Barry Clugston

Trees with useable hollows can be completely consumed by a bush fire or knocked over by a wind and lost as a nesting possibility. To develop new hollows in a growing tree takes many years as many as 100. First a branch needs to tear off in a wind or snow lands on the tree or the tree gets overwhelmed and the breaks apart. Then insects make their homes in the sap wood. With all this activity the branches get weakened and will drop to the ground.

All the babbler families make use of ground level and mid height to spend their day feeding, and leaping around. The babblers can fly but one of the charactiristics and easily recognizable features are these giant strides the birds make. The birds make the exercise look so easy they cover so much territory in such quick time. They live in family groups and they chatter all the time and keep in touch with each other. When it comes to nesting they have an unusual practice.

There is an ongoing focus on the relatively common species and rightly so. This group includes the Magpie which won the vote as the most popular bird at the last season community vote by Birdlife Australia. Birdlife runs the annual national community vote and is based in Melbourne. There has been a growing interest with appreciation of birds across the nation and it is distressing to watch the spread of a bird flu virus just entering the country from another country.