Mother Mountain: The Symphony of Birdsong (46)

Vern Hansson’s amazing picture of a black-headed honeyeater feeding a pallid cuckoo …

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

The flame robins along the Lenah Valley track had escaped the fate of being cuckoo surrogate parents. A pair of black-headed honeyeaters had not been so lucky.

I had failed to find nests of this honeyeater species in the location earlier in the year but clearly they made a home there.

It’s not a pretty sight for the emotional or faint-hearted, an outsized cuckoo chick being fed by a pair of tiny black-headed honeyeaters. The fan-tailed cuckoo appeared the dominant cuckoo in the area, but the honeyeaters had fallen victim to the larger pallid cuckoo.

When I saw the spectacle close-up for the first time, it was worse than I had imagined. The cuckoo actually lunged at one of the honeyeaters after it had received a big juicy insect, and the quick-retreating “parent” had obviously learned to be wary of the cuckoo’s ferocious beak.

In a half a century of bird-watching I had never seen this remarkable feat in detail. The actual feeding process can be so quick, often in a sheltered location, that it goes unnoticed. Certainly by me. I managed to catch a glimpse of flame robins feeding a fan-tailed cuckoo chick on Mt Wellington last summer, but before I could study this behaviour up close and personal on one of my daily walks the birds and their “offspring” were frightened off by a passing white goshawk.

It had promised to be a pleasant day of birdwatching. As I walked north of the Springs dusky woodswallows swooped overhead and satin flycatchers called from the eucalypt canopy. And then the sight of a pallid cuckoo in yellow-brown mottled, untidy juvenile plumage, sitting on a bare branch looking about it eagerly.

Despite my emotional reservations, I was keen to see this bird behaviour, which judging by the number of cuckoos of three species that called incessantly in the spring and summer must be far more common than I realised.

I waited for a few minutes, all the while growing anxious that the pallid cuckoo had already learned that it did not need the attentive parents, and had sent them on their way. And then it happened in a flash. A black-headed honeyeater arrived and pushed a bug into the gaping, yellow beak of the cuckoo. The cuckoo, gulping down the food, lunged at the honeyeater, catching it for a moment by the wing before it could struggle free.

Despite these apparent dangers, the honeyeaters – measuring a mere 14 centimetres compared with the cuckoo’s 28 – remained attentive and dutiful, and over the next half hour or so I watched them bring the cuckoo a vast amount of insects, in about 20 sorties. On one occasion, one the honeyeaters even visited a spider’s web on a tea-tree shrub to steal food for the pallid cuckoo from this.

On a balmy, summer’s evening I had finally seen one of the most fascinating sights in nature, even though it was one of the saddest.

The pallid is biggest of the four species of cuckoo visiting Tasmania in the summer. I’ve never been a fan of any of them because of their anti-social, parasitic nature. In truth, they are only doing what evolution has programmed them to do ¬– and we can’t blame them for that.

Meanwhile, the juvenile flame robins I had been tracking all summer were virtually fully grown and a male among two females was already showing the extensive orange-red colour of the adult. They seemed less reliant on their parents now, travelling considerable distances to find food and soon they would be on their way. The parents might even carry out renovations and repairs to the nest, to start a second brood.

After the cuckoo experience I carried on to the Sphinx Rock. Christmas bush was still in flower, along with pockets of flowering satinwood in cool, shady places. A creeping tea-tree that had grown into a tall shrub, two metres or more high. Around this a family of grey fantails danced in a chase for flying insects, chirping as they went. The family of fantails – comprising the adults and three juveniles with warm plumage and beige wing bars – then followed me along the track.

Next day I was back on the mountain, Sphinx Rock again, but this time the birds took second place to the spectacle of new or renewed fires, raging in the far distance over the Derwent and Frederick Henry and Storm Bays. Nine fires, one a massive one between Dunalley and Eagle Hawk Neck. Grey clouds of smoke rising high into the sky, touching the clouds.

It was hot again, it felt as though the sun was burning a hole in my felt hat. On the way back to my car I disturbed a pademelon in undergrown a little off the track. It was too hot and exhausted to move far, merely stopping to give me a tired look. The bush also looked tired and wan under the fierce sun, with the leaves of blanket bush and dogwood curling up in the heat.

Cheeseberry sprouted anew, however, the fresh and bright green new leaf giving a two-tone appearance to the shrubs, resting atop the dark-green older foliage.

Still the young of currawongs, both black and grey species, called for food in the shade of the eucalypts. One young black jay pursued its parents, although still downy and hardly able to fly on wings still to develop primary feathers. It crashed through the canopy, balancing awkwardly on thin branches.

The dense and tightly-packed form of the native cherry provided a rich contrast to the generally sparse and open shrubs and canopy of the dry forest. These beautiful trees, which never grow to great heights, were now festooned with the tiny crimson berries from which they derive their name. These are very attractive for birds at this time of year, and in the summer months I carefully checked each tree along my established birding walks to see what they would reveal. The berries on the outside of the trees are soon taken by the bigger birds, especially currawongs. The currawongs, though, often find difficultly prising their way into the heart of the native cherries, and these inner sanctuaries remain of the preserve of smaller species.

Experience had taught me there were treasures to be found at the heart of these trees, more like a European conifer than a species native to south-eastern Australia. The layered branches, with fine lace leaves in rich greens and not the blue-green tones found in many other native tree species, would make ideal Christmas trees, as symbolic and romantic as the spruce on Pillinger Drive.

I parted the branches of native cheery after native cheery. I had once found tawny frogmouths in a cherry and I now always looked for nocturnal birds roosting in these trees. I even held out the hope of finding a boobok owl, because I had experience of owls of similar size roosting in the evergreens of Europe and North America.

Although I did not find a frogmouth, there were two surprises. Firstly, beautiful firetails feasting, silently, on the berries inside a tree along the Silver Falls Track and then an even bigger surprise. Swift parrots picking berries, delicately and gently from the upper branches of an extra-tall native cheery on the Pipeline Track to the south.

The swift parrots should have been on breeding grounds amid the blue gum forests of eastern and south-western Tasmania and finding them raised the possibility that they might be breeding in blue gums on the lower slopes of the mountain, or another favourite eucalypt, the black gum. The nearest colonies of knew of where on North Bruny island.

A hissing blue-tongued lizard, which I nearly stepped on while craning my neck to view the swift parrots, sent me on my way. And checking the higher slopes of the mountain just one more time in the second week of January I noticed that the owners of the house on Pillinger Drive with the yuletide spruce had finally taken down their giant Christmas decorations.