Tuesday, 31st January 2023
Summer at New Norcia – It's All About the Birds!
Some find it just too hot to travel north in the midst of summer in Western Australia. For some, it's just too noisy. It's true, our resident cockatoos make quite a chorus when the sun shines (and often even when it doesn't!) but, as in any community, the quieter ones often get overlooked. Photographer, New Norcia resident, and bird-watcher Jim Longbottom shares his insight into lesser-known bird life on the fringes of our town.
Birdlife at New Norcia
by Jim Longbottom
If you never travel far from the monastery cloister or guesthouse, you could be excused for thinking that birdlife at New Norcia was limited to thousands of Corellas, pink and grey galahs, and a smattering of ringneck parrots (28s). As you move away from the “monastic Corellas” who live noisily in community, the birdscape changes.
Where I am living, towards the top of Piggery Lane, the Corellas thin right out and there are more ringnecks, who monopolise my bird bath in the mornings, and we have a number of Carnaby’s cockatoos who move through the area.
For me, the highlight has been with the little birds that are ever present in the area: little yellow plumed honeyeaters, silver eyes, blue wrens and red breasted robins. The latter two put me in mind of scripture:
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? …. even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Mt 6:25-34
