The True Tale of the Toddler and Tawny Turd

We have been lucky enough to have a tree outside our kitchen window with a horizontal branch at eye level. On most days a single tawny frogmouth would sit motionless on the tree branch several metres away. He could see us looking at him. We named him Buckbeak.

Sometimes there were two tawnies sitting on the the branch. The second tawny was named Fluffy. She was a little smaller, fluffier and paler.

Over the years, Buckbeak and Fluffy had babies but we could not tell them apart. The babies would grow up, learn to fly and leave the area. But Buckbeak and Fluffy would stay. They would have more one or two more babies each year.

The babies were always named Snowball1 and Snowball2. Each morning our kids would get up and provide a tawny update. We loved watching them and we took hundreds of photos. The tawnies moved around to other trees but they would always come back to the branch that we called the Tawny Port.

It was hard to find out much information about tawny behaviour online but there was a book available through the CSIRO by a professor in NSW named Gisela Kaplan. I purchased and read her book. It was based on ten years of research and it is the most comprehensive study ever done on tawny behaviour. We learned a lot about tawnies.

For example, when tawnies are scared they try to flatten their bodies to improve their camouflage. It makes them look more like a branch. We noticed that they were rarely scared of us.

One day my young son was playing in the garden near the Tawny Tree. He found what appeared to be a dog poo. He did what any inquisitive child would do and he poked it with a stick. If it was a dog poo, it was unlike one we had ever seen before. It was made up of shiny blue fragments of Christmas beetle shells.

It appeared to be a pellet which is what some birds regurgitate because it is indigestible. However according to the most definitive book ever published on the topic, tawnies do not regurgitate pellets. But what else could it be?

I wrote to the author and told her how about my toddler’s findings. I described the pellet and the location near the base of the Tawny tree. I commented that my toddler’s research was not supported by her book.

Gisela wrote back and she was delighted that I had written to her. My toddler was right. It was a tawny pellet. She said that generally, tawnies do not expel pellets. However in some situations when there may be an abundance of a specific food source, such as beetles, then this can occur. She said she would amend future editions of the book to include this new information.

I believe this story has an important moral or take home message for everyone. The lesson for me is that curiosity and research are powerful forces. If you are interested in a topic then you should read as much as you can and communicate with experts in the field. You might find that your experience is not consistent with what you read, but that’s okay.

Be open minded to new information and get involved in the debate. The experts are not always 100% right all the time. However if new information comes along then they should be willing to change or modify their position based on the fresh evidence and so should everyone.

For my son, the take home message was clear "it's good to prod things with a stick".