[Animals] Searching for Spotty: the lure of the legend of Sherbrooke Forest

[-_-Moltres-_-]

 

n my family, ornithology meant lyrebirds. Not long before I started school we moved to the market town of Croydon, then just beyond the fringes of suburban Melbourne. The Dandenong Ranges were our back yard – too close when bushfires swept through in the summer of 1962 and my father joined the firefighters and came home late, blackened, with his eyebrows singed. In late autumn and early winter, however, the mountains were cool, friendly and at peace. Dad and I would rise at 5am, long before dawn, and creep around a chilly and dripping Sherbrooke Forest with sticky black soil clinging to our hands and knees.

Ornithology meant being quiet, listening, searching for “Spotty”. I could never quite work out how my father knew which of the birds we heard was Spotty, except that we seemed to follow the loudest and clearest calls. Usually we would find him in a clearing, foraging in deep leaf mould with his long feet. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, he would throw his long tail over his head and dance.

 

My father, like so many enthusiasts before and since, never tired of the antics of the lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae. He never noticed if the day was cold or wet. Much has been written about the beauty of the lyrebird’s tail, but the fascination of this bird for him was its almost-human personality. With large bright eyes adapted for dark forest life, and teasing calls, a master of mimicry and ventriloquism, Spotty lured us into thinking like a bird. If we could wriggle into a position where we could watch for a sustained period, we could observe the tricks of his trade. He would be here– but his call was over there. Whose call? My favourite was his eastern whipbird imitation, but it could equally be a bell miner or one of the many scratchy little calls of as-yet-unidentified “little brown jobs”. Spotty was an ornithological schoolmaster. As he worked through his mellow repertoire, Dad would whisper to me the names of the birds Spotty was imitating. The sounds were not all bird calls. He did a splendid breaking twig, too – possibly the noise he associated with us.

Learning to live with people

The lyrebird is secretive, but not always shy. It takes the trouble to bury its discarded feathers and drop the faecal sacs of its young in streams to be washed away. Yet its bold encounters with the human species have given it a special place in the po[CENSORED]r imagination. A mutual fascination for lyrebirds and people emerges from many of the curious lyrebird anecdotes recorded in the “Stray Feathers”’ columns of early Emus. A gang of men building a road into Walhalla, east of Melbourne, in 1907 were favoured with a regular “building inspector” – a male lyrebird who capitalised on the grubs and worms disturbed by the works.

Many early reports expressed concern about the lyrebird’s habit of nesting so close to the ground. “In Southern Gippsland foxes have become so numerous that all ground nesting birds are in a fair way to extinction,” the Australian Naturalist reported in 1906. “It is to be hoped that before the last of [the lyrebirds] fall victims to Mr Reynard, they will learn to build out of reach.” LC Cook at Poowong in South Gippsland recorded that indeed lyrebirds did learn: they built their nests higher and higher when fox numbers increased

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/04/searching-for-spotty-the-lure-of-the-legend-of-sherbrooke-forest