Old Gum Tree…by Brad Marks

Sorry for the lag in posts, the first of the year bird count reset means we are in a target rich environment, especially down here in south Texas. Sun up to sun down we are chasing birds and then by the time I get the spoils offloaded to the storage drives (and the secondary storage drives), make the eBird submissions, update Intrigued’s Average Year bird tracker and write up the day’s trip report I am absolutely exhausted. My brother Ron was also able to join us for a few days so I’m trying my best to get him caught up – yes, our brotherly “competition” transitions to “collaboration” when we are in the field together. My slow start is picking up steam as I’m now on firm ground in the Texas top 100 birders list and steadily climbing. Even bagged a premier rarity for the Rio Grande Valley today – a nice gift for my birthday (today). More to come on that success, but for now, if you are interested you can get up to speed on where we’ve been on our Average Year status page (note, I have not been able to get the charts updated yet) – link here. Best of all, I’ve been meeting a number of wonderful and extremely helpful birders this trip – our feather community never ceases to amaze me.

While I recover from my birthday celebration, going to put you in Brad’s capable hands to bring you another very special bird from their trip “Down Under”. Take care everybody, I’ll be back once things start settling down here.

Take it away Brad…

The title of this story should get your braincells remembering a song from childhood.  That is, if you are over a certain age.  I’m not admitting to anything at all, mind you. 

Jan and I were on assignment down under.  We had just completed a long day visiting Taronga Zoo in Sydney and traversing everything there is to see at Sydney Harbour.  We spent a little while trying to find P. Sherman at 42 Wallaby Way (from Finding Nemo by Disney), but then decided it was probably time to find our hotel.

Sydney is a lovely city to visit.  There’s a bit of nearly everything for any visitor.  Sydney has tall buildings for the architecture lover.  There are great restaurants liberally sprinkled through the downtown area.  A few blocks away from the harbour is fantastic shopping, even some very high-end stores with queues forming outside an hour before the stores opened.  Not to mention the Sydney Opera House (a life goal) and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, both right on the water.  In my humble opinion, Intrigued readers really must visit Sydney.  No, I’m not being compensated by their tourism council.  And yes, I’m using Australian spellings where they differ with their American cousins for this story.

On the way back from the harbour area, Jan and I decided to walk through the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney.  It was on the way to our hotel after all, and a great chance to look for birds.  Within seconds of setting foot in the botanical garden, our first photo subject was prepped and ready to go for us.  I was looking to the right side of the path at a Noisy Miner and Jan was looking to the left.  She lifted her arm to point at a bird in the tree and asked, “What’s that?”  Before I could turn to focus my attention, she had raised her camera and was firing away.

Not going to see one of these hanging out in one of our local trees, that’s for sure. Hit the jump to learn more about this kooky looking bird!

This is a Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) and the subject of the famous children’s song everyone reading this probably learned as a child.  Well, everyone that went to elementary school in the 1960’s or 1970’s or favorite boy/girl scout/YMCA camp.  If the earworm hasn’t dug in by now, here are some lyrics to help get it embedded.

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,
Merry merry king of the bush is he.
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra,
Gay your life must be!

Guess what?!  The Kookaburra we saw was actually sitting in, are you ready for this, an old gum tree.  Yup, that’s right.  Just try to get that tune out of your head now.

We were only carrying our medium length zoom lenses (18-200mm), so I’ve had to crop these images a fair amount, but stopped before they began to pixelate too much.  The Kookaburra was sitting about 15 feet above us on an exposed branch with the afternoon sun lighting it nicely.  If it was concerned with paparazzi looking in its general direction, we saw no sign that its feathers were ruffled in the slightest.  Except for an occasional glance around, this bird didn’t move for most of the photo shoot.

Kookaburras are a member of the kingfisher family.  This is one of those cases where a characteristic of the bird actually helps identify it.  They are named Laughing Kookaburra because their call/song sounds like laughing.  However, this one was giving us the silent treatment.  Even if it were singing, Merlin was having a helluva time identifying birds in Australia (worked better in New Zealand oddly enough).  It kept telling me there wasn’t enough data to positively confirm what it was hearing.  Or that Merlin only had an 18% chance of correctly identifying what it was hearing.  But it had zero trouble identifying House Sparrows.  Go figure!  I guess that means that Merlin needs more data/volunteers from Australia out actively identifying birds for future listeners. 

At a causal glance, the Laughing Kookaburra looks similar to the Blue-Winged Kookaburra except for a few key visual traits.  The wings of a Blue-winged are, ready for this, iridescent blue on the leading edges.  Laughing Kookaburras have only light blue spots on their wings.  Blue-winged also don’t have the same eye stripe as a Laughing Kookaburra. 

The range of each is different as well.  The Blue-winged can be found along the coast, and a fair distance inland, of the northern half of Australia from Brisbane on the east then anti-clockwise to nearly Perth on the west.  The Laughing Kookaburra is only found on the eastern third of Australia from about Cairns (pronounced “cans”) in the north, clockwise this time, to Melbourne and Adelaide in the south.  Populations also exist on Tasmania and a small area all the way over by Perth. 

Kookaburras can grow to be 18” in length, or just a tad smaller than an American Crow.  They are rather blocky looking when compared with the sleek look of crows.

The Laughing Kookaburra has a rather vicious hunting technique; it may choose to bludgeon its prey before eating it.  They have been known to take snakes up to 1 meter in length, grab them behind the head, then violently beat them on the ground before swallowing them head first.  Tougher cases involve a Kookaburra dropping the snake from a height to stun it first.  Easier prey includes insects, crayfish, earthworms, and rodents.  Wildlife Intrigued photographers are not on their preferred food list.  That’s really a good thing because everywhere we went, we were told that everything in the wild is trying to kill you.  (poisonous snakes and spiders, saltwater crocodiles, scorpions, plants that have toxins on their leaf edges, etc.)

Laughing Kookaburra mate for life.  They also form strong family units, with a pair of mated birds keeping several adult children and their offspring in the local family unit.  These extended families greatly aid in hunting and territory defense (about 6 to almost 90 hectares, or 15 to 300 acres), since Kookaburra are non-migratory.  I noticed the Aussies put the emphasis on the second syllable:  mi-GRAY-tory, whereas Americans tend to emphasize the first syllable:  MI-gra-tory.  Laughing Kookaburra can live up to 20 years in the wild. 

With our camera memory cards filling up, and my tummy starting to rumble a bit, we decided to move along to our next stop, the hotel.  We had, after all, covered over 9 miles that day on foot while carrying our cameras.  It was time for a snack.

Thank you for reading.  If you want to see more Kookaburra photos, please visit here. 

Credits

Thanks again to Jan for proofreading and editing.  Thanks to Jan for many of the photos in this article.