Further to my story this week about felling the hawthorn in our back-yard:
We've been in our present house about two years now and have been steadily
removing non-native trees (of which there were an awful lot in a small space).
As we have removed them we have found that we get fewer and fewer non-native
birds. When we first moved in we had Sparrows, Mynahs and Starlings roosting
in a bamboo-clump, when we removed this they moved to a Pittosporum hedge,
when we removed this, most disappeared. And so it went on.
Finally we removed the Hawthorn (the penultimate non-native) and there has
been an eerie lack of any of the above three pests in our yard now for the
last two weeks and we can get on with enjoying the Scarlet Robin that's been
around, and the immature Black-faced Cuckoo-Shrike practising its hawking
from the phone wires.
Unfortunately nothing native we've planted is more than a meter or two high
yet so we haven't had hoards of native birds coming to feed, but one day...
Anyway, I think the moral is clear, away with those introduced trees and
shrubs...
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Dr John Leonard
PO Box 243, Woden,
ACT 2606, AUSTRALIA
" Old pond,
leap-splash?
a frog. " Basho
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