Bowerbird, finch, parrot and turkey (scrub)

[Syd Curtis <>]

Warranted free of abuse and controversy, actual or potential.  (And a bowerbird has a win.)

This story poses no questions and provides no information, except perhaps to indicate how important blue objects are to a male Satin Bowerbird.  And you knew that already, didn¹t you?  It runs to a thousand words, so hit the delete button now if time is of the essence. 

My mother Hilda Curtis (nee Geissmann) was a child when her pioneering family moved to Tamborine Mountain (south-eastern Queensland) in 1898.  She became an acknowledged expert on the natural history of that biologically rich basaltic plateau, and had a particular empathy with birds.  I arrived on the scene in time for the Great Depression, but our farm provided us with the basics of fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, and eggs, and bandicoots were plentiful, ridiculously easy to trap and very tasty.  So my childhood in the ?30s was pretty much idyllic.

This story however, concerns the 1960s.  Hilda, by then a widow, had her beloved birds for company.  A pair of whipbirds nested most years in the patch of rainforest Dad had retained as a windbreak against the westerlies.  (Exquisitely beautiful, are whipbird eggs.)  White-browed Scrub-wrens nested in the wood-shed, Kookaburras and Kingfishers in termite nests on trees in "our scrub".  And a variety of birds came to the feeding trays in front of the kitchen window, which she kept well-supplied with seed:  mainly sunflower seeds, much favoured by the King Parrots and Crimson Rosellas, and smaller seeds for Bar-shouldered and Peaceful Doves, etc.

The Red-browed Finches were fed separately on canary-seed.  Mother would sit on the front verandah, with her "Littlies", as she called them, all around her and feeding off her hands.  Any house-guest walking in garden early in the morning before the finches had been fed would be forcefully reminded that they were waiting for breakfast:  they would fly straight at one¹s face, only veering off in the last half-metre or so.

Occasionally a Scrub Turkey would find the feeding trays, and while Mother liked the turkeys, her pension didn¹t really run to satisfying their enormous appetites.  So if a turkey persisted, I would trap it for release near a National Park with a couple of kilometres of residential development between the Park and Mother¹s home.  The turkeys were easily caught with a cage propped up on a stick and a string to pull the stick away.  

But this story concerns a bowerbird.  There was always a resident male Satin Bowerbird with a bower on our property.  In the 1930s in our farming community, the usual set-up for washing clothes was a wood-fuelled ?copper¹ in which to boil them, and three tubs for rinsing, outside the back door.  For ?whites¹ the final rinse had ?blue¹ added to it.  Reckitt¹s Blue (was there any other?  I think not.) came in a cylindrical block, about 2.0 x 1.5 cm, enclosed in a square of cloth, tied with a string.  This was dropped into the water and swished around until enough of the block had dissolved to give the desired colour.  Whether this really did make the whites whiter, or whether it was just persuasive advertising, I guess I¹ll never know.  Commonly, the knob of blue was hung on a nail near the tubs between washes.  

My parents never had to buy blue:  if mother needed a new knob, it was simply a matter of going to the bower and selecting one.  On one occasion I counted 54 separate blue-bags ranging from discarded empty ones (no doubt from households that stored the ones in use indoors) through to ones that clearly had had but a single use.

Society progressed and the copper and tubs were replaced by washing machines.  No more blue-bags.  But coloured plastic was invented and blue clothes-pegs became an acceptable replacement.  Mother was hospitalised following a stroke and for some years the house was unoccupied.  Old SBb moved his bower into the garden.  When I found it, he had more than 30 very new-looking blue plastic pegs.  The neighbours over the road said the pegs weren¹t theirs;  the next nearest house was half a km or more away, so he had foraged well afield for his treasures. 

I had always known of the birds¹ fondness for blue, but I hadn¹t realised just how important blue objects were to them until the time I visited Mother and found old SBb on the feeding tray.  "Oh, I¹ve got some treasures for him," Mother said, and produced a collection of small blue objects.  I thought a photo was in order, so I opened the kitchen window, and set up the camera on a tripod, reckoning to throw a blue object onto the lawn, focus on it and with any luck SBb would eventually notice it, and fly down to pick it up.

So Syd goes to the window, and throws an empty pen.  Immediate reaction; old SBb is onto it in a flash and off to his bower before I could even get to the camera.  Score: SBb ­ 1; S ­ nil!.  Minutes later he¹s back on the feeding tray.

"Ahah," I thought, "I¹ll beat you."   Mother also had a couple of old tin dinner-plates, that she sometimes put on the lawn with seeds.  I attached a string to one, put it in the right place, with another pen under it.  Now I can focus on the plate, and when I¹m ready, a quick tug will remove the plate, leaving the pen exposed.

But I didn¹t do the job properly, did I?  The end of the pen must have been protruding from under the base of the plate, and although covered by the rim so I couldn¹t see it when looking down on the plate, from the feeding tray, old SBb must have seen a glint of blue under the rim, and I get back into the kitchen just in time to see him haul the pen out from under the plate.  SBb ­ 2;  S ­ nil.

Third time lucky.  All goes according to plan.   SBb ­ 2;  S ­ 1.    Old SBb wins on points.


Syd Curtis at Hawthorne in Brisbane, Queensland,