A while ago when the days were short, I started my walk in semi darkness. I thought I was hearing a tawny frog mouthed owl at the bottom of Quinn Rd. Well I may have, or I may not. Probably not.
As time went by I heard it later in the morning and in different places and I wondered why an owl is humming when he should be asleep.
Then one morning last week on my way back a bronzewing pidgeon flew up close in front of me from the gravel with a flurry of wings and settled briefly in a nearby pittosporum. I had a good sight of the green sheen on its wings. The next morning on my way back down Launching Place Rd, I heard the noise again coming from a pine tree in front of the Jehova Witness people's house. I stopped walking and looked up into the tree for a couple of minutes scanning all the branches in search of the hummer. Its movement gave it away, its chest puffing out and back in unison with the noise. Some sort of pidgeon I concluded. The only other feature I could see at this distance with the naked eye was that it had a light coloured cap on top of its head which I noticed before it flew away.
I was telling Jod about this, and about the bronzewing, at the farm while we bunched a load of dogwood blossom. He said it could have been a bronzewing making the noise but he wasn't sure about the cap so he pulled his bird book out from under the bench in the shop and looked it up. Sure enough the male has a creamy coloured cap which the female doesn't, which explains why the one I saw the day before had a grey head.
Just now I have looked up the common bronzewing in my bird book ( The Birds of Australia- A book of Identification- 758 Birds in Colour- Ken Simpson, Nicolas Day).
Its distribution is all of Australia except Cape York Peninsula. Its voice is resonant, deep, a repeated 'oom'.
It would seem that's what I've been hearing. Also on the bird scene I saw numerous yellow tailed black cockatoos during the week which are always good to watch. And the currawongs have been absent now for some weeks, which I'm happy about, I was getting tired of them nicking the mini dog yummies I put out on the shed windowsill for my friendly blackbirds. And I took a walk in the galah feeding paddock. There were many obvious, neat, concave hollows in the ground where the birds had been 'beaking', about two inches in diameter, and lots of broken off dandelion leaves. I don't know if the galahs etc were taking a bite out of the stems or biting them off to find seeds underneath.
