WITH DON KNOWLER
“Tasmania left off the map again, this time when it comes to birds.”
That was my first thought when I read that the white ibis – which does not occur here – was leading the poll to be named Australia’s favourite bird for 2017. Thankfully, bird enthusiasts came to their senses and named the magpie as No.1.
The white ibis winning the Guardian Australia/ Birdlife Australia bird of the year contest would have been a bitter pill – or should I say a bitter quill – to swallow.
The ibis is the poster bird of the Anthropocene, the humans’ geological epoch, and no amount of defending this scruffy “bin chicken” in the avian press, extolling its capacity to adapt to mankind’s world, will win Tasmanians over – at least this Tasmanian.
As it happened, despite intense lobbying for the ibis and suspected vote rigging for another species, the powerful owl, the Australian magpie swooped to victory with 19,926 votes. But still the ibis came second, just 843 votes behind.
The magpie will do us fine, compared with some others on offer, especially the troublesome kookaburra and rainbow lorikeet (No.3 and No.6 respectively) – imports from the mainland and causing as much mayhem here as visiting footy players on season-ending tours.
And anyway, we have our own species finding a home in our cities and suburbs: the silver and kelp gulls.
Both of these gulls, sharing the fast food that’s also on the human diet, have been recorded also sharing the same ailments that blight obese humans, including high levels of cholesterol.
The poll was interesting in that it once again underlined our connection with the birds we see around us, the ones seen to share our world.
Most of the others who made it into the top 10 from the 50 voted on are common birds. Many of them – including mainland species such as the willy wagtail (No.7) and the cassowary (No.9) – are not seen in Tasmania because we simply have fewer species than the vast Australian mainland.
The ibis, though, was a surprise, and certainly ruffled my feathers. Most mainlanders only know it from raiding rubbish bins or stealing sandwiches in city parks, but I remember spending many a happy hour at an ibis roost in Far North Queensland, the mangroves on the Ross River in Townsville being shared with fruit bats. As the bats left in the evening, the ibis were returning.
There was one notable Tasmanian bird on the list, however, which would have been seen by very few of the voters, even if it does migrate to the mainland each year. The orange-bellied parrot, down to just 16 wild birds at its last stronghold at Melaleuca in Tasmania’s far South West, came in at No.21 with 2324 votes.