lirralirra

This week I had the profound pleasure to watch an exquisite Azure Kingfisher as it perched and plunged.

To give an idea of scale, this tiny kingfisher is perched on a garden stake. These birds are about 18cm from the tip of the bill to the tip of the tail, and they weigh about 35g. The colours are almost indescribably beautiful violet-blues with rich rufous underparts. And what a cute little tail! Adult birds can have a small white tip to their bill, while juveniles can have a larger white tip which makes me think this is likely to be a young bird.

Azure Kingfishers feed by perching above water and plunging headfirst to catch their prey. Their splashes are surprisingly dramatic.

Azure Kingfishers form monogamous pairs and raise their young in burrows dug into creek and river banks, close to water. And this is where shotguns become an issue. For the three months of Victoria’s duck shooting season there are almost twenty thousand sites where it is legal to shoot, up to eight species of native waterbirds. Depending on the bag limits that are set, this can equate to about half a million dead and injured birds (at a ratio of 3:1 respectively). But it’s not only ‘game’ birds that are impacted. Each year thousands of non-target birds are shot, including threatened species like Freckled Duck and Blue-billed Duck, along with pelicans, swans, coot, raptors and cormorants. Although I’ve not seen any kingfishers that have been killed or injured by shotgun pellets, it is certain that, along with all wetlands wildlife, they have been impacted by the booming roar of shotguns and the sounds of distressed, dead and dying birds.

Instead of repeating information that I’ve given in the past I’ll redirect you to informative posts that explain more about the duck shooting season and why I am so passionately calling for a permanent ban. It is not, as I used to imagine, about a handful of overall wearing farmers wandering down to their dam and mindfully shooting a duck for Sunday lunch.

My daughter was at the wetlands on opening day in 2017 when even the Game Management Authority admitted that ‘In addition to illegal behaviour … many hunters were behaving unethically or irresponsibly. Hunters have been taking excessively long shots well outside of their shooting skills distance, resulting in wounding and lost birds. Some made no attempt to recover downed birds and kept shooting. This sort of behaviour is illegal or unethical’. Her moving, firsthand account can be read in the lirralirra post Hope Amongst Horror

More information can be found by reading the Season of Shame posts (links in the Favourites section of the righthand sidebar) and in the AGNPOTY Again post where an image of mine associated with shooting was a finalist in the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year 2019 competition. Other relevant posts can be found by searching for ‘duck shooting’ in the search bar.

The Victorian Government usually calls the season at the start of January, though they’ve also been called before Christmas and in 2009 the season wasn’t called until early February. 2009 was the year of the catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires and instead of refusing to permit a season the Brumby government called a shortened season with a reduced bag limit, despite there being very few ducks on the wetlands.

If you haven’t yet written to your local MP, the Premier and the decision-making ministers there could still be time for your views to be counted: daniel.andrews@parliament.vic.gov.au, jaclyn.symes@parliament.vic.gov.au, and lily.d’ambrosio@parliament.vic.gov.au

I am wavering between fear that a devastating season will be called and hope that the Labor Government will continue its progressive animal welfare agenda and call a moratorium this year.

Happy birding

Kim

~  Facebook page Kim Wormald – lirralirra   

~ Facebook group  Ethical Bird Photography