Recording of bird song (15 minutes) from my food forest in the South East corner of Australia

Hi everyone!

Well, it is now spring here in the land of down under. The food forest of 300+ different fruit trees are growing well and there has been a whole lot of rain this year in this corner of Australia. Anyway, I was in the food forest the other night supervising the chickens who get to free roam (lucky them!) most evenings under the fruit trees and I decided to take the microphone and laptop out and record the bird song. It is pretty feral here as there are a huge number of birds. The recording is an mp3 file which you can download for free from my podcast website at this link: Fernglade Farm weekly podcast

The weekly blog of all the crazy things going on here can be found at this link: Fernglade Farm Weekly blog

Hope you enjoy it! And it is a pleasure to share this place with the good people here. The bird calls should sound quite exotic to people living in the Northern hemisphere and I have not edited or altered the recording in any way.

Chris

Plenty of familiar sounds. Was the cockatoo a black?

Hi D. Klaer,

Nice to hear (excuse the pun)! I do get the Gang Gang black cockatoos here, but I didn't notice any around that evening. They sound like squeaky doors and are unmistakable. The cocaktoos in the recording where the Sulphur Crested variety. I've noticed that the Long beaked Corella's are spreading their range too and they also turn up here from time to time now. They sure do kick up a fuss, but the magpies which live here permanently send them on their way. I've read that a lot of people have troubles with the cockatoos - they can even begin sharpening their beaks on house frames and windows. One chewed through a low voltage solar power cable once...

Hey, out of curiosity, how far south do you believe that the stingless bees can be kept? I have plenty of varieties of native bee - both small and large - here and they love the garden. I also keep European honey bees too.

Cheers

Chris

Hi Chris.

If you are keeping them in a log or box then Sydney is roughly the limit though I do know of somebody that kept them in Victoria. He was heating the hives though and I don't know how successful he was.

Hi D. Klaer,

Many thanks for the informative reply. Heating the hive over winter here would be a tricky business. I'm on off grid solar and there is just enough light here for current needs for about 3 weeks either side of the winter solstice when the sun is lower in the sky. The 3 weeks after the winter solstice would be very cold indeed for those stingless bees. The European honey bees and all of the other local native bees seem quite happy and content with that situation though. You may be interested to know that even during those winter days - and it does snow here occasionally - that if the daytime temperature ever exceeds 10'C, the European bees will send out foragers. There are flowers here all year around for them just for that purpose. The flowers was a complex problem to work through.

Chris