SUMMER'S ON THE RUN - the feathered vagrants who turn up on our shores
Summer’s on the Run… By Ian Browne Shamrock News
From where? Well, New Guinea is a good start, or perhaps the Indonesian archipelago. A couple of years ago I ran a series of stories on the noisy cuckoo species who migrate from our equatorial north, down into New South Wales. Why do they bother to put so much energy into this behaviour? To escape the monsoon rains, the wet season makes it hard to breed-n-nest. While living in Darwin the channel-bills turned up briefly, but the monsoon enters the fray there too, so they keep heading south.
What else brings monsoon escapees this far from home? Our cities have provided an abundance in exotic floral garden species which offer fruit and flower throughout the year, so native bird species that used to move between the mountains and the coast, depending on seasonal requirements, now just ‘stay put’ in places like Sydney. So, the currawongs provide a nest for the migratory channel-billed cuckoos, the wattle birds (honeyeaters) for the koels. An unbalanced currawong population may provide a bounty for large cuckoos from along the equator, but this also means pressure on small native birds that now have to suffer the increased predation via the currawongs.
Yesterday I did a walk after work out in the farmlands near Murwillumbah, subtropical northern NSW. At this time of year, the channel-billed cuckoos are always noisy where I walk, and in temperatures above 30c I also heard my first cicadabird of the nearing summer. But there are other birds who also rock up to our shores from further afield, from time to time. While working in Darwin 15 years ago I saw a large raptor on the edge of Holmes Jungle, in the outskirts of this steamy city. I knew it was too big to be a black, or whistling kite, and it wasn’t a wedge-tailed eagle, or immature sea eagle. It was in fact a Gurney’s eagle, a vagrant from neighbouring New Guinea. I am only one of a few that has seen this bird in Australia, well, who has acknowledged its existence here. Talking of koels and channel-bills, a type of koel usually seen in Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia turned up in NW Australia, a flamingo on Cocos Island! Australia used to be a flamingo paradise, but the pond systems that provided the brine shrimp dried up, and so did the pink feathered wonders. This arrival to our very own Indonesian islands region was thought to have arrived in from India.
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Other birds that would sure to surprise are the Columbo house crow, common to places like Sri Lanka and India. My time in Kolkata, and Yangon, Myanmar saw me sharing time with these birds, especially as the local vultures had disappeared with chemical poisoning via the livestock industry. These black-n-grey crows have been seen in Sydney, and out in the rural regions also.
So, keep an eye out for new arrivals, and don’t be surprised if you see something exotic and wonderful calling from the backyard mango tree. You can always notify ecologist Dr John Martin here of your treasure https://www.facebook.com/wingtags/ ??????????????????????????
My story on the koel can also be read in this year’s exciting release of the clever book, ‘A Guide to the Creatures in Your Neighbourhood’ https://www.urbanfieldnaturalist.org/