Return to the Outback

It is another year to my PhD, and thus another field season, and like last year, I find myself in the beautiful Australian Outback equipped with even more equipment, a field assistant and many hungry and eager apostlebirds. The spring here is still windy and cold most days and the insects have yet to arrive en masse. My birds remain light in mass and somewhat unconditioned for breeding, but last years breeding attempt was extremely fruitful for them and they have many young. Rumby, my sassy bird from last year has tempered with age and now she is not so boldly searching my bag, but rather politely waiting on the scale for her reward. I miss her playfulness but her own children carry her bold exploratory trait, and I enjoy seeing then trot towards me.

The apostlebirds remain in their winter flocks, as in April of this year when I was here last. Except that instead of nine out of 15 social groups, I have ten groups amalgamated into roughly seven groups that flip over ridges, cross mud flats and toy with many, many different locations that for them, are probably not all that far apart, but for me and “Mr. Ten Pound Speaker” plus recording equipment, are not in fact, far apart.

My most stable group right now is the Hopover Clan, consisting of 7 adults and 7 young ones of various ages. Like most apostlebirds in our study population, they are tame enough to feed, weigh on kitchen scales, follow, record and now train to approach as single eager participants in my experiments designed to tease apart how apostlebirds view their own calls. However, Hopover Clan needs to entertain themselves somehow, and they like to play “Hopover-walk around” with me. The game goes like this. I arrive at their humble abode, and they dutifully come down, get on the scales and present their legs for examination of the colourful anklets that identify them. They get bread in reward. If they are not satisfied with the bird-human interaction, they hopover to the other side of the lake, and I then start my trek around the lake. When I finally catch up the birds, they dutifully come down and allow me to count them all. They eat some more bread, poo on my bag, and if they feel like it, they fly back to the other side of the lake. Or, they may take a little snooze in the trees, then hopover the lake.

The end result is a nice walk for me, some recordings and some experimental results, and poo on my bag. Welcome back to Apostlebird Abode.