It’s the little things – the little things with wings that sing
With so much emphasis on the big glossy things like the cockatoos and kookaburras it’s easy to overlook the little birds.

In a world that worships the big SUVs, the tall buildings, the jumbo airplanes, the super oil tankers, the bulk container ships, the mega shopping centres and the outsized sporting arena, is it any wonder that when it comes to tiny little birds that flit about in the understory of local bushland, they seem insignificant and hardly worth paying any attention to.

Even smaller are the insects that these birds feed on, so growing insect-attracting plants and encouraging ground-dwelling arthropods that forage around in leaves, rocks and lower hanging branches is more important than we might imagine.

Whether it be at Munibung Hill or in our gardens and on the verges, the best way to attract smalls birds is by providing them with small native shrubs.  Visit wildflower and indigenous nurseries to check out the options. Choose wide, dense, mounded shrubs with foliage to the ground, as they offer superior shelter. Consider for example She-oaks (Allocasuarina spp.) from groundcovers to medium trees, Wattles (Acacia spp.) and don’t  forget the grasses. These are important lepidoperan hosts and create top-notch habitat, particularly for birds and lizards – kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra), weeping grass (Microlaena stipoides) and wallaby grass (Rytidosperma spp.) 

    Reference: Gardening Australia magazine, April 2024

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Old timers can teach us a great deal
Let’s take a fresh look at Munibung Hill, with new eyes. With a mindset that respects the age old lessons that she has on show each day.

The most common approach to anything old is to toss it on the scrap heap. Old is bad. New is to be hankered after. But we are doing ourselves a great disservice by dismissing the old in favour of the new.

The Oldest Ecosystems on Earth: What they teach us about resilience.by Ferris Jabr, (Nautilus, June 10, 2024) urges us to look anew at the old, especially old ecosystems.  And when it comes to old, then Munibung Hill at 251 million years has had a lot of experience at what it means to live within an interconnected framework.

Ferris writes that: “When we adopt a deep time, holistic perspective, some ecosystems take on an almost organismic quality, shifting across the planet’s surface like giant amoebae, expanding and retreating in response to environmental fluctuations, yet persisting as coherent entities.

Scientists have not yet agreed on a precise definition of life, but many experts have phrased it more or less like this: Life is a system that actively sustains itself.

And later …
The tenacity of the planet’s longest-lived ecosystems reveals an essential characteristic of life at any scale: interconnection. By definition, all living things are systems made of smaller interrelated parts. Those systems are themselves inextricable from the larger networks that surround them. Every individual tree is a universe of mineral, water, and cell harboring sprawling communities of microbes and fungi. At the same time, a tree is a vital component of the larger forest, landscape, and even the very weather systems on which it depends.

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A call for compassion for the species we depend on
‘Climate refugia’ is just more jargon you could say. But we need words that stand out and grab our attention if we are to counter all the other language flying around us.

In a special report: Barrington to Hawkesbury Climate Corridors Plant Communities and Threatened Flora: Connecting regional climate change refugia for native species’ persistence in a warming world’ by Paul Winn, there is a well reasoned call for extra emphasis to be given to those species within those areas that are under threat of increasing human interference and degradation. To quote a brief section from pages 17, 18 of this 92 page report ..

‘Threats to the natural environment are being exacerbated by ever increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. In 2021, GHG emissions increased 6.4 percent to a new record, eclipsing the pre-pandemic peak as global economic activity resumed.

The combined global land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.08 degrees Celsius (C) per decade since 1880, but since 1981, the rate of increase has more than doubled to 0.18 °C per decade. 

Areas of suitable habitat within generally unfavourable landscapes
are referred to as ‘refugia’.

Refugia represent areas that biodiversity can persist in, or retreat to, until the surrounding landscapes becomes favourable to expand.

However, contemporary climate change is a much more significant problem than in the past due to the speed of the change coupled with the pre-existing threats to native species from modification of land and waters by human settlements, pastoralism, agriculture, logging, invasive pests and weeds, inappropriate fire regimes, land clearing and resulting fragmentation of natural vegetation.

These threats erode native species resilience to climate change by disrupting species movements and natural ecological processes, and drive populations down to nonviable levels.’

MHCS lays claim to Munibung Hill being a significant contributor to biodiversity ‘refugia’ providing an urban locality with a unique opportunity to protect remnant threatened plant communities, that are in turn, providing habitat for a range of species, including a number within the threatened species list.

Publication produced by .. Barrington to Hawkesbury Climate Corridors Alliance* – 21 March 2023
Lead Author: Paul Winn, Contributors: Jo Lynch, William Degeer, Nicola Bowskill
*The Community Environment Network (CEN), EcoNetwork Port Stephens, The Hunter Bird Observers Club (HBOC), The Hunter Community Environment Centre (HCEC), The National Parks Association NSW – Hunter branch
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Within the Lake Mac area, a reference species is the Squirrel Glider, found at Munibung Hill and listed as endangered.

…. From MMM Issue #45, Aug-Sept, 2024