Harlequin in the parsley patch

My lovely wife Pammy is my 'spotter'. She spots things out in the garden that I miss. Eagle-eyed she is, which of course is a good quality for a botanical illustrator to possess. This morning, she spotted this person in our parsley patch. Yes, it's hard to miss, but of course eagle-eyes didn't miss it.

It's a cotton harlequin bug, Tectocoris diophthalmus. I had to get in for a closer look...

That's better. Then I did what I always do when I'm not sure of what I'm photographing. I Googled it. Shoot and Google, that's my policy.

And good old Google, or more specifically the Australian Museum website, set me straight. This is a juvenile Cotton Harlequin Bug, a brand-newie, which will turn orange (with spots) as it matures into an adult. Those blue bits glint with a metallic wink in the sunshine.

Apparently I am lucky, in that we are currently infested with a single little kid of a Cotton Harlequin bug. My Googling tells me that these bugs, when they appear in large numbers, can be destructive little sap-suckers in gardens. They do attack cotton crops, as their name implies, and they love a good suck-and-chomp on hibiscus, abutilons (Chinese lanterns) and any other hibiscus family plants. However, they ain't fussy it seems, and any juicy flower buds can become its dinner.

I practise 'live and let live' as much as possible here in Amateur Land. So s/he's welcome here, and a pretty addition in fact. If s/he invites the gang around for a flower-munching party on, say, my citrus trees, I might have to get out the soap spray, but until then I'm happy to welcome this beautiful child into my garden.

Purple monsters

You can imagine our excitement when our newly planted baby shrub popped out its first flower. In this case it's one of Pammy's shrubs, her Tibouchina 'Groovy Baby' which we planted only a few weeks ago. But wait on, what are those holes in the flower? And who's that wriggling around on the anthers?

Of course, it's the purple flower munching monster, disguised as a caterpillar. He/she probably is also responsible for the nifty holes in the petals. These are caused by the purple flower monster drilling down into the flower bud for a feed, before the whole thing unfurls.

Tatty swiss-cheese flowers and purple monsters couldn't put a dampener on our excitement. The little tibouchina is roaring along, sending out new leaves. The weather right now is as autumnally perfect as you could possibly wish for here in Sydney, and as the plant obviously wants to do some growing, I treated it to a gourmet feed. As for any other purple monsters wanting to attack our baby, be warned, we're on the lookout for you guys!

Leafy homes

Believe it or not, this is an apartment block. For spiders.

(Have all the squeamish readers clicked away in fright? Yes? Only three of you left? Okay, let's proceed.)

You'd be forgiven for thinking this is an angel's wing begonia, and it is to us gardeners, but to some very docile little spiders it's the apartment block where they live and cause no problems at all, apart from swatting flies.

Here's the occupant of apartment 32B, spotted this morning while I was watering the garden below his apartment block.

He's vewy vewy small but he's not alone. Lots of Begonia Mews' leaves have similar eight-legged occupants who set up webs within the gentle curves of the leaves and make a living trapping inattentive flies, aphids and other passers-by. It's a living.

While most of the residents at Begonia Mews favour an open-plan layout with panoramic views for their leafy pads, there are some who prefer more privacy, and a muted palette of rusty browns. To each their own taste, I guess.

Further up the side path, at Tillandsia Towers, a couple of leaves have been turned into a floating condo for a very shy person who just wants to be alone.

"Go away!" said the recluse when the paparazzi came knocking, and so I slunk away, having got my exclusive shot of JD Spider for Garden Amateur News magazine.

Meanwhile, out at the front of the house they're in a delirium of leafy homemaking. I trimmed the hedges last week and so there are countless leaves still lying around, just waiting for a decorator to do something with them.

Though we don't have much of an autumn here in Sydney, it seems to me that this autumn we have far more of the leaf-wrapping spiders setting up home. It makes sense that they'd do their thing in the leaf-falling season, and while these spiders are around at other times of year, they are suddenly everywhere in my garden.

Colllectively, they perform a handy little service keeping insect numbers down, and they're such small and timid little spiders that they're no bother to me as I potter around. I'm a far more dangerous, scarier thing than they could ever hope to be. My main mission, apart from leaving them alone once I've taken their photo, is not to use any chemical sprays which might kill them (plus the bees and all the other good insect friends in the garden). I wouldn't dream of doing that anyway.

While I can't honestly say that I love spiders (I don't quite, I'm still a bit freaked out by them, or by accidentally walking into webs) I am very happy to say that I do rather like and admire them for their intelligence and natural artistry. As for what they think of me, I'm sure that I'm always just plain scary. Ironic, that.

Hello, what's this I see?

Pottering around the garden this morning ticking off a list of 'feed this', 'repot that' type jobs, I came across this interesting person in my lime tree. Somewhere between 5cm-7.5cm long (two to three inches) he/she was doing the 'master of disguise' thing and not moving a bit. The perfect subject for a photo!

Handsome devil (click on the photo to make it bigger, if you like). With those spines on its back, I am sure all sorts of creatures, including me, would think "leave this person alone". Which is what I did, of course. Live and let live as much as you possibly can, then a bit more, I say. There is a very pretty, big black, white and orange butterfly known as a citrus or orchard butterfly which is quite common around here (seen here every day in fact). Perhaps this is Junior?

Update! Yes, this is a citrus butterfly caterpillar. Always welcome in my backyard!

Another pleasant "hello, what's this I see" moment this morning was the first tinge of yellow on my Eureka lemons. "About time, too", says the Impatient Gardener (me)! Isn't it nice when a crop shows signs of ripening?

Finally, a very pleasant discovery not in my backyard, but down at my local fruit shop, Banana Joe's in Illawarra Road, Marrickville. Quinces are back in season – hooray! I love quinces, and if you want to see what I do with them in the kitchen, I rattled on about them at length here, last year. Yummy as part of breakfast, stewed quinces, but quince jelly is also lovely, too.

Quinces have an old-fashioned charm (which is why I popped them into one of my Grandma's old bowls for this photo). Unlike so many fruits which seem to be available year-round to consumers, quinces (and figs, for that matter) still have their seasons, then their absences from the shops. I like that about them.

The other thing I like about quinces (apart from the eating) is that they're the stuff that dreams are made of. If in the extremely unlikely event that I manage to win Lotto or some similar lottery, I am immediately retiring from work and heading for the country, to do some serious gardening on a decent patch of ground, not just this little green handkerchief of earth I have here in the inner-city.

I'd like to grow things I can't grow in Sydney. I'd need a country property in our coolest zones, up in the mountains somewhere, so I could grow quinces, pears, apples, raspberries and all sorts of cool climate things that don't really work that well in Sydney. That's what I mean about quinces being what dreams are made of. The 10-minute walk home from Banana Joe's was consumed with planning out that orchard!

Cuckoo in the curry tree

When you think of cuckoos, most of us tend to think of Swiss clocks with a little door that opens to allow a little bird to pop out and say 'cuckoo' once every hour, on the hour. Last Sunday I finally managed to take a photo of our resident cuckoo, a koel.

It'd have to be a very large clock to house this cuckoo. At least our koels maintain the cuckoo tradition of reliable time-keeping. Every morning around 4am they wake up the neighbourhood with their loud, repetitive calls. As a result, unfortunately, koels are not exactly our most beloved birds! This particular individual is a bit of an oddball version of koel. It's a juvenile male that's going through its first moult, to become a glossy, all-black adult male.

What attracted him to our backyard was the sight of all those juicy curry tree berries. Unfortunately, this is not a good thing. All sorts of berry-producing non-native plants are turning into bushland weeds. The berries might be eaten in my backyard, but the seeds are then carried by birds to bushland sometimes miles away, where they then sprout and compete with native plants.

While the koel family has been part of our neighbourhood for years, these birds are a relatively rare sight, even if they're a familiar sound. The sight of the young moulting male was a big enough surprise midway through Sunday afternoon, but right on dusk another koel appeared perched on our clothesline, this one a juvenile female.

The interesting thing about cuckoos, of course, is the clever way they fool other bird species into raising their young. The adult cuckoos lay their eggs in other bird species' nests, and when the baby cuckoo hatches it pushes the 'host' baby birds out of the nest and the 'host' parents raise the cuckoo baby.

For our koels, their most regular 'host' birds are currawongs - big, black-and-white birds similar in many ways to magpies, but with black beaks. The system seems to work, as the two koels visiting last Sunday were both born last spring are only now getting out and about. The nice thing about juvenile birds is that they tend to spook a lot less easily than adults, and so bumbling amateur photographers such as me can blunder about and manage to get a couple of snaps without startling the birds into flight.

The bee-loud glade

Wandering down my street the other day, a poem by the great Irish poet YB Yeats came buzzing into my head, for reasons fond enough to me. The young street trees planted by our green-tinged local council, God bless 'em, were coming into bloom, and the bees were voicing their approval loudly and busily.

This is one of them. It's an ivory curl tree, Buckinghamia celsissima, a native tree originally from Queensland, but totally at home here in Sydney. It'll grow to at least twice this size, and when it grows up it should be completely covered in long, white blooms, as many of the older ivory curls in various other streets of our area are right now.

Every single bloom of the row of young ivory curl trees was occupied by two, four or six busy bees. Each bloom is about six to eight inches long. They don't last all that long, probably a month at best, but they're a summer treat nevertheless.

Their happy hum could be heard from some distance away. However, about 18 months ago, one extremely young ivory curl tree attracted more bees than anyone expected...

A swarm, of approximately a zillion or so bees. This large Mardi Gras of bees suddenly appeared one late afternoon, set up quite a din in the ivory curl (which wasn't in flower, as it was late winter) and stayed the night. The next morning, around 10 o'clock, the whole swarm took off at once and flew across our house and off to who knows where, sounding like a low-flying aircraft as it swooped away en masse. Quite inspiring and pleasing, seeing as how it all ended peacefully.

While that memory of the bee swarm came and went, and the happy soundtrack of the much smaller company of bees went about their business the other day, I struggled to remember all of the Yeats poem which I have always loved so much but haven't read for many years, and so here it is.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

By William Butler Yeats.

Close encounters of the waspish kind

Putting off gardening jobs that need to be done usually delivers a sweaty comeuppance to the slacker responsible (me), especially on hot summer's days, when the lazy gardener finally gets around to doing them.

Here's a classic case of a job that should have been done a month ago. Relying on various limp excuses (pre-Christmas magazine deadlines, then holidays away, and hot & humid summer days ever since my return from holidays) I put off trimming this creeping fig (Ficus pumila) which I planted to cover the ugly, sloppy brickwork on my neighbour Michael's big garage. However, as Michael expressed some fears that the plant might actually entrap and devour his gorgeous grand-daughter Michaela if I left it untrimmed, I promised him that I'd cut it back this weekend.

As well as using hedge shears on the lower parts of the wall of green, I brought out my wonderful extendo pole-pruner, which keeps middle-aged male gardeners on the ground, where they belong. It seemed like a good idea, but it's slow going snipping off individual stems one by one, and with the weather warming up to around 28°C (82°F) plus humidity at typical muggy Sydney summer levels, I decided to get out the step ladder and wield the hedge shears to get the job done much faster.

Here's how things looked an hour later. Now, before you scream "you missed a bit" please proceed to the following photo.

Excuse my poor Photoshop skills, but check out the section inside the white circle. Can't quite make out what's there? Next photo please, Projectionist!

That's better. A wasp's nest. With lots of wasps. Cranky wasps. Surprised wasps. Disturbed wasps. Scared, threatened wasps. Me, I'm the disturbing (accidental) scarer of cranky wasps. It's great fun being up on a step ladder, sharp hedge shears in hand, cutting away merrily at a creeping fig, only to find a black and ginger humming crowd of wasps erupting from the greenery. Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt might have the World Record of 9.6 seconds for the 100 metre dash, but I would like to claim 0.25 seconds as the new record for the six step ladder descent. But wait, there's more!

What did stupid do next? He climbed up on the shed roof, didn't he? Well, that's the only way to access the section of creeper-covered garage wall on the far left. And what did stupid uncover with his hedge shears? Yes – you're probably all ahead of me by now – yes, a second wasp nest, more populous, more scared/angry/disturbed etc than the first one. And what's the new world record time for the five steps back across the tin roof and six steps down the ladder, hotly pursued by wasps? Not sure, didn't bother to count, as by that stage I had developed a really timely case of asthma attack. Brilliant, just what I needed. I hate my weak lungs. Cowards, both of you.

Back down on the ground, I headed for the house and my puffer, then waited half an hour for everyone to calm down, especially me. And this is why I have deliberately 'missed a bit' on that wall. I'm not sure what to do, in fact. But here's what I'm thinking....

1. As there are two wasp nests up there, it's obviously a great spot for a nest. They'll keep on building them there even if I knock them down.

2. I have no right to knock the nests down. I've been sharing this backyard with the wasps for 19 years and I haven't been stung once. They're pretty good backyard citizens, if you leave them alone. And now I know where they live, I should be able to avoid them.

3. Wasps are a beneficial insect in the garden, keeping down the numbers of pest insects (which they put in their nests as food for the next generation of larvae).

4. However, trimming that rotten big wall of greenery is a job that needs constant attention, and now I have to decide whether to get rid of it or not. Still can't decide. And as for today I'm not going out there. I'll declare this Sunday a day of rest, give my lungs a chance to settle down, give the wasps a day of peace. They deserve it. They probably had a hell of a day yesterday, too.

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.

Garden webmasters

This is Andrew, and he has his own little spot in the garden where I don't get in his way, and he doesn't get in mine, either. We get on fine. I'd never dare call him Andy, as his formal name is the Saint Andrew's Cross Spider, so calling him Andrew seems to be the right level of familiarity. (But of course this could actually be Andrea, for all I know about spider sexing.)

The Saint Andrew's Cross Spider has a clever method of scaring off potential predators by weaving extra 'legs' of spider web material and standing on the web in a way that makes it look like a spider twice its size. Andrew/Andrea measures about 3cm on the diagonal, from leg-tip to leg-tip and makes his living helping to keep garden insect numbers down.

I don't know the species of spider which created this tiny little web in part of my murraya hedge, but I was amazed by its tiny size and basket-like construction. The whole web is about 1cm across (ie, half an inch). (Update below, I've solved the mystery!)

UPDATE! After doing this blog post in the morning, the tiny web mystery was solved later in the evening. The net belongs to the Net Casting Spider. This amazing spider holds its net in its 'hands' and as soon as a customer comes along, it wraps it up in its net. The net and the spider were gone this morning, so I presume its strategy worked well, yet again.

Stupidly, in the morning I poked a biro tip into the photo to give some sense of the net casting spider web's tinyness and managed to bump it out of shape. I am sure that all spiders see us humans as dopey, blundering clods. Of course we don't always have the best opinion of them, either, but that's mostly due to those unpleasant entanglements at night or on early mornings. Pam and I have developed a handy little way of coping with our various garden webmasters.

Here's the main alleyway for spiders at my place: the three and a bit metres from the front gate to the front door, edged on both sides by hedges. The St Andrew's Cross Spider builds its web along the line of the hedges on the left, and present no problems for us, and we don't bother it (although there is an outside chance that our tossed-in morning newspaper delivery could ruin Andrew's day, but that hasn't happened yet this year.) However, there are some other spiders who simply cannot learn that spinning a web across the path, between the hedges, is simply NOT ON! And so they're repeat offenders, always at night of course, building webs across the pathway.

The solution is simple: a good supply of sticks, at both ends of the path (fortunately our street tree, a eucalyptus, provides a constant source of sticks). Waving the stick before you as you proceed up the path does make you look like a weirdo, but it works, and as it's night time you rarely (but not never!) get caught waving the magic wand. I wish the other spiders were more like Andrew, but I have at least learned that, like human society, the society of spidery garden webmasters has its fair share of dummies who'll just never learn.

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.

Wandering minstrel

The other morning I was working from home, as usual, when I heard a birdsong that I'd never heard before. I'm used to hearing a fairly wide variety of bird calls here, from various raucous cat-alarm squawks through to loud kookaburra laughs and the sweet, sweet melodies from our big, beautiful black and white magpies. But this new birdsong was very distinctive, very different and quite musical. So I went outside, saw this person sitting on a powerline, then rushed back inside to fetch my camera. As well as having never heard this bird before I knew I had never seen it, either.

It's hard to describe a birdsong in words, but my bird-watching guide which told me this is a figbird suggests that it's a "strong, mellow tu-tu heer, tu-heer". I guess that could be something like it. I agree with the "strong mellow" bit, not sure about the words though, but I won't attempt my own version of it.

More specifically, my Field Guide to the Birds of Australia (by Graham Pizzey and Frank Knight, and it's excellent) says this is an immature male figbird. Once he reaches adulthood that mottled, pale yellow chest will be a striking yellow statement of virility.

The other thing the book says is that Sydney is as almost as far south as figbirds travel. The distribution map says figbirds are found, starting from Nowra in the south, all the way along Australia's East Coast up to the tip of Cape York in tropical far North Queensland, as well as in the Top End of the Northern Territory and in the Kimberley in Western Australia's tropical north. When I mentioned to a couple of far more knowledgable bird enthusiasts that I'd seen a figbird, they said they're not a common sight here at all, so I am glad to have made its acquaintance.

He stayed chirping and posing for the camera for a good 10 minutes, enough time to take a few not-too-sharp pix (these are blown up and cropped a fair bit using the snazzy new easy-cropping tool I have discovered in Photoshop). I can never rely on my memory to identify a new bird well, so I always try to get some photos.

My wife Pam, who is a botanical illustrator, does amazingly rapid sketches of any birds she sees in the garden, noting colours, patches, and all sorts of details I could never hope to remember. In fact, seeing Pam do this has given me quite an insight into her powers of visual observation. I feel almost blind by comparison! Thank goodness for cameras.

The Freshwater Pub

I like to think of my backyard birdbath as a freshwater pub for all my flying visitors, somewhere for all of them to enjoy a cool, refreshing drink. Naturally enough, birds galore visit, but sometimes bees and butterflies also stop by for a sip, and so everyone and everything is welcome here. I can't help but think sometimes that a garden without a functioning birdbath is incomplete, and as a contribution to the local wildlife a birdbath really does turn a garden into a sanctuary for them.

This is our nice, old, original stone birdbath we bought 18 years ago, soon after we moved here. It looks a lot older than that, which is a bonus, and it's very popular with the smaller birds. But it does have one minor drawback: its rough texture is ideal for slime and algae to form on, and so it needs frequent cleaning, which is what it gets.

About 10 years ago, we bought this glazed ceramic birdbath, initially thinking of it as a replacement for the old 'slimy' stone one. But 'Old Slimy' remained so popular with the birds that we realised we had actually just installed a second, upmarket birdbath that's consistently more popular with the larger birds. It's up on a plinth about 60cm (two feet) high. It's much, much easier to clean than the old stone bath, and stays cleaner for longer, but the glazed ceramic surface is too slippery for the birds. So, we always have natural stone sitting in the middle, for the birds to land on securely.

Over the years we've acquired two other water bowls which are not birdbaths, but no-one told the birds that, and each water bowl gets its share of visitors enjoying a drink, especially in summer. In the bottom of the larger bowl at the back we've added some glass beads and pieces of colourful Paua shell brought home from a New Zealand holiday.

This avant garde thing was another holiday souvenir. The stainless steel bowl we already had, but the shiny stainless steel globe came from the Art Gallery of Queensland in Brisbane. A Japanese artist had done an installation there of thousands and thousands of these steel balls floating on a large canal-cum-lake thing inside the gallery. Kids were welcome to play and clunk the balls together and make them move round, a nice tactile installation with plenty of clunky, bubbly sound effects. The balls were for sale at the Gallery Shop and so we bought one, and it hasn't deteriorated one bit in the five or so years we've had it here. Small birds like to grip the thin edge of the bowl, look at the other 'bird' in the shiny sphere, and have a drink. It's a remarkably popular part of our Freshwater Pub!

I had mentioned that I always have a stone to place in the glazed birdbath. Both of my stones slope down gently into the water, and this is really handy for little visitors such as bees (pictured here) and butterflies. I need two stones for this bath, as each becomes a bit slimy after a couple of days in the water. So I remove the slimy stone, replace it with the dry one, and it all seems to work pretty well as a little system.

Check the wear on the birdbath brush! It matches the shape of the old stone bowl perfectly. I never ever use any kind of chemical to clean each bath. Just elbow grease, fresh water and the brush. I figure that's safest for all the creatures who use it.

And speaking of the creatures who visit, the other important thing I practise is no discrimination of any sort. It doesn't matter to me whether an innocent creature is a native or an introduced species. I'm an introduced species of sorts. My family originally came here (of their own free will!) from Belfast in 1840, but I was born here and this is my home. I belong to this land. I'm sure this bulbul, which is not a native species, feels exactly the same way as me. Red Whiskered Bulbuls were introduced here in the 1880s from China and India as caged birds – brought here as prisoners, an old Australian story – and they have since thrived mostly in Sydney, where the climate and the availability of backyard fruit trees seems to suit them. Whatever, he and his family is welcome in my backyard. Of course it does get hard to tolerate the starlings and the mynahs and other aggressive exotic species, but they have never taken over in my backyard, or even established all that much of a presence here. They just visit every bit as occasionally as the others.

Of course native birds such as this beautiful magpie, one of the best singers in the Universe, are particularly welcome. I don't do anything special to attract native birds over non-native birds, apart from growing some native plants and cleaning the birdbath regularly. There's no shortage of magpies in my area, and we see lots of native wattlebirds, Blue wrens, New Holland honeyeaters, and Willy wagtails here, plus a surprisingly large variety of occasional native visitors, such as kookaburras, black-faced cuckoo shrikes, even a couple of beautiful little Spotted Pardalotes. One morning I even came across a very seriously lost Heron! I also participate in surveys for a great local research outfit called Birds in Backyards, and if you're in Australia reading this blog, check them out at http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/

Taking on a birdbath is extra work. It needs to become another part of your regular 'garden maintenance' rounds if it's to work properly. As I work from home this is easy for me. Commuters rushing out to catch the train in the morning and then coming home in darkness each evening might find it just not practical.

However, if there is someone at home a lot who has five minutes to spare every second day, then swishing out the birdbath with a brush that you don't use for any other purpose is the main job, apart from refilling the water and maybe changing over a wet, slimy stone for a dry one. The rest is just sitting back and watching.

A few years ago I bought Pammy a nice little pocket-size pair of Nikon binoculars, and they sit on her studio windowsill. The moment old eagle-eyes spots something, she's onto them with the binoculars. If the bird isn't recognised we move onto Phase Two: "get out The Book". I guess we've become an old pair of backyard 'twitchers' (birdwatchers) and a very interesting little hobby that has turned out to be, too!