Wildlife Notes

[Dirge]

Last year I was minding my own business practicing when a cicada moved to within 3 feet of me and started singing. This has happened a few times since, and I think they might hear the buzz of the reeds (Wheatstones' best long-scale, mind, no rubbish) as competition males. The local sparrows actively hunt cicadas and seem to do it by sound, tracing the cicada by their song; the end often being a zig zag aerial chase, the cicada emitting bursts of sound as it goes. The sparrows usually get their victims; it's a high risk thing, going courting if you're a Kiwi cicada.

 

The cicadas are quite beefy and it must be the equivalent of me chasing down a christmas turkey; clearly no one has taken the local sparrows aside and explained that they are FINCHES and supposed to be PREDOMINATELY SEEDEATERS. Anyway you can probably guess the next bit. There I am practicing next to some french windows and suddenly, just outside, I notice a sparrow doing a helicopter impression and craning her neck in every direction. I'm pretty sure she had heard the concertina and was trying to spot the cicada...

 

(the sparrows are here in NZ for the same reason as they seem to be everywhere else in the world, because some homesick Brit introduced the little blighters to remind him of 'home')

[Dave Rogers]

clearly no one has taken the local sparrows aside and explained that they are FINCHES and supposed to be PREDOMINATELY SEEDEATERS.

 

English sparrows'll eat anything - my Grandad used to do a lot of fishing on a London canal and every time he reached for his bait box, there'd be at least one guilty-looking sparrow sat there with a "living beard" of maggots protruding from its beak...