In some ways, I take more pride in the return of birds to Lanark than I do in anything else that has happened on the property in the past 50-odd years. I use the word ‘return’ deliberately: the birds had been there before. By all accounts, the country around Branxholme, which includes Lanark, used to teem with bird life before white settlers arrived. In 1858, a remarkable character named James Bonwick (1817–1906)—teacher, school proprietor, gold prospector, historian, archivist and journalist— had this to say about our area: ‘The Smokey River rises from the Branxholme Swamps. Great numbers of native companions, herons, ducks and geese frequent these swamps. The country between Branxholme and Hamilton, eighteen miles, I found to be like that from the two falls—plateau forests and swamps.’
It has been estimated that when I took over Lanark in 1956, 80 per cent or more of the 200 bird species that had been present in the area before white settlers arrived were no longer there. By clearing the woodlands and draining the swamps, farmers had deprived them of a habitat. Today, the bulk of those 200 species have returned. This is a great result for the environment as well as for the birds, for an abundance of birds is always an indicator of a healthy landscape. I had this pointed out to me by an officer of the World Wide Fund for Nature in 1985 not long after the fund appointed me a trustee. I made a note of what he said: ‘The number of species of birds present on a given piece of farmland and the number of individuals present on that land is a direct indicator of the health of that piece of land.’
The first list of bird species at Lanark was compiled more than 60 years ago by Murray Gunn, a naturalist with a passionate interest in birds, and an older brother of my friend Graeme. Murray was only a teenager then, but in the late 1940s he happened to spend some time at Lanark working for his father, a builder, who was erecting a woolshed there. While Murray worked at Lanark he made a list of the birds he saw in a notebook that he always carried with him. Years later, Murray and I were both members of the local branch of the Victorian Field Naturalists Club, and I have a distinct memory of talking to him one day about the importance of having enough bushland on the farm where birds could breed. It was probably the first time I discussed the matter with anyone.
The most detailed of all bird life studies at Lanark was undertaken in 1987 by Elizabeth Jacka, an RMIT student. Drawing from records compiled by Murray Gunn and from our own farm diaries, she was able to compare the number of bird species believed to have been in the district in 1840, before white settlement, with the number observed in 1956, when I took over Lanark, and the number in 1976, after the wetlands had been reinstated. Her conclusion was that the 200 species estimated to have been present in 1840 had fallen to 39 by 1956 but had risen to 133 by 1976. This was a remarkable increase, especially considering that by 1976 the revegetation of Lanark was far from complete. Although we had done some woodland planting by then, Lanark’s overall woodland component was still quite small, amounting to not much more than a fortieth of the property. If nothing else, this shows that a relatively small investment in woodland planting can result in a huge expansion of bird life. The number of bird species observed at Lanark continued to grow in the years after Elizabeth did her study. By 1996, the number stood at 158.
Elizabeth had been involved with other RMIT students in an earlier study of bird life at Lanark. The study was the idea of Jim Sinatra, an RMIT professor, and it had the active support of Murray Gunn, who had then been monitoring the comings and goings of birds at Lanark since 1950. The project was a labour of love for everyone concerned: each provided his or her expertise free of charge. The students in the first study group were Amanda Kimmins (who produced wonderful sketches and large-format perspectives), Jonathon Pearce, Graeme Quin and, of course, Elizabeth Jacka. Using my revegetation notebooks and bird diaries, they prepared charts and extracted relevant data to illustrate the changing land conditions and growth in bird numbers every ten years until 1996. The result was a ground-breaking paper titled ‘A Farm Review 1840–1986’.
In 1987, Elizabeth took this study further with the 306-page paper that I referred to before. She was then a fourth-year landscape architecture student. Her work is both innovative and technically accurate to an exceptional degree. Indeed, I am not aware of anything else of its kind. In 1999 Elizabeth was awarded honours at RMIT for a final study, ‘Birdscapes For Western District Farmlands’.
The eastern great egret was one of the water birds to make Lake Cicely its home for part of each year. I am particularly pleased about this, because this egret happens to be my favourite bird. For those not familiar with the species, I should explain that the large egret is a tall, all-white water bird with long legs and a long bill. Over the years the large egret has been a fairly regular visitor to Lake Cicely. I find its whiteness particularly appealing. It is not glossy white, like many other white birds, but has a kind of matt finish. It looks immaculate—all the more so when it is displaying its breeding plumage.
This egret is sometimes wrongly referred to as the white crane, which brings to mind yet another gem by the ecologist Aldo Leopold, one of my favourite sources of quotes. He wrote in his book A Sand County Almanac (1949): ‘And so they live and have their being—these cranes—not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the ticking of the geological clock . . . [and] the sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harboured cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.’ (Leopold was probably referring here to the whooping crane, now recovering from near extinction.)
Birds were not the only type of wildlife to take advantage of the lake-side habitat we were creating. Eastern swamp rats moved in, too. As I was to learn from experience, this nearly always happens when you restore an ecological balance to what had been a degraded area: various types of wildlife, suddenly finding a healthy habitat to their liking, move in and, for a while, proliferate. This happened with the eastern swamp rats. Suddenly, the place teemed with them. In no time they had stripped Cicely’s garden. They even chewed the rind off the lemons growing on a tree. The new habitat was not the only reason they multiplied so rapidly—they also lacked predators.
We had recently gone to a lot of trouble to rid the property of foxes and feral cats (David shot them with a spotlight at night). I did this for the sake of the eastern barred bandicoots that we had introduced there, but it was the swamp rats that seemed to benefit most.
Lake Cicely had been, for us, a big, expensive undertaking, but both Cicely and I soon decided that it had been worthwhile. For a time, though, it seemed we were about the only people in the district who thought so. The reaction of friends and neighbours who saw the lake was generally negative. Most were too polite to be openly critical, although you could tell that they thought the whole enterprise was a folly. Others did not hold back. They told us plainly that they thought the construction of the lake was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard of a farmer doing. What a waste of time and money! What a waste of good grazing land!
Although we were convinced that we were right and they were wrong, the negative reaction was disconcerting to say the least. I think both Cicely and I needed some reassurance at that time and, happily for us, the famous ornithologist Graham Pizzey came along to provide it. I had long known of Pizzey from his numerous books, one of which was a well-known field guide to Australian birds. While still a young man, Pizzey had given up an opportunity to take over the family leather business and, instead, devoted the rest of his life to a field of study in which he was passionately interested—bird life.
Graham Pizzey first visited Lanark in the early 1960s. He was staying with a neighbour who brought him to the property to see the old swamp we had reinstated. He spent perhaps fifteen minutes walking around the swamp by himself, studying it from every angle. Cicely and I stood there, awaiting his verdict with some trepidation. Finally, he walked over to us. ‘John,’ he said, ‘what you’ve done here is wonderful.’ They were his exact words. I remember them, because they resonated in my mind for a long time afterwards.
Later, Graham and his wife, Sue, came to live at nearby Dunkeld, and not long after we finished Lake Cicely he came to inspect it. His judgment was that we had done a great service to the environment. Pizzey told me one other thing. He predicted that riparian plants would return to our restored wetland of their own accord, just as the birds had done, because waterfowl would bring in the seed on their feet and in their gut. When seasonal conditions were right, he said, the plants would reappear. This proved to be true: Lake Cicely soon had a full suite of riparian plants, none of which we had planted ourselves. All we had done was fence the area off. We had a very different result in the dryland areas on the property we fenced off. There, no regeneration occurred whatsoever.
Lake Cicely proved to be a habitat for frogs as well as birds. In 2001 Damien Cook of Wetland Ecosystems Australia did a study of the various kinds of frogs living in and around Lake Cicely and was able to identify the following: striped marsh frog, spotted marsh frog, eastern banjo frog, common froglet, Ewing’s tree frog and growling grass frog.
How are birds faring at Lanark today? I regret to say that over the past decade or more—say, since the mid-1990s—I have noticed that some species have disappeared altogether and that bird numbers generally have declined. I can only conclude that this is because farmers are continuing to clear bushland and drain swamps and other wetlands. I fear that a prediction made by the noted ornithologist Professor Harry Recher in a 1999 paper might still prove true. The paper, titled ‘The State Of Australia’s Avifauna’, was published in the Australian Zoologist in June that year. Professor Recher wrote: ‘I expect less than half of Australia’s terrestrial bird species will survive the next 100 years. If I am wrong it will be because Australians modify their behaviour and change the way they manage the land, water and natural resources.’