WITH DON KNOWLER
The sun was shining strong and hard when I woke on the first day of spring and the day held promise for summer migrants.
On the first day of September I always go to my local birdwatching spot, the Waterworks in Dynnyrne, to see if welcome swallows have arrived. But by the time I reached the reserve at about noon the weather took a turn for the worst.
Winds blowing from the southwest brought rain to the Waterworks Valley and snow to the top of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Even the migratory birds which had already arrived in the previous week, the striated pardalotes, were refusing to sing.
The spring migration this year was halted in its tracks by a sudden cold spell which extended into the official start of the season of rejuvenation. The snow might have sent Tasmanians to the snowfields in a revelry of skies and snowmen but the migrating birds found nothing to celebrate.
Snow and blizzards can be deadly for birds, especially if bad weather comes late in the winter when the migrants have already crossed Bass Strait from the mainland. Most migrants are insect eaters and in extreme cold, insects tend to be inactive. Such conditions especially affect birds that hunt on the wing.
I always start early on my migratory bird hunt, before the official start of spring, as I mentioned in this column a few weeks ago, I had my first confirmed sighting of a striated pardalote at the Waterworks, after hearing what was probably the same bird the day before. On a sunny day of 18C, the pardalote looked as bright and sparkling as the beautiful day in a crisp freshly minted yellow and white spring plumage.
More pardalotes arrived the next day but the weather was already changing, with snow falling on kunanyi/Mt Wellington over the next week, and temperatures plunging to a little above freezing point in Hobart. From that moment I had nothing else to report until the official end of winter at the end of the next week and even then the migration had not picked up. By September 1, I was still waiting for the first of the welcome swallows.
A reader in Launceston reported that black-faced cuckoo-shrikes had arrived in mid-August. The cuckoo-shrike is called the summerbird in Tasmania and in many country areas, spring has not arrived until the summerbirds are sighted. We in the cities, used to seeing birds in city parks, might time the arrival of the seasons by the movements of the swallows, but country folk are of the opinion that one swallow does not make a spring. Cuckoo-shrikes, beautiful light-grey birds with striped chests and the black face which gives them their name, usually come when the weather has warmed up in mid-September.
A sighting in mid-August was remarkable, but it proved to be a false start to spring.