Australia: Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains, in the hinterland west of Sydney, are not really mountains.  They are the much-dissected remains of the edge of a plateau.  This, of course, doesn't detract one whit from their beauty, and I was very happy indeed when our friend Rita offered to take Eileen and I for a drive into the Blue Mountains National Park on April 2, 2011.

Eileen and Rita decided that I would be best left to my own devices, and so they dropped me off to do a bit of walking on the Braeside Track in the Blue Mountains National Park near Blackheath – my first chance in almost four decades to get back into a bit of real Australian bush. It proved to be a lovely spot, perched on the edge of the plateau, and crossed by a peaceful-looking little stream that, if you follow it far enough, pitches over a sheer cliff to fall as a cascade into the valley below.

The edge of the cliff, in fact, was never far away.

The technical term for this sort of woodland, a woodland dominated by various species of eucalyptus, is "sclerophyll", meaning "hard-leaved". Eucalyptus woodlands are quintessentially Australian, and apparently bothered the dickens out of early European landscape painters. Paintings of the Australian scene done by Europeans in the early 19th century almost invariably substitute perfectly ordinary English woodlands for a treescape dominated by eucalyptus, even if the artists had the real thing right in front of their eyes.  

The spindly, open branches of eucalyptus, bearing their clumps of grace-green, sickle-shaped leaves only at their tips, give the real Blue Mountain landscape the look of a woodland designed by Dr. Seuss.  Homesick Englishmen hated it.  My delight at seeing it again, by contrast, was unbounded.

Above the trees outcrops of Hawkesbury sandstone lined the trail. These are potential homes for one of Australia's most dangerous animals, the Sydney Funnel-web Spider (Atrax robustus), so it doesn't do to go sticking your hand into attractive-looking crevices. I didn't try.

Eucalyptus trees can be divided into broad general categories based on their bark: boxes and stringybarks with their rough, corrugated bark, for example, and the smooth, peeling bark of gums. 

When a gum tree like this one (presumably a Blue Mountains Ash (Eucalyptus oreades)) peels away its bark, the long strips of discarded material collect in the crotches of its limbs. These collections of shed bark provide a unique hunting ground for a number of insect-eating birds, including some honeyeaters that seem to specialize in them, flying from clump to clump without investigating anything in between. One bird, the Crested Shrike-tit (Falcunculus frontatus), doesn't wait for the bark to peel. Instead, it tears fresh strips away from the tree with its heavy, parrot-like beak.

This is the bark of a Scribbly Gum (probably Eucalyptus sclerophylla). The "scribbles" are the burrowings of moth larvae. More specifically, according to Wikipedia, "These zigzag tracks are tunnels made by the larvae of the Scribbly Gum Moth (Ogmograptis scribula) and follow the insect's life cycle. Eggs are laid between layers of old and new bark. The larvae burrow into the new bark and, as the old bark falls away, the trails are revealed. The diameters of the tunnels increase as the larvae grow, and the ends of the tracks are where the larvae stopped to pupate."

More substantial signs of burrowing insects were the sun-baked mounds of termitaria like this one.

Not all the insects remained out of sight; this little butterfly is an Eastern Iris-Skipper (Mesodina halyzia). My thanks to Don Herbison-Evans for confirming my identification, which he said was "pretty good for a northerner"!

Australia is home to a host of wildflowers, and is second only to South Africa in its proliferation of members of the wonderful protea family (Proteaceae).  My visit, in the Austral autumn, was too late to see the most glorious of them all, the Waratah (Telopea speciosissima), but along the Braeside the absence of its flowers was almost made up for by the blooms of its cousin the Mountain Devil (Lambertia formosa) [early botanists thought so too; "speciosissima" means "showiest", but "formosa", a name awarded the Mountain Devil as far back as 1798, means "beautiful"].

The Mountain Devil's unflattering English name refers to its peculiar horned fruits.  It is also called Honey Flower; like many members of its family it is a copious producer of nectar, as this visiting bee would suggest.  It is the only member of its genus in eastern Australia; the other ten Lambertias live in Australia's southwest, the second-richest floral zone in the world after the Cape region in South Africa.

The grevilleas. or silky-oaks, are also members of the Proteaceae.  Therre are a lot more of them: over 350 species.  Only a handful range outside Australia, but some species (and their hybrids and varieties) have become popular garden plants in other parts of the world.  This is Bog Grevillea (Grevillea acanthifolia ssp. acanthifolia).

The best-known, and perhaps the most distinctive, of the Australian Proteaceae are the Banksias, named for the indefatigable eighteenth-century botanist Sir Joseph Banks.  This is Hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa), named for the wiry, hook-shaped style that tips each of the hundreds of flowers in each Banksia "cone".

The myrytle family, Myrtaceae, includes Eucalyptus, and for that reason alone is one of the dominant plant families in Australia.  Some of the trees formerly included in Eucalyptus, the bloodwoods and ghost gums, are now placed in their own genus Corymbia (including the well-known scarlet-flowered species ficifolia, a common ornamental plant).  I believe that these are the flowers of Red Bloodwood (Corymbia gummifera).

Australian heaths (Ericaceae, formerly Epacridaceae) dominate entire landscapes.  This one, Fuchsia Heath (Epacris reclinata), is a haunter of rocky outcrops that is close to being a Blue Mountains endemic.

Australia has some of the world's most peculiar orchids (and that's saying something), including two genera that flower entirely underground.  This one is called Parson's Bands (Eriochilus autumnalis), and if you can find an illustration of an old-time parson in uniform, with his white neck-bands, you will see why.

There are a great many members of the pea family Fabaceae in Australia, and a great many of these have little yellow flowers that look (to my zoologist's eyes) frustratingly alike.  I think this one is  Bossiaea heterophylla.

This appears to be a slightly different pea, its flowers not yet fully open, but I cannot tell which one it is.

This attractive little flower is one (which one?) of the roughly 50-60 species of Tetratheca, an Australian member of the largely tropical and subtropical family Elaeocarpaceae.

This is Slender Riceflower (Pimelea linifolia, Thymelaceae), also known as Queen-of-the-Bush.  Among other things, the bark of this shrub can be processed into thread, the so-called "Bushman's bootlace".

All but one of the many species of Goodenia (Goodeniaceae) are found in Australia-- including this one, of course.

After my walk, Rita took Eileen and I to a nearby lookout point atop a tall sandstone escarpment.

The rock faces along the escarpment grow warm in the sun, and here we found a basking Carpet Python (Morelia spilota) taking advantage of the situation.  The snake was not in the least disturbed by the eager photographers above.

Of course I kept my eyes peeled for birds.  Eileen and Rita are not birders, but I managed to find one species that even a non-birder could appreciate...

The Crimson Rosella (Platycercus elegans) is common in the mountain forests, and can be remarkably tame (presumably because they expect handouts from the tourists).  This one perched in front of us at almost eye level, and sat there long enough for all of us to see - fulfilling Eileen's three criteria for a bird worth watching even for a non-birder: colourful, cooperative and obvious.

This bird, I'm afraid, would have failed Eileen's colourful criterion, but I was glad to see it anyway.  It is a Brown Thornbill (Acanthiza pusilla), one of a group of confusing little birds once considered to be close to the warblers of Europe and Asia but now known, like so many other of the continent's songbirds, to belong to a purely Australian radiation (my Malaysian readers may know one of its few non-Australasian cousins, the Flyeater (Gerygone sulphurata)).  It is an active, tit-like bird, hunting for insects in the shrubbery.

According to molecular evidence, the most "primitive" of Australia's host of honeyeaters [or the most basal, indicating that they belong on the earliest surviving branch of the family tree] are the two spinebills, one in the east and one in the west.  This is the Eastern Spinebill (Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris), to my mind it one of the prettiest of the family.  Its long bill is ideal for reaching the nectar at the base of long, tubular flowers like the Mountain Devil in the background.

The Golden Whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis) defies the usual convention that brightly-coloured birds tend not to be good singers.  Its clear, ringing whistles from the forest canopy help give the lie to the old canard (from a poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833 - 1870)) that Australia is a land of "songless bright birds".

The voice of the Pied Currawong (Strepera graculina) is hardly what one would call musical, but its cries of currawong! kraha! are among my strongest memories of Australia.  They are, like their cousins the Australian magpies, bold and aggressive birds; this one was clearly looking for a handout.

This little bird peeping out between the branches of a eucalypt may not seem like much to get excited about, but it means a lot to me.  He is a male Red-browed Treecreeper (Climacteris erythrops), and the members of the Australian treecreeper family, Climacteridae - birds not even close to the treecreepers of the Northern Hemisphere, whose nearest relatives may be (of all things) bowerbirds - were the subject of my doctoral research back in the early seventies.  I spent many happy hours following treecreepers around through Australia and (to a limited extent) New Guinea, so coming across one was like a re-encounter with an old friend.

The icing on the cake was that the Red-browed, of the three treecreepers recorded in the Sydney area, was not the one I expected to see.  In my day it was much harder to find than the White-throated (Cormobates leucophaeus) or the Brown (Climacteris picumnus).  Alas, that is no longer the case.  The Brown, a bird of open savanna that I once studied near Greendale, southwest of Sydney, is now extinct in the region.  The Red-browed, a relatively inconspicuous denizen of the mountain forests, has survived.

Australia: Sydneysiders

 

I think almost everyone will recognize this view: Sydney Harbour, with the world-famous Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House, taken from the grounds of Taronga Zoo on the harbor's north side, on March 28, 2011.  It is a view I last saw in 1974, and one with a great deal of personal resonance for me.  I lived in Australia from 1972-1974, working on field search for my doctorate, and I love the place; going back, after all this time (far longer a wait than I ever intended), was a highly emotional experience.

I visited my old stomping ground, the Australian Museum - much changed, of course.  For one thing, this fuzzy and appealing model of Diprotodon, the long-extinct giant wombat relative that once roamed the interior in vast herds, is a new arrival since my day.

This is a nature blog, not an emotional journal (as hard as it might be to distinguish the two at times), so having made the point that Sydney is far more than just another travel destination for me I will move on to my encounters (re-encouters, really) with the city's wildlife.  I didn't have far to go to find it: Eileen and I stayed with her old classmate Rita in Eastwood, where Crested Pigeons (Ocyphaps lophotes) were dooryard birds.

Though it is hardly a kangaroo or a koala, the Crested Pigeon is a quite satisfactory symbol of the uniqueness of Australia's wildlife.  In Australia, the birds and mammals (and, in part other wildlife as well) that fill various ecological roles in other parts of the world are frequently replaced by similar-looking (or acting), but quite different, creatures.  This is familiar for mammals: there are marsupial equivalents here for creatures from moles to flying squirrels (not to mention, in the absence of genuine anteaters, two quite unrelated anteater equivalents, one a marsupial and the other an egg-laying monotreme).

It happens for birds, too.  Australia lacks pheasants (aside from a few tiny quail), but it has a number of more or less pheasant-like pigeons.  The Crested Pigeon is  hardly the most extreme example - I don't think anyone would mistake it for anything but a pigeon of some sort - but it will do.  It's very pretty, too.

Birds were not the only Australian wildlife at Rita's door; here, for example, is a Fence Skink (Cryptoblepharus virgatus) on her garden wall.

From Rita's back porch I could watch the most gorgeous dooryard bird in the world: the Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus).  In the years since I lived in Sydney, Rainbow Lorikeets have greatly increased their numbers in the city precincts.  Perhaps surprisingly (who, it would seem, could resist such a brilliant creature?), not everyone is happy about that; the lorikeets are beautiful to look at, yes, but their harsh screeching voices are not to everyone's ear.

Lorikeets are a particularly Australasian group of parrots, with a specialized diet of nectar and pollen and a brush-tipped tongue to scoop it up.  The combination of spectacular parrots nibbling on beautiful flowers can be sensually overwhelming at times!

Australia has a higher proportion of nectar-feeding birds than perhaps any other continent, perhaps because its dominant trees, the eucalypts, are bird-pollinated.  In addition to the lories and lorikeets, there are some fifty species of Australian honeyeaters (Meliphagidae). In Sydney, though, one dominates: the Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala).  It is, I'm afraid, something of an ornithological villain.

Miners have exploded in urban Australia.  Unfortunately, they are extremely aggressive, driving any other birds they can bully out of their territory.  The result, for someone who has been away from Australia for over three decades, is shocking.  The common small garden birds I used to associate with every park and lawn - fairy wrens, small honeyeaters, Australian flycatchers and the like - have all but vanished.  In my walks around bits of urban bush I was hard put to find any bird smaller than a miner.

Bigger birds, like this Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), can hold their own quite successfully against the miners - and that can be a problem of its own, for some of these birds - particularly the magpie's close relatives the butcherbirds (Cracticus spp) - are predators and nest robbers.  The smaller fry don't stand much of a chance.

One of the most obvious ways that Sydney's urban birdscape has changed has been the influx of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (Cacatua galerita), possibly bolstered by the release of unwanted pests.  They, too, have their detractors; according to Birdlife Australia, "The species has become a pest around urban areas, where it uses its powerful bill to destroy timber decking and panelling on houses."

Rita's house is only a short distance from Terry's Creek, a bit of urban woodland that made for a pleasant morning bird walk.

After so many years of seeing eucalyptus trees in places where they do not belong, it was pleasant indeed to get back to their homeland.  This is (I believe) a Sydney Blue Gum (Eucalyptus saligna), one of over 700 species, all but nine of which occur in Australia (only fifteen species range naturally beyond the continent).  

Though an exotic eucalypt woodland can be a barren place, in their native range eucalypts play host to a great many animals.  The gum trees, like this one, shed their bark in strips that collect in the crotches of limbs, and the insects that hide here are hunted by birds that fly from one clump of bark to another, often ignoring the rest of the tree.

Eucalypt flowers produce copious nectar, food for honeyeaters and lorikeets; here you can glimpse a Musk Lorikeet (Glossopsitta concinna), a far less conspicuous species than its rainbow-hued cousin.

Some Eastwood butterflies: a Common Crow (Euploeia core), above, and below, a rather battered Common Brown (Heteronympha merope).  With a few exceptions Australia's butterflies are less distinctive than its vertebrate fauna; many are representatives of genera, like Euploiea, well-known in south-east Asia; the Common Crow itself ranges as far north and west as India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.  The Common Brown, though, is a southern Australian endemic.

Golden orb-weaving spiders also belong to an almost world-wide group; this is either Nephila edulis or N. plumipes.

It was nice to have Terry's Creek to wander through - though obviously its state of preservation doesn't suit everyone!

If any bird can be called characteristic of Australia it must be this one: the Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguinae).  Eileen was delighted when I showed her one; she had been taught to sing "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree" in school in Malaysia, without ever having been told precisely what a kookaburra (or, I suspect, a gum tree) actually was.  It is, in fact, the world's largest kingfisher, and it can be remarkably bold; this bird was at Taronga Zoo, but it was perfectly wild.

Also at the zoo, a Noisy Miner and a Kookaburra check out the picnic leavings.

Sydney, of course, is wonderfully situated on its glorious harbor, and ferry rides (to the zoo, or elsewhere) are a delightful way to appreciate it.  Eileen and I spent one morning riding the ferry outside the harbor mouth to Manly, famous for its sandy beach.

Here we found Silver Gulls (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae), as ubiquitous as their extremely similar cousin the Red-billed Gull (C. scopulinus) in New Zealand. 

The Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena) is widespread in Australia, and has colonized New Zealand in recent decades.  These three, resting on the pavement at Manly, seem quite uninterested in a flight across the Tasman.

Australia has five species of crow.  They are not easy to tell apart, but fortunately in Sydney there is only one: the Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides), a bird whose mournful wailing call can be quite startling to a birder familiar with the harsh cries of North American crows.

While Eileen indulged in people-watching on the beach, I took a stroll to the nature reserve on the rocky shore along the southern end of the bay.

Part of the reserve's purpose is to protect a population of Eastern Water Dragons  (Physignathus l. lesueurii), quite substantial lizards (the male can exceed a metre in length) that have adapted quite well to our presence in parks and gardens. 

I found this rather self-satisfied individual sitting directly under the sign in the previous picture.  I interpreted his smug expression to mean, "See that sign?  You can't touch me, mate - I'm protected!"

After taking a ferry to Manly, Eileen and I decided to take one in the other direction, up the Paramatta arriver that flows into Sydney Harbour.

Sydney is surrounded, in fact, by beautiful country.  Near the end of our Australian sojourn we headed north to the Hawkesbury River.  My aim here, though, was not to take in the scenery, but to visit an old friend.

Dr. Harry Recher is an American expatriate, a long-time resident of Australia who has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the ecology of Australian birds.  During my time at the Australian Museum, Harry acted as my valued mentor and supervisor, and I was delighted to have a chance to visit him and his wife Judy after so many years.  It doesn't hurt that they live in a beautiful spot on an island in the Hawkesbury; Eileen and I had a lovely afternoon at and around their home.

Harry has been extremely concerned about what has been happening to Australia's birds in recent years, including the decline of so many once-common city birds that I mentioned earlier.  Harry's short video on the plight of Australia's small birds should be required watching for all readers of this blog - and if you live in Australia, get your friends (and enemies, including politicians) to watch it too.

There are still birds on the Hawkesbury, though their numbers are declining.  This tailless Eastern Rosella (Platycercus eximius) flew in to a casuarina tree on the slope below Harry's porch.

High overhead, we saw a few Noisy Friarbirds (Philemon corniculatus), one of the larger honeyeaters - the family to which Harry has devoted much of his research.

Back in Eastwood, Harry's words stayed with me as I looked, mostly in vain, for some sign that not all the small birds had gone.  On my last morning I found it - one of my favorite Australian birds, a Rufous Fantail (Rhipidura rufifrons), hiding in a patch of brush.

Even this bird, though, was in trouble; the last I saw of it it was being pursued by a predator, a Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus); I can only hope that I did not, in my eagerness to see and photograph the fantail, draw the butcherbird's attention.  And, of course, I hope the fantail got away!