30 Merri Merri
About this episode
A creek changes every season if you keep walking beside it. Ann McGregor shares birdwatching along Merri Creek, or Merri Merri, and the birds that appear through the year.
Episode illustration: Australasian Pipit
Ann McGregor started birding as a child at her family’s weekender in the Dandenong Ranges. She still enjoys watching long-term favourites such as the Eastern Spinebill and Golden Whistler, but also spends time birding around Australia and overseas, always on the lookout for unfamiliar species. Ann has co-ordinated the Friends of Merri Creek bird surveys since they began in 2008 and is here to share her experience with you.
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Kirsty: The Wurundjeri take their name from the Woiwurrung word 'wurun', which means the manna gum, and 'djeri' the grub which is found in or near the tree. Wurundjeri are the witchetty grub people and their ancestors have lived on this land for millennia. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend this respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders living around Australia.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa and I'm a teacher, conservationist and lover of wild birds. Today, you and I are joined by Ann McGregor, who is going to share her love of the Merri Creek and watching birds through the seasons. Here is how Ann got into birdwatching.
Ann: Way back many years ago, my parents bought a property in the Dandenong Ranges with a big garden. They were very keen gardeners. I was an only child. So what was I to do? Well, I wasn't going to start gardening, was I? I was about 7 or 8 and there were quite a lot of birds in the garden. So I started looking at them. An uncle of mine was actually a member of the Bird Observers Club of Australia. Then maybe it was even Victoria. Then he found out I was looking at the birds, so he joined me up as a member of the Bird Observers Club, which was really nice of him. And so that sort of enhanced my interest, I guess. I've been looking at birds more or less off and on ever since then. Yeah, different in different places.
Kirsty: Ann is here to share her knowledge and stories of one of her favourite bird watching spots, the Merri Merri, which is also known as the Merri Creek. It flows for 70km from Wallan, which is in the north of Melbourne, until it joins the Yarra River at Dights Falls near the centre of Melbourne.
Ann: Merri Merri Creek - it should be two 'Merris', which means rocky creek in Woiwurrung language, the language of the Wurundjeri people who are the Traditional Owners of the Merri Creek catchment and much more besides. They looked after the creek and all the country in the catchment for obviously many thousands of years. European settlers arrived, people moved up the Merri Creek quite early on in the 1800s and started clearing the trees and developing farms, dairy farms and sheep grazing country and so on. And then that was closely followed as Melbourne grew by industries. So creeks and rivers were considered very handy drains. In those days there were no sewers, so you just tossed your wastewater or your rubbish or your refuse into the creeks. It's quickly degraded the water quality. I think it was probably really smelly, like the Yarra by the middle of the 1800s, most of the native vegetation had been cleared in the in the lower sections of the Merri Creek near where it flows into the Yarra. At Abbotsford it was quite degraded and that lasted well through most of the 20th century. A lot of the 20th century it became invaded by weeds like fennel, which was pretty dense and almost over head height, and it was still considered a dumping ground. If people had something they wanted to get rid of, they just took it down and dropped it in the Merri Creek, including old cars, stolen cars and burnt out cars and wrecked cars and all sorts of other junk. But it was in the 1970s that people started to realise that we could do better. There was more interest in more parkland for people to have go for walks or enjoy a picnic or whatever. In the northern Melbourne suburbs, people didn't have a lot of parkland but there was this public land along the creek corridor, which had been degraded and neglected and overgrown. Some very adventurous children used to play down there, but not many other people went and visited the creek. And in the 1970s a number of local groups got started with either picking up the rubbish or campaigning against the freeway reservation, which ran down the Creek Valley, planting native trees or indigenous trees and shrubs along the Creek in in places. So that was the beginning of its restoration. And that that restoration has environmental restoration has continued for the last, well, 40 years. So and it's still going. There's still more to do.
Kirsty: The Merri Merri is an important waterway for animals, plants and people. For example, the area where the Creek meets the Yarra River (known as Birrarung in Woiwurrung language), continues to be a significant gathering place for Wurundjeri people. The Creek is also important for other people living in the area.
Ann: Socially, it's important because as I mentioned, those inner suburbs, suburbs like North Fitzroy and Northcote and East Brunswick, Coburg, Thornbury are relatively disadvantaged in terms of parkland, public open space. And the Creek corridor is a really valuable open space because it's linear, because people can walk or ride a bike for quite a long length along the Creek and enjoy an escape from the suburbs because it's of its bushland nature. Now ecologically, it's also very important because it starts up in the Great Dividing Range, it flows for about 70km. So beyond Wallan, quite a lot of bird species actually move north south through the seasons and they come over the dividing range. There's a little gap called the Kilmore Gap. It's a bit lower there, the ranges and so they can move south down the creek valley through the northern suburbs and get to the Yarra River and go east along the Yarra or west towards the Bay. It's quite an important corridor for that reason, and other mammal species and so on can move along that corridor too, but not as regularly as birds that have seasonal migrations.
Kirsty: In previous episodes of Weekend Birder, we have heard about how people form groups to care for important bird habitats around Australia and is part of one of these groups, the Friends of Merri Creek. And she has been conducting the group's volunteer bird surveys since 2008. During this time she has learnt a lot about the birds that live in and alongside the Merri Merri.
Ann: There's a few groups, I mean the very broad groups like obviously the waterbirds that that live in the water or the lakes like Coburg Lake or Edwards Lake, which is actually on a tributary of Edgars Creek and a tributary of the Merri Merri. So you've got the ducks and the cormorants and the moorhens and grebes, herons, kingfishers, and then you've got the bush birds which have moved in since the the revegetation work has matured. And so there's lots of trees and shrubs and ground cover now for them to live in. So things like the honeyeaters and the insect eaters like the Grey Fantail or Golden Whistler, pardalotes that glean in the eucalypt canopy. They eat the lerps on the leaves. One of the really favourite species, I think, along the Merri Merri are the Tawny Frogmouths. I don't know whether you'd call them bush birds, but they they roost in the trees and feed on in open areas at night. Then there's the reptiles, the birds of prey that come to feed on those other birds. There's a number of them. Further north from the Craigieburn area, there's the grassland birds. So Merri Creek catchment has a lot of significant native grassland remnants and birds like pipits and skylarks, and some of the finches live in those grasslands.
Kirsty: You can learn more about Tawny Frogmouths in Weekend Birder Episode Nine with Marian Weaving. Let's pause for a second because you may not be familiar with pipits and skylarks. The Australasian Pipit is found across Australia and also overseas. It is found in open country from wet heaths to dry shrublands and the grasslands that Ann was just talking about. It can be tricky to see because its brown body, which is about 16 to 18cm tall, is so well camouflaged. You'll notice that it has a pale, creamy white stripe on its eyebrows and also below its cheeks. Its underbelly is creamy, white and spotted and its breast has dark streaks. Its wings and tail are dark brown with the outermost feathers, a white colour. The Eurasian Skylark is also known as the Common or English Skylark, and it was introduced to Australia from Britain in the 1850s. It can be found in South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. It is really easy to get the Skylark confused with the Australasian Pipit because they look really similar. So one way to tell them apart is that the Skylark has a pale ring around its cheek and it also has this cap like crest at the rear of its head. Another way to tell them apart is by listening to their call. Here's the Pipit. And here's the Eurasian Skylark, which is really famous for its song that it often makes while flying high in the air. Many thanks to Marc Anderson for sharing these recordings on the Xeno-canto.org website and has learned a lot about these birds by watching the through the seasons.
Ann: Spring time is pretty exciting because the spring summer migrants arrive. So we've got birds like Reed Warblers, which very sensibly head north for the winter. They don't like our cold winter. They come back to breed in southern parts of Australia and if they can find some reeds in the Merri Creek, they'll nest in amongst the reeds. And they're very vocal, you know, when they're around, so it's easy to tell when they've come back. The Sacred Kingfisher is another one that also goes up to Queensland or even beyond Australia for the winter and comes back to breed along the Creek. And then obviously a lot of other birds are busy breeding in spring and they're pretty noisy too. They're calling to establish territories and maintain territories and attract mates and so on. So it's a pretty lively time in the spring. And then as summer wears on, you can see the young birds becoming independent and moving out from the nest and their parents. You might see the raptors chasing the extra birds that are around and in drought times. In fact, it's quite interesting that the cities like Melbourne are now becoming a refuge for quite a lot of bird species. If it's really dry inland or even just over the divide, there's more water put on gardens and there's still probably water flowing in our creeks and rivers. And so a number of species might come into Melbourne in the summer just because there's more food and water about. And then in autumn we actually get some birds coming down from the mountains where it's getting colder and colder. So Flame Robin - beautiful, bright red, scarlet red bird. They come down to the grassland plains. So some of the native grasslands in the middle and upper Murray catchments. Now Silvereyes can be seen. These little, little birds that often come into fruit trees. They can be seen year round, but some Silvereyes actually come across from Tasmania. They're tiny birds but they fly across Bass Strait. They decide that Tasmanian winter is too cold for them, so they come over to Victoria and apparently you can tell the Tasmania Silvereye, because they have a much browner flanks than the mainland residents. Autumn and winter are generally much quieter in terms of bird calls, but so you might have to look harder to find birds. But in the winter a lot of the native shrubs like grevilleas and correas are flowering. And for the honeyeaters, like the Eastern Spinebill and the New Holland Honeyeater quite common along the creek. We also seem to see the Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater coming in in places not not right along the creek, but some places in the colder months obviously must be some food supplies, some flowering shrubs or trees that they like. So yeah, it's changing through the seasons, which is why we do our surveys four times a year to try and pick up on those on those changed populations. But of course there's a lot of resident birds that are there year round.
Kirsty: Ann says that a great way to grow your knowledge of local birds is to join a group like the Friends of Merri Creek.
Ann: Friends of Merri Creek was set up in 1988, so we've been going quite a while now. We're basically trying to continue and expand the ecological restoration of the creek and its tributaries and the significant places, the native vegetation that's in the catchment as well. And we have all sorts of activities from water quality monitoring to education events, walks and talks and tours. And we write lots of submissions and letters to strategic planning processes and things like that. We of course run bird surveys at ten different sites four times a year. Beginners birders are most welcome to those bird surveys and we try and count the birds, which is a bit challenging. Estimate how many birds we've seen as well as identifying them. So to help beginners particularly, we've produced a little colour brochure with the most common few dozen birds that we're likely to see not just on the Merri Creek but across northern Melbourne. So it's a little bit more manageable than the sort of 700 odd species in the Australian field guides, which are a bit daunting. There's lots of other ways to get involved in Friends of Merri Creek. We have weddings and planting days and so on very frequently. There's a very busy events calendar on our website.
Kirsty: Like many Weekend Birder guests, one of Ann's favourite birdwatching tools is her binoculars.
Ann: I can't do much without my binoculars. My eyesight's not really good, and so they're a must have for me. My daughter, who's a very keen birder, she'd say, You don't have to have binoculars to be a birder. Obviously you don't. I mean, anyone who enjoys wild birds is a birder, so you don't need fancy binoculars or a fancy telescope or anything. But I've got a pair of not super expensive. I've had them for 20 years, maybe 15 years at least. These binoculars and they've really done well. Eight by 42 is the magnification eight times. So it's sort of a wider field of view is really important for keeping birds within the within view. It's called Celestron. I don't even know if they're still available. I think it's a Japanese brand. That and learning about birds around you in your backyard or your neighborhood. Get to know them, get hold of a field guide and put names to the birds and learn their calls, because it's so easy to say, "Oh, that was a Blackbird," or, "That was a Noisy Miner". Just from their call. And you don't have to actually go and find the bird to know what's around. And if you can find a friend or somebody who can help you identify them rather than you having to pore through the field guides, that's really helpful. And that's why our surveys, we do try and help people with the identification.
Kirsty: You can learn more about binoculars and how to use them in Weekend Birder Episode Five with Anthony Overs. Many thanks to Ann for sharing her smarts with us and many thanks to the volunteers at the Friends of Merri Creek and anyone else who is caring for the Merri Merri. After this episode finishes, you're welcome to read the show notes or visit the Weekend Birder website to learn more about the Creek as well as Pipits and Skylarks. Happy birding.
