in Hobart to put her modern story in words, in a nature diary compiled over nature’s southern hemisphere calendar year, from June, 2012, to the end of May last year.

It started out not just as a record of a year in the life of the mountain, but a challenge to see every bird that is listed on the mountain’s avian checklist, all 67 species.

Green rosellas, flame robins, peregrine falcons and black currawongs would fly across the pages of my notebook, and to paint a complete picture of the mountain’s wildlife wonders I’d follow a platypus along the mountain stream below the Silver Falls, and an echidna along the Ice House track. Plants and fungi would feature, too, and I’d make sure I’d tramp the Organ Pipes Track in mid-summer when its dust and dolerite pavement carried a carpet of satinwood and waratah blooms.

The diary would be solely about nature, with scant reference to people and the places used by them. The human politics of Mother Mountain, or how she should be of service to man, would definitely not feature but the year I chose to devote to my diary was the year in which the veto powers on development, held by the mountain’s protectors, the Mount Wellington Management Trust, would be lifted. So the human world witnessed from the mountain’s summit, blinking traffic lights and wood smoke from chimneys in Hobart, and the events that might shape man’s view of the mountain, would form a backdrop of their own.

The diary started in June, 2012, as I have said, but for the purpose of this blog I’m running it from the following March to coincide with the start of autumn this year. It’s about nature after all, and what can be seen on the mountain in any given week, or month. And I won’t plug into the debate about whether the mountain needs development or what developments might be appropriate, including plans for a controversial cable car.

This is about Mother Mountain, and me.

…

March 1- 9, 2013: Mother Mountain invited visitors to her fastness on the first day of autumn. She was in a good mood. The winds on the summit were calm and still, and the scattered cloud high so that nothing would obscure the view across eastern and southern Tasmania, and the mountain vistas to the north-west.

The early-morning sun threw a patchwork of colours over the peak, and drew stark shadows from the Organ Pipes, the light and shade on the fluted columns of dolerite demonstrating how the geologic feature was given its name.

The summit is usually a noisy place, high winds screaming through boulders of rock and scree, whistling around the communication tower that dominates the summit, and through the adjacent latticework of the radio mast. And then there are the cries of the black currawongs, forest ravens and green rosellas fighting to be heard over the wind.

But today the silence was palpable, unnerving, and at one point it was only broken by the thin warble of a flame robin, preparing to move to lower ground for the winter.

“Here is quiet solitude that cannot be described. One has the feeling, as though put under a bell-jar, of being separated from the outer world, for no sound can enter the silence”.

The words were written by Austrian explorer Baron Karl von Hugel after he climbed the mountain 1833 and 179 years on I could see, and hear, what he was talking about.

The countdown to winter might have started but the warm sun suggested otherwise. The birds, though, that make the alpine environment their home during summer were not to be fooled. The crescent honeyeaters and eastern spinebills that had fallen silent towards the end of the breeding season now were in an excited chatter as they called to each other on the long descent to winter habitats nearer the coast. They flitted between snowberries, the white fruit hanging in clusters from leathery dark green leaves.

On the lower slopes of the mountain I came across large flocks of silvereyes, moving through scattered bushes and scrub to lower ground like the eastern spinebills and crescent honeyeaters. In autumn and winter the silvereyes forego their usual melodic chatter for a mournful song – a lament for summer – and this is the song I heard today.

Summer, though, and the threat of bushfire on hot days had not retreated entirely.

Within in a few days temperatures were soaring again, and an Indian summer was in the air.

The blue haze that carries warm eucalypt oil released by the mountain’s gums on ultra-hot days was back, giving a last gasp before summer ends, and the people of Hobart looked anxiously to the mountain to see what she might bring. The eucalypts – which exploit fire to regenerate – appeared to be inviting conflagration.

For two days the temperature passed 30 degrees, and from the mountain a bushfire that had been burning under control in Risdon Vale to the north-east broke from its shackles, advancing towards the suburb of Lindisfarne, a high plume of grey and yellow smoke and ash announcing its progress.

Summer might be reluctant to retreat but the birds were departing not just from the mountain but from the countryside of southern Tasmania. I had not seen a swallow in a week and a friend who lives on a rural property at Pontville reported the nesting swallows had moved north from there.

As birds departed for the mainland, others moved within Tasmania on a domestic migration. They were moving from the Tasmanian high country to be nearer the warmer coast. At the Waterworks Reserve in the shadow of Mount Wellington small flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos flew in from the Upper Derwent Valley, now that crops had been lifted there. The cockies sipped at the edge of the reserve’s lakes, throwing their heads back to gulp the cool waters.

The late heat was hard on the birds, especially the young of the breeding season just past. A little earlier as I tramped the Lenah Valley Trail to Sphinx Rock I disturbed a young green rosella. His new feathers were dusty and bedraggled and for a moment the bird perched on the low branch of a silver wattle, its beak open and its chest heaving in a gentle panting movement. It spotted a trickle of water on what is normally a raging stream and flew down to drink.

Late afternoon bennett’s wallabies and pademelons emerged early to go in search of water, and on the mountain’s lower slopes they could be found secreted between rock and dense bush at the water’s edge of the rivulets that reach out in fingers from the mountain’s base.

In the first week of autumn the last of the great cruise liners visiting Hobart during the summer months arrived in the Derwent. The Pacific Pearl was soon on its way, the blast from its horn drifting to Mount Wellington’s summit in the still air breaking the silence of Baron von Hubch’s bell-jar. The cruise season was finishing just in time. A change in the weather brought grey mists sweeping in off the Southern Ocean, and the cool air carried by the south-easterly winds would help drive the northerly bird migration.

• Watch The Tommy Cooper of Birdwatching (Video by Oliver Ward):

Pic*: From Don Knowler’s website: http://donaldknowler.com/ The image is by Tim Squires: http://timsquires.com/