Teaching new birds old tricks

“Mom! MOM! Come quick! I see an eagle!”

There was no chance there’d be an eagle in our suburban garden in Johannesburg, but I entertained Ayva’s five-year-old excitement.

“Where?!”

“Right there!” She points out my office window.

I try not to laugh.

Behold, the “eagle”:

“That’s not an eagle, baby. That’s a dickhead hadeda who wakes us up at 4:30am every morning with its godawful squawking that sounds like a duck being strangled.”

Of course, I didn’t say that, but I wanted to.

Hadedas (pronounced haa-dee-daas) are “the African alarm clock that you never have to set.”

You also can’t hit snooze or throw it across the room when it “goes off.”

Pharrell Williams’ classic reaction to his African wake-up call is basically everyone in South Africa who was hoping to sleep past 5am in summer.

When we moved to Australia, I was thrilled to swap the hadedas (a species of ibis) for laughing Kookaburras and robotic Magpie chirps. Waking up to those sounds is still music to my ears.

So, imagine my horror when, soon after arriving in Adelaide and having a picnic in a playground, a group of Australian white ibises approached us!

Granted, these were a lot prettier to look at, like the Cinderellas to South Africa’s psychotic, ugly stepsisters.

But my heart sank as my hopes of ever sleeping in on a Saturday vanished as quickly as the discarded sandwich crust that the ibis found in the grass.

Turns out, my trauma was misplaced.

The Australian white ibis, affectionately known here as “bin chickens” for their penchant for dumpster diving for anything that resembles food (or doesn’t; they’d eat shit with sugar on it), don’t have the same obnoxious caw as their South African brethren.

Fun fact: A group of ibises is known as a ‘congregation’ or ‘colony’. And when they’re in flight, it’s known as a ‘wedge’ of ibises.

Their squwacks (see what I did there? Half squawk, half quack? No? I’ll see myself out) are almost laughable in comparison. And kinda sweet.

I almost felt bad for every time I threw stones in the general direction of hadedas to shoo them away.

(Before you send hate mail, don’t worry; I never hit my target. Just ask anyone who’s ever driven in a car or gone bowling with me how bad my aim and sense of direction are. Hence, “general direction”.)

Not that it deterred them. If anything, they came closer because they thought I was throwing food ??

0 to 300 in a microlight

But what has softened my hard spot for ibises is this story about scientists in Europe who are teaching the northern bald ibis – once extinct in Europe – to fly their long-forgotten migration routes.

Why would they need to be “taught” how to migrate? Isn’t that an instinctive thing that birds just do?

Yes, and no.

Birds learn migration routes from their parents. But since the bald ibis is being reintroduced in Europe, it doesn’t have any parents to learn from.

Plus, climate change has made migration more challenging. With the birds now migrating later in the season, they face harsher weather conditions.

So, humans must “imprint” themselves on the birds, so that they trust them enough to lead the way and teach them a new migration route from Austria to Spain. The “foster parent” sits at the back of a microlight aircraft, waving and shouting encouragement to the birds as they fly and learn the new route.

And it’s working! ??

The project, inspired by the film "Fly Away Home," has been successful in increasing the central European population of the bald ibis from 0 to almost 300.

After 17 journeys, some birds have even taught the new route to their babies. The current flock is still en route; they started their journey on 13 August and expect to arrive in Andalusia in early October.

The project raises hope that this technique could be used to ensure the survival of other threatened migratory species.

Proof, once again, that a little bit of tech and a lot of human ingenuity can do wonders for sustainability.

Those birds can count themselves lucky that I’m not the one leading the way because they’d probably end up in Antarctica. Although, in the case of hadedas, I might have a bunch of South Africans cheering me on ??.

— Tarryn ??

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More good news

• ???Green prescriptions: A UK government-backed project prescribing activities in nature to tackle mental ill health resulted in a significant increase in levels of happiness and a decrease in anxiety among the 8,000 participants. The ‘prescriptions ’ included nature walks, community gardening, tree planting, and wild swimming.

• ???Eye in the sky: Climate group Carbon Mapper has launched a satellite to track the world’s biggest methane emitters from space. The data from Tanager-1 will be made publicly available, and is the second methane-detecting satellite launched in the past six months by a nonprofit as the screws tighten on super emitters. This comes as scientists warn that methane emissions are rising at the fastest rate in recorded history.

• ???Goodbye, coal: The UK will close its last coal plant at the end of this month; Denmark is left with a single coal power plant after closing one this month; and permits for coal-fired power plants in China have dropped by 83%.

• ???Nature gets a second chance. Cumbria Wildlife Trust has purchased more than 1,200 hectares of England’s Skiddaw Forest and plans to turn it into the country’s highest nature reserve and the UK’s biggest rewilding project to restore Atlantic rainforest.

One small thing you can do

Become a citizen scientist.

You don’t need to hand-rear baby birds and teach them how to migrate while yelling from the back of a microlight to make an impact.

In fact, you don’t even need to leave your house.

Citizen science is a growing field that lets everyone help with vital data collection that scientists use to understand the impact of climate change and other things on nature and biodiversity.

I’ve never been much of a birdwatcher. I grew up in Johannesburg, where the only birds you’re likely to see in your garden were pigeons. And goddamn hadedas.

But then I moved to Australia and everything changed.

Now, in a single day, I’ll see Rosella parrots, rainbow lorikeets, galahs, kookaburras, magpies, and crows in my garden. Even the pigeons are badasses with their mohawks and red eyes.

I didn’t know what a lot of these birds were when I first moved here.

As South African comedian Schalk Bezuidenhout puts it, we’re not used to seeing cockatoos or parrots in the wild. And if you do, you try to catch it because it’s probably someone’s exotic pet (and there’s probably a handsome reward for it's return).

So, I looked for an app to help me identify them and stumbled on Birda .

It’s a free global birdwatching app that you can use to log bird sightings, whether you’re a noob like me or a seasoned birdwatcher like my aunt (hi, Kim!). It’s beautifully designed, fun to use, and you can connect with other people, if that’s your vibe.

I love that you can look for birdwatching hotspots based on other people’s sightings, and also that it records your time spent in nature, which as we’ve seen in the good news section above, can make you happier and less stressed.

It’s certainly made me more aware of my garden visitors, and I’ve started making friends with a mischief of magpies.

I use Birda along with ChirpOMatic , a cool app that helps you identify birds based on their chirps and tweets. It’s like Shazam for bird songs.

Using this crowdsourced data, scientists can:

• Monitor changing bird populations over time and across geographies,
• Identify species in decline,
• Identify new species,
• Track migration patterns,
• Understand how factors like climate change or habitat loss are affecting bird communities and behaviour,
• Identify areas of critical habitat and prioritise conservation efforts, and
• Track the impact of events like disease outbreaks and wildfires.

Not ready to commit or just want to dip your toes into citizen science?

Register for the upcoming Aussie Backyard Bird Count . Between 14 and 20 October, spend 20 minutes outside everyday and record what you see.

Not in Australia?

Register for the next global Great Backyard Bird Count .

Not into birds? Try these:

• Take reef photos for The Great Reef Census .
• Record bees and other pollinators for the Australian Pollinator Count .
• Find and photograph frogs for FrogFind .
• Help gather data about clouds, mosquitoes, trees, and land cover with the GLOBE Observer app .
• Register for one of the many projects on Zooniverse .

Because lots of little actions combined can add up to something remarkable.

I'll leave you with this...

This hilarious spin on Planet Earth about bin chickens. The guy doing the David Attenborough voice almost had me fooled.

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