WITH DON KNOWLER
For more than 100 years, The Times newspaper in Britain has heralded the approach of summer by publishing a letter from the reader who hears the first call of the migratory European cuckoo.
I’ve now learnt that for many years there was a similar tradition in Tasmania, recording not the arrival of one of our cuckoo species from the mainland but that of the swallow (pictured).
The swallow clarion call came from a single reader, Charles Burbury. He wrote to the Mercury about migrating swallows and other interesting matters over a number of years until his death in 1946.
His letters were recounted to me by his granddaughter, Doris Kouw, when I was invited to speak about birds to the Ladies’ Probus Club of Lindisfarne in September. Kouw promised to dig out one of his letters about the swallows, but instead I received an equally fascinating one about Burbury’s apparent discovery of another fast-flying, insect-eating visitor to Tasmania.
On a visit to Japan just before the outbreak of World War II, Burbury thought he had found the nesting site of the swifts that grace Tasmanian skies in spring and summer. In 1937, the Mercury reported at length on Burbury’s visit.
“Interested in ornithology since boyhood, Mr Burbury made an interesting discovery concerning the swift, a bird similar in appearance to the swallow. It has been said that only on rare occasions has the swift settled while passing over Tasmania in the autumn.’’
The newspaper does not specify which of the two swift species it might have been, the white-throated needletail or the less common fork-tailed swift. The needletail breeds right across central Asia and is far more likely to be the bird.
The article described Burbury visiting the 300m-high Kegon waterfall near the town of Nikko north of Tokyo and descending in a cage to view it. There he saw thousands of swifts coming and going to ledges on the cliff face.
Just four years before Japan entered World War II, it is not surprising Burbury described seeing “much military activity”.
Having grown up at the historic Inglewood estate in the Midlands, which was founded by his pioneering forebears, Burbury also noted how overcrowded Japan was and how little of its land was suitable for cultivation.
With remarkable prescience for the time, Burbury sensed during his visit that Japan had plans to expand its borders across the Pacific.
As the newspaper report of his trip stated: “The idea among Australians that Japan had covetous desires on Australia could be scouted, he considered.”
Coincidentally, the week I received the cutting was the 75th anniversary of a crucial event in Australia’s campaign against the Japanese in Papua New Guinea. On November 2, 1942, Australian troops captured the jungle settlement of Kokoda.