Advertisement
Published: November 24th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Just above Hobart is a big mountain called Mount Wellington (everything in Tasmania is named after English nobility). On the lower slopes of the mountain is a tiny little town, or suburb if you will, called Fern Tree. This is quite a popular area for visiting birders, and also popular with your general tourist types too who want to walk up the mountain. Fortunately Fern Tree is well-served by the local bus route. Its a very nice wee place as well. The forest here is filled with tree ferns and huge moss-covered fallen trees. I was here looking for a particular little bird called the scrub-tit. There are twelve endemic birds in Tasmania (endemic meaning not found anywhere else on the planet). I'd seen most of them already but there were three I still hadn't been able to find. The scrub-tit was supposed to be fairly easy to find around Fern Tree. The field-guide says it is a common inhabitant of forests all over Tasmania. Except where-ever I was of course. They look very similar to the Tasmanian scrubwren, also endemic but much easier to find. So I wandered all over the mountain, trying not to step on all the scrubwrens
that were EVERYWHERE, but narry a scrub-tit did I see. I did spot a pink robin, though, which is a robin that is pink. A walk to the Hobart Waterworks about an hour away yielded nothing new, although the Tasmanian native hens are always a delight. They're not actually hens at all, but rather big flightless rails, sort of like a poor man's takahe. Unlike takahe though they are still quite common, at least unless foxes manage to get established on the island. It was a nice day, scrub-tit or not.
The next day I headed to another birdy place in another nearby suburb, the Peter Murrell Reserve in Kingston (or Huntingfield, depending on who you talk to). The reason people come here is to spot the forty-spotted pardalote. Pardalotes are tiny wee birds that live in the tops of trees feeding on insects and generally trying to avoid being seen as much as possible. There are three species in Tasmania, the striated pardalote, the spotted pardalote, and the forty-spotted pardalote. The first two are found all over Australia but the last one is endemic to Tasmania. They feed and live only in one particular species of eucalyptus tree,
bus shelter at Fern Tree
its hard to see in the shadow, but there's a sofa, armchair, table and book shelf in there and most of those have been chopped down, so the bird's kind of in a corner now. There's only about 3500 of them left. I'd seen the striated the day before but here at Peter Murrell I managed to spot all three species. The spotted is the prettiest one in my opinion. I also saw a few black-headed honeyeaters, which were the second-to-last of the endemic birds I was trying to find. The scrub-tit is the final one needed. While I was staring up into eucalypts looking for pardalotes, a man walks by and says "you must be looking for the forty-spots?" (they are pretty famous little birds in the area). Then he says "have you seen a frogmouth yet?" and leads me over to a tree and points out a male frogmouth sitting on a nest on a branch with two big fluffy chicks under his chest. "The female's around here somewhere too," he says. The photos of the male weren't that great because he was silhouetted against the sky, but I found the female after a while and she was in a much better position. The man also told me where to find some nest burrows of the
spotted pardalotes (they nest in the ground) but they didn't appear to be in use at this time. The bus back into Hobart had a TV on at the front for the benefit of the school-kids. It was playing the worst movie ever made, Transformers. The children appeared to find it entertaining, which says about all that needs to be said about Michael Bay movies.
On the third day it was back to Fern Tree. The next (and last) place I'm going in Tasmania is Maria Island and out of all the endemic birds only the scrub-tit isn't found there. So today was the last chance to find it. Once again, dozens of scrubwrens everywhere, but no sign of a scrub-tit. I checked every single scrubwren for the tell-tail black tail band but nothing. Eventually I found a side-trail that I knew no-one had been on yet because there were still spider webs across it, and on there I finally found a scrub-tit. Once I saw it I discovered that despite what the books would have had me believe there's little chance you could confuse the two birds. The scrub-tit is obviously smaller and less round and "wren-like" than
the scrubwren, and most importantly it was behaving like a treecreeper, working its way up and down tree trunks and delving into crevices after insects.
I also found another echidna. I love echidnas. They're so small and round and spiky.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.132s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 10; qc: 25; dbt: 0.1093s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
Justin
non-member comment
grrrr
You must of watched a different transformers movie because the one i watch was awesome........im sick of your hatred of all good sci fi movies im gonna kill your marine fish (Any actual marine fish deaths are enitirely daves fault)