Balhannah Birds

We sat high up on an outside deck at the back of the house, and the air was warm at 8am.

Yesterday the temperature at 10am was 35 deg. C., and by 3pm it had climbed a further four degrees – 39 degrees is beginning to get to the uncomfortable stage. 

We walked up to the local shops late in the morning, and although the heat was already intense we revelled in it, enjoying the sensation after the chill of a Waikato winter.

Up in the Adelaide hills of South Australia, on the edge of the little village of Balhannah, it was quiet and peaceful, and breakfast of toast laden with fresh avocado and tomato on that deck overlooking the Onkaparinga River was as restful as could be. The river, in fact, was usually just a trickle, little bigger than a decent Kiwi farm drain, but in Aussie they revere water greatly, and anything that looks vaguely like a creek is bestowed with the grand title of ‘river’. 

The Aussies understand the value and absolute necessity of water a great deal more than we do. We mostly have it in abundance, and often squander it stupidly. In Melbourne, where we also stayed, there was a bucket in the shower, and the grey water collected was daily tipped on to garden plants. So too was the baby’s bathwater.

At Balhannah, according to our host, average rainfall was about 350mm, perhaps a third of what we get in the Waikato. The bulk of Balhannah’s rain falls in August, and in the August just gone a single 70mm downpour flooded the Onkaparinga River, bringing it lapping to the edge of our hosts’ section. It was gone within 24 hours, but the drenching the banks and verges got sprouted dense long grasses and weeds, and the odd willow tree in the riverbed was lush and shiny with abundant leaves.

The burly ghost gums lining the river seemed to take it all in their stride, their gnarled, battered trunks, maybe two centuries old, having weathered – and survived – whatever an often harsh world has thrown at them.  They’re fascinating old trees, sparsely branched, with dead wood stubbornly clinging to the mother-trunk, and a host of knot-holes where birds shelter or nest. Their scaly trunks are mostly silver-white or pallid grey (hence the name ghost gum), and sometimes the butts are charred and blackened from bushfires of earlier times.

A long-range weather map for the whole of Australia showed that about half of the country would get less than 50mm of rain from November to January, with substantial areas getting 10mm or less.

It’s a dry, ancient land, and it doesn’t hurry itself about anything. Ill-informed people suggest there is nothing to see in the outback – “just sand and rocks and dust and flies and heat…” What pathetic rubbish.

Weird animals, a plethora of brilliant birds, myriad insects and an astounding array of plants inhabit this subcontinent, like nowhere else of earth. Around Adelaide alone there are almost 70 different species of eucalyptus trees, and from the deck overlooking the Onkaparinga River I saw about 25 different species of bird.

At 5am each day, at the first faint touch of grey in the sky, a hundred and more big white sulphur-crested cockatoos crashlanded noisily into the upper branches of the ghost gums, setting up a terrible din as each tried to outdo the other in volume with their barn-door screeches. For 10 to 15 minutes the sound was horrendous, and then they hurtled off somewhere else in a flapping, soaring, rusty-voiced yammering mob.

By contrast a small family of kookaburra began the day chortling just across the river once the cockatoos had gone, and up and down the streambed little groups of magpies would start to chatter and chuckle. From high up in the gums their warbling calls seemed far more melodic and complex than the magpies in New Zealand. As well, there were the darting, sharp-screaming vivid groups of parakeets and rosellas, all racing through the branches and yelling strident early morning encouragement to each other.  English blackbirds are also common, though against the vibrant and sometimes raucous calls of the Aussie native birds their song seemed somewhat muted. 

Crows, of course, are ubiquitous, not in large numbers, but heavy and black and hoary and ponderous, and somehow surrounded by an aura of evil. No wonder the collective term for them is “a murder of crows”.

We didn’t hear or see them, but a small crew of koala lived somewhere in the trees near the deck, and our hosts told of the guttural mutterings they sometimes hear at night from the strange little animals. Several foxes are also known to cruise the valley, sampling any catfood or other scraps they can snaffle. 

With a grimace our host told of recently having five chooks, and how they were accidentally left out of their netting pen one night. Five pathetic bundles of bloodied feathers were found the following morning, and the fox – long gone – came in for some potent vituperation. 

Snakes? “Yes,” say the locals, “there’s bound to be some in that rubbish and long grass along the riverbank. Maybe browns, or red-belly blacks.”

But being smart Aussies they stick to the open ground, and leave the thick stuff to the snakes. The snakes, also being smart Aussies, stick to their patch too, and neither side tempts fate unnecessarily.

That night was appreciably cooler, and perhaps like we humans, the birds had slept and rested better, and they awoke next dawn fully refreshed. All of them were keen to let the world know just how good they felt. As the first gray fragments of light swept along the riverbed, the rolling, rollicking deep-gutted laughter of kookaburras burst out across the area, competing with the incessant and growing crescendo of the massed wheeling cockatoos; there were blackbirds in full throat, and there was a repeated series of klonking, fluted notes from some bird I couldn’t identify. 

Magpies burbled gleefully together, a pair of spur-winged plovers scolded and harassed some perceived interloper, a coot squealed in the riverbed, and there was an endless series of piercing whistles and shrieks from the swarming lorrakeets, rosellas and other small parrots as they preened and waddled importantly up and down the high branches, proudly sporting their brilliant plumage. 

It was a sight and a sound of a vast orchestra, such as New Zealand may have sounded like 200 years ago.

And now that we’re bringing tui back into our towns and cities, who knows what we can accomplish in the next few decades? The beauty of the sound would be so worth it.

Kingsley Field can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz  His first volume of these columns was published recently, and he is now working on Volume II.

Read more from Kingsley Field here