“The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience.” ~ Hilaire Belloc
I doubt that my thoughts are quite as elevated as Belloc’s as I huff my way up the hill behind our place. But at least I’m on my feet, working on a post-retirement fitness regime that sees me walking up, down and around The Patch most mornings.
It’s a chilly spring morning, and the valley is bright, quiet. As I strain up the straggly slope, the silence is pierced by a bird clearly calling out pick-it-up, pick-it-up! Rapidly, repeatedly, as insistent as a miniature drill sergeant: it’s a striated pardalote tutoring from the treetops. I’ve become the motivational target of a bird that’s the size of a glue stick.
They say a coach should lead by example. And you’d have to say these tiny birds have done the hard yards. Some of our striated pardalotes (Pardalotus striatus) fly as far away as south-east Queensland each autumn. And each spring they fly back to mate and nest in our bushland. An 11-gram bird doing a round trip of up to 4,000 kilometres – no wonder you don’t see fat pardalotes.
Striated pardalotes are found in every state and territory of Australia. Of course there are regional variations, indeed several different races, of these birds. Subtle differences in marking and colourings have been clearly noted. But it took an international website that shares bird sounds from around the world to persuade me that they also have regional accents. The site, xeno-canto.org, has thirty different recordings of striated pardalotes from all over the country. While describing bird calls in words is not an exact science, and birds do have vocabularies, it seemed to me that the pick-it-up, pick-it-up call of our pardalotes is not found everywhere. You might even say that our birds have a Tasmanian accent.
As I continue walking through The Patch, pardalotes are not the only birds barracking, although I should use that word loosely. A couple of big black forest ravens fly over. They tilt their heads, lifting their wingtips in what looks to be a rude gesture. Then, like drivers yelling their displeasure through the car window, they sledge me at the top of their lungs: Aaaahh-gawaaarn-ga-waaaarrrrrrd! One even alights on a treetop to continue the tirade. And when kookaburras start joining in, it’s clear my fitness efforts are laughable.
But it’s not all discouragement. Olive whistlers do what they do best, whistling in a cheerful, encouraging manner. Tasmanian scrubwrens sound even more excited, urging me on with a thin, high-pitched cheer. Tasmanian thornbills too express a wild, shrill excitement, and high above a couple of kelp gulls join in, cheering shrilly caaarn c’maarrrn c’maar-aar-aaarn.
It’s not only the calls. Sometimes my tramping disturbs small amorous groups of brush bronzewings. When these heavily-built pigeons take off in fright, their wings make loud applause. This frightens more than it encourages, but the result is still an acceleration in effort. Later my path takes me close to the rivulet, and even it seems capable of a demure roar. I feel encouraged, although it occurs to me that I’m probably having aural hallucinations brought on by oxygen deprivation.
But it’s when I start wondering if the plants will join in (“Surely the dogwood would!”; “What’ll the wattle be saying?”; “Is the eggs and bacon bush egging me on?”; “Is that orchid giving me the bird?”) that I realise I’ve gone deep into fantasy land.
Thankfully the mute bulk of kunanyi/Mt Wellington straightens me out. Just near my turnaround point I see it afresh, the angle of view new, subtly different. The mountain’s massive presence is silent, reassuring, a balm to soothe my barmy internal chatter.
I pause, my sanity regained. And now I can feel – and smell – a change in the air. There’s sunshine for a start, and sunshine with warmth in it. That lick of warmth has awoken The Patch. Some of the signs of this are subtle, like the season’s first bird orchids and spider orchids quietly rising from the moist leaf litter. Other signs, such as the flowering of wattles, altogether lack subtlety. From my vantage point it seems as though a massive golden tide of blossoming wattle has begun to flood the valley.
Although common – and disparaged as unspectacular in some tree books – silver wattles (Acacia dealbata) have their Cinderella moments. It is as though they distil summer’s sunshine, mature it through winter’s long, dark nights and short, cold days and then, come spring, fling the sunshine willy-nilly onto every available branch.
Each blossom – and there must be hundreds of thousands per tree – becomes a perfect sphere. As I examine it more closely, I can see that each globed blossom in turn contains globelets. As each of these matures, it unfolds, sending a radial burst outwards, giving each whole blossom the appearance of a Roman candle caught mid-explosion. An individual blossom is in micro what the whole tree, indeed the whole landscape, becomes in macro: a slow, explosive burst of spring exuberance.
This botanical gusto extends to the blossom’s perfume. If, at first whiff, an individual blossom has only a faint scent, en masse the scent is altogether less modest. It fills The Patch with a thickly sweet, almost dizzying tang. Taken together these sensory bursts make wattle blossom time one of the happiest and surest signs of spring. If I’ve begun my walk as an Eeyore, this has turned me into a Tigger.
Vertebrates and invertebrates soon join the jollity, visiting the blossoms day and night. Moths, mammals, butterflies, beetles, bugs, bats and birds, including our pardalotes, feast on the distilled sunshine in one form or another. Perhaps they know, happy thoughts notwithstanding, that the flowering of the wattle is far from the end of wintry weather. Without fail there will be more snow before the year is out. Eeyore can’t always be wrong.
Peter Grant lives in the foothills of kunanyi with his wife. He worked with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service for 24 years as manager of interpretation and education. His passion for the natural world led him to write Habitat Garden (ABC Books) and found the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. More of his writing can be seen at naturescribe.com.
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