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 flycatcher I had found declaring a territory a week earlier fluttered out from the top of the waratah on the Silver Falls Track, hovered and returned to its spiky, serrated perch. The flycatcher saw me and started to fly away but turned back and returned to a satinwood a few metres from the waratah. I was not a threat, a danger, I meant the flycatcher no harm and he knew it.
I stood still and waited for him to launch himself skyward again. In fine plumage, crisp and shimmering in the spring sunshine, he continued his sorties, snapping at the insects buzzing in waratah, satinwood and stinkwood. In a blur it crossed the undulating tops of the bushes and shrubs before freezing in the image of grey fantails I see in illustrations and pictures, a shuttlecock hanging in the air, defying the normal laws of gravity. This, the precious moment it makes its kill, hovering like a hummingbird to snatch at gnat or fly, before returning to its perch. The crankyfan – as they are known in parts of Tasmania – then wiped its bill on a twig and preened itself in the strengthening sun. He then began to sing, with all his energy, throwing back his head, then lowering it to catch his breath. He was confirming his choice of breeding territory and when I looked closely at the waratah I could see clearly this would be home to the male and his mate for the summer.
Although the bright-green foliage of the semi-alpine species is often widely spaced on both shrub and small tree, the plant chosen by the fantails to house their nest was tightly-packed, perhaps because two other waratahs were growing in the same location and the branches of each pushed against each other.
Returning to the site a few days after first hearing the male in sweet song, a foundation for the nest had been laid, constructed at a junction of where a thinner branch diverged from a thicker one.
Birds that build cup and domed nests tend to lay a firm foundation – much like that of a house – on which a structure can be anchored. The foundation is usually of sticks or thick stems of grass, in the fork of a tree or shrub, a tree stump or among rocks. The foundation’s material is carried to the nest site with much effort and energy. The fantails, in contrast, choose to attach their nests to a branch, strapping vines and grass across the main bough and, when this has been secured, building the nest downward. A tapering stem under the nest gives it a wine glass shape and helps disguise the nest as a bundle of vegetation caught on a branch.
Strands of spiders’ webs
I watched the birds for several hours, the fantails coming and going with long strands of the vines of creepers, including pieces of mountain clematis, the creeper growing in an adjoining waratah. The birds twirled and turned as they weaved and bound the vine to the branch.
When this foundation started to take obvious shape, remarkably camouflaged even at this early stage of development by the use of the mountain clematis vines, I then saw the female flycatcher flying low into the wet forest in a gully below the fire trail, where she gathered strands of spiders’ webs. She snipped them off and then flew to the nest and started to work the web into the foundations. As the nest progressed, slowly lengthening in shape below the branch, I could see more and more spiders’ web being used to give the nest its structure.
The bowl lashed to the thin branch was clearly visible after about a day, and during the week of construction this became fuller, with a solid cluster of grass stays – all lashed together with spiders’ web – trailing below it. The nest, however, still had to attain its distinctive wine glass shape, in which the longest strands of grass became flayed, giving the “glass’’ its flowering flat base.
I’d often seen insect-eating birds picking out insects from spiders’ webs – robbing the spiders of a meal – but I had never realised just how important the actual webs were in the construction of nests.
The flame and pink robins, whose nests I had found in the previous week, were using this magic material, so strong and light, in the construction of their nests, and now the fantail was using it. In the course of the summer I found Tasmanian and brown thornbills, and scrubwrens, doing the same.
The fantails’ nest was not so very far from the pink robin’s, along the Fern Glade Track or just off it, and I was pleased I had found two nests I could monitor during the same journey to the mountain. This would free up time to visit others I had found, which tended to be far flung, either below the Springs or some distance to the north of it.
There was danger in the air, though, at the joint fantail/pink robin location. Grey currawongs had chosen the same gully following the Dunns Creek to also build a home for the summer. I just hoped the parent currawongs would not notice the nests on their feeding forays up and down the gully. And later in the season, the robin young.
Marauding grey shrike-thrush
As if the danger of currawongs and a marauding grey shrike-thrush cross-crossing the gully, forever on the lookout for nests, was not bad enough. In the trees above me I could hear both fan-tailed and shining bronze-cuckoos and, in the third week of October, a new arrival, the pallid cuckoo, the biggest of the family to visit Tasmania.
The growing cuckoo menace was confirmed when I saw strong-billed honeyeaters chasing off a shining bronze-cuckoo from an area of the forest where they were obviously planning to build, or already had built a nest.
Lingering in the vicinity of the Fern Glade Track brought rewards other than my target species. One morning, the rays of sun just beginning to penetrate to the forest floor, I came across a pair of green rosellas feeding in fern, holding the fern fronds in their claws to munch on new growth. And above them, sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched. I looked up at a giant dead gum to find a pair of the birds inspecting a nesting site in a cavity. It was a tree riddled with large holes and I had marked it down as a possible nesting site for yellow-tailed black cockatoos.
Preoccupied with nests again, I had overlooked orchids. The sight of a purple beard orchid soon brought me back to orchid mode. As its name suggests, the orchid appears to have a straggly beard falling from a “face” of overlapping green shoots. Like the parson-in-the pulpit I found a week earlier, its colourful beauty was easy to spot just off a trail on the sunny southern slopes of the mountain but as spring progressed other, smaller ones would be harder to find.
Stunning, mysterious and diverse, Australia’s 1700 orchids are the precious gems of our flowering plants. I now regret overlooking them in the past. As with the hidden world of fungi, I’ve been too busy looking up at birds, and not looking down.
The birds of summer had been slow to arrive, and when I looked at records from previous years I noticed that I was missing some of the early ones, the pallid cuckoo among them, although I could now say that I had heard the species at least.
But where were birds that should have arrived already, the dusky woodswallow, the black-faced cuckoo-strike – the summerbird of Tasmanian folklore – along with swallows on the mountain itself and not in the surrounding foothills and valleys, and another swallow family member, the tree martin.
Taking a break from the mountain to watch the striated pardalote nesting activity at the Waterworks Reserve, I met a bird photographer friend who also kept records of arrivals in spring. When I mentioned the species I was missing, he said a wave of woodswallows had come through on strong winds from the north in early September. These were the winds that had brought down trees on the mountain, but I had not seen the woodswallows afterwards, or the surge of other arrivals carried across Bass Strait because I had been across the water myself, enjoying a few days in Melbourne.
These birds must have been just passing through, moving further south for the summer. Bird migration can be scattered and sporadic and some years birds just do not arrive in some areas. Not all birds return to the area where they were born, like the welcome swallows.
The pink robin’s nest above Dunns Creek now had a sitting female. If I climbed a tree a little way from the nest I could just make out the shape of her back enveloped by the high side of the donut nest. All the while, the male robin brought her food.
