ON THE WING
A male flame robin turned up unexpectedly at my local reserve this month and immediately put in play the great robin hunt.
I see all four of Tasmania’s robins at the Waterworks Reserve from time to time but never on the same day. Achieving the “quartet” is quite a feat in Tasmania, so I thought I’d give myself a story to tell at the next meeting of BirdLife Tasmania.
The flame robin (pictured) is relatively common across the state but it rarely appears at the Waterworks, for reasons I do not understand. In fact, in 17 years I’ve only seen flame robins on a handful of occasions – and these have usually been females, which do not carry the striking flame-red plumage of the males.
I always see the robins at the start of spring, so I can only assume some of them make brief stopovers in the Waterworks Valley on their way from wintering grounds close to the rivers and bays of South-East Tasmania to breeding areas on the slopes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
When it comes to stunning plumage, the flame robin has to be the most striking of our native birds. It leaves another stunner, the scarlet robin, in the shade.
At a distance, both look similar until you see the flame-red of the flame robin’s breast, which to me looks like embers of a hot fire stoked by the wind. Along with the different hues of the breast, the two species can be told apart by the extent of their red plumage. The flame robin’s dazzling feathers end just below the bill while the scarlet robin appears to have a black head or hood reaching well down the breast.
On the morning I saw the flame robin I also saw a scarlet robin on the embankment of the most northerly of the Waterworks reservoirs and I immediately thought my luck would be in to see all four species.
I had seen another of the four, the dusky robin, the previous day and had heard the fourth, the pink robin.
As often happens in birdwatching, things do not always run to plan. I managed to find a singing dusky robin – a Tasmanian endemic species – and then searched high and low for the pink robin, a species which carries a beauty of its own with a breast more magenta than pink and black feathers forming a cloak over its head and back. It failed to show.
No boasting at the BirdLife Tasmania meetings of my four robins – and gleefully jotting them down in the register of sightings – but I was not complaining.
When I saw the flame robin I had been on a swallow hunt, to record the first of the welcome swallows for the spring. Although the swallows had not turned up, the flame robin was more than compensation.