ON THE WING
Frost sparkled on the lawn, winter refusing to loosen its grip. Still, the song of spring rang out from the hedgerows in my valley and later from the Waterworks Reserve. The first summer migrant, the striated pardalote (pictured), had arrived.
In recent years I have been hearing the pardalote’s “pick it up, pick it up” song earlier and earlier. In the 17 years I have lived in the Waterworks Valley, I have always timed it for the final week of August, about a week before the welcome swallows arrive.
Last year, however, the pardalotes could be heard calling in mid-August. This month they beat this arrival date by about two weeks – August 1, to be precise.
After a mild autumn, I was surprised to hear the pardalotes still calling at the official start of winter. When I first heard a bird on August 1, I thought it might have been one of these stragglers, an individual perhaps somehow missing the migration north and deciding to tough out the Tasmanian winter.
The sheer number of birds calling, though, especially at the Waterworks Reserve, indicated a wave of birds had arrived overnight, under clear star-lit skies, carried by favourable winds from the north.
Birds of many migratory species can take advantage of such conditions, and a calling fan-tailed cuckoo, another early bird of summer, confirmed there had been an overnight flight of note.
The striated pardalote, one of three members of the family found in Tasmania but the only one to undertake migration to the mainland, is a cavity nester and uses the cracks between the sandstone walls of the Waterworks Reserve to house its nests.
Later, I checked nesting hollows used year after year but they appeared to be devoid of birds. These early arrivals were possibly passing through my neighbourhood and heading further south.
Although it might have been the first day of August, with a month to go before the official end of winter, spring was definitely in the air. The reserve was alive with birds and birdsong, and a pair of masked lapwings were in a merry courtship dance. Males of two species of robin, the scarlet and the dusky, were staking out nesting territories.
As birds arrive from the mainland on a north-south trajectory they cross paths with domestic migrants travelling east to west, leaving coastal areas that are relatively warm in winter and heading to higher ground.
The reserve was alive with two such domestic travellers, eastern spinebills and crescent honeyeaters, dipping into the blooms of winter-flowing grevilleas, marking time, refuelling before tackling the slopes of kunanyi/Mt Wellington towering above them.