WITH DON KNOWLER
A family of “turbo chooks” (pictured) scurried across the tree-lined drive leading to Government House, confirming what I had come to see – Tasmanian native hens had taken up residence.
I had written in recent months of native hens and wood ducks invading the city. Here was another example. The hens and ducks were keeping each other company, happily foraging on the manicured grass verge skirting the drive.
I had been alerted to the birds’ presence by the Official Secretary to the Governor, David Owen. Within days I was being given a tour of the mansion’s extensive grounds by Owen and the garden supervisor, Steve Percival.
What’s more, Steve had drawn up a list of the birds he had spotted in the grounds over the years. The native hens and wood ducks were new additions.
In all, there were about 40 species on the list. As we strolled through the grounds on a beautiful spring day, we saw many of them, including a grey fantail snatching at insects disturbed by our steps.
The 15ha of gardens are a bird haven, and it’s easy to see why. The grounds are a mix of formal parkland, in the style of English landscape-garden designer Capability Brown, and also open pasture, with a smaller garden devoted to Tasmanian plants. At the garden’s centre is an ornamental lake dotted with water lilies. It occupies the quarry that provided the sandstone to build the residence. Hidden to the side of this, reached by a narrow flight of sandstone steps, is a Japanese garden.
The lake and its fringing vegetation are a lure for birds favouring such a habitat. White-faced herons can sometimes be seen hunting fish and frogs. Little black cormorants, which favour sheltered freshwater rivers and lakes over their marine counterparts, sometimes pay a call.
It’s not all rosy for the gardeners, however. Steve and his staff are charged with keeping the grounds, and the house, in top condition. They are on constant watch for birds not giving the building the respect it deserves. In the orchard, apple trees have been netted for the first time as raids by musk lorikeets and sulphurcrested cockatoos have, at times, damaged the fabric of the 1855 building, including pecking at the face of the majestic clock.
The grounds of Government House are far from a static exhibit. A recent innovation has been the establishment of an imagined replica of the garden planted by the French during the D’Entrecasteaux expedition to Tasmania in 1792. Although the vegetables of that garden are long lost, Government House managed to source the seed varieties planted at Recherche Bay from a heritage nursery in Paris.
The garden will be a new point of interest to the public, but it is strictly off-limits to the native hens. The flightless birds may have made friends in high places, but access to the vegetable patch would be extending the welcome too far.