Birds of Western Wolli Creek: A case study in local extinction

Birds of Western Wolli Creek : A case study in local extinction

Justin Cahill

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Justin Cahill

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Part of the proceeds of all sales of this study go to the Wolli Creek Preservation Society Inc to help protect the Wolli Creek Valley, the last substantial remnant of the natural environment in inner south-western Sydney.

To my Father

"So we rode around the park until quite late talking and philosophising quite a lot. And I finally told him I thought, after all, that bird life was the highest form of civilisation…"

- Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1925.

"It is the responsibility of all who are alive today to accept the trusteeship of wildlife and to hand on to posterity…the entire wealth of diverse animals and plants. [They have] … no right by selfishness, wanton or unintentional destruction, or neglect, to rob future generations of this rich heritage. Extermination of other creatures is a disgrace to mankind." - World Wildlife Charter proposed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1962 quoted in Silverberg, R. The Dodo, the Auk and the Oryx, 1967.

Please direct all inquiries to Justin Cahill at

PO Box 108, Lindfield, 2070

New South Wales, Australia

or to mailto:jpjc@ozemail.com.au

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. How the west was lost

II. Previous studies

III. Method and results

IV. A land of silence ?

V. Afterward

VI. Stop Press

VII. Appendices

VIII. Bibliography

IX. Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

This work serves two purposes. First, it is an account of the birds observed in the western part of the Wolli Creek Valley in Sydney. It is, to date, the only detailed study of the species found there. The standard work on the district’s birdlife, the late Neil Rankin’s Birds of Wolli Creek, focussed on the eastern part of the Valley between the suburbs of Earlwood and Undercliffe. This account deals with the section of the Valley that passes through Kingsgrove, Bexley North, southern Earlwood and northern Bardwell Park.

My second purpose is to publicise the idea of local extinction. We hear a lot about threats to species found outside Australia. There are regular media reports expressing concern for the survival of tigers, pandas and orangutans. These reports justifiably demand attention. But the process of extinction is going on right here in Sydney - quite literally in our own backyards. Changes to the native birds found in the western part of the Wolli Valley over the last century illustrate this process.

The Wolli Creek Valley is the last part of the Cooks River system to retain significant elements of its original landscape and native vegetation. What has survived is quite varied. The Valley’s habitats range from mangroves, saltmarsh and reedlands to heathland, woodland and open forest. This diversity of habitats supports a large number of native animals, especially birds. In addition to offering these habitats, the Valley also provides a corridor along which migrating species can travel through south-western Sydney.

Despite these promising features, it is not surprising that most naturalists overlooked the western part of the Valley. Much of its remaining native vegetation was infested with weeds and the track leading through it was often muddy and overgrown. Happily, this is no longer the case. A significant amount of bush regeneration work has been carried out recently and there is a new track. But even before these improvements, the patient observer could find much to interest them there. At least I did between 1990 and 1993, when I conducted regular surveys of its birdlife.

My survey notes would have slowly yellowed in a box somewhere but for an accidental discovery years later in the Mitchell Library. Mired in other research, I started flicking through the card catalogue to see what it held on Alfred John North (1855-1917), the distinguished ornithologist who served as Assistant in Ornithology at the Australian Museum from 1891 to 1917. There were several cards. One led me to a thin, pale blue cardboard box stuffed with some of his correspondence. Another led me to his ‘Private Note Book’, a large maroon volume with marbled endpapers and thick pages covered in his scrawl. Judging from their generous layers of dust, no-one had looked at them since North died in 1917. As I leafed though his note book, I was surprised to find regular entries about trips to ‘Woolli Creek’ (the contemporary spelling of Wolli Creek) and Kingsgrove.

This was important. North had published records of some of the native birds he had found in the Wolli Creek Valley in his Nests and Eggs of Birds Found Breeding in Australia and Tasmania, a four-volume epic that remains a standard work today. Neil Rankin had briefly mentioned North’s work in his Birds of Wolli Creek. But as I kept reading North’s note book, it became clear that his work in the Valley was more extensive than previously known. While Neil was able to draw on records going back to 1940s, the detailed accounts in North's note book pushed available records of the Valley’s avifauna back to the 1890s.

That was not all. North, an unrepentant pedant when it came to scientific protocol, had recorded all the species he had seen in his note book using their scientific names, which are in vulgarised Greek and Latin. As I gradually made out one unfamiliar name after another, it became clear that several of the birds North had observed nesting in the Valley had never been seen there again.

That revelation underlies the second purpose of this work. In 1909 the NSW Colonial Secretary declared that the Wolli Creek Valley had been set apart for preserving native birds. But within about forty years most of the distinctive vegetation in the Valley’s west had been cleared, taking a number of native bird species with it. This mirrored a wider trend. By the mid-1990s, the loss of temperate woodland in south-eastern Australian was threatening many woodland birds species with local, or possibly even complete, extinction.

History, we are warned, repeats: [o]nce as tragedy, and again as farce. Despite the progress made by the environmental campaigns of the 1980s, surviving habitat for native species is still routinely destroyed. After decades of local campaigns to save the Valley from several capital works projects, including the M5 East Motorway, in 1998 the State Government promised to reserve it as a regional park. While parts of the Valley were transferred to the National Parks and Wildlife Services for this purpose between 2001 and 2011, large areas were omitted. They include, at the time I write, most of the surviving bushland in the western part of the Valley. Today theses areas remain under threat from the possibility of development and the proposed duplication of the M5 East Motorway. By showing what we have already lost in one small place, I hope to encourage a greater appreciation of what we still stand to lose.

I am grateful to the many people who helped me with this study. Neil Rankin kindly gave me copies of his field notes and those of Arnold McGill. Jeff McGill, Arnold’s grandson, provided me with biographical details. The late Audrey Barnes, a descendent of the King Family, which farmed at Bardwell Park, generously sent me copies of her family history and historic photographs of the Valley. Gavin Gatenby gave me regular updates on birds he had seen in the Valley. The late Bob Fenton provided me with details of the Red-capped Parrots of Strathfield. Nola Taylor supplied me with information on Stotts Reserve and the Bardwell Valley. Jaynia Sladek of the Bird Department at the Australian Museum provided me with information on the Museum’s ornithological collection. The ever-courteous and efficient staff of the Mitchell Library gave me access to North’s papers. I have also benefited significantly from the work of Doug Benson and his co-workers on the Valley’s botany, from the late Dr Lesley Muir and Brian Madden’s Bibliography and Ron Hill and Brian Madden’s Kingsgrove: the First Two Hundred Years. Judy Finlason sent me material relating to Burrell family farm at Bardwell Park.

Over the last five years, the Wolli Creek Preservation Society Inc has established a number of survey teams to continue documenting the Valley's birdlife. The places they cover, I was delighted to find, include the area subject to this study. I am grateful to the dedicated members of these teams for providing me with copies of their survey results for the period 2007 to 2011, which gave me an unexpected opportunity to update this study. Deb Little, Peter Stevens and Kathy Caruana, my wife, kindly scrutinised drafts of this study. While I was once Secretary and then President of the Wolli Creek Preservation Society Inc, the views expressed here are mine alone - as are any errors. The unattributed quotes in the text are from my field notes.

Finally, there is Patrick Cahill, my father. When I was very young, he took me looking for birds at my grandparent’s farm near Gore - instilling in me a love of nature that I too now hope to pass on.

I. HOW THE WEST WAS LOST

Geology and vegetation

Wolli Creek is a tributary of Cooks River. The Creek begins as a network of stormwater channels that drain the suburbs of Wiley Park, Roselands, Narwee and Peakhurst. They merge into a single channel at Beverly Hills, which runs east up to Bexley Road, near Bexley North railway station. From Bexley Road, the Creek flows east through its natural banks. A small tributary, Bardwell Creek, joins it near Turrella. Wolli Creek then continues east until it joins the Cooks River at Undercliffe, about 8 km south west of Sydney’s General Post Office.

The geology of the Cooks River Valley is dominated by Hawkesbury sandstone overlaid with Ashfield shale. The sandstone was deposited during the Triassic Age when, it is thought, Australia was part of the super-continent Gondwana. The shale was deposited later, sometime between the Middle Triassic and Jurassic Ages. In some places the shale gradually eroded away, exposing the underlying sandstone.

These geological variations are reflected in the various plant communities found in the Cooks River Valley. The sandstone-based areas support forests and woodland made up of eucalypts (including Sydney Peppermint and Blackbutt) and angophoras (including Sydney Red Gum) and heath. Those based on shale support forests dominated by Turpentine and Ironbark. Other parts of the Cooks River Valley support Banksia scrub, freshwater and brackish swamps and mangroves and saltmarsh.

Recent studies indicate the vegetation in the shale-based areas is more varied that previously understood. It is now thought the higher parts of the Valley supported Turpentine Ironbark Forest, while the plains between these forests and the Valley's waterways supported a distinctive plant association known as ‘Cooks River Clay Plain Scrub Forest.’ This association consists of woodland mostly of Broad-leaved Ironbark and Woollybutt. In some places, these taller species were absent and they were dominated instead by Ball Honeymyrtle, a small paperbark. Both these shale-based communities are now described as being part of a broader community known as ‘Cooks River/Castlereagh Ironbark Forest’.

While it occupies a small area, the western and eastern parts of the Wolli Creek Valley are geologically distinct. The western part of the Valley down to Bexley Road consists of a flat plain of clay-based soils derived from Ashfield shale. East of Bexley Road the Valley is dominated by Hawkesbury sandstone, with the Creek passing through a broad, irregular-shaped valley until it reaches Undercliffe. The geological differences between the western and eastern parts of the Valley are reflected in differences in the native vegetation they contain (or, in the case of much of the western section, contained). The shale-based part of the Valley supported Cooks River Clay Plain Scrub Forest, which grew along the Creek, with Turpentine Ironbark Forest growing behind it. By contrast, the sandstone-dominated part east of Bexley Road contains forests and woodlands dominated by eucalypts and angophoras, heath and patches of Sydney rainforest and Blue Gum-Blackbutt open forest.

We know a great deal about the original vegetation of the western part of the Valley, particularly around Kingsgrove, thanks to the Total Environment Centre’s 1976 study of the Cooks River and the painstaking research of