Squatting is the easiest
For the humble bee there is a range of accommodation options to house your young. Social bees such as the Western Honey Bee (Apis melifera) are social creatures and build large communal hives that house the queen, drones and worker bees who look after the young. However of the 1700 species of Australian native bees only 11 are social. The rest are solitary.
These bees individually build nests to house their young. The Blue-banded Bee (Amegila sp.) for example builds its nest as a tunnel in the ground (or in the lime mortar of very old building, click HERE to view). Each egg is provisioned with a pollen food store and sealed with a series of sealed cells filling the tunnel. Other species bore holes in wood or in the fleshy stems of plants. It’s a lot of work.
Cuckoo Bees (and a whole range of native wasps) bypass this building effort by laying their eggs in the nests of other bees before the cells are sealed. After the nest is sealed the cuckoo bee larvae hatch and consume the eggs of the original bee and the associated food stores. Though this strategy bypasses the nest building effort it is fraught with danger as laying the eggs in another’s nest can lead to ugly confrontations.
One species of bees has an easier strategy still. The Cloudy Masked Bee (Hylaeus nubilosus) finds an abandoned nest of a potter or mud dauber wasp and moves in. No construction costs, no fighting with the neighbours (or the residents).
Squatting has its advantages.
Fairies in the garden
Sweet Bursaria (Bursaria spinosa) is shrub of the Pittosporaceae family with profuse white flowers. It is my insect-attracting plant of choice at the moment. Above a local grove of Bursaria there was a shimmering of tiny creatures moving so quickly it was difficult to tell what kind of creatures they might be. It was not until one of them settled of a flower that I could see it was a tiny moth – a Fairy Moth (Nemophora sparsella) to be exact (pictured below).
This Fairy Moth is about 10mm long and is distributed along the eastern Australia from Tasmania up to southern Queensland. The forewings are metallic purple in colour with a transverse gold band. The alternative name is Longhorn Fairy Moth because the antennae length in the males is up to 3 times the length of the wings.
So if you see a shimmering in your garden out of the corner of your eye it’s probably a Fairy Moth … or possibly something more magical.
Little Or Yellow
The two equal-smallest birds in Australia are the Weebill and the Yellow Thornbill. In fact, the Yellow Thornbill (Acanthiza nana) used to be called the Little Thornbill as it is fractionally smaller than the other thornbills. And since it has practically nothing else to distinguish it, no stripes or eyebrows or wing-bars, it was called Little and then it was decided the name Yellow was more appropriate. It is yellowish but not as yellow as, say, a Golden Whistler or Yellow Robin; it can appear brownish- or greyish-yellow. The best distinguishing feature is the lack of any distinguishing feature.
This is a thornbill that is only seen in trees – never on the ground. Furthermore, I recently learned that their preference is for Wattle trees rather than eucalypts. They like the feathery-leaf types, like Black or Silver Wattle.
They are often found in Yea Wetlands (in the wattle trees!) and are possibly common in the area. But they are thornbills after all – small active birds in the canopy – and hard to distinguish at a distance. They are also hard to photograph and I felt very privileged to get these photos when I located a small group that locals said are always around this particular copse of wattles.
Small. Unobtrusive. Plain. No distinguishing features. This is not going to be on anyone’s list of favourite birds but they are ours – endemic to south-eastern Australia. They are unique to this part of the world.
Japanese Visitor
Today’s topic features a bird that is rare in our district, but then it is rare nearly everywhere. The Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii) with striking stripes and a long beak flies to Australia from Japan each Summer and feeds along grassy waterways and edges of swamps and lakes.
They are a shy and cryptic bird. Usually, they spot you … well before you spot them. Once you get within about 20 metres or so they are off in a zig-zagging whirr. It was considered a great skill to shoot them in the old days before hunting was outlawed. Their eyes are strategically placed to enable them to see up and behind almost as well as ahead.
I saw one up Deepdene Rd in a wetland overflow. That’s typical: a bit of water, a lot of grass, sometimes on mudflats probing the mud with that strong beak. This summer there have been reports of significant numbers of Latham’s Snipe in some wetland areas; it’s a good year for them. So I hope more are found in the district this year.
Latham’s Snipe are non-breeding visitors to Australia, tripping down to the south-east of the continent from their breeding grounds in Japan and Russia. It’s a remarkably long trip, and one female was fitted with a tracking device. She flew three days non-stop from Japan to northern Australia.
The birds leave again to head north in late February/early March, arriving back in their breeding grounds in Japan and far-eastern Russia by April/May. The entire global population, estimated to be somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 individuals, is thought to visit Australia during our warmer months.
It’s always magical to spot a snipe. There are even rarer ones on our continent – Painted Snipe, Pintail Snipe – but this one (that you are most likely to see) is distinguished and rare enough to be greatly rewarding.
Xmas baubles for free
One of the largest families of beetles is Chrysomelidae or the Leaf Beetles. Both the adult beetles and their larvae are herbivores generally eating the young leaves of specific plants during summer.
Eucalyptus Leaf Beetles, pictured left are sometimes called Tortoise Beetles because they can withdraw their legs under the shell when threatened and are often mistaken for Ladybird Beetles because of their shape. They are highly coloured. The adults feed on eucalyptus leaves leaving tell-tale half-moon shaped indentations in the leaf margin when eating.
Even more spectacular in appearance are the leaf beetles of the genus Callidemum, (Callidemum hypochalceum pictured above and right). These beetles have a metallic sheen on their carapace, so much so that it was difficult to photograph without getting your reflection in the image. Their plant of choice is Dodonea (Hop-bush).
If your Xmas tree happens to be a Hop-bush, you may be lucky enough to get these baubles for free.
Lock up your larvae
Christmas time is the time of the Scarabs – think Xmas Beetles, Fiddler Beetles and Spotted Flower Chafers (Neorrhina punctata), pictured left. I have childhood memories of there being are lots of them around at Xmas but there don’t seem so many around any more. It is also the time of the year when scarab beetle grubs, those big white grubs that live in the ground get nervous (I am anthropomorphising a bit).
Major predators of scarab grubs are Hairy Flower Wasps. These are largish sized wasps and some, like the Yellow Hairy Flower Wasp (Radumeris radula) pictured below, quite frankly are very hairy. The adult wasps feed on the nectar. After mating the female wasp searches for scarab larvae in the ground. When found the wasp paralyses the scarab grub and lays a single egg on it. When the egg hatches the wasp larva devours the still living but paralysed beetle grub.
Hairy Flower Wasps come in several colours. Black Hairy Flower Wasps (Austroscolia soror) pictured right, typical fly low over piles of mulch or wood chips in the search for grubs.
Scarab grubs can do a lot of damage in agriculture and agroforestry if out of balance. As scary as the wasps look we should encourage these hairy friends to hang around.
Leaden You Know
One of our district’s summer migrants is the Leaden Flycatcher (Myiagra rubecula). Not very common in farmland, Leaden flycatchers like open woodland with lots of eucalypts but little understorey. I can count on finding them at Constitution Hill in Yea, or at the Old Cemetery and in some years they are common in Yea Wetlands. They come to these Southern climes in order to breed.
Leaden flycatchers have a ringing distinctive call – a loud pleasant towhee-towhee; plus like other flycatchers they also make a metallic buzzing and grinding noise.
If you follow the call and track one down, it will be sitting on a branch and it will shiver its tail as it calls, as if it is a great effort.
There are two other possible flycatchers in the district – the Restless Flycatcher (with completely white throat and belly) and the Satin flycatcher which looks very similar to the Leaden but is confined to the tall damp forests of places like Toolangi or King Lake. The names denote the supposed difference in the brightness of the black coloration -Satin being shiny and Leaden being dull.
It might have a more leaden colour than its cousins, but the Leaden flycatcher, personally, I find lifts the leaden heart and quickens the leaden step with its cheery song, shivering tail and smart tuxedo.
Follow the clues
The flowering of the Cassinia has finished. My next go to plant for insect photography is Sweet Bursaria (Bursaria spinosa). Its flowers also attract a whirlwind of insects although of a different kind. There are no Jewel Beetles but Ladybirds abound.
The sighting of a motionless Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera), pictured left can only mean one of two things. Either it is tired and is having a sleep (unlikely) or it is dead having been ambush by a predator. If it is the latter the finger is firmly pointed at a Spectacular Crab Spider (Thomisus spectabilis) as being the perp.
The Spectacular Crab Spider is a noted ambush hunter of bees. It hides amongst flowers until a bee approaches and then pounces and kills it. And it does not just hunt in white flowers. This spider can over time change its colour to yellow to hunt in yellow flowers as well. More than that, as most insect have vision stretching into the ultraviolet the spider can match its UV reflectance with that of the surrounding flowers.
A search of the flowers around the dead bee revealed no lurking spider. But after another 30 minutes of searching the accused was located on another flower bract (pictured above).
I can barely see it. It is lucky I am not a bee.
Jewel Boxes of Nature
Most plants are pollinated by insects so it is not usual to see Western Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) for example visiting their flowers. In some cases however the sheer number of flowers or the amount of pollen and nectar a plant produces creates an environment attracting hundreds of insects. I call these Jewel Boxes because they are attract a diversity of animals. Common Cassinia (Cassinia aculeata) is one of these. At the moment it is covered with all manner of flies, moths, beetles and spiders. Not all these invertebrates are pollinators. To be true pollinators they would need to have hair or combs on the legs with which to first trap pollen and then transport it to the next flower. A lot of these critters are there just to feed.
The most stunning of the visitors are the Jewel Beetles (pictured above). Jewel Beetles are a large family of beetles many of which are noted for their iridescent wing cases. There are about 1200 known species in Australia. The adults feed on nectar but the larvae are wood borers.
The young might be boring but the adults are not.
That’ll be a Cattle Egret
There were no cattle egrets in Australia until the cattle arrived. The cattle egret (Ardea ibis) was native to Africa 150 years ago where it wandered behind elephants and other herbivores. Then it started to turn up in other places – Spain, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean in the late 1800s. In 1940 it appeared in Florida and Texas, and then it arrived in Australia as well. It is a “natural introduction” – nobody brought it here. The first Victorian record is near Lake Colac in 1949.
As the name implies, cattle egrets like to hang around cattle. You see them in the paddocks in conjunction with flocks of domestic cattle where it feeds on small invertebrates, worms, frogs and lizards stirred up by the feet of the moving cattle. It is also not unusual to see the bird on the backs of cattle taking ticks and flies from the hide.
In late Spring the male transforms into its golden-headed form which is quite a striking contrast.
While our other Australian egrets – called rather unimaginatively Great, Intermediate and Little – are not faring so well and are possibly in decline, the Cattle Egret is thriving. We provide them with cows and green grass and that’s all they require.
Focus On Fauna 