26 Bush Birds - with Bridget

Become a ‘bird noticer’ and watch the bush birds around you.

This episode is about watching bush birds like the White-browed Scrubwren, White-winged Chough and Spotted Pardalote.

Bridget Farmer is originally from Northern Ireland. She initially visited Australia to friends but fell in love with the country (and a certain Australian man) and stayed longer than expected. She lives in country Victoria with her husband, two young sons, a whole flock of chickens and a studio rabbit. Bridget is a printmaker and her work celebrates Australia’s birdlife and her chooks. She has written and illustrated two children’s books… and there are more on the way.

Available on your podcast app or listen below.

Links

* Bridget’s website - bridgetfarmerprintmaker.com
* Bridget on Facebook - @bridgetfarmerprintmaker
* Bridget on Instagram - @bridgetfarmerprintmaker
* Bridget on TikTok - @bridgetfarmerprintmaker
* Deception by helpers in cooperatively breeding white-winged choughs and its experimental manipulation – link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265005038650050386

Bird calls were recorded by Marc Anderson and licensed from www.wildambience.com

• Episode Transcript - click to read

  Kirsty: Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures is something that we should all take pride in as a nation. I would like to acknowledge elders past and present and any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons listening to this episode.

  Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa. In this episode, we are going to look at birds through new eyes with artist, author and illustrator Bridget Farmer. Bridget came to Australia from Ireland to visit friends, but she fell in love with this country and an Aussie and ended up staying much longer than expected. One of the first things that Bridget noticed was the birds.

  Bridget: I think I remember being amazed at how different they all were and how in-your-face they all were. Growing up in Northern Ireland, there are a lot of birds but they are a lot smaller and shyer and they're hiding in the bushes and in the trees. But in Australia they're all out in full view to be seen and squawking and carrying on. I think that was quite amazing that they were all just out there and easy to see. The magpies were quite extraordinary. I saw signs up on walls and on lampposts saying, "Watch out for swooping magpies!". I said, "What is this for real?". And pictures of heads with sunglasses on the back and tricks to avoid being swooped by magpies. I thought this was a joke and I asked my friends who was who I was staying with, "What's all this about?". And they're like, "Oh yeah. Magpies. Australian Magpies. They get you in spring!". Every time I saw a bird, I say, "Oh, what's that one? What's that one?". And they were like, "Oh, we're not really sure but they're everywhere". How can you not know what these are? And for my first Christmas, staying with them, they're like, "Well, here you go, Bridget. We brought you a present!". And it was my first Australian Bird book and it was fantastic. It kind of all went from there. I've still got that bird book. It's got a lot of inky fingerprints on it from being my reference book. While I'm printmaking, I've added to my collection of bird books over the years. I've got quite a few now. Yeah, it was a great Christmas present.

  Bridget: I remember first finding out that cockatoos were from Australia and how noisy they are is they really go for it? When I was in Belfast as a kid, they used to be this cockatoo in the Belfast Zoo called Kizzy. And it was the highlight of every zoo trip because Kizzy would say, "knickers". And so all the kids would be around Kizzy's enclosure, yelling "knickers" at her and Kizzy would scream back, "Knickers!". Absolute highlight. And when I came to Australia and saw the cockatoos here, it just reminded me of poor old Kizzy. I had no idea that cockatoos were actually native of Australia. So it was extraordinary seeing, seeing them here and yeah, and all the other brightly coloured parrots and parakeets and everything just, just out there in the wild native to here. It was great.

  Kirsty: Bridget's love of birds has grown over time, especially when she discovered that they are really aligned with her drawing style.

  Bridget: I like to draw fast with loose lines, just trying to capture the character of the bird and the movement. A bit of life to them. When I was studying in Scotland, we would be encouraged... I studied jewellery in Scotland, but we were encouraged to always keep drawing and I would go to the museum and draw the stuffed birds there and I draw the pigeons and the seagulls on the streets. And I found that birds - you could capture quickly. There's not too many limbs or anything. And if you just get the beak right and the eye right and just that stance, you can really capture such a lot in just a few lines. When I came to Australia, I found through drawing the birds, I was able to learn the birds. When I first arrived in Melbourne, I discovered printmaking. I did a weekend course in drypoint etching and it just clicked, absolutely clicked. And I said, "Ah ha ha! This is me! This is what I want to do!". And the subject matter just naturally became birds because I was drawing the birds anyway to try and keep them in my head. It was a great way to remember the different shapes and the markings and things like that by drawing them. It certainly seems to go to a different part of the brain rather than just looking at a picture. If you actually pencil on paper and start drawing it, it stays in your brain more. Through my sketches, I would take them on further and they'd become the images on the drypoint plates, on the metal or perspex plates. I'd scratch into the plates. It was always birds. I started getting known for drawing birds and it sort of went on from there.

  Kirsty: Bridget wrote and illustrated a book called 'Kookaburra Kookaburra' in 2018. It's a book that I love to gift to the many children in my life. She went on to write and illustrate Bush Birds, which was included in the notables list for the Children's Book Council of Australia 2022 Book Awards. Bush Birds consists of twelve riddles for readers to guess which Australian native bird is being depicted.

  Bridget: Because I only choose twelve birds for each of my books and it is so hard to whittle it down to just twelve. And I often get people going, "Oh, why didn't you include this bird? Why didn't you include that bird?". And it's so hard choosing those twelve birds. Once I make that list and work out, I look at maps and stuff to see where they might be found. Is there a wider range? Often poor Western Australia gets left out because it's very difficult doing birds across the whole country. I think I might need to do a separate Western Australian book, especially for them. But for the Bush Birds, because I do live in the bush, it was basically a lot of the birds that I do see when I'm out on bird walks or just in my garden. And so I would go out and take photos of those. I would do a bit of research, like where would they be found. And I sort of collected all that imagery and information. Then I had to do what I find is the hardest part is write about them, write a little rhyme about them. And I find that the hardest part, and still not as confident with that side of making books - the printmaking part I'm really happy with. But I still manage to procrastinate a lot when it comes to starting a new plate. People talk about how scary the blank page is, but try doing it on a piece of copper, which is ten times the price of a piece of paper or one hundred times the price. And once you make a mark in that metal, there's no going back. It's very scary. I sometimes have a spotless studio when it's time to start a new plate, and that's very unlike me to be tidying up over something else. But once I start and get into it, I get really into it. And yeah, it just sort of flows from there. I do drypoint, which is slightly different from you may have heard of copper plate etching or acid etching. Drypoint you don't use acid or anything, you just scratch straight into the metal. So I use copper or aluminium and I have a needle, an etching needle, and I just make the scratches straight into the plate. Those scratches, when inked up to ink up, you sort of rub ink all over the surface of the plate and you rub it in with a piece of cloth called Tarleton, and then you gradually wipe back the excess ink. So the ink sits in the lines that you've scratched and the rest of the ink is wiped away. So when you put it through your printing press with damp paper over the top, the ink in those lines is transferred from the plate to the paper. Each inking up, you only get one print. So if you want another print in the addition, you have to go through the inking up process all over again. I had no idea how it worked until I actually did it. I went all the way through art college. I mean, admittedly I did jewellery, but I went through all of art college and had no idea how an etching was made still. And I would ask people in the printmaking department, but I don't understand how - how is it just lines? Because we all have done a bit of lino printing where you roll the ink onto the surface of the plate. Yeah, but this is completely different and I love the result, especially with drypoint you get slightly fuzzy line, which is just sort of lovely and warming and gentle. The deeper you scratch into the plate, the darker the line will be. So you can get sort of faint lines with lighter scratchings. I also use a bit of sandpaper for some areas, and that sort of holds tone so you can get varying levels of tone in the background.

  Kirsty: That's an incredible process that Bridget goes through to create amazing bird artworks. One of the birds that she fell in love with while writing Bush Birds is the White-browed Scrubwren.

  Bridget: This little bird - you don't notice it, but it's actually everywhere. Yeah, it's a little, little bird. Very dismissible because it's a little brown bird scurrying around in the leaf litter. And you can hear it sometimes, but you don't always look. But if you start looking, you start noticing it. It's in there, it's hopping around. And they're actually quite... not tame, but maybe they're inquisitive? Maybe because people don't notice them, so they feel a bit more brazen, you know? And I was living in Hepburn Springs near Daylesford when I had my second baby. In those early newborn days, I'd be on our verandah. I'd be feeding him and these little Scrub-wrens would hop around my feet and sometimes actually land on my shoe or whatever. And they just became really special. And so when it came to choosing birds for the Bush Birds book, I definitely had to include a little White-browed Scrubwren because although you think they're just little brown birds, if you look closer there's there's so much more to them. And they actually have this lovely sort of chevron zigzag feature on their wing and they've got lovely facial markings. And, of course, their little white brow. If you start looking out for them, you'll start seeing them everywhere and they've got a lovely raspy call, so their calls quite recognisable. Next time you're in the bush, perk your ears up, have a listen and then you'll hopefully see them.

  Kirsty: White-browed Scrubwrens are the most common and widespread of Australia's five species of scrubwren. They can be found in bushland, heath rainforests and gardens in northern Queensland all the way down to South Australia and across to the mid-western Australian coast. They also like to hang out in Tasmania. Their colour can slightly vary depending on where they're found. Scrubwrens found in the north are more yellow underneath and those in the south have a dark streaking on their throat for more. On how to identify little brown birds, I highly recommend you listen to Weekend Birder Episode 07 with Ricky Coughlan. Another bird that Bridget adores is the White-winged Chough.

  Bridget: Before I had children, we were living properly in the bush and there were always these quite large family groups of these blackbirds. And I think it was my neighbor who was also my landlady. She was great. And she said, "Oh, look out for the White-winged Chough. They make a funny call if you disturb them. They sound all sad and morose. And they say 'Oh! Oh!' as they fly away". I was like, "All right, I'll listen out for that". And so I'd go for walks in the bush and sure enough, there they were all together and their family group and crying into the into the bush. And I thought, well, this is really interesting, because if this wasn't pointed out to me I maybe wouldn't have noticed how different they actually are. They're blackbirds. You might just think, "Oh, they're just ravens, they're crows, you know, nothing too interesting". Sorry. Ravens and crows. You are interesting. But yes, you often see ravens around and you might just think these are these are more ravens. But when you look closer, you realize they're sleeker and they're slimmer than than ravens. Their beak is longer and slightly curved and smaller. And they've actually got this this red eye, which is really quite different. When they when they take off and fly away, you see the white wings on them. And so this really interested me and I had a little read about them and learned that they're the only birds that partake in slavery, which I thought was really interesting. Because they're such a sort of family orientated bird, the whole flock raised the young but sometimes they need a bit of help. So they go to a neighboring flock and steal a few teenagers from that flock to help out in their flock. I don't know what the other flock does without their teenagers. They must have to go on and find a few others to help out the whole flock, build the nests and care for the young. It's really interesting. Maybe I've found out more about Australian birds because I've it's really become part of my work but the stories I hear about the interaction between all the flocks and stuff like that, it seems so different from birds from home. But I don't know, maybe that's because I haven't looked as deeply into the birds from Ireland. But the birds in Australia, they're extraordinary. So interesting. White-wing Choughs live in the open forests and woodlands of southern and eastern Australia, especially where it's a bit damp and muddy. Speaking of mud, they build the most amazing nests using leaves and grasses which are then held together in a perfect cup shape by mud or manure. And here's a fun fact that I learnt recently - a study by researchers at the Australian National University found that grown White-winged Choughs sometimes pretend to feed their baby brothers and sisters, but actually steal the food right out of their mouths for themselves. Cheeky buggers! I'll put a link to this study in the episode notes. When writing her book Bush Birds, Bridget also couldn't go past the Spotted Pardalote.

  Bridget: I remember I visited a school and I was talking about the different birds I'd seen and I mentioned the Spotted Pardalote and I just got blank faces from all the students. And I was like, "Oh, maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong, shall I say it in Australian accent?". And they're like, "Oh yeah". And so I gave it a go, I gave it a shot, "A Spot-ted Par-da-lote". Everyone still had blank faces, but I still felt that I'd given it my all and I still hadn't got it. Yes. So the Spotted Pardalote is just a little jewel of a bird. It's beautiful when you see it up close. Just all the different colours and the little spots over. I have a friend and he described it as just like looking into the night sky. All those little white bright spots on its head. It's beautiful. And also I'm really pleased that I can now recognise it's call. I was sitting in my garden in Hepburn Springs and a little Spotted Pardalote landed on a branch just next to me and it started making its call. And it was amazing. And it's really stuck in my head.

  Bridget: I find remembering bird sounds really difficult, but this one stuck in my head. And now I can hear its little ditty all over the place. And it's so great just knowing that there's a little Spotted Pardalote in there somewhere. That little jewel in a tree somewhere, and you just know it's there from the sound of it. So I had to include a Spotted Pardalote in my Bush Birds book. Recently, I got a message from a parent who had bought my book, and I'd been reading it to the child, and they sent me the loveliest message. They said that, "Yesterday there was a Spotted Pardalote in my garden and because of your book, I knew what it was and I just warmed my heart". This is exactly why I make my books so that we begin to notice these things and find joy in it. Once you start having things pointed out, you start seeing it more and it becomes part of your daily life. When you start noticing the environment around you, the beauty of nature around you. I sometimes think I sound like a cliche, saying it's the beauty of nature that sort of keeps me afloat. But I really think it does. It keeps me happy. These little blips of beauty throughout your day lifts you and yeah, once you start noticing the birds around you, it can just sort of lift you. I love it.

  Kirsty: I love Spotted Pardalotes too. They were one of my Grandpa George's favorite birds and every time I hear one, I think of him. We'll have to do a Weekend Birder episode just on pardalotes because there are four species in Australia. Reach out if you want to come on the show and talk about them. Bridget has some great advice for people who are expressing their love of birds through their art.

  Bridget: I think the most important thing is just to keep going, keep practising, to keep drawing, to keep painting, to keep writing, whatever it is that is your spark. Just keep doing it. I've been through so many different incarnations of my work, of my products, but it's all part of the journey. You've got to keep going and keep finding out where this path leading you. A good idea is to try different things. I (as I said) studied jewellery but it wasn't until I did a weekend workshop in printmaking that I was like, "Oh, haha! This is it. This is it!". I would never have found that out if I hadn't given it a go. I've also been very lucky that I've had a great mentor, my friend Tash, who runs the business Jubly-Umph. She's a fantastic businesswoman and she's really guided me a lot over the years. She often tells me, "Oh, you should try this. You should try this. You should try this". And I listen to about fifty-percent (and I really I should listen to an awful lot more than just fifty-percent). And she's always right. She's been a fantastic help.

  Kirsty: Bridget has also turned her bird art into games, mobiles, tea, towels and stationery. What a talent! One of my prized possessions is an an enamel pin from her collection that has the words 'Bird Noticer' written on it. I've stuck it to my birdwatching backpack.

  Bridget: I always called myself a 'bird noticer' when my kids were really little, because people would see my work and they're like, "Are you a birdwatcher?". And I couldn't say that I was because I didn't go out watching birds. I didn't have time. And instead I'd say, "Well, I notice birds. I'm a bird noticer, not a birdwatcher". So I'd notice birds wherever I was, but I wouldn't actively go out and watch them. So yeah, bird noticer. And then when I started mentioning that and I made the badges, so it just spoke to so many people and like, "Oh yeah, yeah, that's me too. Yeah!". So we're allowed to just notice them without actively going and studying them or whatever. But we can still claim to love birds and just be a noticer. It's really nice. Even if it's the very first time, go outside and see what you can see. See what birds you see. And over time you'll get to know what the birds are. Even if it's just one bird a month. Go out and see if you can find it and learn about it. Draw it, draw it tons of times. I find that really helps. It's a beginning, you know, you've got to begin somewhere.

  Kirsty: If you're lucky enough to hear this episode during the week that it goes live, visit @birderpod on Instagram and enter our Bridget Farmer giveaway. We regularly give out free stuff there because birdwatchers deserve all the love. Many thanks to Marc Anderson for providing the bird calls featured in this episode. And big respect to Bridget for sharing her love of wild birds with us all and educating us through her artwork and her books.