The photo above is from the end of the story.
I was watching a lyrebird in a full male display, singing with feathers overhead. This was in the undergrowth (off the Prince Henry Walk in Katoomba), and I was slowly edging in to get closer, also fiddling with the camera.
I heard a small sound nearby, and suddenly a fox, bright orange and quite large, appeared and lunged at him.
The lyrebird leapt up, and in a sequence of flying hops, got up onto a tree branch.
I was surprised at how far ahead of the fox he was. The escape was from an awkward-looking position, with the fox close and moving quickly. But the fox would not have gotten within 2 feet of the lyrebird.
The fox vanished. For a while, the lyrebird and I stood there. The lyrebird craned his neck, looking back towards his display area, apparently watching for the fox.
After a few minutes, the lyrebird hopped down and wandered off into the bush. Soon I heard some sounds from roughly the same direction, but near the road. I went up and found a lyrebird just on the other side. He was up in a branch, singing.
I am not sure that it was the same one. It probably was – I’d heard fairly consistent scraps of sound from the right direction, and lyrebirds cross that road with a lot of confidence. The amount of ground covered was right.
I was able to stay with Julian for another hour or so. He foraged, wandered, and he spent just about all this time in the open, to some extent. He might have been avoiding the undergrowth. It was natural to suspect that he was a bit spooked by the fox, and the concealment the fox had made use of in dense brush.
Then he hopped up onto a log, also in a moderately clear area – this was great for me with the camera. There he went back into a sequence of displays and songs…
… including the overhead displays I’d come across at the start…
… and, some of the time, a half-way position with one of the large “lyrate” feathers high and the other lower, as in the photo at the top.
Why did I refer to him above as “Julian”? This event, with its escape, took place on June 25th of this year, the same day that Julian Assange was finally released.
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Here are some videos:
(To see it without my face and the title, click on the title to watch directly on YouTube.)
The end (with some interesting movements):
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Notes
My book Living on Earth is now out in the UK and Australia (another few weeks for the US). It has a lot on lyrebirds, and another chapter includes a discussion of conservation and introduced animals, especially predators like that fox. I found this a hard topic to think about. This episode certainly brought home the dangers of introduced animals in places like Australia.
This lyrebird interaction was notable for another reason as well. Soon after I came across the (or a) lyrebird across the road, I heard the only example I’ve come across so far of a lyrebird replying to another species of bird with an imitation of its call. Some magpies did their warbling call nearby, and the lyrebird looked up and briefly replied – very accurately, too. It then moved into a couple of other songs, pretty quickly stopped, and resumed digging beside the road.
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