An answer - if anyone has any ideas about how to protect a garden?s blackbirds
from the attacks of currawongs.He likes his blameless, melodious blackbirds
(they?re an introduced species-but have never exploded tn plague proportions)
and
is sickened by seeing them torn to pieces by Australia?s very own currawongs.
They, the blackbirds in his garden, have tried to nest ingeniously to escape
detection (even building on lop of a ladder in a garage) but the currawongs,
like
intelligent cruise missiles, seem to find them anyway. Native purists may argue
that we have no business trying to protect an introduced species from a dinky-di
one and that this is just Nature being red in tooth and claw but then we?ve
already
influenced Nature by making nice, green gardens here on the Limestone Plains.
In doing so we?ve made habitats for lots of the things currawongs like to eat
and so
have probably altered currawong behaviour significantly (lots of them now spend
the whole year in and around the city menacing bluckbirds whereas once they
surely spent some part of the year up in the mountains) and boosted their
numbers enormously. But if any reader does know of a plausible-sounding, non-
lethal currawong deterrent. please suggest it to us. Alas this columnist
suspects
that all one can do when currawongs are ripping and tearing is to look the other
way. Once in the Aranda Bushland this columnist, left what the tabloids would
call ashen-faced by the experience, saw a currawong picking off, one by one, the
chicks of a distraught and powerless maned duck (what we used to call the wood
duck). What was one to do? Currawongs have to eat and perhaps the fact that
maned ducks have so very many chicks is an adaptation to the fact that so
many of them, the wild being a ruthless place, are likely to succumb to some
everyday atrocity.
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