Backyard visitors
Flowering natives give you a front-row seat to nectar lovers playing hide-and-seek, says LEONARD CRONIN
Asemblance of tranquillity has returned to the garden. Familiar bird calls dominate the morning chorus, and cicadas serenade our summer evenings while green tree frogs lounge around the pool. There’s always something new happening in the garden, but this spring was wild and stressful for our wildlife. Bushfires and droughts seared the landscape, inflamed by powerful winds and record-breaking temperatures, giving us a taste of the new climate norms and sending a clear message that we have to drastically reduce our carbon footprint.
Despite, or because of, these extreme weather events, the grove of grevilleas and callistemons in front of our house superpowered their flower production, creating a nectareous banquet attracting new visitors and more regulars than usual. We hadn’t seen lorikeets in our garden before, so were thrilled to see a small flock swoop in every morning to feed on grevilleas. Hanging off branches, swinging from flower heads, they were unfazed by the noisy friarbirds that had commandeered the grove, attempting to chase the tiny, lusciously adorned scarlet honeyeaters from the nectar-laden shrubs.
Scarlet honeyeaters seek out flowering natives such as grevilleas, callistemons and banksias, their bell-like calls a tinkling counterpoint to the ebulliently chattering friarbirds. They are a delight to watch as they hover to collect nectar, held aloft by tiny, ferociously beating wings, dipping their curved beaks in and out of the flowers.
But beware the friarbirds, whose sentries scanned our grevillea grove from surrounding trees, swooping in to chase these doughty little red birds from their feeding grounds. Undaunted, the scarlet honeyeaters engaged their tormentors in
a game of hide-and-seek, leading the friarbirds on a fruitless chase through the shrubbery.
Adding to the springtime feeding frenzy, a small contingent of grey-headed flying foxes discovered our garden restaurant. It’s not unusual for them to stop by parks and gardens on their way to forests of flowering eucalypts, but this year they were hungry enough to leave their roosts a couple of hours before sunset, giving us a rare chance to observe these superb flying mammals in broad daylight.
Len gardens in the Northern Rivers, New South Wales