Swamp birds 1: Coot
There is a set of birds found around reedbeds, dams and lakes about the size of a domestic hen with distinctive colours on the frontal-shield above the beak. They are often called the gallinules, and they are so widespread they can appear a little pedestrian. The most common is undoubtedly the Swamphen a large blue-purple bird with a red beak and frontal-shield whose Latin name catches its purple front and black rear: Porphyrio melanotus. All gallinules forage on aquatic vegetation, or adjoining reeds and grass, looking for worms, molluscs and succulent vegetation. The other common gallinules are the Dusky Moorhen (Gallinula tenebrosa) and the Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra). Keen observers will note that the moorhen is more likely in small wetlands and swamps while the coot prefers larger stretches of water (every town’s sewerage pond is sure to have a flock).
The Eurasian Coot has a distinctive white frontal-shield. It takes to flight with a pattering run across the water. It is often seen bottom up as it searches for food under the water.
Their nest usually built on the water concealed among the reeds, may contain as may as fourteen eggs though usually 6-9. The chicks have reddish heads. For the first year the young birds are plain black without the white frontal-shield.
Eurasian coots, as the name suggests are found throughout Europe and Asia and recently arrived in New Zealand. The white frontal-shield may be the reason why the phrase arose ‘bald as a coot’. The Oxford dictionary says this phrase arose in the 1400s. but I haven’t heard it much lately though complete bald heads seem to be more fashionable than male-pattern baldness. We need to revive the phrase, bald as a coot!
A different squadron
The sight of a ‘squadron’ of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos overhead is a sight to behold but recently large flocks of Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) have proved to be equally impressive if not as noisy and at a higher altitute, pictured left. Pelicans are one of Australia’s heaviest flying birds. They can be found Australia wide around large bodies of water – salt, brackish or fresh.
Pelicans move across the landscape following their food source. Australian Pelicans are primarily fish eaters although they have been known to eat birds as well – ibis, ducks, etc.
The uncommon sight of large flocks of pelicans in our district recently may been due to the drought in other parts of the country. They usually settle on large bodies of water but have been noticed swimming (pictured above) and feeding (pictured below) on some of our local farm dams.
I wonder what the fish think.
The Mutants of Flowerdale
Almost ten years ago this blog featured a leucistic magpie (click HERE). Leucism, derived from the Latin word leuco meaning white, is a genetic mutation resulting in the partial loss of pigmentation in an animal. In the case of birds it means the excessive white colouration of the feathers.
Last week whilst driving through Flowerdale I noticed (with my aged eyesight) on the hill in the distance a solitary bird that looked like an Australian Ibis (Threskiornis moluccus) – but with short legs. Telephoto pictures revealed it to be another leucistic Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), pictured left, with more white feathers than normal. Interestingly it was photographed in the same field as the bird in the previous blog eight years ago. This bird and the one in the previous blog look very similar and given magpies can live to 30 years old in the wild it could be the same bird. If it is, this bird has been living in the same location for a long time, something that I had never considered before.
In a neighbouring paddock was another leucistic magpie, pictured right. This bird had an almost exclusively white back and white pants (all the recognised magpie forms have black ‘pants’). Maybe the mutation is being propagated through the offspring. In smaller birds this propagation is not likely to persist as white birds tend to stand out more and therefore are more easily targeted by predators. Magpies however are probably big enough to look after themselves.
Regularly patterned magpies like the Black-backed Magpie below did not seems to be fazed by its differently patterned companion. We can all learn something from that!
A Mother of a Spider
Spiders lay their eggs in silken sacs the shapes of which differ markedly depending on the species of spider. Where the sacs are kept is also species dependent. Some spiders suspend their egg sacs to vegetation, on their webs or on surfaces. Ground Spiders (pictured left) live in crevices in wood or rocks and attach their very thin egg sacs to those surfaces.
Wolf Spiders are one of only a couple of types of spider where the female carries the egg sac with them, pictured right. Female Wolf Spiders attach the spherical sac with a silk line to the spinnerets at the end of the abdomen. The egg sac is carried under the abdomen until the spiderlings are born. When the spiderlings are ready to hatch the spider opens the sac to release them.
The spiderlings are carried around on the mother’s back for the first few weeks of their lives (pictured above). If they become detached the mother will wait for them to climb back on board. During this time the spiderlings do not eat but instead rely on fat reserves within their bodies for sustenance. When those fat reserves are exhausted the young spiders leave to hunt their own food. Unfortunately, some of the first foods are their siblings.
Brings a new meaning to ‘Love your brothers and sisters’.
The Flame of Life
In July, a couple of years ago, I was in Yea’s old Cemetery. In this sombre place of weathered stone and wrought iron, hard soil and lichen, the cemetery’s oldest headstones are in poor condition, contributing to the awareness of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death and decay.
In the brooding heaviness of a grey day in this place, a party of flame robins (Petroica phoenicia) was on the move. Perhaps half a dozen birds, of which 4 at least were males.
The contrast was heart-changing. The mood lifted, the beauty shone, it was like poetry.
To invert the solemn words from the Funeral liturgy, In the midst of death, we find the flame of life.
Handy camping tool – or not?
On our last camping trip the sandy tent area we pulled up at was pitted with unusual crescent shaped holes in the ground – cause UNKNOWN.
Included in our camping kit for the first time was a new gadget, a ‘black light’ (ultraviolet) torch. Why? Because some minerals such as calcite and hyalite (a form of opal) fluoresce under ultraviolet light. And what better way to entertain yourself after the sun goes down than doing a bit of UV fossicking.
Walking around in the dark with the new gizmo we found no fluorescent rocks but noticed that in those crescent shaped holes were creatures that did fluoresce. But they quickly ducked back into their holes before we could make out what they were.
We eventually found a creature out in the open glowing bright blue in the UV light (pictured above). We did not really have to use our white-light torch (pictured right) to identify it as a scorpion.
Scorpions are arachnids (just like spiders). They have eight legs, two large pincers and a tail equip with a sting. No one understands what chemical in the scorpion exoskeleton causes it to fluoresce under UV light. Nor do they understand the reason why scorpions fluoresce at all.
Suffices to say that the UV torch will remain in our camping kit so we can hunt down fluorescent minerals and invertebrates. That is, if we really want to know.
Chicken, duck or goose
One of the best ways to view Australian raptors is simply by driving your car through the countryside. They are invariably hovering stationary above a field, perched on fence posts and powerlines keeping an eye out for unwary prey, or they are on the side of the road feasting on the roadkill.
Unfortunately the latter is why many raptors are killed, also being hit by cars. This is particularly true for Wedge-tailed Eagles that cannot get out of the way quick enough as a car approaches.
I recently encountered a Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), pictured left in the middle of the road feasting on what I assumed was a dead native animal. Upon stopping the Kite flew into a nearby tree. The carrion turned out to be an extremely large form of poultry, pictured below.
Whistling Kites are found in Australia, New Guinea and New Caledonia. They feed on a large range of animals, birds and insects. In summer they hunt live prey but as the weather cools down and there is less food around their diet turns to carrion. People more expert at poultry than I identified the dead bird as a rooster. In this case the carrion was as large as the kite itself. I can only assume that the dead rooster was dropped on the road by a fox.
The dead bird was removed from the road and thrown into a nearby field to avoid a further accident.
One dead bird is enough.
East versus west
Macropus, coming from the Ancient Greek meaning long foot, is a genus of kangaroo of which only 2 of 15 known species still exist. Commonly they are known as grey kangaroos and the existing species are the Western Grey Kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus), pictured left and the Eastern Grey Kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), pictured below. Until recently the Red Kangaroo was considered a sub-genus but has been determined to be sufficiently different to be its own group.
As the name suggests the two species have different ranges. The distribution for the Eastern Grey almost follows the north-south Queensland, NSW, Victoria border and all territory east. The range of the Western Grey extends across southern Australia but stops around the Victorian border and extends north into NSW. So there is overlap in southern NSW.
When photographed together it is relatively easy to tell the two species apart. The Western Grey is browner and smaller with a darker face. But if you a travelling in the Riverina and you see a roo the definitive test is that the Eastern Greys have fur over all their ears whereas the Western Greys only have fur at the base of the ears.
The challenge is to get close enough to tell (without running the animal over!)
Jacky Winter and the Flying Ants
This sounds like a title for a children’s adventure book. It’s really just an observation on some interesting behaviour. The Jacky Winter (Microeca fascinans) is not common around the Strath Creek – Yea district, but is occasionally observed. It is a bird of farmland, woodland, dry scrub. They have no distinguishing marks except the tail has white feathers down each side (which I could not get the bird to flaunt in these photos). In Spring their call goes ‘peter-peter-peter-peter’.
I saw 4 of these birds engaging in typical behaviour recently. They were all sitting on fenceposts and sallying out to catch flying insects then returning to their posts. What was the occasion? It is flying ant time! The air had many flying ants and these insectivorous little robins were loving it.
Once a year at the end of summer, ants and termites produce swarms of winged females and males known as alates, called queens and drones respectively. They come pouring out of the nest and hit the air in a nuptial flight. While in the air, a queen and a drone will clasp each other, and fall to the ground to start a new colony. In termites, this is done by biting off each other’s wings, whereas ant alates keep their wings (but the drones die when their work is done). There are thousands of species of ants and I do not know which species these black ants are. Different species time their flight according to warmth, humidity, day-length; some are spectacular, all are wonderful.
As well as reproducing the colony – only one couple needs to be successful for that!- this proliferation of flying protein is a bumper provision for the ecosystem, feeding all manner of spiders, birds, reptiles, bats, predatory insects.
Sometimes the overproduction of seeds or eggs or alates in nature seems so generous and helpful to other species, it makes one question the view which sees nature as highly competitive and only concerned with survival of the fittest. There is a strong sense of cooperation and mutual care sometimes.
Humans, take note!
Rabbits Digest
A frequent sight on farmland is a patch of rabbit droppings. They have their favourite spots – usually open and clear, often with a nice view across the valley. This site is not simply where they go to be tidy and keep their droppings in one place. They also eat them.
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) employs this method of digestion as their solution to the problem that grass with its high fibre and cellulose is a reluctant contributor to nutrition. Cows and deer solve the problem by chewing the cud. Horses have a long complex digestive tract. Rabbits have kept their small size and nimbleness by eating the grass twice. It is called caecotrophy (or cecotrophy in the US).
The droppings shown in the photos are not the pellets that are eaten. The caecotroph poo is black and covered in mucus and usually eaten immediately. The second time through, the indigestible parts and waste products emerge in the familiar balls that accumulate on the patches and mounds where they sit at night.
Not all rabbits live in the burrow. Older rabbits, especially males, hide out in the grass like hares during the day only scurrying to a burrow when threatened.
But come the night, when the moon is blessing the landscape, each rabbit will graze for a while then move to a dropping mound, sit back, survey the beautiful surroundings and munch on some fresh poo.
Ahh! the serenity!
Focus On Fauna 