Are Currawongs Always Wong?

I wrote this very recently for the Canberra Ornithologists' Group newsletter Gang-gang (http://www.canberrabirds.org.au/); it occurs to me, given the passions that Pied Currawongs can inspire in eastern Australia, that it might be worth offering it to a wider audience as well. I've edited it very slightly to take into account the different context.

......

The boldly staring eye is one of the first things people remark on. The heavy straight business-like beak with the wicked little hook on the end suggests, quite rightly, deadly purpose. Most of their hunting is for invertebrates, searching carefully, stopping to listen and relentlessly pursuing small prey under loose bark and in crevices, hammering at surfaces with that powerful beak. Vertebrates feature quite heavily too however, and grisly stories abound, if we choose to interpret them that way. Eye witness accounts refer to a persistent assault on the feet of a large Green Tree Frog until it fell to the ground, was seized and eaten as it was held down; another tells of a pair working as a team to harry a Feather-tailed Glider. It is understandable if people were shocked at seeing one hurtle into a family of Superb Fairy-wrens and seize the blue male, or select a male Scarlet Robin from a mixed foraging party. Accounts are numerous of eggs and nestlings taken. Are you nodding grimly? Sorry, what was that – currawongs?? No, no, I was talking about Grey Shrike-thrushes, generally one of our ‘favourites’. 

If you’re suggesting that it’s not the same thing you’d be right – in fact unlike shrike-thrushes, currawongs are primarily fruit eaters, at least outside of breeding season. (We normally use ‘currawong’ in the south-east mainland to imply Pied Currawong, but the comments here are generally applicable to the other species as well.) Overall they are truly omnivorous, but even so most of their meat is in the form of insects; their favoured prey is phasmids, the big stick insects which in numbers can defoliate eucalypt forests. In particular they favour the big-bodied gravid female phasmids, for which a million eucalypts are doubtless grateful, in their quiet way.

OK, of course I’m trying to make a point here. We have favourites, in almost any facet of life, which is fine as long as we acknowledge our biases, at least to ourselves. It’s understandable that we should get upset that ‘our’ nests are raided in our yards that we’ve set up to protect wildlife. On the other hand, everyone loves blue wrens, but they can slaughter hundreds of native animals, including babies, in our garden every day. So, our concern for birds preying on other animals, including baby ones, does not extend to insects. Our bias here is almost entirely towards other vertebrates.

The really important difference between currawongs and shrike-thrushes in this context is simply one of abundance. If shrike-thrushes were present in flocks, searching the shrubbery for nests, we may well turn our animus towards them and feel benignly towards the occasional cheery Pied Currawong we encountered. We’ve done two things here (and make no mistake, this one is primarily down to us). Both are due to the fact that we’ve improved conditions for currawongs in Canberra, primarily by planting exotic berry-producing shrubs like Cotoneaster and Pyracantha species. These produce fruit mostly in autumn and winter, providing a reliable food source at what would normally be a tough time of year, and there is little doubt that this allows currawong populations to remain higher through winter than would have been the case in pre-European times.

Furthermore until recently virtually the entire Canberra Pied Currawong population headed for the hills in spring to breed in the mountains. Even in the early 1980s a begging currawong in Canberra was a most unusual occurrence. In 1976 the surprisingly impressive Readers Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds commented that “very few people have ever seen their nests”, a statement that seems ludicrous today. Now, while many Pied Currawongs do still breed in the mountain forests, very many also breed in the same suburbs where they spend winter. There are two implications of this dramatic behavioural change. The period when growing baby currawongs want lots of protein to get them established (like most other chicks) is the time when currawongs prey most on vertebrates, including nestlings. Formerly this harvest took place out of sight and largely out of mind, but suddenly it was happening right in our faces. A secondary implication of this was that the menu in suburbia was rather different from the mountain fare. Up there, discreetly hidden away, all the nestlings taken are of native species; in suburbia a good proportion are exotics such as Feral Pigeons, Starlings, Blackbirds and Common Mynas. Overall the proportion of currawong diet which comprises native birds has undoubtedly fallen in recent decades (though the higher number of currawongs must also be considered).

Our concern with currawong diet is not new, though the focus of the concern has changed. Alec Chisholm, in his column in the Argus of 27 October 1934, reported that the Brisbane Pest Destruction Board from 1925 to 1934 paid (the bounty is not recorded) for the carcases of 55,204 ‘Scrub-magpies’ (ie Pied Currawongs). Their crime is not described, but I assume it was for pinching fruit rather than for the killing of other birds (after all they also paid out for 171,541 starlings and 443,913 sparrows). Various early writers listed a wide range of food taken to which they were not welcome, including raisins on the drying rack, quinces, olives, maize (after stripping off the covering) and chook eggs, as well as insects which were not begrudged. References to nestlings are very scarce.

I don't expect to change any minds by a mere opinion piece. But if it encourages someone to re-examine the nature of a bias, it will have been worth while. Birds are just what they are - only we judge them as being right or wong.

Silly Drongo?

Fork-tailed Drongo
Etosha National Park, Namibia
2003

It may not be the only drongo in my suburb of Duffy, but it's the one that interests me the most at present! Drongos, despite most Autralians' perceptions, are actually a group of pretty spiffy medium-sized glossy-sheened long-tailed aerial show-offs, which do so in order to catch flying insects. Most of the world's 25 or so species (these things are dependent on your preferred taxonomy) are found in southern Asia and Africa, but one, the chatty, flashy Spangled Drongo, is found commonly in tropical and sub-tropical near-coastal Australia from the Top End to about Sydney. South of that it gets pretty scarce; inland it's scarcer still, so an appearance in Canberra is a rare treat for those of us who appreciate such things. There have probably been less than 10 individuals reported here, and this bird would be only the fourth or fifth in a decade (it can be hard to know if multiple sightings in a short time refer to one or more birds). In my 30+ years in Canberra it's only the second I've seen here. It's difficult to say what drives such unexpected appearances; we can be pretty confident that overall rising temperatures are pushing warmth-loving species further south, but what made this one decide to leave the relatively balmy coast and head up to Canberra, currently very frosty indeed? It's not saying, as it hangs around the same clump of planted acacias on the western edge of Duffy, on the border of Narrabundah Hill, dashing out to catch insects, sometimes taking a sojourn in the yards across the road. Its brown (not glowing red) eyes tell us that it's not a full adult; maybe its inexperience simply led to it getting disoriented, perhaps accompanying a band of migrating honeyeaters returning from their winter break up north.

Spangled Drongo, Duffy. August 2012.
Note bee in beak!

And before we leave this engaging chap to get on with things and presumably eventually go back to where it might find others of its ilk, I should point out that our derogatory use of the word drongo to suggest someone who's not intellectually the full quid is not taken directly from any attribute of the bird (despite what you might read on Wikipedia!). In the 1920s the owners of an Australian racehorse named it Drongo, presumably in the hope that it might prove as dashing as the bird; it didn't quite, though it managed a few gallant second places. In time the word has come to mean someone pretty hopeless, rather than a trier who just fell short, as was the original connotation.

Starting Out

Azure Kingfisher
Barmah Forest (River Murray, near Echuca)
April 2012

I've been watching nature, experiencing it, loving it, trying to understand it and sharing those small understandings with others for nearly as far back as I can remember. The Sleepy Lizards (Shinglebacks) out the back of the farmhouse near Wasleys, north of Adelaide, fascinated me as a very small child, as did the small animals that come onto the safely enclosed verandah. My reading as a boy centred around animal books, much of it pretty anthropomorphic, including (at different levels) Shy the Platypus, Shadow the Rock Wallaby, Penguin Road, Kipling, Ernest Thomson Seton, Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough. I have the book where, at age 12, I kept my first daily bird list on a family holiday from Adelaide down the Coorong into Victoria. In time, by now in Canberra, I started to run bush tours back in 1984, for a long time in association with the local Conservation Council and Environment Centre until their needs differed, and wrote books, including wildflower field guides and natural history guides to the ACT's magnificent Namadgi National Park. I taught courses through the ANU's Centre for Continuing Education, including on birds and plants, and have had a regular natural history slot on local ABC radio since 1992. I've served on ACT government environment advisory committees since 1984 and chaired the committee for the past few years. I still do all these things, but now, very tentatively, I've decided to try and share thoughts and observations in another medium, blogging. Who would ever have thought it? But let's see how it goes. I'll comment on things I see happening that might be of interest to others, talk about the natural history of trips that we make - and some that I've made in the past - and if there's any response I can react to that too and perhaps fine-tune future postings accordingly.