Lyrebirds and Sushi
Back Into The Blue Hue
It was a very wet day in the Blue Mountains. Clouds had lowered themselves to the cliffs, while waterfalls which only yesterday were small trickles began to swell. Katoomba’s empty main street rang with the sounds of rain hitting off cafe signs and streams trickling into gutters. I stood in the middle of this deluge of sound and water, having delayed the day's hike while the rain malingered, reading cafe menus and identifying reasons why I shouldn’t eat lunch at any food establishment I found across. After many hangry thoughts I decided I wanted to try Sushi.
I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about eating sushi without looking like an uncultured buffoon but felt the first step must be to open the door and greet the waiter. She gave me a seat beside the conveyor belt and handed me a menu. Having noticed my inner turmoil as I debated whether lifting the plates off the conveyor belt was theft or common practice, she asked how I was getting on. I took this to mean it was time to order and outlined my hopes and dreams for this meal, expecting her to go off and do whatever waiters do after they walk through the glaze-windowed doors in every restaurant on Planet Earth. Instead she smirked, wrote down our order, reached over to the conveyor belt carrying food under our noses and placed them on our table.
Having made my way through a wonderful Morse code of small, coloured plates (each representing a different price) I congratulated myself on having survived my first meal transported by conveyor belt. The rain had fizzled out into a cold mist outside and I got up to pay the bill. Now, I would not consider myself to be hard of hearing but occasionally I mishear what someone is saying, and it generally leads to great confusion. To make matters worse, it only seems to happen in restaurants and cafes, places where you really need your wits about you. In this particular instance I misheard the waiter when she asked if I’d like a receipt, thinking she was asking where my receipt was. I immediately jumped to the worst case scenario and assumed that I had already been entrusted with a receipt, eradicated the moment from my memory and then lost it among the rainbow of small plates we had accumulated. Within seconds I was scrambling under chairs and rummaging through cutlery, searching for this mysterious sheet of paper which I had unknowingly lost. Having upturned the entire restaurant I sheepishly explained that I had somehow misplaced my receipt and wouldn’t be able to supply it to her. Bemused, she explained that in Australia the customer isn’t required to write their own receipt. I awkwardly accepted my reciept, which had been in her hand all this time, and walked out the door, concluding that sushi was nice, I was just incompetent.
Katoomba falls
As a child, I first stumbled upon these mountains in books about Australia. I was fascinated by how difficult Europeans found it to survive and navigate them compared with the ease with which Gundungurra and Dharug Peoples crossed them. In fact, every other living thing seemed to find it easier to traverse this country than the Europeans, the most beguiling example of this being the first seven cattle to arrive in Australia. They had spent a few months happily grazing the grass around Port Jackson until one evening their farmhand had forgotten to close their paddock gate. The cattle took this opportunity to make a go of this new continent alone. After an entire blogsworth of unsuccessful mountain crossings, Europeans finally pushed through. You can imagine their surprise when, having crossed thick forests and foreboding cliffs, they discover that Daisy&Co. are seven years into their own bovine interpretation of River Cottage, feeding and breeding with gusto.
These now wild cattle seemed to really click with these mountains, for possible descendants of these wild cattle were still found wandering the bush in the 1930s. 10 year-old Jonathan had become entranced for life: every mountain range can swalllow a herd of cattle but few can spit them out again 130 years later. I had to see this place for myself.
As already mentioned in my last blog, I certainly wasn’t swallowed by the mountains like cattle, I barely got near them. Every time I tried to hike here I was spat out like bad coffee. So today’s task would be my final attempt to complete the hike which had failed 10 years ago and then failed again only yesterday when my three cousins almost perished for lack of food. They had done alright I suppose: Middle and Youngest covered about 500 metres and Oldest had bravely weathered a couple of kilometres before seeing visions of food under every second tree. Daring to hope for success, I headed down a warren of steps before coming to a metal staircase descending slowly down to the valley floor. It looked like it had been superglued to the cliff face and I wasn’t keen to rest my little toe on it, never mind my entire body. But then I looked down the valley, with its blue haze of trees stretching out the horizon, broken only by sandstone cliff-faces and strands of mist and I knew I had to risk an untimely end.
Of course, it never came to that and I made it safely down the stairs. I walked in silence, consumed by the sounds of rain dripping off the leaves of the turpentine trees and the squelch of feet on mud. The piping calls of bellbirds echoed through the forest and mixed with the metallic ringing of the rosella, before being interrupted by the squawks of cockatoos at random intervals.
An hour into our walk I noticed that the birdsong was no longer mixed together but had separated into individual bird calls. It is of course possible that the birds were taking part in a variety concert but it was far more likely to be a lyrebird, arguably the best mimic on planet earth. I listened to it show off its repertoire as it hid in the undergrowth: first the sad cries of a currawong, then the booming whip of a whipbird and finally the rising crescendo of the kookaburra’s laugh. They’re also pretty good dancers, a skill which seems essential in securing a lyrebird partner.
Lyrebirds are famous for being mimics, which might lead you to assume that they spend their time stealing other bird calls and collecting their songs for their avian stamp collection. But the lyrebird has actually learned much of its repertoire from its parents. It’s song is the accumulation of generations of birds copying, tweaking and adding their own little flair to their parents' song; the best sounds of their forest home blended into one mixtape. This means that lyrebirds actually have different dialects: Lyrebirds in Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, have songs which are similar to each other but different to lyrebirds in the Blue Mountainswho in turn have different songs to lyrebirds in Tasmania, similar to accents or languages in our human culture.
These avian gramophones are also very involved in their local communities, and have such an effect on the landscape that they would be welcomed into the most elite Tidy Towns committee with open arms. In fact they are christened by science as ecosystem engineers, which means that they have a significant effect on the ecosystem. One lyrebird displaces an average of 350 tonnes of soil and leaf litter (about 11 dump trucks worth) every year while searching for its favourite insects, encouraging the growth of certain plants, discouraging others and increasing the number of insects in the area. All of this trojan work ensures that the habitat remains suitable for the lyrebird while also giving animals and plants space and light to grow.
Having enjoyed a show of trills, rises and falls to rival Carmen, I wound my way through the forest before coming to my exit point: a nine-hundred step staircase that zigzagged its way up the cliff like a fire-escape. 900 steps can be a daunting prospect but I had consumed three weetabix that morning AND carried a secret weapon: two Cadbury Dream bars. These divine squares of white chocolate heaven could power a walker across the outback far better than beef jerky ever could. I am convinced that if Ireland sold these dream bars we would replace the Spire with something decent, sort out the economy and finally bring the LUAS out to the airport.
With each rest break, the view improved. First I looked right into the canopy of Eucalypts with their drooping leaves, then we got our first glimpse above the treetops and watched a cockatoo fly across the valley. Higher up, the clifftops shrunk and the individual eucalypts merged together below us into one large head of broccoli. Higher still and the broccoli began to look rancid as the blue hue created the appearance of mould. We could see the contour lines of the forests folding towards the Kedumba river valley.
I was at the top in no time. Chocolate seemed too casual for such an achievement so I celebrated with ice cream instead, watching tourists line up for pictures in front of the valley. The chocolate remained intact and lived a happy life in my suitcase until after I had left Australia when it was eaten on a drizzly autumn day with much nostalgia. It even provided me with enough energy to finish a game of Monopoly, surely the most pointless first I’ve ever celebrated.
And so, ice creams finished, I headed back to Sydney to continue my holiday, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was to hit these mountains. Just six months after my visit, Australia’s East Coast experienced its worst ever bushfire season. Intense fires devoured huge swathes of the east coast, eating up forests, burning up homes and tearing across social media platforms. 79% of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area was destroyed in the Grose Valley Fire, leaving few places for nature to recover. Some places never will.
40% of the superb lyrebird’s habitat in Australia was burnt. For those that survived the burn, high intensity fires are usually followed by a sudden explosion of vegetation which is too dense for the lyrebird to forage in. Foxes and cats also move into areas after fires to pick out prey that are more exposed, directly affecting the lyrebirds breeding success.
Lyrebirds are deemed to be of “Least Concern” by the IUCN, but Birdlife Australia believes that they are now “Threatened”. At any rate, local populations are vanishing in areas that experienced high intensity fires or face pressure from habitat loss and as they disappear, their dialects are lost forever. These intense fires are forecast to continue increasing in strength, posing threats to this landscape of green valleys, where lyrebirds dance and cattle have a better GPS system than humans. We can only hope scientists can find out as much as they can about these birds before their song cultures, their community mixtapes vanish forever. Having listened live to some of their greatest hits, that really would be a shame.
Bushfire smoke rising from the Blue Mountains. Photograph used by kind permission of Gary P Hayes.