Ben Cruachan – natural history

Our eldest grandson stayed with us recently, and we went for a wander at Bellbird Corner. The Drooping Mistletoe is still in flower, and we are starting to see a few Imperial White butterflies flitting around their food plant. One landed high in an infested Blackwood, I tried to show Marlow but he couldn’t pick it out, so I aimed the tele lens at it and showed him its picture on the monitor, wonderful things these digital cameras.

I hadn’t been birding at Bushy Park since the big flood came down the Avon, so went out yesterday for a couple of hours. The riverine landscape has certainly changed after so many days with ten metres of flood water surging through, whole stands of wattle trees have disappeared, lots of the shrubs along the river are dead, flood rubbish has piled up three metres high, and all the fencing along the private property has been ripped out and dumped. For the first ten minutes I hardly saw a bird, just a few Welcome Swallows riding the breeze, things were not looking good. I cut across to a stretch of River Bottlebrush in the neighbouring property, and although it had suffered, at least it was holding some birds, Yellow-rumped Thornbills, Blue Wrens, a couple of White-browed Scrubwrens, and a flock of introduced Goldfinches.

The flood had dumped many tonnes of sand and gravel right over there, fifty metres or so from the actual river bed, the Avon in flood is an enormously powerful force. I started to see some Yellow-faced and New Holland Honeyeaters in the mistletoe, but didn’t hear or see a Grey Thrush or Rufous or Golden Whistler. It looks as if it’s going to be quiet out there until some cover regenerates, which will take a few years. It was still a bit early for the Rainbow Bee-eaters, but when they arrive they’ll find their nesting bank has been partially washed away. Likewise the Sacred Kingfishers, some new nest holes will have to be drilled. On several occasions we’ve seen a Gippsland Water Dragon near the bee-eater nest site, I wondered if it had survived the torrent, but as I approached there was a splash and there it was swimming to the opposite bank, I guess it rode out the flood up in a tree.
For a few years now a Eucalyptus cephalocarpa in our garden has been the happy home of a magpie family, the nest has been rebuilt and added to, and lots of youngsters raised. Not this year. For twelve months there has been a pair of Little Ravens haunting the place, keeping a close eye on the compost heap where all our kitchen scraps finish up. Then we noticed them taking sticks up to the maggie’s nest, they’d taken over. At the moment they are feeding young, I don’t know how many, when they get a bit bigger I should be able to count them. The parents spend every daylight hour collecting food in the paddock, the very dry conditions are making it hard for them to keep up the supply. I set up the camera on the tripod this morning to try and get a picture or two, one of the parents came from behind me, and a look at this photo suggests that the chick is downing a lump of tomato from the compost.

The Red Wattlebirds are having an easier time of it, the Yellow Gum is in flower, so there’s plenty of nectar and insects on tap to feed their pair of plump chicks in the outer foliage. They just have to see off the Rainbow Lorikeets that are competing for the sweetness and keeping up a constant screech of annoyance. Perhaps I’d better go and put out a few sunflower seeds to draw them away and give the wattlebirds a free kick.