Bird 'watching' - then and now

In 1602, Shakespeare wrote in The Merry Wives of Windsor, "She laments sir... her husband goes this morning a-birding”, which probably meant he went hunting or trapping birds, or gathering their eggs. The term ‘birding’ is still used today in some places, mainly though for the peaceful pursuit of just watching birds.

John Gould named the Gouldian Finch, Chloebia gouldiae, in honour of his wife

In 1838, John Gould and his wife Elizabeth arrived in Australia and began to document the birds of this continent – mainly Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia. Gould, who was formerly a taxidermist, ‘collected’ fresh specimens for Elizabeth to draw. According to his own accounts, Gould seldom turned down the chance to taste the flesh of his specimens.

Reed Warbler specimen - part of the Hume collection in the Natural History Museum

In 1885, British ornithologist Allan Octavian Hume, donated a collection of more than 60,000 bird skins and 20,000 bird eggs to the Natural History Museum in London. Hume’s collection was amassed while he was a civil servant on the Indian subcontinent.

In the 1950’s in the UK, the term ‘twitcher’ was used to describe a serious birdwatcher prepared to travel long distances to catch a glimpse of a rare bird. Twitchers are often dedicated list-makers. The term ‘twitcher’ has an interesting origin: a serious birdwatcher, Howard Medhurst, would arrive at a destination on the back of a friend’s motorbike and he was so cold and shivering his friends described him as twitching.

Ornithologists today are a little more commiserative.

The term ‘bird watching’, now interchangeable with ‘birdwatching’ apparently, first appeared in North America in 1901. The pursuit of birdwatching became increasingly popular as optical quality of telescopes improved and with the emergence of readily available field guides. Today, with the development of binoculars, phone cameras and apps, the average age of birdwatchers has plummeted.

Whether birding, birdwatching or twitching, observing and learning about birds is a mindful pastime, accessible to everyone. Birdwatching can be done in your own backyard, or as some do, you can fly overseas just to see birds. Birdwatching connects you to nature, lowers your stress and improves your well-being.

 

Birdsong

Vivaldi is the composer most thought of as the one that imitated birdsong in his musical compositions, especially in Spring – The Four Seasons, where he used a flute concerto to imitate the song of the Goldfinch. The songs and calls of larks, cuckoos, swans, linnets, orioles, magpies, etc., have all been the inspiration for many composers down the years.

Some recent research by French scientists using AI to analyse 100,000 songs from 3,000 bird species revealed they all consisted of 8 fundamental types of sound that are used in various combinations to produce the myriad of trills, whistles and harmonies that birds use.  

Listening to (some) bird’s songs has long been recognised as having many therapeutic benefits. 

Here’s some links to some favourite local birdsongs to help cope with our grey winter days …

Grey Shrike-thrush                           Grey Butcherbird                            Golden Whistler

 

Superb Fairy-wren                     Gang-gang Cockatoo                     Brown Thornbill

Willie Wagtail                             Eastern Whipbird                           Lewin's Honeyeater

         Grey Fantail                           Australian Magpie                       Laughing Kookaburra

There are numerous online sources for downloading birdsong. Many current bird apps have excellent birdsong features to help recognize which bird goes with which song. Be careful but, many birds, not just the Lyrebird, are good imitators of other birds and many have different calls for different reasons – territorial, courting, communicating, alarm, etc.

Wood wide web - fact or fallacy?

It has been long well-accepted that trees and fungi have a mutual partnership. Mycorrhizal fungi are able to act as an extension of the tree’s root systems. The fungi help provide the trees with minerals and water from the soil and the trees supply the fungi with sugars formed from photosynthesis in their leaves. This example of beneficial mutualism between the two species has been known since 1885 when the German scientist, A B Frank discovered the relationship.

A small mycelium network on the underside of a log - Bunyip SP

After producing a number of scientific papers in 2021, Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, published ‘Finding the Mother Tree’, a book in which she proposed that the mycorrhizal fungi can be used by the trees to share resources between one another, even that the trees can ‘communicate’ with each other by sending and receiving signals via the fungi.

It has now emerged that the speed at which Simard’s hypothesis has spread, has outpaced any science underlying it – it appears that more research is needed.

Spectacular Rustgill (probably!) - Thornell's Reserve

In 2023, Professor Justine Karst and two other scientists published a paper in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution with the wonderful title ‘Positive Citation Bias and Overinterpreted Results Lead to Misinformation on Common Mycorrhizal Networks in Forests’, a scientist’s way of saying ‘we think you are wrong’.

Nangara Reserve

Whatever. While the debate rages, I won’t be deterred from visiting some of my favourite forests and marvelling at the amazing diversity of fungi, trees and other flora and fauna that are under threat from climate change and other man-made activities.