Bird activity: October
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| Young Australian Raven |
The many pairs of Australian or Noisy Miners that plague our place are building nests, sitting and feeding the young that have hatched. White eggs, speckled with brownish orange, particularly so at one end, sit in one little nest lined with stuffing from the padding off our trampoline. While I stood watching, a miner bird flew onto the side of a shed and perched on a metal strip that ran all the way around it. The bird peered down into one of the holes the strip and the corrugated side of the shed made. Poking his beak into the hole he tried to reach a creature in there, failing that he clutched onto the metal strip and looked up into the hole from the bottom then poked his beak in that way. Then he tried the top again and finally the bottom once more and succeeded this time. He flew off with most likely a large spider in his beak.
Walking through the paddock I could hear the little blue wrens calling to one another and far off a Willy Wagtail. A Straw-necked Ibis took off from an old, dead gumtree. I often see the Common Myna by the side of the road while driving to town, no doubt plotting which bird they will assassinate next. They are not a welcome site to any lover of Australian native birds or even other animals, like sugar gliders. The Common or Indian Myna will knock young birds from nests, and, if it does not stoop to that, they will at the least steal hollows in trees to nest in; meaning there is another place taken from our native rosellas, cockatoos, possums and other birds that nest in hollow trees.
I had another amazing find. Last year a pair of Wedge Tailed Eagles hatched a chick so I did not expect that they would be nesting again this year but they did. The chick had already lost all its white fluff by the time I first saw it. Adult feathers covered its body and were starting to appear on its head. I went down the cliff a little way to get a better look. One of the parent birds took off from a nearby tree and glided gracefully downwards, spreading its wings in a two meter wingspan.
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