Lyrebird fledging

This bundle of sticks wedged into the base of a tree is the nest of a Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae. It measures about half a metre wide and tall. The adult female builds the nest, incubates the single egg and raises the chick on her own. The males only display, sing and mate with the females at their display mounds - see post of 10 August 2023 below. Sandra Lauer and I found this nest in August this year, when it was still winter in the forested hills near Canberra, Australia. The nest at the time contained an egg. The egg is incubated for about fifty days and the chick spends another five to six weeks in the nest. It snowed a number of days during the incubation and chick periods, but the nest is thickly lined with soft downy feathers plucked from the adult female's breat and belly.

I found a nest in 2023 that had been raided by a predator, probably a feral cat, but it was inconclusive - see post of 27 August 2023. So this time, I set up a camera trap to watch for any potential predator. Although the camera didn't detect a predator, and I couldn't determine what animal it might have been, the chick did fledge, which is good news. 

Below are a few clips of the birds' behaviour.

This is a photograph of the chick when it was about five weeks old. It is about the size of a bantam chicken, it has lost most of its first black chick down, but it is not yet fully feathered. The rufous throat feathers are showing well though. There is no room for both the chick and the adult in the nest.

In this clip, the adult female is feeding the chick in the nest, then she jumps down. There is clearly still food in her throat pouch, so she gives the chick another feed. After that, she takes a faecal sac from the chick, runs into the forest with it and either buries it or eats it as the camera stopped recording.

Here a Grey Fantail Rhipidura albiscapa comes in close to the nest as the female feeds the chick. The contact calls between the adult and chick can be clearly heard. The adult prods the chick's rear to induce it to release a faecal sac, then she quickly swallows the whole sac before jumping don from the nest.

The chick is fed once again, but it is nearing time for it to fledge from the nest and it watches its mother as she walks off through the forest, scratching in the litter for invertebrates to eat and give to the chick. The area around the nest, for about thirty metres, was well turned over by the female from her previous weeks of foraging.

The final feed at the nest. The female begins to walk away, watched by the chick. Then, with a little hesitancy, it jumps to land right next to its mother and the two birds walk of into the forest, calling to keep in contact all the way.

Thick Bush and Clear Roads

An adult male Flame Robin Petroica phoenicia

Winter is almost over in Canberra and the first of the Spring migrants are moving in, as I have seen on a few recent August days up in the nearby Brindabella Ranges, in the Namadgi National Park. The White-eared Honeyeaters were the most vocal with their chopping calls, there were a few Flame and Scarlet Robins, back from their winter quarters in the lowland paddocks and woodland, but most of the birds had yet to return. 

The forest was rather quiet overall. At this time of year the characteristic sound is that of singing lyrebirds. These birds reside there all year and lay their eggs in mid-winter when snow is on the ground. Their incubation takes several weeks and the single chicks take several more weeks to fledge. So, perhaps they need to lay early to give the young time to grow over their first year. 

A small part of the heavily forested Brindabella range

I first counted lyrebirds in the area in 2001 and 2002, before the catastrophic bush fire which burnt out most of their habitat in January 2003 - over a hundred thousand hectares. As I had those counts, I have been counting them in the years post-fire to measure how their numbers have compared over the years since.

They came back slowly from single birds singing along transect lines, to similar numbers as pre-fire after several years. Now however, their numbers are dropping and on one transect there have been no birds for two years. The reason? One might be because the fire destroyed so many trees and most of the ground cover including the leaf litter, that the regrowth has come up thickly with grasses, shrubs, ferns, and saplings all competing for space. That has created a dense mass of vegetation at ground level. Lyrebirds need leaf and bark litter to forage in for invertebrates, their main food, and leaf litter needs space to collect on open ground.

A Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae forages on an open part of forest floor

It  is good to see the forest recovering, but it will take many more years for the full structure of the mature forest to re-establish. The lyrebirds will survive, and once the saplings grow tall and shade out the lower plants, the ground cover will open up and leaf litter will build up, then the lyrebirds will have more foraging habitat. 

Thick regrowth smothers the forest floor - no room for leaf litter to collect and lyrebirds to forage

The open ground is also an important habitat feature for other birds such as the robins. The Flame and Scarlet Robins both hunt by perching on a low branch, then swooping down to catch invertebrates they see on open ground. As there is now so little of that under the close ground covering vegetation, they are largely restricted to hunt in what open spaces there are. The main ones being those along the forest roads.

The artificial open ground of a forest road - but leaf litter only collects along the edges 

There were robins hunting along most of the roads, which made bird-watching of them easy. I wondered how many there were hunting in the thick vegetation. However, the bush where I tried to walk in for a look was impenetrable, wandering off the track was not an option. There are some open spaces, and there will be lyrebirds and other ground-foraging birds there. And there will be more in future as the forest grows into shape.

A male Scarlet Robin Petroica boodang hunts from a perch above the forest road

The open roads are also good for insects as they allow sunshine to reach the ground. It is cold up in the ranges and insects benefit from the extra sunshine through the gaps. What amazed me was how the robins were mostly catching small insects that I could not even see. Butterflies were easier to spot as they spend much time basking in the sun. Such as the Australian Painted Lady butterflies that were out sunning themselves last week.

An Australian Painted Lady Vanessa kershawi basks in the sun on a forest road
 (note the specific blue centres to three ocelli on the hindwings)

The Australian Painted Lady is a migrant butterfly and these were probably some of the first to arrive in the area. Soon the forest will be busy, and noisy once the large numbers of migrant birds return. 

Flame Robins are rather smart-looking birds