*Pic: Duke of Wellington, after whom Mt Wellington is named … says Don: In the year 2012/13 the mountain assumed the Aboriginal name Kunanyi under a dual-naming policy. To me she is simply Mother Mountain. To all Aboriginal peoples, the Earth is the mother of all things. It is the base of the kinship system which binds all people, plants, animals, birds, land and water into one huge family.
The “Respect the Mountain” forum ( here, here, and here ) at the Hobart Town Hall earlier this year prompted Don Knowler to return to a diary he compiled after daily rambles on Mt Wellington during the previous year. In what promises to be a momentous year in the modern history of Kunanyi, the weekly diary gives the mountain and its wildlife its own voice. All Don’s Mother Mountain columns – and much more by this superb writer – can be found under the Category, Don Knowler, here
Although Mount Wellington had been known to the first Australians for thousands of years it only became a part of the written record with the advent of European exploration and then settlement.
The “written record” of the mountain is similar to the record of war, which tends only to be written by the victors.
We know little of how the mountain shaped and influenced the lives of the first Australians, but we know how the mountain in European eyes was not distinctive enough to be given a unique description or name of its own. It was merely named after a succession of other peaks known to the explorers, finally being named after a successful British commander in war.
The first recorded European to visit the land that would eventually carry his name was the Dutch mariner Abel Tasman, although it is not known whether he actually saw Mount Wellington.
The evidence points to him becoming aware of it, though. When he passed to the island’s southern tip, he noted a “high round mountain” in his log. His ship was caught in a storm and buffeted by strong winds and heavy sees. He named the treacherous waters to the south of the mountain Storm Bay, a name they still carry to this day.
No other Europeans visited Tasmania until the late eighteenth century, when several visited what was now referred to as Van Diemens Land. These included Frenchman Marion de Fresne in 1772, Englishmen Tobias Furneaux, 1773 , James Cook in 1777 and William Bligh, in 1788 and 1792. Frenchman Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, who gave his name to the d’Entrecasteaux Channel and Bruny Island, came in 1792–93.
In 1793, Royal Navy Commodore John Hayes arrived on the Derwent River, naming the mountain Skiddaw, after a peak in the Lake District of northern England. This name, though, never gained in popularity. In 1798 Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated Tasmania and during this time Flinders referred to the mountain as Table Mountain, for its similarity in appearance to the one which towers over Cape Town in South Africa. The French explorers had referred to Mount Wellington as Montagne du Plateau.
Table Mountain remained the mountain’s common name until 1832 when it was decided to rename it in honour of the Duke of Wellington who, with Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium in 1815.
More than 180 years on, the name Wellington in association with the mountain is slowly losing its currency. In the year 2012/13 the mountain assumed the Aboriginal name Kunanyi under a dual-naming policy. To me she is simply Mother Mountain. To all Aboriginal peoples, the Earth is the mother of all things. It is the base of the kinship system which binds all people, plants, animals, birds, land and water into one huge family.
Because of inclement weather into the second week of September, I decided to give the hunt for arriving migrant birds a rest and instead search for the nesting territories of resident species.
Too early to find nests
It would be too early to find nests, of course, but singing male birds would indicate territories to monitor during the coming months.
My hopes of an early start to the nest quest were raised by a pink robin singing near the start of the Fern Glade Track out of Fern Tree. The soft, rhythmic twitter was being sung from a high perch above Dunns Creek, which flows through the gully holding the track. Although largely birds of the wet forest floor, in my experience male pink robins often choose a high perch from which to declare ownership of their corner of the forest. I searched for the bird for about an hour, without success. I had a strategy: when it started singing, I’d home in on the location, but as soon as I had my binoculars focused the bird would stop. The male, although it would now be in sparkling spring plumage, was lost in the tight-knit canopy of dogwood. Fed by the waters of the creek and the sun penetrating the higher eucalypt cover, the dogwoods had grown into tall and stout trees, in contrast to the tight and stunted forms you often find on the mountain.
My neck and back aching from bending backwards and skywards, I finally gave up the robin hunt for another day. I would return, though. The territory, and hopefully a nest later, was in easy reach after a short drive from my home in the city. It would be one I could monitor over an extended period of time, perhaps returning to it several times a day. The closeness of the Fern Tree Tavern, a 10-minue walk away, was another attraction.
There was menace in the air. All the time I searched for the singing pink robin, I could hear a shining bronze-cuckoo calling, the first of the species I had heard this season.
My excitement at hearing a second cuckoo was tempered by the fact that it was in the location that clearly was popular with robins. It would be just my luck to find a robin nest, and then see it parasitised by cuckoos.
Of the four species of cuckoo visiting Tasmania, the two smaller species – the shining and the horsefield’s bronze-cuckoo – largely prey on the smaller species of bird. They are able to penetrate the domed nests built by ground-nesting birds like the fairy-wrens and scrubwrens, whereas the larger pallid and fan-tailed cuckoos concentrate on the large open nests of the bigger hosts anchored in shrub and tree.
Although the pink robin builds a small, open nest this still provides a perfect place for the bronze-cuckoos to deposit their eggs.
I complain in winter when the birds are not singing, and now I was confronted by another problem. The songs were so prolific and loud, I found it difficult to home in on any one sound.
The songs, and calls, merged into a muddled, confused symphony, single notes out of harmony and rhythm. The dawn chorus, as it is sometimes called in spring, may be pleasing to the ear at a distance but close-up in a quest for individual sounds it can be annoying. I hear it as “rap”, the kind of sound I complain about when my student son has his radio turned up too loud. Nature’s rap. I like the sound of that, if not the sound itself.
Alarm calls to warn of danger
Birds make sound for three main reasons. There is birdsong, created largely by male birds to declare territories and to attract mates. This is the sound we most associate with birds, and the sounds that tend to be mimicked in musical compositions, old and new.
Then there are contract calls, usually brief, loud and unmelodic which are designed to keep birds in contact with each other, either on feeding forays or on migration. Included in the contact calls can be the sounds made by young birds to demand food from their parents.
Thirdly, birds make alarm calls to warn of danger, usually predators flying overhead or hunting in the neighbourhood. Alarm calls, usually brief and raucous, are recognised by all birds, the birds warning each other, across all species, to watch out. All birds, ultimately, look out for each other, and speak as one.
Amid the cacophony along Dunns Creek some notable songs rang out, easily separated from the rest. One was the resonant “booming’’ of the brush bronze-wing pigeon, a single note timed at exactly one second intervals. To some ears it can sound like the warning beep of a reversing truck. Then there was the golden whistler’s descending melody, ending in a sharp “crack”, and the generally loud and easily recognisable songs of the grey-shrike thrush – which seems to be saying “Joe Witty’’ is its name – and the chortle of yellow-throated honeyeater.
The golden whistlers, however, were hard to spot in the first weeks of spring, their y striking plumage – mixing golden-yellow, white and black – camouflaged amid the bright flowers of the silver wattle.
Now spring had arrived the common, louder songs had to compete with those of the cuckoos, the dominant refrain of the forests in spring and summer.
The burst of bird song came with a burst of male bird energy. Singing is merely a part the male’s method of attracting females. To demonstrate their virility and strength, males also have to display their good health. Together with robust singing, males were also prancing along branches or bobbing along tracks, thrusting out chests, fluttering wings, throwing back their heads.
A male black-headed honeyeater put on a particularly impressive show on a low branch. Jumping up and down, lowering wings, raising them. Two females were very impressed.
The birds were singing the song of spring but winter hung in the air. A cold snap had dumped snow on the mountain again and as I scouted out bird territories cars descended the Pinnacle Road with snowmen on their bonnets.
As the cars came down, the crescent honeyeaters and eastern spinebills were going up. Their time in the valleys and the plains nearer the ocean – where the tiny pink bell flowers of common heath provides a vital food source in winter – were over and it was time to return to the breeding grounds on higher elevations.
Difficult to find
The search for migrants, and then breeding territories, proved disappointing in the cold but all the same it turned up a species I had not seen so far during my calendar year.
Dusky robins – the biggest of the robin species, but lacking the crimson, orange or pink plumage of other family members – are usually difficult to find on the mountain. They have plain brown plumage and merge perfectly with the dry woodlands where they are found. These woodlands only occur on the lower slopes that catch the sun, and are often not traversed by the popular mountain tracks which tend to follow the contours through wetter woods.
The dusky’s song is a melancholy one, drawn out and plaintive, and this earns it another name, the “sad robin’’. I heard the sad robin one morning along the fire trails bordering the Finger Post Track and found a pair hunting for insects. It would be another location to scout for nests a little later in the season.
In open, grassy areas I was also hoping to find swallows but I had not seen any after my first sighting, 11 days previously. Those swallows must have been birds not intending to stay on the mountain, but merely moving through to travel further south.
I checked for the pink robin again. No robin, but a black-headed honeyeater at the same location near the Springs had chosen a mate, or the female had chosen him. And both honeyeaters touched beaks on the branch of a dogwood.
