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| Eastern Spinebill at work. Image: I Am birdsaspoetry.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/birdsaspoetry/41576558371/ |
December Bird of the Month: The Eastern Spinebill
Gladstone was an expert amateur naturalist who lived on Lyndfield Park near Gunning from 1941 until 1996.
Image of Gladstone Weatherstone courtesy Wayne Weatherstone
Just Because I Like Them
On 20 December 1975, Gladstone wrote “Eastern Spinebill Honey-eater noted near sheds today for a short period" He saw them again later - twice in 1979, twice in 1980 and once 1981. In 1979 he observed "These are rare visitors here”.
Sometimes Gladstone exclaims about the beauty of birds he sees or birdsongs in which he delighted, but the Eastern Spinebill's undoubted attractions go unremarked. I am sure it must have been a joy for him to see them - such appealing birds so rarely present. As we shall later see, he once drew a spinebill for a naturalists' journal which suggests a real liking for the species.
Familiarity does not lessen the pleasure that comes from having them around. The Eastern Spinebill remains one of my favourites, despite seeing them often and regularly over many years. And that’s why Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris gets the Bird of the Month Guernsey for December. It also tells us something about our environment as well as allowing us to stray into the fields of poetry, art and home gardening.
A Poet’s Perspective
Lionel Welsh, a Ballarat-based poet active in the1950s, included a poem on the spinebill in his poetry collection Turkey Lolly Man. Before launching into celebratory verse, he introduces the bird to his readers, saying:
“One of the best-known of our honey-eaters, the Eastern Spinebill is a harmony of black, white and chestnut-brown. Few birds are tamer, and they will venture fearlessly and trustfully within almost a hand’s touch of a human being. Hovering before honey-laden flowers, and a clapping of wings in flight, are characteristics of these exquisite jewels of the bird world.”
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| “A harmony of black, white and chestnut-brown”. An Eastern-Spinebill on
Common Heath (Epacris impressa) Image:
(https://www.jjharrison.com.au/ |
The poem begins with two admiring stanzas on bulbuls and peacocks, both introduced birds. Welsh then comes to the spinebill:
I grant their beauty rules the East,
But I have Australian loves as well;
The shining spinebill aflit to the feast
Of honey stored in waxen bell.
A scarlet-eyed, chestnut-fronted sprite
In fairy heath-land, red and white!
Now for Some Plain Prose
The Eastern Spinebill is a common resident of the Upper Lachlan Shire. That is not to say it is present everywhere, every day. It likes forest and woodlands with shrubby understorey as well as heathlands and shrublands. Happily for the home gardener, it can also spend lots of time in parks, gardens and orchards.
It is an active and often noisy bird – hard to miss when it is with us. Gladstone, a particularly observant birder, was also a keen and productive gardener. Yet he rarely saw Eastern Spinebills in his garden, despite them being familiar residents in the Upper Lachlan.
Why did he see them so little? Almost certainly because his farm was put down to the mainly introduced pasture grasses recommended by leading experts at the time. So, with no trees and shrubs to speak of on Lyndfield Park, his home garden did not provide enough habitat to keep the spinebill for more than just a short stay. Farms with diversity in their paddocks are much more likely to enjoy seeing these birds all year round. If we want to see Eastern Spinebills, we can make it happen.
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| Image: Leo. Creative Commons |
Unlike most other honey-eaters, the spinebill can hover like a hummingbird. Its diet is about half nectar and half insect. It has high energy needs and has been observed visiting between 26 to 60 flowers per minute.
Spinebills vigorously contest amongst themselves over food sources and territory. Their aggression is mostly ritualised, so the one putting on the best show usually wins – thus minimising injury risk and energy expenditure.
Native Good, Exotic Bad?
We are often urged to favour native plants in our gardens to benefit Australian bird species. This is generally good advice. Spinebills are very fond of nectar from native shrubs and trees, banksia species being especially favoured. But they love many of the introduced plants in our gardens.
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| Image: Swee Oon |
In 1986 Ian Warden, writing under the pen name Indigofera in the Canberra Times, was contemplating purging his garden of all introduced species. He wanted it to be a haven for native birds. However, he learned that the big attraction for Eastern Spinebills in a friend’s garden he visited was pineapple sage – this despite that garden being surrounded by bushland.
At right is an Eastern Spinebill hovering in the air while drinking nectar from a marmalade bush flower Streptosolen jamesonii - a plant which is native to the Andes.
Our place, which is surrounded by bushland, has both natives and exotics in the house garden. Spinebills are regular visitors. Yes, they love banksias and the like. But they also spend a lot of time on camellias, fuchsias, fruit trees and other exotics.
Sid Hillier, who lived on the property for many years before us, used to see them but less frequently. The difference between Sid's time and ours? The house garden is a bit bigger now, but the big change is we have a higher proportion of the property devoted to trees and shrubs.
An Artist’s Delight.
What birds have figured most often in Australian arts and crafts? This
looks to be a significant PhD subject waiting for attention. As far as I
can establish, nobody has attempted to tackle this question yet.
However, a cursory trawl through the internet shows spinebills certainly
have their admirers
Eastern Spinebills were among the first species to be painted and drawn by artists who arrived in the First Fleet. Sometimes these early artists could not make their subjects, which were very new to them, look true to life – in some cases because the birds being drawn were long dead.
We don’t know the artist who painted the three birds shown at the right. But whoever it was did a very creditable job. The Eastern Spinebill is, of course, at the bottom right. The other birds are the White-Naped Honeyeater [at the top] and the Yellow Robin [bottom left]
Image: From Drawings of birds chiefly from Australia, 1791-1792, State Library of NSW.
Not only did Gladstone know a lot about the plants and animals of our district, but he was very skilful indeed at photographing and drawing them. His slides of birds and their nests were described by the President of the GFNS as being "not only of outstanding natural history interest but also very artistic".He did many pen and ink drawings of birds to illustrate articles he wrote for the Goulburn Field Naturalists’ Society journal. Pictured right is an Eastern Spinebill drawn by Gladstone which appeared in the journal.
Like the first colonial artists, Margaret sometimes paints dead birds. Her subjects though, are usually road kill rather than victims of muskets. She also has the benefit of a refrigerator to preserve her subjects and bird reference books as well.
If the National Gallery decides to mount a retrospective exhibition of Margaret’s complete works the curator will have a difficult job finding them. They have been sold far and wide. Margaret has only one painting of a spinebill still in her hands – and that because she is not entirely satisfied with it.
Margaret’s remaining spinebill, pictured right, certainly captures the essence of this bird.
That’s It for the Gladstone Series
This is the last article in the “Bird of the Month” series although Gladstone may return on occasions in other guises. What have I taken from researching the Gladstone blog series?
- Despite the awful enormity of the global heating we are now feeling, there are good reasons to be optimistic.
- The story of Gladstone's former property and many others shows very conclusively that biodiversity and production are intertwined – not mutually exclusive as most thought during Gladstone's time.
- We are bringing birds back as well as keeping our farms productive.
- Collective, co-operative action across landscapes works. Neighbours working together achieve so much more than they could be working in isolation – as was more usual not so many years ago.
- There are so many wonderful and beautiful things happening in the natural world that science and ordinary people like us don't know about yet
"Mates of Mundoonen" is a joint project of Gunning District Landcare and the Yass Area Network of Landcare Groups. It came into being because research on May's Bird of the Month alerted us to the possibility that the Spotted Quail-thrush may be in danger of local extinction. The two groups tendered this Gladstone's Bird of the Month article as evidence to support their successful funding application.
Pictured above is Gunning District Landcare’s Janet Heffernan setting out transect markers in the Mundoonen Nature Reserve for a systematic long term program of bird surveys as part of the “Mates” project. Gladstone would have approved.
Thank You
• Nicki Taws (Program Specialist – Ecologist, Greening Australia);
• Dr Tony Saunders (ornithologist and President of the Crookwell Native Flora and Fauna Club);
• Mark Clayton (former Senior Technical Officer, CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology).
Mark, Tony and Nicki have reviewed drafts of all the previous articles in the Gladstone series before publication. I am very grateful to them for their help. Time pressures prevented me from having this article reviewed, so any challengeable assertions you might find here are entirely my fault.
Thank you also to:
• John Weatherstone for providing a transcription of Gladstone's Notebook and fielding lots of follow up Gladstone related questions; and
• Margaret Southwell for telling me about her mid life journey into bird and botanical art together with a delightful home garden and art collection tour.
Like to Know More?
You can find out about the Mates of Mundoonen project which Gladstone posthumously helped bring about at https://gunningdistrictlandcare.org.au/projects/item/36-mates-of-mundoonen
Margaret Southwell’s art and craft work is often to be found at Creative Gunning
A short biography of Gladstone is available by e-mail from bobgunninghistoryblog@gmail.com.
Turkey Lolly Man by Lionel Welsh can be found at the State Library of Victoria.
You can find a bird list for the Upper Lachlan at Birds of the Upper Lachlan Shire by Dr Tony Saunders
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