14 Honeyeater Migration
About this episode
Some birds pass overhead in waves, if you know when to look. Carol Probets shares the Yellow-faced Honeyeater migration through the Blue Mountains and the birdwatchers who count them each year.
Episode illustration: Yellow-faced Honeyeater
Carol Probets’ 25-year career as a birding guide began in 1994 when she decided to turn her passion into a job teaching beginners birdwatching classes. Since then she has introduced hundreds of people to birdwatching and guided countless Australian and international birders around the Blue Mountains, Capertee Valley and throughout NSW. Now semi-retired, she works freelance doing bird surveys and still can’t believe her luck getting paid to go birding. Carol is also a past President and current Vice-President of Blue Mountains Bird Observers and co-ordinates the annual honeyeater migration counts. Apart from birds, she is interested in all aspects of natural history and loves bushwalking, photography and good coffee.
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Kirsty: The guest of this episode of Weekend Birder lives in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, the land of the Darug and Gandangurra people. For countless generations, Aboriginal peoples have shared the Blue Mountains as their seasonal home, hunting ground and ceremonial place. They have a continuous and deep connection to their Country and I would like to pay my respects to elders past and present. I would also like to recognise the strength, capacity and resilience of past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in the Blue Mountains region.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder - I'm Kirsty Costa. If you have never met Carol Probets before, you are in for a treat. Carol has introduced hundreds of people to birdwatching, especially in the Blue Mountains, Cape Verde Valley and throughout New South Wales.
Carol: It would have been before I was about seven or eight. I just for some reason I was just fascinated by the birds around me and was not because of anyone I knew as I had no family members that were into birds. It was just something that I was just fascinated by. And I'd hear these bird calls around me and wonder what they were. Eventually, somebody gave me a copy of the book 'What Bird is That?', which at the time was the only field guide available. There are much more effective field guides available now but at the time it was a very interesting historical book, that one, because it was so important that in those days. I'd look through the book and look at all the hundreds and hundreds of birds and think, "Wow, I wonder if it would be possible to see some of these!". And I didn't have binoculars or anything (I was too young) but it was a great thrill whenever I could actually identify something that I saw. But as you get into your teenage years, that it seems like an uncool thing to do. And so I kind of lost interest for, well I didn't fully lose interest, but it kind of just got forgotten about for a while. And then when I was 23 years old, I moved up the mountains. I got into rock climbing and I moved up the mountains and because of that, for the first time ever, I met other birdwatchers. IWhile being out in the bush, much of my interest was rekindled. That's when I really got into it big time and that was in in the early 1980s. I joined various birdwatching clubs, started keeping proper records and start contributing to what is now called 'citizen science'. We sort of think of citizen science as being this new thing, but in fact, it's been around for many, many years. It just wasn't. Called citizen science back then, and it wasn't done via an app or smartphone. It was it was done by writing things on sheets of paper and then sending them in the mail.
Kirsty: Carol has spent decades exploring the Blue Mountains, where more than 250 different species of birds have been recorded. Its rainforest gullies, rocky heathlands and eucalypt woodlands are home to some of Australia's most endangered birds. One of the places that Carol loves to visit is what she calls 'Honeyeater Hill'.
Carol: It's one of our honeyeater counting sites, and it's not marked on any map as 'Honeyeater Hill'. It's a name we gave it. It's near Katoomba and it's on a ridge covered in Heathland. Being an exposed heathland site, it doesn't have the best bird diversity. For the best bird diversity in the mountains, you really need to get into the rich wet forests. The forests that are dominated by Blue Gums and Monkey Gums or the western valleys with the drier woodland are really good bird diversity. But this beautiful heathland hill, when it's a good day you have the chance of a really special bird experience out there. And it is one of the best places to actually watch the honeyeater migration, which on a good day that is something that's really spectacular. And it's not just honeyeaters that are coming through, but all sorts of migratory species. You just never know what's going to turn up next. You just watch all these birds whizzing past you in waves and you could be seeing not just various honeyeaters, but pardalotes and all sorts of other migratory species - swallows, woodswallows and I've even seen a flock of Swift Parrots fly past (which are a critically endangered species now). On top of that, you have the most spectacular views. You don't want to go out there on a windy day or a freezing cold day but if it's a nice day, you just sit there and bask in the views. You can see pretty much 360 degrees and it's just so unexpected what you could see there. When the migration is happening, Peregrine Falcons live there and they patrol the area to hunt any of the slower little migrating birds. And if you are really lucky, you can see the Peregrines hunting and catching the little the honeyeaters or some of the other migrants.
Kirsty: There are more than 180 species of honeyeaters living in Australasia. With 83 species found in Australia, they make up our largest family of birds.
Carol: Wherever you are in Australia, there's going to be some sort of honeyeater around. From the alpine areas to the driest deserts, to the coasts, to the tropics - everywhere in Australia there are some sort of honeyeaters. And they're so variable. They range from the tiny Scarlet Honeyeater (which is about the size of a gum leaf) up to wattle birds and the largest of wattlebirds, the Yellow Wattlebird (which is 45 centimetres long). So it's a pretty big size range. They tend to be dominant, pugnacious birds in their environment - they're always squabbling with each other and chasing each other away from the best flowers. They're very agile and fast flying, are able to hang upside down and are very acrobatic birds. The word 'honeyeater' is actually a bit of a misnomer. They don't eat honey, they eat nectar from flowers to various degrees. Some of them rely very largely on nectar and others less so. All honeyeaters also feed on insects in addition to nectar and things like insect secretions - things like lurps and honeydew and fruit. So they have actually quite a wide variety of food. But you've got birds like the little Eastern Spinebill and the Scarlet Honeyeater and the iconic critically endangered Regent Honeyeater, which are birds that rely very much on nectar - nectar is a major part of their diet. And then ranging to honeyeaters like the Brown-headed Honeyeater, where insects are a much bigger part of their diet. So yeah, a really variable group.
Carol: They are very important ecologically because they're major pollinators of a lot of our flowers in Australia. One of the features that distinguish honeyeaters is that they have a brush-like tongue. If you imagine a little paint brush that they can move in and out of their bill. It can extend beyond the tip of the bill, which they use that to gather up the nectar out of the flowers. They all have a slightly down-curved bill. It might be long and thin or it might be shorter and thicker but it's always slightly down-curved. And another thing about them is that when you're identifying them, it's often the features on the face that you use to identify. And you mentioned that quite a few of them have some sort of yellow stripe - that's a good example of those face markings that can help to identify them. If you see a honeyeater and you can see the face, it's usually a big help.
Kirsty: A way to identify if a bird belongs to the honeyeater family is to look at its scientific name. Western Science organises animals by classification, which is based on where they live, their anatomy, their behaviour and other characteristics. Western Science tends to use Latin or Greek to give every animal a unique scientific name so that people around the world can communicate about an animal no matter what they might call it in their local language. The scientific name of each bird is designed to tell you something about the birds relationship with other birds. So when you look up different honeyeaters in your favorite field guide or in an app you're using or online, you will find that every species starts with 'meliphagoidea'. Once you know this, you will discover that myzomelas, spinebills, friar birds, chats, miners and wattlebirds also belong to the family of honeyeaters. And you will also discover that quite a few of these species migrate.
Carol: It's a phenomenon that's called the 'honeyeater migration' and it's not just the honeyeaters that migrate, but it's predominantly honeyeaters. And it just so happens that the Blue Mountains is one of the best places in Australia to see it. Not long after I first moved to the mountains, I started noticing in certain places in Autumn. You just had this constant stream of particularly Yellow-faced Honeyeaters just coming through in hundreds and hundreds. On a good day, it's just totally overwhelming the number of birds that fly through. It's actually one of the most spectacular migration events in Australia and yet hardly anybody knows about it. I mean, people talk about the whale migration and the big migrations in other continents but we have our own spectacular thing here. The problem is it's very hard to predict - you just have to be in the right place at the right time to see it. About 12 years ago, we our club decided that we would embark on a program to monitor the numbers of the migrating honeyeaters at some of the bottlenecks where they come through. As these birds fly North from their breeding areas to their Winter feeding areas, they're generally going in a northward direction. And as they come to the Blue Mountains, they come up against these big vertical cliffs so they're funneled into the gullies. All these masses of birds, they all get funneled in like a bottleneck into a narrow pass where they come up the cliffs. If you stand in certain places at the tops of these gullies, you just get phenomenal numbers coming through. It can be absolutely breathtaking.
Carol: So we embarked on that rather ambitious project of counting these birds and monitoring them. We've been doing that for over ten years now and we have over 50 volunteers that take part. It's all Blue Mountains residents that take part because of the way we do it, because there's so much variation from day to day. We really need to count on lots and lots of days. It's not something you can just come up and do on one day. We have teams of people counting on a certain day every week for the 6 or 7 weeks of the Autumn migration. They do a 20 minute count on whatever day is their scheduled day. If it's raining and wet, we still have to count and you're likely to get no birds at all. If it's overcast you might get a few. But if it's a really good day, you can get thousands and thousands of birds. It's worth persevering all those weeks just for the chance of having a good day. Some of our our biggest counts have been over 4000 birds counted in 20 minutes. If you can imagine, it's like standing outside a big motorway and counting the cars going past. It's a bit like that. They're just different birds all the time going past. They're all going past in the same direction. It's quite exciting, really, to count them. We've counted them for over 10 years now and we've done 1400 counts on 470 separate days. The idea is to monitor for any long term changes in their numbers. Because there's so much variation from day to day and from year to year, it has to be a long term project. Because only by doing this for a long time (for many years) is the only way to really be alerted to any declines or any changes in their numbers or to just see to try and work out any trends, to try and work out what actually influences the numbers.
Kirsty: I don't know about you, but I'm curious to know how Carol and her team count hundreds of birds at once.
Carol: What we do is if they're coming through in small numbers, it's not too much of a problem - you just can count them as they go past. But once the numbers start to get bigger and they're coming through faster, then we teach people to get a mental image of five birds. You count in fives - 5, 10, 15, 20 and so on. And then if they get even more, then change to counting in tens - 10, 20, 30, 40 and so on. On a really really big day, sometimes you find yourself going, "50, 100, 200, 300". Like that. They're just coming through so fast. We don't pretend that it's an accurate count. It's the best estimation that's possible, really. We've tried out comparing different people's results at the same time and the results are surprisingly close, actually. And the good thing is that you don't need to be able to identify them, you just need to count. As long as you can see and as long as you can count, it's something that people can can get involved
Kirsty: Yellow-faced Honeyeaters and White-plumed Honeyeaters are the most common honeyeaters that Carol and her team see during their counts. So where do they migrate and why do they migrate?
Carol: They're migrating from their breeding areas. This is Autumn, remember? They've finished breeding. They breed all along the tablelands and coastal areas of south-eastern Australia. They're coming from their various breeding areas and they're going towards areas where there's good winter nectar. They're generally moving north and the winter feeding areas are not necessarily the same each year. It depends where the best nectar is and where the best conditions are. It might be the banksia heathlands on the coast, might be the banksia heathlands in the mountains, or it might be the Box Ironbark woodlands, which are inland and west of the mountains. Some years are more inland years and some years are more coastal years. The Swamp Mahogany woodlands on the coast and the Spotted Gum is another one that attracts a lot of honeyeaters in the Winter. Just these various areas according to what's flowering best that year. The other thing to remember is that they're partial migrants. A lot of Australian birds are partial migrants and what that means is that some of the population migrate and some of them don't. It's just a certain proportion that migrate and that proportion may change from one year to another, which may explain why some years we get a really big migration. And some years, like this year, very small migration.
Kirsty: Because the Blue Mountains is a migration bottleneck for Yellow-faced Honeyeaters, it is known as a Key Biodiversity Area. Key Biodiversity Areas are identified as being the most important places in the world for species and their habitats. Carol and her team are part of an official program that identifies maps, monitors and helps to conserve key biodiversity areas. The data that they are collecting will soon be available to BirdLife Australia and any researchers who wish to analyse it. The Yellow-faced Honeyeater is widespread in eastern and southeastern mainland Australia, from northern Queensland to eastern and southern Australia. Here's how to identify it when you are out birdwatching.
Carol: Size wise, most people are familiar with sparrows. It's comparable in size to a sparrow, but it's slightly longer. But that's because honeyeaters have longish tails. The tail is a bit longer than the sparrow's tail and the bill is a bit longer than sparrow's bill. It actually weighs less than a sparrow. To look at it, at a glance, you'd think, "Oh, it's roughly sparrow size, but it's got a smaller body and a longer tail". Apart from that, it's a fairly plain looking bird, just sort of grey brown, but with the lovely yellow stripe through the face. The amazing thing about them is the way they just move through in these massive waves. So many of them. And they have a little contact call, it's such a cheerful little call. As they fly, they all kind of go, "Chip, chip, chip, chip". So when you hear hundreds of them doing that, it becomes such a characteristic sound of Autumn when they're moving through. Every time I hear that migration, the call of the Yellow-faced Honeyeaters, it's like, "Oh! Autumn's here!" (or to a lesser extent spring). They're starting to come back in spring and then when they land their call is very brisk, "Chick up, chick up, chick up, chick up". So it's a really cheerful, brisk little call. Kind of lifts the spirits every time you hear it.
Kirsty: Carol recommends a good field guide and a good pair of binoculars as basic tools for watching honeyeaters and other Australian birds.
Carol: The beauty of birdwatching is that you really need a minimal minimum number of tools. There's very few things you really need. And I mean, these days for a lot of people a camera is their first tool and that's fine. But I'm going to put forward a slightly different viewpoint here. I would suggest that the number one basic tool that you need is a good field guide. And by that I mean a book, a paper book, and there are several good ones available. A field guide shows you all of the possibilities. If you're searching for something online you might come across something that looks similar and it's easy to jump to the conclusion that that's what you've seen. But unless you've got a book with all the possibilities laid out next to each other, you can actually compare them all and work out which one. There are three or four really good field guides available at the moment.
Carol: The second tool, of course, is binoculars. A lot of people these days go without binoculars because they have really good cameras or cameras with really powerful telephoto lens. I think it's fantastic that there are so many people getting into bird photography. It means that so many more people get interested in birds because it's such an addictive thing taking photos of birds. And it seems so easy to take a photo of a bird and then work out what it is. I would suggest that everybody, even the keenest photographers, sometimes leave a camera behind. Don't take it with you all the time because it's really good exercise and really good experience to watch birds without trying to photograph them. Just watch them. And if you've got binoculars then all the better. Watch the way they move, try and train yourself to look for the important features so that you can at least get an idea of what you're looking at in the field rather than having to rely on using a photo. I mean, one of the things with using a photo to identify birds is that you might have captured that bird at a weird moment. Sometimes birds are in funny positions or their feathers are fluffed up the wrong way or they're facing the wrong way or they're in shadow. And it kind of gives slightly wrong impression of what the bird looks like. I've actually seen photos that are quite deceptive. They look like one thing when they're actually another thing because nothing is as good as actually seeing the movement that the bird is making. Not just one moment and the way it moves, seeing all the bits that you can possibly piece together of the different angles that you see the bird at.
Kirsty: Carol had a 25 year career as a birding guide and continues to be involved in the birdwatching community in semi-retirement. She has a wealth of advice to share.
Carol: I'll illustrate this by something that I used to do sometimes when I taught beginner birdwatching classes and I had a rubber lizard. The only reason I had a rubber lizard was that I didn't have a rubber bird but it's the same principle. I had this rubber lizard in a box and I would get it out of the box in front of the group and I'd say, "Quickly! Tell me what colour is its belly?". And straight away people would say, "green belly". I would show them in good light that the belly was actually light grey. The box that it came out of had a green lid and I was holding it above the green lid. And what they were seeing was the reflection of the green lid onto the belly and it made it look like it had a green belly. So that just illustrates how color can trick our eyes and what we see is not necessarily the actual colour of something. It can vary by the shadows and by the light conditions. If you're looking in a book or at a photo on online, it can depend on the light conditions that it was photographed under. It can also depend on the colour balance of the photo. People try and describe a bird to me and they say, "It was kind of brown. It was sort of a light brown color". I suggest something and show them a picture. And they say, "Oh, no! It was it was a slightly different color to that".
Carol: If you remember the how deceptive color can be, my advice is not to get too caught up in the exact colour of something. Instead, what you should be looking for is its field marks, which are distinct markings that most birds have. It might be an eye strike. A lot of birds have a pale eyebrow. It might be striations on the throat or on the breast. Striations are little vertical stripes might be barring, which refers to horizontal stripes. Striations might be on the breast or on the tail. Or the bird might have a marking in the wing, a little flash in the wing. Or some spots on the wing, something like that. Any distinct markings can be a great field mark for identification. Along with things like the shape of the bird and the bill, of course, which is very important. The tail length and the habitat and the behavior, all these things together help to identify birds. First and foremost, really try and see if there's any particular markings. There are two very beautiful birds, which are sadly both declining - the Flame Robin and the Scarlet Robin. The books will tell you that the Flame Robin has an orange-red breast and Scarlet Robin has a sort of bright scarlet-red breast. This is usually true, however, I've seen Scarlet Robins that look surprisingly orange and Flame Robins that look surprisingly scarlett. The other way to tell them apart, which is much more reliable, is that the Scarlet Robin has a black throat. The red doesn't go up all the way to the bill, it's cut off abruptly with a black throat. Whereas with the Flame Robin, the red goes all the way up to almost the beak. And it also has a small white spot on the forehead, whereas the Scarlet Robin has a much bigger white spot on the forehead. So those are the things that will really tell you more definitively which one you're looking at, rather than is it a bit orangey or is it more of a scarlet color.
Kirsty: That's such good advice. I am often mesmerised by the colour of a bird and don't properly look at its markings. Thank you, Carol. Your passion and commitment to conservation and education is really inspiring listeners. Check out the notes for this episode or visit the Weekend Birder website. If you'd like to find out more about honeyeaters. And if you live in the Blue Mountains, you might even like to get involved in the migration count. I've been so overwhelmed by the support for this little podcast. Thank you so much for your social media comments, your emails, and for leaving your writing and review on Apple Podcasts. It really means a lot. Stay tuned for more birdwatching stories and advice on Weekend Birder.
