Crimson Rosella

I know it might sound to you like the name of a skin disease, but that’s not what crimson rosella is. THIS is what a crimson rosella is:

It’s a parrot native to eastern and south eastern Australia, commonly found in gardens and mountain forests. They primarily live in forests and woodlands, preferring older and wetter forests. They will also live in human-affected areas such as farmlands, pastures, fire-breaks, parks, reserves, gardens, and golf-courses. I got this picture while staying in a cabin in Halls Gap, in Grampians National Park. They are rarely found in treeless areas. At night, they roost on high tree branches.

These beauties are about 14 inches long. Crimson rosellas forage in trees, bushes, and on the ground for the fruit, seeds, nectar, berries, and nuts of a wide variety of plants. Despite feeding on fruits and seeds, rosellas are not useful to the plants as seed-spreaders, because they crush and destroy the seeds in the process of eating them. Their diet often puts them at odds with farmers whose fruit and grain harvests can be damaged by the birds, which has resulted in large numbers of rosellas being shot in the past.  

On the other hand, rosellas will also eat many insects and their larvae, including termites, aphids, beetles, weevils, caterpillars, moths, and water boatmen. As termites are a major menace in South Australia, people should LOVE any bird that eats them.

April Fools!

This bird looks like it could be part an April Fools of Day prank, but it’s no joke. When I spotted this bird the first time, I thought to myself, “What in the world could THAT be?!” The answer is: a European goldfinch.

Like all the white people who live in Australia, this colorful bird isn’t a true native. The European goldfinch was introduced into Australia in the 1850s and 1860s with releases in Melbourne first in 1863, in Adelaide in 1879, Sydney before 1886 and around Hobart in the early 1880s or earlier. Goldfinches had established themselves over their present range in south-eastern Australia by the 1900s. 

Unlike many of the non-native animals brought to Australia by colonists, the European goldfinch hasn’t caused any harm to any native species. They seem to get quite well with all their indigenous neighbors. There’s a lesson there for us.

Play Ball!

Today is, for me, the REAL first day of spring: Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. I plan to be watching when Mariano Rivera throws out the ceremonial first pitch at Yankee Stadium this afternoon.

Because it’s spring here in North America, and the beginning of the new season for what some of us still like to think of as the national pastime, I’m taking a break from the Australian and New Zealand birds. Today, here is another sure sign of spring in much of the continent, the chestnut-sided warbler.

This little guy spends the winter months in a range from Central America to northern South America—something I’m trying to persuade my wife we should do, too. But by now, he’s on his way north to the breeding territory in the northern U.S. and Canada.

I took this picture last May at the Magee Marsh in northwest Ohio, a spot where thousands of warblers stop on their way north. That’s why it’s home to an event called The Biggest Week in American Birding. If you’re a bird watcher, this is a festival you should attend at least once. Warblers like this are typically hard to spot, because they spend most of their time high up in trees, flitting about almost constantly. But at the BWAB, they’re right at eye level. It’s amazing! The festival has a great website that will have all the information you need.

Happy spring and happy birding to all. And if you’re a baseball fan, have a great season, even if you’re a Red Sox fan.

A Welcome Sight in a Wondrous Place

This pretty little bird is an Australian native called a Welcome Swallow. Like other members of their family the world over, they are acrobatic fliers, catching insects as the dart across ponds. I would liked to have gotten a nice shot of a welcome swallow in flight, displaying its familiar forked tail. But they’re just too fast for me. So I had to wait for one of them to take a short break on a reed along the banks of a pond on Fraser Island.

Fraser Island is a marvel unto itself, one I’d urge you to include on your Australian itinerary. It lies off the coast of Queensland near the city of Hervey Bay (which Australians pronounce as “Harvey Bay”). About 75 miles long and 15 miles wide at its widest point, it’s the world’s largest sand island, and the only place in the world where a rain forest grows on top of sand dunes.

Fraser Island and its sister islands were formed over hundreds of thousands of years as winds, waves and ocean currents have carried sands from the far south-east of Australia, and from as far away as Antarctica (but before Australian and Antarctica split from each other), out to the continental shelf, and in towards the land again in a zigzag pattern, to form a string of sand islands along the Queensland coast.

While most of the sand that makes up Fraser Island has come from the far south-east of Australia, some of it has traveled for thousands of miles and millions of years from Antarctica, starting its journey before Australia and Antarctica split from each other.

About 700 million years ago Antarctica had mountain ranges that rival the modern-day Himalayas. These mountain ranges were eroded with the resulting sands being accumulated on the continental shelf where Fraser Island now lies.

Periodic changes in the earth's temperature have created changes in sea levels which have helped to form the island.

There are two lodges on Fraser Island, and camping is permitted. If you’re not taking a guider tour of the island, you’ll need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to get around.

Galah

Here we have another example of an exotic bird in a decidedly not-exotic natural setting. This is a galah. It’s one of the smaller members of the cockatoo family, about 14 inches long. Galahs live throughout Australia, and the are not hard to find. Quite the opposite. You’ll see them in big groups in open fields. And unlike so many species of birds that have almost been wiped out because of human interference, we’ve actually made galahs more abundant, because they eat crops and make use of the cattle drinking ponds and wells.

I took this shot in Apollo Bay, in somebody’s back yard. A small group of them were pecking for worms and insects. They wouldn’t let me get right next to them, but they didn’t seem to care when I was 10 or 12 feet away. As I traveled through Australia, I’d see them on power lines, in trees, all over the place.

And although I never heard anyone use the term, Wikipedia informs me that this bird’s name has become part of the native slang for an idiot or clown, e.g. “flaming galah!”

Jurassic Park bird?

This bird looks like it might have flown right out of Jurassic Park. It’s the New Zealand Kaka, a large and endangered parrot. Conservationists there estimate there are fewer than 10 thousand of them, thanks entirely to a deadly one-two punch delivered by humans. Although New Zealand has just over four million people living in an area roughly the size of Great Britain, all but a sliver of the native forests these birds call home have been cleared. Combine that with the introduction of predator mammals who have not trouble finding and eating the Kakas’ eggs, and it’s a small miracle that any of the birds are left.

Kakas are about 18 inches long. They may look a bit ungainly, but they are very agile fliers, capable of weaving through trunks and branches, and can cover long distances, including over water. They get all their food from the trees, eating seeds, fruit, nectar, sap, honeydew and tree-dwelling—especially wood-boring—insects.

You’re likely to hear a Kaka before you see one. Like other parrots, they are not quiet birds. And like many other birds, their name seems to derive from their call: a harsh, repeated, rhythmic “ka-aa” when flying above the forest canopy.

Laughter?

Before I even knew what a kookaburra was, I knew the song with the lyrics, “Laugh, Kookaburra. Laugh Kookaburra.” I later found out the kookaburra was a bird and that its call sounded like laughter. Not so fast, my friend.

These two beauties were in the rain forest on Fraser Island. It’s almost as if they composed this shot themselves, just waiting for me to come by with my camera. But they didn’t make any noise, and it was another week or so before I heard what a kookaburra really sounds like.

We were staying at the edge of the Grampians National Park, named for the small mountain range in southwest Victoria it comprises. At dusk, from at least a hundred yards away, came an arrestingly loud sound that my wife and I at first thought must be monkeys having a fight. It was an “ooh ooh ooh aah aah aah” noise—the kind you might make if you were trying to imitate a chimpanzee’s vocalizations. We couldn’t see what was making the noise, even though it was so loud we thought it might be in a tree right outside of our cabin.

And that’s what kookaburras sound like. We heard them several more times, always in the early morning or at dusk. Laughter? That’s not how either of us would describe it.

Sure Sign of Spring

In honor of this first full day of Spring, here’s a bird that will soon be arriving in tree tops as far north as Canada. This is the Northern Parula, a warbler that doesn’t have that word in it’s name for some reason I can’t find.

This is perhaps my favorite picture from my trip to the Magee Marsh in northwest Ohio last May for the Biggest Week in American Birding. I like it so much because northern parulas are so difficult to capture in a photo. They spend most of their time high up in the canopy, eating insects and flitting about. Birders hear them more often than they get a good look at them.

The experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology say northern parulas have an odd break in their breeding range. They breed from Florida north to the boreal forest of Canada, but skip parts of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and some states in the Northeast. They think the reason for their absence may have to do with habitat loss and increasing air pollution, which affects the growth of moss on trees that they depend on for nesting.

However you’re spending this first full day of Spring—I plan to watch NCAA basketball all afternoon—keep this image with you to add a little extra beauty to your day!