Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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. There were fuscus, white ears, yellow-faceds, But it was the yellow tufteds that dominated the dawn chorus.
They were the ones that were really present in the dawn chorus around our home. And that continued for about 15 years, the first 15 years that we lived here. And then I'm thinking, I haven't seen a yellow tufted honey eater for a couple of days. And then it became, I haven't seen one for a couple of weeks. And I'm listening to the dawn chorus, and I'm just not hearing them.
It's like, where have they gone? What's going on here? Listening back through my recordings, I've got recordings from September of 2015 when the Yellow Tufteds are in full song. A whole group of them are there singing in the dawn chorus.
Thank you.
I've got another recording from two months later and they are completely absent. The only thing that you can hear from honey eaters is a very, very distant white plumed honey eater. And I think I'm hearing a honey eater that's probably down on the river flats. We're up on the ridge here. So I'm hearing it maybe a kilometer away.
For the next few months, I wasn't getting any honey eaters in our dawn chorus. And then I started getting a few yellow faced honey eaters. The brown headed started to become a little bit more vocally noticeable. The next year, um, the yellow faced weren't so present, but what it, suddenly we'd got white ears turning up and they started forming a dawn chorus.
And that first year there was only one bird singing, but the following year there were two or three singing and they started doing this counter singing that we've talked about before, listening to each other as much as they're singing, alternating their songs. And for the next couple of years, that population built up.
Around about 2019, having never had them here before, suddenly New Holland's turned up and they started integrating themselves into the Dawn Chorus. And that pattern has continued right through until now. The other bird of course we have is the red wattle bird. So, and also the brown headed's tended to be quite, uh, quite vocal as well.
So what I'm hearing is that our Lichenostomus honey eater that is particularly noticeable is creating these beautiful patterns has changed over the years. And this mirrors movements of populations of birds.
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Chapter 3: What unique characteristics define different honeyeater species?
They're still there. Smaller group, but yeah.
One of the things that I've learned over 150 episodes of this podcast is that knowing your local birds and their habitats really enables you to learn in lots of different ways. And that birdwatching is as much about listening as it is about watching.
It's knowing a place, but it's also recognizing the importance of sound. It's not just important to us that we listen and we recognize species and perhaps what they're doing, but to understand that communication for birds is absolutely pivotal to their lives. And the requirements of communication, the way that that communication is undertaken, the purposes of it shape other behaviors.
So the sound actually tells you a lot about what that species is actually doing. It's not just a oh, there's a white-eared honey eater, and that's a good starting point. To understand that these honey eaters are actually, their lives are shaped by their vocalizing, their communicating, is a powerful insight.
The more closely you pay attention to birds, the more complicated and fascinating they become. And here, listener friend, we're actually going to go full circle, because back at the start of season four, episode 119, Amanda Lamont talked about the call of the spiny-cheeked honey eater at Mungo National Park in southwestern New South Wales.
There, she said, this honey eater's call sounded different to other places in Australia. And when she heard it, she knew that she was at Mungo. Andrew's research backs Amanda's experience.
As I travel around the country, you hear Spaniards in different populations giving very different songs. And what I've realized is that each local population has their own song. And so what they are doing is creating a sonic identity as a form of bonding, of belonging to that local community.
In 2023, I think, I was up in southern Queensland and I had the opportunity to drive down the road to Bourke, which goes through some pretty remote area. And I'd last been there 20 years ago and I'd recorded a spiny singing there at dawn that just had such a different song. I didn't even recognize it as a spiny at the time.
Coming back 20 years later, I wanted to go to that same spot and see whether I could hear that same population of honey eaters. And I couldn't quite find the location. I ended up camping about 15 kilometers away from where I'd recorded. I recorded Spine East that morning and they had a similar but noticeably different song.
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