Morning light

Of all the times of day I love being in my garden, mornings are the best. It's the morning light, low and clear and, compared to the shadows, as bright as the sun itself. As the garden awakes from sleep, dull colours shimmer brightly, dark greens become pale and young again, and honeyeaters come to enjoy their breakfast of nectar as I enjoy my coffee. (As always, click on the photos to make them bigger).

Here's the scene this morning. My garden faces north-east, so the morning light comes in from the right. There are a few bare garden beds here now, as I've just pulled out my tomatoes and zucchinis. And the birds are happy. Covered with mulch, these 'bare' beds have suddenly become a wormy, insecty feeding ground for blue wrens, magpies and wagtails.

Perched atop a grevillea, this perky little New Holland honeyeater checks to see what's going on before enjoying another lick of nectar.

A young wattlebird ponders its favourite grevillea before darting there for breakfast.

As well as the red one providing food to the New Holland honeyeater pictured earlier, this 'Peaches & Cream' grevillea, a young plant just two years old, has come into its own this summer and, flowering well, is now the delicacy of choice for several different native bird species. Maybe it's multi-flavoured, as well as multi-coloured?

As the sun rises all the lower-growing colours get a glow on. In the foreground are my zinnias, and that's blue salvia behind. The spiky grass on the left is my new pot of lemongrass enjoying its sunny spot. Far right, the basil and baby curry leaf trees catch the sun.

Against the dark background of our murraya hedge, the frangipani's leaves are X-rayed by the sun.

So too the hollow shallot leaves. Sometimes I think they'll just spontaneously burst into flames, so aglow they are with light.

I had originally chosen about 20 'morning light' photos for this blog, as everything here looks wonderful at this time of day. But mornings aren't a time for excess. It's a gentle, beautiful time of day and I never miss the chance to be there if I can possibly manage it.

New Year, fresh start

This little person is not only celebrating a new year, he or she is just starting his or her first year. Yesterday, junior made his/her debut, perched on our clothesline taking in the unfamiliar surroundings, wondering what in the hell was going on.

You've left the nest, kiddo, start feeding. Unruly, fluffed-up feathers and a bewildered look; noisy squawking as soon as a parent appears, saying 'feed me, feed me' – still just a kid.

But all the parent does is ignore junior, fly to the nearest flowering grevillea and say to the kid – 'you're on you're own now darling, have a taste of this sweet nectar and instinct will kick in'. These native grevilleas are remarkable plants, in flower virtually year-round. Its main flowering peaks are in late spring and autumn, but here it's midsummer and the flowers are plentiful.

As well as the reddy-orange flowered grevillea, we also have this two-toned 'Peaches & Cream' grevillea in our backyard – a plentiful supply of nectar – and here is either Mr or Mrs Wattlebird tucking into his/her favourite flavour. Always feeding and clucking together as a pair, these two birds have been an item in both our neighbourhood and our backyard for several years, but for some reason this is the first time we have spotted one of their babies with them. Maybe it's the first one to survive, or perhaps we just haven't noticed the big event before (but I doubt that, we're out in the garden all the time).

Whatever the real story I am simply glad to see the new arrival. It marks the new year and the new beginnings such an occasion implies very nicely.

Happy New Year to all baby birds, fellow bloggers, blog-readers, lurkers, gardeners and passers-by.

Cafe society

Our street tree is in full bloom now, and for the next five or six months it becomes the local cafe for various nectar-eating birds. It's hard to sleep in here on winter mornings, as the lorikeets and wattlebirds start up their chirpy conversations soon after sunrise, which is mercifully heading towards 7am as the days shorten.

Probably the most colourful of Sydney's prolific native birds is this one, the rainbow lorikeet. These have become commonplace here in recent years. As little as five years ago they weren't seen much here in my local district, but now they're camped out in our local cafe, the pink-flowered form of the gum tree, Eucalyptus leucoxylon.

It's easy to photograph these birds, as they're not fussed by people's presence and are quite happy to go on feeding while I go on snapping.

A much more difficult proposition is photographing the flighty red wattlebird. Mr and Mrs Wattlebird will flee the moment they sense someone is looking at them, and so yesterday morning this is the best portrait I could manage. They have a yellowy chest and distinctive red flaps of skin on their cheeks, which are called 'wattles'. (And so, no, they're not called wattlebirds because of an attraction to wattle (Acacia) trees and shrubs.)

Equally difficult to photograph simply because they never keep still, bees galore feast on the plentiful gum tree blooms.

There's another very pretty little black and gold honeyeater called the New Holland honeyeater which also visits the tree, but I couldn't get a photo of one yesterday. While the lorikeets and wattlebirds endlessly bother each other over feeding territory rights, the quick little New Holland honeyeater, about a third the size of the other two birds, darts in and out of the tree getting its sugary energy hit.

The constant presence of these birds has led me to read up a bit about them. The rainbow lorikeets are doing well out of human habitation, occurring almost in pest proportions in places. Long ago they were a migratory bird species which ranged up and down the long Australian coastline feeding on whatever was in flower, then moving on as the seasons changed. Lorikeets have adapted well to urban landscapes. They love all the showy native flowers of gum trees and grevilleas gardeners everywhere have planted and no longer need to 'move on' in search of food. And they love the way we've provided generous clumps of native trees and shrubs to decorate man-made things such as traffic islands, car parks, etc, which we then flood-light at night. We might think the lights are for our own human safety, but from the lorikeets' point of view they also keep away predators such as snakes, owls etc. Lorikeets know a safe roosting spot when they find one and the communities there can be quite huge.

The downside of all the pretty lorikeets is that they compete with all sorts of other native birds, taking nesting sites and consuming food sources. Red wattlebirds are notoriously aggro towards other birds trying to share their food trees, but they can't shift the lorikeets from our gum tree. And, for that matter, the lorikeets haven't kicked out the wattlebirds, either. And so the struggle for existence goes on, the chirpy chatter and flashes of colour disguising the toughness and resilience of these two combatants for feeding rights in the local cafe.