Curlews on Vulture Street: Cities, Birds, People and Me

By Darryl Jones

In Curlews on Vulture Street, acclaimed urban ecologist Darryl Jones reveals the not-so-secret lives of the most common birds that share our towns and cities. Despite the noise, heat, dust and fumes, the ceaseless movement, light and toxins, many birds successfully live their lives among us. And not just furtively in the shadows. Ibis steal our lunch, brush turkeys rearrange gardens, and magpies chase us screaming from near their nest. From his childhood in a country town noticing blackbirds and sparrows to studying brush turkeys in the suburbs, Jones shares a fascinating story of curiosity, discovery, adventure, and conflict, played out in city streets and backyards. He also provides rare insights into the intimate lives of some of our most beloved and feared, despised and admired neighbours. You'll never see magpies, curlews, ibis, lorikeets, and cockatoos in the same way again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781742238579

Book preview

PREFACE

‘Curlews? On Vulture Street?’

Sergeant Irene Untolerand looked at me across the table like someone who knew trouble when she saw it. But what she saw was worse: a contemptible waste of her valuable time. I suspected she was someone who could extract a confession without saying a word. This was not a time to be flippant.

‘Stone-curlews, actually,’ I offered. I should have read the room, but no. ‘Surprising to find them in such a built-up area …’ I had been driving along Vulture Street in Brisbane’s West End just a few hours earlier, when suddenly I became aware of something large and alive right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and stared in amazement: a bush stone-curlew was standing in the middle of the road. It wasn’t just that it was big – almost ibis-sized but more compact – but that it was here at all. They are supposed to be reclusive and easily disturbed, hiding in mangroves or on remote grasslands far inland. This strange, lanky, awkward-looking creature should not be wandering around downtown Brisbane. It was clearly oblivious to the risk of the cars all around. And then I noticed it was shepherding a couple of tiny chicks, just a few days old. Oh, I see: they’re heading towards a park on the other side of the road.

What I hadn’t noticed was the police car behind that almost smashed into my rear end.

West End Police Station was just a few blocks away, in the heart of this old but vibrant suburb. It’s an easy walk from Brisbane’s ultra-modern CBD, yet this area is a heady mix of hippy commune, traditional Greek village and hipster enclave. The local cops are used to handling the odd drug dealer or clandestine sourdough racket but were not so enthusiastic about urban ecologists on their beat.

‘Is this some kind of Extinction Rebellion thing?’ demanded the young constable who stood beside my open car window, Queensland Police Service notebook open, pen at the ready. He had not been impressed when I tried to explain why I had stopped so abruptly.

‘Curlews, right there …’ I stuttered, gesturing towards the now-empty roadway. The birds were nowhere to be seen.

‘Tell it to the sarge, mate,’ was all I got.

The sarge was now listening, arms folded, head tilted slightly, death stare engaged. ‘So, explain again why you had to stop your vehicle without warning in the middle of a busy street, endangering the public and my officers?’ she asked in a low, steady, ‘don’t-try-to-be-smart’ voice. Logic, science or clever debating strategy was not going to work here. Instead, I went for the card of last resort, the desperate ploy of the almost certainly doomed.

‘I was worried about the babies …’ I muttered.

Silence. The officers shifted, almost imperceptibly. The sergeant, though still staring, changed her demeanour; only a little, but I noticed. Careful now, but it just might have worked. I arranged my face into what I hoped was a sincerely concerned look.

‘Babies?’ asked Sergeant Untolerand.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The curlew was trying to get its newborn chicks to safety across Vulture Street into the park. Appears they hatched in a tiny garden on the other side of the road. It’s hard to believe they’d survived all the cars and cats.’

I paused. More silence. Everyone was looking at the sergeant, waiting to see how she would react.

Nothing happened for a few long moments.

‘I see,’ said the sergeant, standing up slowly. ‘Bloody cats,’ she muttered and then turned to her staff. ‘Constable, see the gentleman out. Miller, get on to that woman from the Council. They’ll need to put up a sign.’

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Vulture Street, Brisbane, as anyone with even the slightest awareness of cricket will know, runs along one side of the Gabba, that enchantingly named cathedral of Australian sport in the suburb of Woolloongabba. For its entire length, this busy road traverses a typical inner-city landscape of trendy pubs, ageing warehouses and quaint wooden houses, which are being replaced inexorably by hideous rectangular apartment blocks. There is no green space to be seen, apart from scraps of lawn and some unkempt shrubs shoved into the odd triangles of land that sit between off-square buildings and car parks. Nowhere seems suitable habitat for anything but a desperate rat or pigeon, yet this large bird is not just enduring, but thriving. Their usual habitat is grassy woodlands and coastal forests – the bush – where they quietly skulk in shady patches during the day, emerging at dusk to hunt insects and lizards. But many of these areas have been turned into housing developments or farms, and stone-curlews have suffered.

But, although these birds have disappeared from most of southern Australia, in the northern part of their range they are still plentiful. What no one expected was that they would take to the urban landscape of Brisbane in a big way. And not just the leafy suburbs; in fact, they are more often found in these tiny, pathetic, neglected spaces in the inner city.

How this is even possible is intriguing. It exemplifies the disconcerting fact that all sorts of wild things have unexpectedly moved in and are living happily among us in our otherwise humancentric landscape. Nature has come to town. Unpredicted animals are now occupying places in towns and cities that seem, to us, completely unsuitable. Of course, this isn’t what happens for the majority of wild species when we completely transform their habitats into the weird landscapes in which we humans like to dwell. More often, almost everything flees or dies once the bulldozers arrive. Everywhere on the planet species are vanishing under a tsunami of urbanisation. Most will never return. The expansion of urban areas is now one of the primary causes of global extinctions, up there with climate change and habitat loss. Yet, some creatures, seemingly against all odds, are raising a middle finger – or feather – to humanity’s hubris and are doing just fine.

Before I arrived in Brisbane in the early 1980s, this city was still the big country town of persistent, but inaccurate, legend. Vast sprawling suburb would be a more accurate description, with the familiar weatherboard Queenslander houses on stilts presiding over their quarter-acre blocks. Every backyard had plenty of room for trees – often tall gums, retained from the original bushland, or planted poincianas or jacarandas – and a wide sward of lawn maintained by the Saturday morning ritual of severe and deafening mowing. Gardens were comprised of a few English roses, chrysanthemums or dahlias, while gardening was an uneasy juxtaposition of traditional European constraint and subtropical exuberance. The consequent – and ongoing – attempt to impose order and control over raw natural vigour has resulted in a domesticated savannah of lawn with a few scattered trees over a vast suburban landscape. Ideal for backyard cricket, but not much good as wildlife habitat.

Not that anyone seemed interested in having wildlife around their home. Animals that were somehow domesticated or tame – those that had forsaken their wildness for dependence on people – were mostly welcome. But real wildlife was something you encountered out in the countryside or in a national park. The wild animals that ate your roses or disrupted your sleep were Pests or Nuisances. Real wildlife had to be actually wild, living in the wilderness – or at least in the bush – somewhere else, far away. It wasn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t be part of the human world, especially not in The City.

Of course, that is misleadingly simplistic; the reality was much more complex. But this idea of ‘wildlife’ contains a hint of the fundamental difficulty of trying to understand our place in the world, and the diverse relationships humans have with the rest of nature. At this point, a different book might begin to explore dialectics on the intersection of man and nature, human dominion over Creation, nature versus nurture, art versus science, Laser Skirmish versus forest bathing. All are important, but I am more comfortable discussing what’s happening when a magpie slams into the back of your head, or why a brush-turkey has just turned your carefully manicured garden into a mound in front of the garage.

In Brisbane today those traditional Queenslander houses are starting to vanish. Many have been renovated into expensive real estate statements or, more often, demolished to make way for a cluster of template townhouses, set fifteen centimetres apart with barely room for a stand of pointless decorative palms.

Throughout the entire continent, however, yards and gardens that do have some space have had a profound transformation over recent decades. Gone is any semblance of European symmetry or the aesthetics of order. Backyards everywhere have been comprehensively redesigned, as our once disparaged native plants have been rediscovered with cult-like zeal. Now, endless cultivars of grevilleas, banksias, callistemons, kangaroo paws and a thousand other species blossom in every street and local park. These ‘new natives’ have been manipulated beyond anything evolution could ever have contemplated, including enlarged blooms that are present year-round. They’re marvellous, astounding, but hardly natural. And the wildlife – and the people – love them.

This rapid alteration has been revolutionary and, like many large-scale experiments, some of its outcomes have taken us by surprise. Although many of these plants were marketed as ‘bird attracting’, no one was fully prepared for the extraordinary explosion of a small number of native birds that took advantage of this super abundance of nectar and pollen. Throughout the land, rainbow lorikeets and noisy miners have become the commonest birds in towns and cities. But these are just the sweet-beaks. Everywhere there are native pigeons, rosellas, magpies, crows, currawongs and cockatoos. Hidden in darkness, brushtail and ringtail possums have proliferated and Australia’s largest nocturnal avian predator, the powerful owl, takes full advantage of this bounty. Among the skyscrapers, every capital city is graced with peregrine falcons who prosper with deadly precision on the endless supply of feral pigeons. Flying foxes scream and squabble in our trees, bandicoots delve into our lawns and masked lapwings vindictively guard their eggs on school sports ovals.

And, on scraps of vacant land all over inner Brisbane, a strange-looking bird is raising its chicks, despite the cars and foxes.

These days, people do notice the wildlife. It is hard – no, impossible – not to. People see, meet, welcome, feed, shoo away or take selfies with urban wildlife. Many of these interactions are benign, trivial and sometimes intimate. Even in a 43rd-floor apartment, cockatoos, crows and butcherbirds fly by and perhaps land on a balcony in search of a handout. Feeding these visitors is ubiquitous, although still controversial. There are also less positive interactions, often when animals seek a snack without consent. And, of course, the springtime dramas involving magpies and people can be serious and tragic. Plenty is going on between humans and wildlife. This intersection of realms is where I have been dwelling now for several decades; the strange, exhilarating place where people and nature mix, often uneasily, trying to understand what the heck is going on.

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A long time ago, when I first mentioned my tentative desire to learn more about the wildlife that lives around people, I was told plainly to forget it. To be able to understand nature, it was pointed out firmly, you have to avoid humans. Nature, it seemed, was the part of the planet without people. I was told a lot of things that turned out to be nonsense.

This book is what happens when you ignore such advice. It is a tale of people, wildlife, urban wilderness, towns and cities, triumphant successes and epic failures. It is a personal account of serendipity, discovery, adventure, danger and mind-numbing tedium. It is also, in part, the story of the strange hybrid field of knowledge called urban ecology, exploring how this has evolved and changed in the decades since it started. It plays out in the subtropical suburbs of Brisbane but much of this story is applicable everywhere.

If there’s a theme to the whole thing, it would be an attempt to answer this question: can people and wildlife coexist in places dominated by humans?

Finally, it is my story. It’s biased, far from objective and often painfully naïve. But it is also, give or take a modicum of poetic licence, an honest account of what has been a wild and unpredictable journey.

Urban terminology

There is no getting around this: the way that parts of cities and towns are described can be very confusing. A simplistic representation of a city often assumes a circular arrangement of different zones radiating evenly out in all directions. At the very centre is the most altered, the CBD (Central Business District). Surrounding this are the suburban areas, made of smaller buildings and single houses. Further out still are the fringes with larger blocks and maybe small farms, then proper farms and, finally, the bush – natural areas. This concept is often called the ‘Urban-Rural Gradient’ or ‘Continuum’ and there are an endless ways to further break it down.

For my purposes, the entire area of the town and city – including the CBD, the residential areas up to the hobby farms – is ‘urban’. ‘Suburban’ is the part dominated by houses and yards. All you need to know is ‘urban’ means the whole human-dominated landscape we think of as a city or town. Suburban is the part where most of the people live.

1

Blackbirds

ON

Inglis

Street

Do you belong here?

There’s a blackbird on the back lawn. A blackbird! But there can’t be.

I was just home from school and had walked into the kitchen, following the scent of fresh Anzac biscuits. Something moved outside on the lawn. I crept over to the window. It was … a blackbird. I recognised it immediately, which is strange because I’d never seen one before. Not a real one, anyway. There were pictures of them in books of nursery rhymes: blackbirds stuffed into enormous pies or standing on lawns in English gardens. They seemed small, stout and boring. Nothing like this one.

It hopped, paused and hopped again, alert and full of life. I had to watch. It was so vibrant … then a dog barked and it was gone. Vanished.

The whole event lasted a few seconds. I didn’t know that much about our local birds, but I did know that blackbirds were British. They simply didn’t live in the Australian bush; certainly not in an Aussie backyard somewhere with a name like Wagga Wagga. I’d heard there were some in Melbourne, but that’s more or less London anyway: dull, grey and drizzly. Wagga in summer is stinking hot, dry and hard as a cricket pitch. No way a pommy park-dweller would cope with that.

Wagga people regarded anything new – including ideas – with extreme suspicion. That in itself was a bit of a worry: I was already thinking about this bird with an unnatural amount of interest. There was something about its bounce and energy, those bright, intelligent eyes, its jauntiness; it was unlike any Australian bird I knew.

But the questions remained: what was it doing here? How did it find my backyard? How could a British bird live in the Australian bush? And, something else: did it belong here?

I needed to tell someone; but who? There were very few people who might be interested. The obvious option was Uncle Greg, Dad’s older brother, who always came over on Tuesdays. But I was afraid his reaction might be along the lines of ‘bloody useless birds’ or something similar. I still carried the emotional scars of the last time I tried to talk to him about birds. That had been about sparrows, or ‘spags’, as we called them, the dirt-common; the most uninteresting birds imaginable, most people seemed to think. They were just noisy, messy nuisances, stealing the chooks’ food and building untidy nests in the eaves. There was simply no reason to even consider them.

A few months earlier I had been walking past the chook yard when a small flock of sparrows flew up and landed on the fence in front of me. Being so close, I was able to see them clearly. They were all just sparrows, the quintessential ‘house sparra’, but for some reason I noticed that a few were a bit different to the rest. These were a little thinner and pinky-brown, rather than the standard dull grey. And they had a smudge of black on their cheeks, like commando camo. They flew off a few moments later but I kept the image in my head. At school the following day, I found a bird book in the library. There was a page showing the birds that had been released into Australia from other countries. There was a pretty unlife-like painting of the familiar house sparrow, but, yes, another sort as well: a ‘ tree sparrow’, I read. Two species so similar that most people didn’t notice. Or care.

For me, however, this was amazing. A discovery even – something definitely unexpected. Unwisely, I let myself become excited, a common reaction that can somehow have life-long implications.

Contrary to prevailing attitudes that ‘nothing exciting ever happens around here’, this minor event was the first time I realised that unexpected things can occur in the most unlikely places. But you had to be paying attention. Even though these birds were just another boring sparrow, it was something no one else knew or cared about. I was starting to see that markers of personal achievement didn’t need to be cricket or footy scores or having a brand-new second-hand BMX – things a normal fourteen-year-old was supposed to aspire to. It was possible to find remarkable occurrences anywhere.

On the other hand, it was also important not to be too enthusiastic. The day after my sparrow discovery, I had heard Uncle Greg’s characteristic high-pitched laugh coming from the backyard and raced down the back stairs to find him. He and Dad were concentrating on something but I blurted out my news anyway.

‘Hey, Uncle Greg! Guess what! You know sparrows? Well, we’ve got two sorts: house and tree sparrows. Right here! I saw them myself. They’re in the bird book …’

It was then that I noticed the men were extracting a large amount of tightly bound grass and feathers from inside the roof of the chook shed: a massive sparrows’ nest.

My uncle and Dad looked at one another and then at me. A few silent seconds followed before Uncle Greg, still holding the huge nest, fixed me with a steady gaze and said very distinctly: ‘Sparrows? Sparrows? Forget about bloody sparrows! Or at least figure out a way to get rid of them once and for all. Now, if you aren’t here to help, bugger off!’

It was just another instance of when it might have been advisable to keep enthusiasm in check. Best stick to the practical, or discoveries that other people are interested in. And so I didn’t mention the blackbird to Uncle Greg, or anyone. But I did set myself the task of finding out more about it.

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My parents weren’t hostile or disparaging of my interest in wildlife. It’s just that such matters were irrelevant to their lives. They tolerated my enthusiasms, even though they didn’t understand why anyone could be interested in things so, well, trivial. Uncle Greg, however, despite the occasional outburst about vermin, was the one adult who actively encouraged my interest in animals.

Uncle Greg’s passion was Australian parrots and he had a large collection of lorikeets, cockatoos and rosellas housed in numerous aviaries at his hobby farm a few miles away. I was always pestering my parents to visit so that I could see the birds and listen to stories of trapping Major Mitchell’s cockatoos or finding food for fussy turquoise parrots. Late in the afternoon, as we went from cage to cage, replenishing water bowls and checking nest boxes, the place was deafening with screeches and squawks.

His great project was trying to breed these birds. This seemed to involve offering peculiar foods (including termite larvae and poppy seeds) at crucial times, and arcane rituals such as putting slightly burnt sheep’s wool into nests just before the eggs were due to be laid (to keep parasites out, he claimed). Despite his successes, Uncle Greg was always adding to his collection with new birds captured somewhere out in the bush. He was reluctant to reveal much about these trips – I suspect the activities were not entirely legal – but catching these often secretive birds required excellent observational skills and a thorough understanding of their lives. He loved talking about these things with me; I don’t think many other kids, including his own, showed much interest.

These were key experiences for me, especially as a teenager who was navigating the mysteries of groups, gangs and girls. Wildlife was so much easier, even if it did bite and scratch (that part came a bit later). Blackbirds, sparrows and uncles needed to be mentioned here, but this story starts elsewhere – on an isolated farm way out of town.

Ignored by apostles

For the first nine years of my life I lived on a tiny farm in the dry, flat Riverina, about twenty miles north of Wagga Wagga. It was a wide-open landscape, gently undulating and exposed to a pitiless sun and the vagaries of a fickle climate. Huge solitary eucalypts were scattered about the broad bare paddocks, although there were plenty of trees in the wide travelling stock reserves that ran beside the main roads. Thin, meandering lines of trees indicated the locations of the few creeks, which were bone dry most of the time. Avonlea was a typical mixed farm, producing truckloads of wheat bags or wool bales when the weather was kind, and debt and anguish the rest of the time.

While most of the farm was pretty much treeless, our little house nestled up against an extensive patch of trees: ‘the forest’, as I called this rare dark-green island. This dense, shady place consisted mainly of (I came to learn) callitris trees (or black cypress), known simply as ‘pines’. Their timber had legendary resistance to rot and termites; most of the houses in the area were made of pine milled on site. Memories of those days are often vague and indistinct – delightfully so. My world was one of space and a deep pervasive quiet. That ambience – the gentle, comforting security it conveyed – remains a chimera I have pursued ever since.

It was natural, if not expected, that I should make my own entertainment and keep out of the way of the adults. Right from the start, my life was almost entirely solitary but I don’t remember ever feeling alone or lonely. As soon as I was old enough to wander away from the homestead, I began exploring the stockyards, clambering over the machinery and – as often as possible – getting lost in the forest at the back of the house.

All sorts of animals shared this little world with me: dusky woodswallows, blue-tongues and bearded dragons were always around. However, the lousy jacks (I eventually learned these were called apostlebirds) were the most conspicuous inhabitants: strange grey ruffians who always seemed involved in some clandestine exploit. Their squabbling groups were in perpetual motion, emitting odd electronic sounds, entirely oblivious to what was happening around them. My father rarely seemed to notice wildlife, but he always paused to watch the shenanigans whenever the apostlebirds passed by. ‘Silly buggers,’ he would say with a grin, shaking his head as the group tumbled past in a noisy melee.

When my baby sister arrived, Mum was totally preoccupied, which meant I could spend even more time outside. Dad was always off somewhere: on the tractor, rounding up sheep, or helping one of the neighbours with some task or other. Running a farm involved a never-ending series of tasks and everybody, including children, had chores they were expected to do. One of my early jobs was turning the handle of the cream separator when Dad brought in the bucket of steaming milk from the milking shed every morning. And on washing day – every Monday – I helped stoke the fire beneath the huge metal cauldron (the copper) while Mum stirred the hot water and clothes with a wooden pole. There were plenty of other tasks, as well, and I never queried being asked to participate: everyone was expected to do their share of the many activities that kept the place running. It was simply part of the life you lived. Once the chores were completed, however, it was time to disappear.

When the moment came, I was gone in seconds. Grab a hat and a handful of biccies on the way