150 Honeyeaters at Dawn - with Andrew
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What cultural significance do honeyeaters hold in Australia?
This episode was recorded on Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and to the generations of people who have listened closely to this landscape for tens of thousands of years, noticing birds, seasons, and the changing rhythms of country.
Welcome to episode 150 of Weekend Birder. I'm Kirstie Costa, and I honestly cannot believe I'm saying those words out loud. When I first started this little podcast, I never imagined that thousands of people from around the world would end up listening in each week. It still completely blows my mind that this community exists, and I'm so very grateful that you're part of it. And because this is a milestone episode, I wanted to bring back a fan favourite. Andrew Skiok is a professional wildlife sound recordist, audio ecologist, and the author of a book called Deep Listening to Nature. Over the last 30 years, Andrew has documented the sounds of environments around the planet, And many Weekend Bird listeners will remember him from episode 117, where he shared what he's learnt from years of listening to the dawn chorus.
And somewhere, in all of that listening, Andrew started noticing something remarkable about honey eaters and the way that they shape the Australian landscape.
Going back to when I was first recording, and I'd be traveling around the country making sound recordings, and I just assumed that being a nature recordist, you have to get up in the morning to record the dawn chorus. It's just part of the gig, you know. I'd be spending a lot of time recording dawn choruses. One of the things that I loved was the aesthetics of the honey to dawn chorus, because each species seems to have a simple little song. And when you get a group of them all sort of roosting collectively within earshot of each other, you get this it's a really beautiful dawn singing patterns. And it's not something that, you know, when I first started traveling overseas, I realized this is a really uniquely Australian thing.
You don't get this kind of sonic patterning in dawn choruses in, say, Asia or Europe. And so that got me curious about honey to dawn songs. And I also realized that that patterning aesthetically, pleasingly to the ear, works because wherever I was in the country, it seemed to be one species that was doing the calling and hence you'd get this one species doing its simple dawn song and you'd get this bouncing of sound in the landscape. It took me a while for me to sort of pick up on that and confirm that, you know, I think this is a common thing. This seems to be what goes on. And I sort of realized that there's a refinement to that, which is that it's not just one species of honey eater that you hear in the dawn chorus.
So what I realized is that honey eaters come in these various sizes, that you get the smaller Melithreptus honey eaters around the country, white napes and black chins and brown headed and so on. Then you get the Lycanostomus honey eaters, which are the mid-sized green species like the white plumes, and then larger ones, the wattle birds, the friar birds. There's also the New Hollands and white-cheeked honey eaters, which are in a separate genus, and the white-fronted honey eaters. So those honey eaters are in a separate group as well. And what I realized is that in the dawn chorus, you tend to get one of those genuses singing in any one place. Even though there might be multiple examples of the, say, the Lycanostomus Tanudas in the landscape, it tends to be one that you hear.
And that really puzzled me for a little while.
Andrew has nearly 25 years of recordings from around his home in central Victoria. And over time, he's noticed that the honey eaters have changed. Not just the number of birds, but which species are leading.
How do honeyeaters contribute to the dawn chorus?
When we first moved here around 1999, we had yellow tufted honey eaters in abundance around our house. They were just everywhere. I just thought, well, they're our honey eater. They're the dominant honey eater. But I also realized there are other honey eaters around.
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