This week we have particularly noticed what the local birds are up to. There are quite a lot of birds in the caravan park. Magpies draw attention to themselves because of their beautiful call and their apparent lack of fear of humans. There are a couple of adolescent magpies who hang around near our van. Today, they were involved in some play fighting, wrestling around and chasing each other in the air. Even though they still have their adolescent plumage, they fly around with twigs and blades of grass in their beaks. I don’t know whether they are really building nests or just learning how it is done.
There’s a pair of plovers who have nested in the bark garden between two sites opposite us. Luckily, the park is nearly deserted and the two sites are being re-grassed, or the birds might find themselves having to put up with some grey nomads on their doorstep. Plovers nest on the ground, out in the open, so they have to put up with every kind of weather; this last week has given us rain and frost, so it can’t be much fun for the bird whose turn it is to protect the eggs.Today, the gardener was using a whipper-snipper, and seemed to be oblivious to the little bird which was hugging the ground and trying to be inconspicuous. Marilyn and I were enjoying a cup of coffee in the sun and could see there could be a problem, so she ran down to warn him. The plover was beside herself, flapping her wings and screeching.
Happily, the eggs weren’t affected but the gardener’s only comment was, “They’re a bloody nuisance, those birds.” Marilyn was not impressed!The next thing is he appeared on his ride-on mower. Marilyn said, “If he brings that mower near the nest, he can have the caravan park to himself, ‘cause I’ll be leaving.” I suppose she would have taken me with her, but he kept his distance so the threat wasn’t put to the test.
During the afternoon two sulphur-crested cockatoos came to visit. What a couple of drama queens! Everything they do is accompanied by screeches and flapping and raising the crests. They can’t even fly quietly! By comparison, a pair of Yellow Wattlebirds were getting to know each other in a wattle tree – all very low-key and subdued.
Yesterday, we were walking along the Tamar River when a cormorant came to the surface with an eel in its beak, wriggling and struggling. The bird flicked its head around trying to subdue the creature and suddenly it was swallowed whole (well, how else could he do it? He doesn’t have any teeth to chew it). As we watched, the bird dived again and came back with another, smaller, eel. The same procedure and the eel disappeared down the throat. The cormorant seemed to be having trouble keeping its dinner down and there was a lot of head and neck movements before things settled down.
Today our walk was around the golf course at the Country Club casino. There are lots of birds there, very tame and used to people. The native hens and coots are particularly pretty and we saw a Little Pied Cormorant as well, smaller than the larger variety we had watched yesterday.
I dug out my well thumbed copy of What Bird is That? I notice it was first published in 1931 and my edition was put out in 1980. It’s a useful book but the illustrations are copied from the originals and don’t represent the true colours very well. Maybe the Father’s Day fairy might bring me a new one.
It’s just three weeks tomorrow until we fly out to the Philippines. I have only eight more sessions at the hospital and we’ll plan to leave the caravan park immediately after that, either the 19th or 20th. We’ll just wander around until we leave for Melbourne on the 31st and will store the van somewhere safe until we get back about October 6th.
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