Tweet of the Week

On Sunday mornings Radio national 621 has an item called Tweet of the Week. They play a bird call and ask listeners to identify the bird. Yesterday morning I missed the question but heard the answer when it was announced an hour or so later. Before revealing the answer and the name of the first caller to correctly identify the bird, they play it again. I heard, on the radio, the familiar sound of the striated thornbills which I hear nearly every morning outside our bedroom window or in the yard as I pick the herbs for our morning tea. So I said to myself that's the striated thornbill. Sure enough, that was the answer, with only one caller correctly naming the striated thornbill although numerous callers rang in with the answer thornbill.

Half an hour earlier while I was taking Lib beakfast in bed we watched nine of the little fellas flitting about and bathing in the bird bath outside our bedroom window. What a joyous thing it is to watch.

Yesterday evening I came home from my duties on roster at the Emerald Museum and was doing my evening chores eg watering pots and seedlings and feeding my birds. I looked up into the foliage of a peppermint tree (eucy) and there was a group of striated thornbills working away presumably eating leaf lerps as they are known to do. For this I'm grateful. Prior to 2009 we had no small birds as the bellbirds hunt them out and farm the the lerps like ants do aphids for their sweet secretions, leading to tree defoliation and mortality well documented. The heat wave in 2009(?) a string of days 45C, pissed off the bellbirds and they have not returned. Immediately our eucys improved and the loss of a couple a year dead out stopped.