While I was having a reviving cuppa in my sunroom mid-afternoon
yesterday, between bouts of blitzing, I witnessed a presumably common enough
event, but one I’d never seen before. A pair of Red Wattlebirds has been
building a nest in a neighbour’s rowan tree, not well positioned to see
what was going on. Yesterday, my attention was drawn to a koel chorus and I
looked up to see a male koel, yodelling his heart out in the eucalypt next
door. Then the female koel shot into the rowan tree, while the Red Wattlebird
pair went beserk. The male koel joined the female in the rowan and then flew
out a couple of metres to perch in a heavily pruned callistemon, where he
remained for some few minutes, with the wattlebirds dive-bombing him. As it
became possible he wasn’t going to move, I seized the camera and crept
up. He dropped down to a patch of valerian. As I approached, the female koel
shot out from the patch of valerian and headed off north, calling loudly. The
male retreated to his callistemon perch and remained for a few more minutes,
allowing me time for an indifferent photo, before in turn disappearing. One of
the Red Wattlebirds returned to the rowan and remained there but this morning,
a discrete investigation showed no sign of a sitting wattlebird. The koels
remain in the vicinity, however. b
