Superb Fairy-wren: why it's our favourite of Australia's 'feathered jewels'
Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds.
Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds.
Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals.
In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby.
Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches.
With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel.
One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding.
Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia.
Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences.
Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties.
From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives.
Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street.
In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.'
Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong.
So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance.
Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions.
Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives.
As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield.
Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild.
In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways.
The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild.
Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels':
Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends.
There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us.
Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'.
As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it.
Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds.
Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds.
Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals.
In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby.
Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches.
With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel.
One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding.
Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia.
Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences.
Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties.
From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives.
Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street.
In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.'
Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong.
So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance.
Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions.
Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives.
As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield.
Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild.
In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways.
The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild.
Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels':
Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends.
There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us.
Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'.
As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it.
Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds.
Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds.
Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals.
In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby.
Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches.
With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel.
One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding.
Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia.
Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences.
Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties.
From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives.
Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street.
In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.'
Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong.
So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance.
Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions.
Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives.
As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield.
Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild.
In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways.
The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild.
Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels':
Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends.
There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us.
Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'.
As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it.
Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds.
Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds.
Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals.
In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby.
Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches.
With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel.
One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding.
Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia.
Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences.
Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties.
From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives.
Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street.
In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.'
Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong.
So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance.
Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions.
Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives.
As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield.
Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild.
In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways.
The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild.
Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels':
Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends.
There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us.
Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'.
As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it.
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Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds. Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds. Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals. In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby. Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches. With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel. One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding. Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia. Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences. Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties. From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives. Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street. In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.' Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong. So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance. Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions. Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives. As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield. Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild. In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways. The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild. Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels': Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends. There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us. Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'. As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it. Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds. Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds. Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals. In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby. Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches. With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel. One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding. Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia. Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences. Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties. From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives. Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street. In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.' Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong. So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance. Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions. Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives. As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield. Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild. In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways. The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild. Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels': Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends. There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us. Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'. As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it. Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds. Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds. Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals. In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby. Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches. With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel. One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding. Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia. Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences. Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties. From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives. Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street. In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.' Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong. So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance. Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions. Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives. As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield. Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild. In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways. The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild. Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels': Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends. There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us. Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'. As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it. Of the birds that bring wild beauty into our urban spaces, none is more exquisite and captivating than the Superb Fairy-wren, writes birdwatcher RUSSELL McGREGOR, the author of Enchantment by Birds. Superb Fairy-wrens abounded in the garden of the apartment in inner-suburban Canberra where I lived while researching my book, Enchantment by Birds. Iridescent-blue and purple-black males bounced across the lawn and scuttled into the shrubbery alongside their fawn-feathered female and juvenile companions. Superb Fairy-wrens are common in other cities too, including Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, as well as in the farmlands and bushlands between those south-eastern capitals. In and around Perth, their place is taken by the even more dazzling Splendid Fairy-wren, the males sporting an electric violet-blue plumage that shimmers in the sunlight. In northern cities such as Darwin and Townsville, the common fairy-wren is the Red-backed species, coloured jet-black overall with a vivid scarlet saddle. There are six other species of fairy-wren scattered across Australia, ensuring that almost every town and city on the continent either hosts these gorgeous jewels of birdlife or at least has them living nearby. Fairy-wrens are some of the most exquisite birds that can easily be found close to home, but they certainly aren't the only ones. Urban and suburban areas abound with birdlife. Where I live on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, we're visited daily by Pale-headed Rosellas, Rainbow Lorikeets, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, Grey Butcherbirds, Lewin's Honeyeaters, Crested Pigeons, and many more. Occasionally, Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves and Regent Bowerbirds drop by; and there are several species, including Noisy Pitta and Russet-tailed Thrush, that we can hear in nearby bushland but never see. In eight years' residence here, I've recorded 94 species from my backyard. There's a local fairy-wren, too. Here, it's the Variegated Fairy-wren, rather like the Superb, but with bright chestnut shoulder patches. With such a profusion of birdlife, it's unsurprising that lots of birding is done within urban bounds. In 1998, Birds Australia began a Birds in Backyards project to coordinate urban observations into a major research, education, and conservation program. Since 2014, the same organisation, renamed BirdLife Australia, has conducted an annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count. It recently shed the second word, but most observations are still done in backyards. Drawing tens of thousands of eager participants, according to BirdLife it's 'one of Australia's biggest citizen science events!' Its name is new, as is the electronic wizardry that gets data from suburban gardens into scientific datasets. But birding in backyards, like citizen science itself, is far from novel. One hundred years ago, Harry Wolstenholme, son of the suffragette Maybanke Anderson, was an avid birdwatcher who did most of his watching in his garden in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. Sometimes, he backyard-birded alone; sometimes in company with birding legends of the day such as Keith Hindwood, Alec Chisholm, and Norman Chaffer. They not only admired Wahroonga's birdlife; they meticulously recorded it and published their observations in the Emu. A glance through early issues of that journal reveals numerous articles on urban birds. One, by Wolstenholme in 1922, was a bird list for his suburb, with annotations combining affectionate appreciations with astute observations on each species. Superb Fairy-wrens (which he called Blue Wren-Warblers) he found especially charming, delighting in the 'bright warblings of these lovely little birds' that could 'be heard in every garden as they hop and flit about among the small plants and creepers'. Wolstenholme's own garden was an avian haven, arranged to encourage the birds to interact with him. To promote that process, he fed them, and, like others at the time, he had no compunctions about acknowledging the fact. Writing in the Emu in 1929, he explained how he fostered friendship with Superb Fairy-wrens: 'These little fellows, like many of the garden birds, are very fond of cheese. While writing these notes on the verandah I have had to stop now and then to throw morsels to a pair of birds that came close below me in expectation of getting some.' Wolstenholme not only fed his avian friends; he encouraged them to perch on his fingers as they did so. Quite a few obliged. His 1929 Emu article included a photograph of a Grey Shrike-thrush eating from his hand. He even fed a Lewin's Honeyeater by holding sugared water in his cupped palm while the bird perched on his fingers to lap up the sweet liquid. This was hands-on birding. Recounting Wolstenholme's suburban birding exploits in his 1932 book Nature Fantasy in Australia, Alec Chisholm lauded such interactions unreservedly. Like Wolstenholme, Chisholm considered it wonderful that birds and people had built relationships of love and trust. He considered it wonderful, too, that such connections with wild birds could so readily be made in suburbia. Despite its title, Nature Fantasy in Australia covered only a small portion of the continent: the area within a 50-mile radius of Sydney's GPO. In it, Chisholm wrote rapturously about the birds, animals and plants that dwelt there, and meditated on how the natural environment still shaped human life in and around Australia's biggest city. Setting the tone, the book's frontispiece is a painting by Neville Cayley captioned 'The Spirit of Sydney: Scarlet Honeyeater at nest in suburban garden.' The fact that this exquisite little bird was common in Sydney's gardens exemplifies Chisholm's theme of urban Australians' ready access to the wonders of nature. That theme pervades all his writings, not just Nature Fantasy. One of Australia's most accomplished birders of the mid-20th century, Chisholm did most of his birding in and near the towns and cities of south-eastern Australia. He never visited the remote outback. Through his writings, he tried to persuade his compatriots to cherish the everyday birds, animals, and plants around them. While sometimes he turned to more distant topics, he mostly celebrated the familiar nature that his fellow Australians could experience inside and just beyond their back fences. Chisholm was not alone in this. Many of his birding friends and contemporaries - including such notables as Keith Hindwood and Arnold McGill in Sydney, and Charles Bryant and Roy Wheeler in Melbourne - also wrote prolifically about the birds of urban and near-urban places, and, like him, did much of their birdwatching there. Partly, this was due to practicalities. Especially in the early decades of the 20th century, the difficulties of travel restricted birders' options, and put visiting remote places beyond the reach of many. Yet even as the outback opened up, as cars and roads improved, four-wheel-drive vehicles became available, and air travel became cheaper, birders continued to do much of their birding no more than an hour or two from home. The growing accessibility of elsewhere opened new options, but the familiar places near home - the 'local patch', to use the insiders' idiom - retained birdwatchers' loyalties. From its inception in 1952 through to its demise over half a century later, the Bird Observers' Club's monthly magazine, the Bird Observer, devoted between a half and a third of each issue to birding in and near urban locations. Even as the magazine reported on birding excursions to ever more esoteric places in Australia and ever more exotic locales overseas, it continued to keep readers informed about the everyday birds its members encountered in their everyday lives. Many Bird Observer articles reported observations from birders' backyards. Gay Grogan began one on birding in suburban Croydon in the June 1985 issue by exclaiming how 'absolutely delighted' she was 'to see the annual visit of the Fairy Wren to my backyard', then listed dozens of species she had seen there. Entranced by 'their graceful aerial ballet' and entertaining antics, she intimated that the 'gamut of emotions' stirred by the birds in her backyard made her life richer and more fulfilling. Barbara Burns of Templestowe contributed a piece on 'Birds on a busy schedule', fondly describing the many birds she encountered during her daily routines of housekeeping, taking the kids to school, and heading off to work. By putting her in touch with the wild, birds offered respite from mundane matters, even though the wild with which she connected was just off a suburban street. In the 1990s, Molly Brown regularly contributed articles to the Bird Observer on the birds she saw around her home in Manjimup, Western Australia. In typical birdwatcher fashion, she combined expressions of affection for the birds with acute observations about their behaviour. An article on 'Our resident swallows' inquired into those birds' breeding and migratory habits, while another on a 'Roadside walk' discussed birds' adaptations to roads and roadside vegetation corridors. In 'Watching at the window', she delighted in the birds she saw through the casement windows of her living room, without venturing outside. 'A variety of birds come', she wrote, 'but star billing is given to the Splendid Fairy-wren and the Red-winged Fairy-wren. A full plumage male fairy-wren must be high on the list of the world's most beautiful birds, and ... fairy-wrens have endearing characters, too.' Urban birding extends far beyond admiring fairy-wrens from the comfort of the lounge-room. It can uncover some out-of-the-way birds in some not-so-pretty places. Arnold McGill, reminiscing in 1980 on half a century of birding in Sydney, recalled with fondness the Malabar headland 'where the sewer outfall attracted a great number of sea-birds', making it 'as good as any place in the world to watch sea-birds, outside the Antarctic'. He had seen as many as 548 Wandering Albatrosses there in a single day, as well as Black-browed and White-capped Albatrosses, Giant Petrels, and several species of shearwater and prion. Alas, 'the so-called march of progress' put an end to that superb site for seabird-watching in suburban Sydney. Melbourne birders were, and still are, able to get more up-close and personal with sewage-loving birds. Werribee Sewage Farm, now blandly - and therefore inaptly - renamed the Western Treatment Plant, lies just off the freeway between Melbourne and Geelong. So prolific is its birdlife that Werribee has been declared a Ramsar site, and attracts birders not only from Melbourne, but from all over Australia and beyond. Twitcher Sue Taylor maintains that 'it is impossible to have a bad day birding at Werribee'. Waders and waterbirds are the most abundant attractions, but Werribee also hosts numerous other species, including the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot and the closely related Blue-winged Parrot. A sewage farm may not meet everyone's ideal as a place to commune with nature, but it provides crucial habitat for rare and threatened species, including some that come halfway around the world to banquet on its abundance. Smaller though similarly smelly urban locales have long attracted birders as well as birds. In 1947, Charles Bryant published a tribute to the birds of Fishermen's Bend near Port Melbourne. Subtitling his article 'Beauty in a Municipal Garbage Tip', Bryant revelled in both the diversity and the tenacity of the birds to be found there. 'Undeterred by the mephitic aroma of the burning tip, the birds go about their lawful occasions', he observed; and they were just as beautiful and just as fascinating as birds in less easily accessible - if also less malodorous - places. This, and the numerous other instances of birders delighting in rubbish dumps, sewage farms, and the like, testifies to the transformative magic of birds, enabling us to penetrate beyond the superficial unsightliness - and smelliness - of such places and there behold the mysteries of nature. The romance of birds may be transformative, but some birders took the romance of the sewage plant literally. Graham Pizzey, recounting the lead-up to his marriage to Sue Taylor in 1957, remarked that, 'Quite often ... we did our courting at the Werribee sewerage farm.' It's clear from his recollections that the choice of place was his, not Sue's. Still, as Pizzey went on to explain, his romance in a sewage farm led into a long and happy marriage, and there's something delightfully apt about one of Australia's greatest field guide authors fluffing his courtship feathers at a place whose richness in birdlife resulted from some of humanity's baser functions. Sewage farms are the haunt of dedicated birders, but less smelly suburban sites offer equally engrossing birds. Legendary twitcher Sean Dooley began his zany birdwatching guidebook, Anoraks to Zitting Cisticolas, by describing an encounter with a flock of Musk Lorikeets in a busy carpark in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Although he loved seeing rare birds in far-flung places, Dooley admitted 'the truth is that these car park lorikeets a mere five minutes from my home offer the quintessential birding experience'. It's not just that the lorikeets are pretty, although that helps. More importantly, they juxtapose the wild and the human in ways that illuminate our continuing connectedness with nature. The birds impress themselves upon our senses; they confront us with their raucously colourful reality; they tell us, visually and vocally, that even here, in a superficially soulless suburban carpark, nature not only survives, but thrives. As Dooley attests, birding at a local patch remains popular even among twitchers. Convenience, undoubtedly, is a factor, but there's more to it than that. It's also because birders - including twitchers - treasure the birds near home. Birding near home may seldom secure new ticks for seasoned birdwatchers. Yet while most birders enjoy adding new ticks to their lists, very few are interested in nothing but ticking. For most birders, today as in the past, a core component of birding is encountering the wild; and the wild near home can be as fascinating, as puzzling, as beautiful, and as awesome as the wild further afield. Moreover, engaging with the wild near home has an appeal of its own, since it attunes us to the rhythms and syncopations of nature that throb through even the urban environs where most of us live. Hearing the first Koel in September, or the Pied Butcherbird singing every day of the year; watching Superb Fairy-wrens transmute from drab to debonaire as breeding beckons, or Galahs clowning in unvarying costumes of pink and grey; being alert to the flitting, fleeting influx of Scarlet Honeyeaters when the right trees blossom, or the eternal, exasperating presence of Noisy Miners: these and hundreds of other common avian activities have captivated birdwatchers since the pastime's inception, and drawn them into an intimate awareness of how nature changes, remains constant and alternates between the two. They're among the innumerable interactions with birds we can experience close to home, inducting us into a world beyond humanity, but not beyond our capacity for empathetic connection. Alertness to birdlife enhances our appreciation of home by making us aware of its proximity to the wild. In some ways, the intimacy with nature that birders seek is easier to find when engaging with the familiar birds around home than with unfamiliar species in far-flung places. Birding close to home may not be a wilderness experience, but it's a way of touching the wild, with all the wonderment that can arouse. A Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is as wondrous as a Purple-crowned Fairy-wren in a pandanus thicket beside a river in the Kimberleys, even if they're wondrous in somewhat different ways. The Superb Fairy-wren in the backyard is an emissary of the wild. So is its Purple-crowned cousin beside that river in the Kimberleys, but it lives in a place we automatically recognise as wild, whereas the Superb dwells in the midst of human artifice. Its presence there reminds us of the resilience of the wild, its persistence even in environments humans have radically transformed. The resilience of the wild is not boundless, and if we're prepared to listen, the fairy-wren and its backyard bird companions might tell us of the need to protect their homes by preserving the remnants of nature around our own. Backyard birds are living proof that wild creatures can thrive in the interstices between the humanised and the natural worlds. But none can survive the obliteration of the wild. Backyard birds are, mostly, common species; and commonness can dim appreciation, as I've earlier noted in relation to the beauty of Galahs. Yet the other side of commonness is familiarity, which can boost our appreciation of birds, fostering closer and more amiable relations. That's what Neville Cayley was intimating when he nominated the Superb Fairy-wren as Australia's 'favourite' among 'this family of feathered jewels': Perhaps this is because he is abundant in the more populous parts and therefore is more closely associated with our home life. He is quite common in gardens, both public and private, right in the heart of our cities and towns.... No matter where you meet him, you will always find him a charming, trustful little bird, ever ready, with a little encouragement, to make friends. There's more than a touch of anthropomorphism in Cayley's words, but that enhances, rather than diminishes, the point he's making. As classical scholar and birder Jeremy Mynott argues, 'some degree of anthropomorphism is probably both unavoidable and positively desirable' when we bring birds into our orbit of understanding and empathy. That's especially the case for the birds who live daily among us. Through birders' writings on backyard birds, stretching back more than a century, flows a message that, beneath the superficial ordinariness of suburbia, extraordinary things can be found if only we take the trouble to look. The same message is evident in bird art. Peter Trusler's paintings in the 1980 coffee-table book Birds of Australian Gardens are exemplary, conveying the beauty of suburban birds with stunning realism. Many are depicted alongside artificial props: the Willie Wagtail perches on a garden tap; the Red Wattlebird, on a plastic feeder; the Laughing Kookaburra, on a timber table with a lump of minced meat beside it; and a pair of Superb Fairy-wrens disport among exotic creepers in a rock garden. Making the message explicit, Trusler tells us in an 'Artist's Note' that he 'tried to capture something of the "living magic" that the authors and I find as we watch birds go about their daily activities. It can be just as equally appreciated in the man-made tapestry of the urban environs as in the natural splendour of the wilds'. As Trusler's words attest, there's a dichotomy built into our language that divides the urban from the wild. Yet one of the wonderful things about birding - and this is a point Trusler was getting at - is its revelation that birds bridge that divide. Birds live wild in urban spaces. They are, usually, the most visible, most beautiful, and most captivating wild creatures that we encounter around our homes. A compelling motive behind birdwatching is to touch the wild, and the fact that we can fulfil that primal desire in places near home adds to the pastime's appeal. Of course, birders also venture further afield; and as the capacity to do so has expanded, via cars, planes, and all the wonders of modernity, so birders' horizons have widened. But birders still take joy in fairy-wrens bouncing brightly around the backyard, magpies carolling from the clothesline, and sunbirds nesting on the back verandah. These are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: vignettes of an avian world so close we can touch it, so similar we can embrace it, yet so different from the business of humans that we can never fully comprehend it.
