This week’s bird of the week is the Pacific Black Duck. We have seen relatively few of these in Australia, but they are not uncommon. However, the reason this duck bobbed to the surface is a singular, meaningful encounter my wife Deb and I had this past weekend at Mount Buffalo National Park.
We were preparing our picnic dinner on the shores of Lake Catani at Mount Buffalo. Looking towards the lake, I was arrested by the site of a duck beetling over from the other side of the lake and heading straight for us.
Morgan Free-Duck, the name Deb was to give our duck companion, settled on the ground to join our picnic. Here I need to add the important message, that in general one should avoid feeding wildlife of all types. We usually do ourselves, but for Morgan F. we made an exception.
It was easy to make an exception for Morgan F. because this was an exceptional duck. He or she didn’t beg for food, or honk or anything. Morgan just hung around quietly, happy for whatever scraps came his way.
It was a gorgeous night on the lake, and the 3 of us greatly enjoyed each-others company –me, my wife and the duck. As you’ll see, the Pacific Black Duck features a handsome eye-stripe, a beautiful sheen on the secondary feathers, and in fact, a greenish bill. And a pleasant personality – well, I can only speak for Morgan F. He represented the Pacific Black Duck tribe well.
As we packed up, we warned Morgan F. that we were leaving. He wandered toward the lake a bit but then came back up to the picnic table quietly, wandering around as ducks do. It wasn’t until we closed the car doors and looked back, and saw Morgan F. flying across the lake from whence he came, obviously realizing this night’s picnic was over.
This week’s bird of the week is the sulphur-crested cockatoo.
My wife Deb still remembers being amazed at seeing flocks of these big white birds when we first were driven home from the airport. Now we see cockatoos we are not so surprised, but still impressed.
They are definitely a bit like how you would imagine pterosaurs to be. Usually when they fly they announce their presence with a continuous screeching/squawking noise.
So when you get a large group of them together, it’s a raucous. The other night we watched a few 100 of them at our local golf course roosting for the night. Every time one would move about, it would set off some serious squawking…followed by a period of brief quiet, then another would move, setting off more squawking. Hard to get sleep in that neighborhood – whether you’re a bird or some other kind of beast!
When they fly, it is with urgency, like they are thinking they might drop out of the sky if they stop beating their wings frantically. Not great gliders, I guess.
Watching them eat and drink is fun though – as you’ll see in the following video, they enjoy their pine cones, drinking water, and eating sand.
As I said, they are everywhere here and noisy – but still, it is amazing seeing this exotic pet carrying on like the wild bird it is.
On Saturday my wife and I were on a beautiful beach on the east coast of New Zealand near the small town of Matata. We were enjoying some takeaway seafood there (i.e., that is the Aussi or Kiwi phrase for “take-out food” – we did actually pay for it) from a place called “Aunty’s and Uncle Café and Takeaway” when we noticed an exotic looking bird.
We learned it was the pūkeko. Although we only saw one there in Matata, we were to see many others later. Especially early in the morning the next day as we drove along the windy coastal roads. Apparently pūkeko enjoy foraging beside roads, and we saw at least one pūkeko warning sign in New Zealand. There the warning signs are usually note “wandering” as in “wandering pūkeko” or “wandering kiwi.”
As you might expect, there is quite a road toll and we did see the remains of many unfortunate pūkeko on the road.
I need to quote New Zealand Geographic here to give you further insights on the character and reputation of the pūkeko. This is from an article called “Pūkeko: The Indomitable Swamphen” at
“Popularly regarded as brainless kamikazes lacking all road sense, pukeko are confounding scientists with their complex, flexible social lives. And, while other native birds struggle to survive environmental changes, pukeko seem to take everything in their strutting stride.”
I just noticed the name of the author of the article – Ian Jamieson. I was doing my Ph.D. the same time he was doing a postdoc at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and then went to New Zealand to continue to work as an Australian ornithologist and write entertaining New Zealand geographic articles like this one. Alas in looking him up, I discovered that he passed away at age 58 in 2015 – see the following for a moving tribute.
The social life that Ian referred to in the article is that they are generally communal nesters. They live in groups whereby it literally does “take a village to raise a child” as they all share care of the communal nests. I read somewhere that they sometimes steal each other’s eggs, but that doesn’t quite make sense because it sounds like the eggs are communal property anyway!
They are very recognizable with their purple-blue body, black wings, red legs, bill and frontal shield. Pūkeko is the Maori name used for the bird in New Zealand. Little did we realize as we beheld this cool bird in New Zealand that we were in for a surprise when we came home to Australia.
Tuesday night when after we had returned to Wagga Wagga that afternoon, I went for a walk by Lake Albert to shake off my jetlag. Jetlag does some bizarre things to people, and as I rubbed my eyes beholding these strutting birds by the lake, I thought, is this really the same bird?
It turns out it is – in fact they are the same subspecies – the Latin name is Porphyrio porphyrio melanotus. In Australia it is known as the purple swamphen. Somehow I prefer the more quirky kiwi name pūkeko.
Now I have gotten over my shock at seeing that this exotic bird is actually found where I live here in Australia, I look forward to many more times of watching these guys strut around like they own the place. In fact, they are thought to have flown over from Australia to New Zealand about 1000 years ago, although their history of how they got where they are is somewhat mysterious. Because of their swimming and quick trotting ability they almost appear flightless (when I first saw the one in Matata I foolishly said to Deb – look at that flightless bird!) but they occur on some remote islands requiring strong flight and an indomitable spirit to reach!
They are just the kind of bird that you will never fully understand, but my old colleague from Queen’s University, Ian Jamieson certainly had a pretty good handle on these quirky birds with a real zest for life. Ian certainly had a zest for life himself (and was a bit quirky), and I remember him fondly as a fun-loving, always good-natured human being from the those good old days we shared back at Queen’s University.
Last Saturday I was exploring a wetland bird sanctuary called “Fivebough Wetlands” which is situated in and among cow pastures near the town of Leeton, New South Wales, Australia.
The cows looked interesting too, so I took a picture. To my wonder and surprise, large birds called brolgas – a species I was on the lookout for – were in the picture, walking among the cows.
Brolgas are obviously a relative of the whooping cranes and sandhill cranes we are familiar with in North America. Like those well-known birds, they are quite unusual, and unique to Australia. They are a little more common than North American white cranes though – they can apparently be seen flocking in the hundreds in some places.
So the lesson the brolga left me with was, pay careful attention to your surroundings. The brolga can be a meter and half tall or so as you see in my photos. When you least expect it, one of Australia’s largest birds may walk into your view!
When we had our bon voyage party in Langley in Nov. 26th, as the room was filled with the typical chaos associated with too many people in a room, my buddy Steve Robinson implored us to “tell the story,” i.e., why we were going to Australia? I was very grateful to Steve because in a crowded room like that it is quite daunting to try to explain yourself to everybody one on one. So here (finally almost two months after the first blog post) I will re-tell the story, with a few illustrations thrown in.
Meeting mile-a-minute in China
The above photo tells quite a story. We are standing in front of a calamity that is repeated all over the globe. We are standing in front of a lemon orchard, or to be exact, a former lemon orchard that has been destroyed by the mile-a-minute weed, Mikania micrantha. There is also a people story in the picture. The gentleman on the far left is Professor Fudou Zhang, the one who invited me to Yunnan Province, China, to see this weed in action. When I first saw his message, I had my doubts, but my friend Shiyou Li called him up and certified that it was a legitimate invitation, and said “in my professional opinion, I think you should go.” My friend Shiyou and his wife Ruying actually made it to China that first year I was invited in 2010, to meet up with me and a former colleague of ours, Rongping Kuang, who visited Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario back in 1990, for a 20 year reunion of the 4 of us in China as shown below.
From left to right, Shiyou Li, David Clements (me), Rongping Kuang, and Ruying Feng
Back to the first photo, when I visited China in 2010, there were three other weed science foreigners visiting with me – Joe DiTomaso from the California, U.S. (second from the left), Hisashi Kato from Japan (just to the left of me), and Leslie Weston from Wagga Wagga, Australia (just to the right of me). We had an amazing week in China visiting many sites where mile-a-minute was a big issue with our Chinese colleagues, as well as of course, enjoying excellent Chinese food from China’s agricultural abundance, albeit threatened by weeds like mile-a-minute.
From left to right: Joe DiTomaso (University of California, U.S.), Leslie Weston (Charles Sturt University, Australia), Hisashi Kato-Noguchi (Kagawa University, Japan), and Fudou Zhang (Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China)
It was a great opportunity to get to know each other on that first trip (and there have been six trips to China for me since). Although I had first met Leslie at a conference 5 years earlier, it was there in China she said to me: “You know, Australia is a good place to do a sabbatical” as I mentioned in an earlier post. So here I am here in Australia 8 years later, and I can certainly say she was right about that. I am here joining Leslie’s team at Charles Sturt University, taking advantage of the personnel on her team and the advanced equipment at the Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation…and studying our beloved weed – Mikania micrantha (mile-a-minute).
Leslie Weston examining leaves of mile-a-minute at the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Kunming, China. Samples from leaves such as these will be examined to compare genetics of different mile-a-minute populations
You might be wondering, what is a sabbatical? “Sabbatical” comes from the Biblical concept of a day of rest, or a year of rest in every 7. Most universities follow this tradition, allowing faculty members to either stay home and enjoy a change from their normal teaching and administrative opportunities as they pursue research, or go away somewhere to a place to facilitate research opportunities. Trinity Western University certainly supports the sabbatical concept – this is my third sabbatical, but just the second one away, and the first one away was still in Canada, in Guelph, Ontario in 1999-2000. So I am really grateful to Trinity Western University for this opportunity to go far, far away in 2018.
Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada
Still, even with Leslie Weston’s invitation and the welcome from Charles Sturt University, and Trinity Western University granting me the sabbatical opportunity, the prospect of travelling to a relatively expensive country on the far side of the globe was daunting. Just ask my wife about that. So I applied for a prestigious Endeavour Fellowship. Endeavour is a national Australian award named for the British Captain Cook’s Ship that “discovered” this continent down under back in 1770. I was successful in winning an Endeavour Award to support my four months here, and am thus extremely grateful to Endeavour as well.
So that’s the story behind my current exciting endeavour…
I would be remiss if I didn’t include this bird in the “bird of the week” feature, because I see it every week, everywhere.
It is closely related to the Northwestern crow we see everywhere in British Columbia and other related crow-birds found throughout most of North America. It is about the same size, but differs in some respects. The obvious thing is that it is not all-black, and actually features quite a lot of white. The black and white patterning is really quite handsome and striking, especially if you are not native to Australia and seeing them for the first time. Perhaps this is why it is referred to as a magpie?
Another major difference is that it does not say “caw” like a crow but has a delightful, almost computerized warbling call, which I managed to capture after some considerable effort in this short video this morning:
Australian magpies, like all of their cousins in the crow family, are quite intelligent. You can tell by the way they look at you, somehow.
Apparently during mating season they can be quite aggressive and actually attack people. However, as my wife and I have heard, they are smart enough to recognize people and remember what people have done for them, e.g., who feeds them. So maybe the best approach with Australian magpies is to be nice to them, with the hope that they will be nice to you.
The rainbow lorikeet is a beautiful bird in the parrot family that in Canada you would expect to see only in a cage, of course. My first encounter with them in Australia was in a cage, in fact. When we first came here in late December (2017), we got to look after the menagerie of my hosts here at Charles Sturt University, Leslie and Paul Weston. At that time, they had a pair of rainbow lorikeets with a baby in the nest box.
While Leslie and Paul were away on vacation, and I was feeding and looking after the lorikeets, the baby rainbow lorikeet emerged into the sunlight and gradually found his mobility. It was a joy to see – although occasionally the Weston’s dachshunds got a little too excited about the little guy, and I had to tell them to stay away from the cage.
Last week on our trip to Brisbane, we got to see rainbow lorikeets in the wild at the home of my former student, Carla Sbrocci just north of Sydney (see below for the photo of a wild rainbow lorikeet). So obviously in this country, parrots are not limited to cages, and these rainbow lorikeets are distributed all over eastern Australia. In fact, they are invading new areas where they weren’t found before like western Australia near Perth and Tasmania, thanks to human transport.
Before we got to Carla’s place, I had actually seen semi-wild rainbow lorikeets at the Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane. They inhabit the “kangaroo feeding” area of the sanctuary where you can go and feed and interact with kangaroos, and also Australia’s “big bird” – the emu.
However, one of the most interesting interactions I witnessed was the emu sticking its head in the rainbow lorikeet’s house to steal their food. As you’ll see in the video, the lorikeets didn’t seem too alarmed – it probably happens all the time! But it was a good picture of just how big these emus are.
So far Deb and I have only seen emus wild once – four of them on the Newell Highway that we took north to Brisbane, in a section of the highway where there was a recent bushfire. We wondered if the fire had something to do with the emus being at the roadside, but alas I didn’t stop to take pictures. Hopefully I’ll be able to feature emus again if we can actually get some photos of wild ones, but in the meantime, enjoy this thieving emu as a bonus to this week’s bird of the week!
The bird I am featuring this week is not a bird. It is not a plane. It is not a fox. It is a flying fox!
These birds (I mean bats) weight about 1 kilo and have a wingspan of a meter or so, and have been a great spectacle for us to watch here in Brisbane, as they fly up the river near our lodgings in the evening, flying up from wherever they camp. In the daytime they camp in great numbers in trees. Hundreds of them fly up the river and then spread out in search of food…after the bird hour, comes the bat hour!
Come evening they seek out their food — which is primarily pollen but also fruit sometimes. How do they seek these things by echolocation, Deb and I wondered? How might a blind bat find what it needs in the trees, we wondered, as we watch one land in a tree just a few meters away?
The answer is that they find what they need just as you and I would find flowers, using a good sense of smell and a good pair of eyes – yes they can see! Except of course, we can’t fly so we don’t have access to the great number of trees they do.
This ability to fly is of great benefit to the trees they pollinate which have flowers that open at night. In fact, they fly many kilometers every night conducting their pollinator service.
And to watch them fly is quite a thrill. We are used to our “little brown bats” in North America but these bats look a bit more Pterosaur-like flapping along like a bat on a mission with their one meter wing spans. We could watch them all night…see the video for some of the bat action!
Galahs are in the cockatoo family and unmistakable with their pink chests and boisterous behavior. Although they pair up for life, they also form noisy bands of a dozen or so, or even dozens in the evening or the morning.
Most of the photos here were taken by Deb and I in the Narrandera Koala Reserve, back when these birds were an exotic novelty. Now we have seen them everywhere from the countryside to the city, but still you can’t help but take note of them because they are so eye catching and noisy.
Indeed, according to my research the galah is among the most abundant parrots found all over Australia. We are about to head north here to Queensland, so we’ll have to see how many galahs are in the tropical north.
The Royal Spoonbill, just like its name, has a spoon-shaped bill. According to Birds of Australia by Iaian Campbell, Sam Woods and NIck Leseberg, “the massive, spoon-shaped bill is hard to miss, even in flight.”
But how does it use this bill? According to Marcombe’s Field Guide to Australian Birds: “These birds stride through the shallows sweeping the slightly opened bill in broad arcs side to side. Any small creature—tiny fish, crustacean or insect—that touches the inside of the broad tip, triggers it to shut instantly.”
These spoonbills congregate on the edge of Lake Albert, which is just a few steps from where we live here in Wagga Wagga. They are entertaining to say the least. I like to go for walks in the evening along the lake and take a gander and these and other birds, when they are active after our sweltering summer days which are often high in the 30s or even 40s (degrees Celsius). In fact, we are now entering a stretch of several over 40 C days here in Wagga Wagga. Hotta Hotta!
