![]() ![]() Their numbers develop rapidly, raining down from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Their arrival is much like precipitation: a few fleeting drips at first, your mind plays tricks on you, a few brave souls you hardly think you saw. They’re propelled entirely by wind and a few intermittent flaps of their sensationally designed wings, which span up to 1 metre. Nearly one million birds overhead, and not one single head-on collision. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands approaching gale force winds like they were a soft breeze, allowing their bodies to be catapulted towards the island. We could just make out the shape of their bodies, small silhouettes against a back drop of a purely Tasmanian sunset. On October the 5th, at precisely last light, over 800,000 birds made their collective and calculated descent over our island. The birds just kept coming, a mighty swarm overhead but silent as the night sky. The words flew off my lips like a 10-year-old imitating Paul Revere in a school play, running around the exposed hill behind our house, flapping my arms up and down excitedly! “We’re bound to get pooped on!”. “The mutton birds are coming, the mutton birds are coming!” Maatsuyker Island is home to the third largest colony in Tasmania. Flocks of over one million make landfall under the cover of dusk around the islands of Bass Strait to begin their mating ritual. Their arrival is swift and deliberate - one day you feel like you’re completely alone on an island, the next, there’s no doubt in your mind, they own it! The “mutties” travel unfathomable distances, driven entirely by instinct. Within the same few days in late September to early October, a population of nearly 1 million descend upon Maatsuyker Island. The short-tailed shearwater “Puffinus tenuirostris”, also known as the muttonbird or yolla to Indigenous Australians, and affectionately to us as “mutties” travel the globe from polar region to polar region, journeying over 30,000 km every year. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |