I and the Bird #5: 01 September 2005.
Hosted by John at A DC Birding Blog

Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Australia
12 August 2005

We’re in Melbourne, Australia today, and I managed just a few hours birding in between heavy rain showers…

Sadly our crew lay-over in Melbourne doesn’t really give me enough time to hire a car and disappear off into ‘the boonies’ anymore. Long gone are the happy days when BA management seemed all too content to let their crew off the leash for a few days in places like Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane - now we come all the way around the globe to this fabulous country and are only here for 24 hours: I can hear the heart-strings pinging in sympathy for me all across the blogosphere as I type, by the way…

But 24 hours - which has to include the occasional nap to keep going - really doesn’t leave time to do very much at all - particularly in the winter months when it gets light quite late (by the way, if any local birders reading this want to offer some logistical support to a British birder who only comes to Oz about twice a year and only stays a few hours when he does and who is really quite a polite chap, please email me).

Still, 24 hours is 24 more than many birders will ever get to spend in Australia, and there’s always the local sites…

As I’ve said on this blog a number of times, I’m a great fan of Botanic Gardens - if you’re short of time in a foreign country they’re usually a good bet for a visit: they’re usually easily accessed, they’re fairly safe as they usually have staff and other people wandering around them, they normally look good and are easy places to walk around, and there are always some good birds to see - and many of the “residents” are habituated to people and allow close views. They’re also - for all the reasons listed above - great places for photography.

So, with just a few hours available between rain showers and the next flight I decided to stroll from the hotel along the banks of the Yarra River and it’s parklands to Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens (photo left) and see what I could find.

It turned out to be a pretty good decision. I’d been to the Melbourne BG a couple of times in the past - though it looked nothing like I remembered - and was sure I’d seen some decent birds there. Actually I had a very pleasant surprise, because it really is a stunningly beautiful place, quite small with well-established lakes, open areas, and old trees. And there are birds everywhere…

Botanic Gardens are not really the places to find highly localised or habitat dependent rarities of course, but - like Botanic Gardens in other major cities - if they contain patches of original forest/scrub or well-established bodies of water there will often be a reasonable selection of the region’s commoner and more tolerant bird species. In Melbourne’s case birds you can hardly fail to see (or hear) are Silver Gulls, Dusky Moorhens, Australian Magpie-larks, Rainbow Lorikeets, Bell Miners (their odd metallic “clonk” call is constantly heard here), Welcome Swallows, and Little Wattlebirds - and it’s an excellent place to get good views of the often difficult to find Nankeen Night Herons, which are fairly easy to see roosting on low branches over the two main lakes.

Rufous (or Nankeen) Night Heron Nycticorax caledonicus

Immature Little Pied Cormorant Phalcrocorax melanoleucos

Male Australian Wood Duck Chenonetta jubata

Hardhead Aythya australis (female behind, male in front)

Welcome Swallow Hirundo neoxena

While some of the common species here look as if they could be found in almost any country in the world (a Welcome Swallow looks pretty much like a swallow you might see anywhere, and a Hardhead is (I think) beautiful but looks like Aythyas/pochards found on gravel pits and lakes worldwide), Australia has some wonderfully “different” birds that are both widespread and easy to find (and usually endemic to the continent).

I always enjoy hearing the weird, yodelling call of duetting Australian Magpies, for example, (if you watch any Aussie “soap” on TV, you can usually hear Magpies on the soundtrack at some point), and a species that seems to be characteristically busying itself in most scrubby cover in eastern Australia is the endemic and rather wonderful White-browed Scrubwren.

Male White-browed Scrubwren Sericornis frontalis

Another species I always find fascinating is the conspicuous and widespread Australian Magpie-lark: much about their life-history is interesting - they pair for life for instance, which is unusual amongst passerines, and build huge mud-nests (they’re known as Mudlarks in parts of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia).

Like so many of Australia’s birds it was named for its apparent similarity to birds familiar to European settlers, and of course it is neither a magpie nor a lark. Its actual taxonomic relationship to other birds remains uncertain: it was traditionally placed somewhere in-between the mud nest builders and the currawong family (both of which look rather similar), but in the light of modern DNA studies by eg Sibley & Ahlquist (1990) is now rather tentatively grouped in the family Dicruridae (with Monarcha and Myiagra flycatchers, drongos, and Australian fantails). It’s somehow re-assuring, in my opinion, that in our ever-more categorised world there’s a common and familiar bird walking around lawns all over Australia that still defies easy labelling…

Male Magpie-lark Gallina melanoleucos

Australia is also home to many incongruous birds brought over by homesick settlers desperate to see some recognisable birds, and it’s particularly striking just how many individuals of non-native, introduced species there are in the Gardens (at one point all I could see were intoduced European birds, hence the title of this post).

European-derived Starlings (introduced to Australia in the 1860s and now a major pest), Blackbirds (first released in Victoria in 1864 and later in South Australia, Tasmania and NSW) and Song Thrushes (found in Australia more-or-less only around Melbourne) are common; there are Asian Common Mynas everywhere (introduced to control insect pests in the late 1800s they are extremely aggressive towards native birds), and the only pigeons I saw were the now world-wide Feral and Asian Spotted Doves. Some of these species have had a terrible impact on native birds - probably nothing on the scale that introduced rabbits, rats, and foxes have had on native marsupials - but it’s well-known that agressive, hole-nesting birds like the Starlings and the Mynas have prospered at the expense of more timid hole-nesters.

Mynas, Spotted Doves and Feral Pigeons

Blackbird Turdus merula

Song Thrush Turdus philomelos

Common Myna Acridotheres tristis

So, worth visiting?

As I said, I had just a few hours spare before the flight northwards, which ruled out getting to the larger and much better reserves outside the city, but I’d certainly consider the time well spent: nothing rare or unusual, particularly for an Aussie-based birder, for sure, but it was great to get outside in such pleasant surroundings and I had some excellent views of birds that I don’t get to see more than once or twice a year.

Oh, and entrance to the Gardens is free as well!

Common Brushtail Possum Trichosurus vulpecula

Incidentally, if you are out and about in Melbourne keep an eye out for what looks like a sleeping cat curled up in the cleft of a high branch: it will most likely be a Common Brushtail Possum. These lovely animals are one of just a few native Australian animals to have adapted to non-native plants and The Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens (which are close to the Botanic Gardens) provide a wonderful home for possums, particularly Brushtails. Counts have revealed an average of almost 13 per hectare, more than thirteen times the number found in many natural bush habitats!

Not everyone in the city is pleased to have possums in their gardens - though few commentators seem to take into account the fact that few possums will have welcomed the hordes of humans moving into their habitats either - and I found this “spicy” comment on a website:

If Brushtail Possums are destroying your plants – here’s a solution from Melbourne Zoo…

• Several Lilly Pillys were planted as part of the front entrance redevelopment. They suffered major possum damage. The solution was chillies ..more specifically, Tabasco Sauce. The plants were sprayed with a diluted Tabasco mixture – and obviously once bitten, twice shy – the possums left them alone from then on.”

Information on introduced species from floraforfauna.com.au

For more on Native Wildlife in Melbourne go to onlymelbourne.com.au

All photos on this page © Charlie Moores