When your observation skills are shite, but you’ve still got friends: Satin Bowerbird double bower! 🙌

I always thought I was pretty good at observation. I’m always alert to different calls, a flash of colour glimpsed in the leaf litter, the sound of scurrying through grass. And I’m not afraid to stop mid conversation and run towards a bird I don’t know or an animal doing something unexpected. I like to think I see things that other don’t. Ah, yeah. About that.

I got a message Friday from a friend who said she’d spotted a Satin Bowerbird bower on my street during her walk. There’s a bower, right near the footpath and from her directions I was pretty sure that it was the one she was referring to. But then I looked at the photo she’d sent me. Yeah that was no regular bower it was a DOUBLE BOWER! Fair to say I’d never seen one of those before, let alone even heard of one!

So Matt and I decided to ditch the beach walk and do a street walk instead and phone in hand, the directions from my friend up on my screen, we started to scour the area we thought she meant. I quickly clocked ‘our’ bower; the one near the footpath, partially obscured, blue trinkets fanned out in hope of attracting a mate. But that was ‘our’ bower, the one we knew. In a tree off to the side I caught a glimpse of the deep blue sheen of the male as he clicked and whirred until he spotted me and then flew straight across the road and out of sight. For a bird that has built his dance floor right next to the footpath, he sure is skittish!

And so we continued on, peering over fences and through the sometimes thick shrubbery but could not for the life of us unearth the double bower. Eventually I looked at Matt and with my hand over my eyes to block out the sun, I asked, “You don’t think that OUR bower is THE bower, do you?” We looked down the road towards where the bower was and then back at each other and then back again. Matt literally broke into a run desperate to get there first to check 😂 No we’re not super competitive, why do you ask?

And so once again, we stood in front of the bower, the trinkets and some of the bower visible but obscured behind some low growing plants and a couple of branches. Matt stepped off the path and pulled back the foliage and… the bower that we have seen time and time again, the bower that we don’t even bother looking in on anymore, the bower that’s ‘just there’ was actually two bowers sharing a wall!!!

My best theory on this is that this particular Satin Bowerbird was fond of his location and after finding some issues with his bower had the option of pulling down and rebuilding from scratch, or to just add on an additional wall, an extension if you will. I guess the next step is to find a spot where I can discreetly observe him to see if he uses both sides of the bower or if he prefers one over the other. The blue display surrounds the entire bower though so that makes me think he uses the entire structure. Hoping to find out soon! 🙏

I have learnt an important lesson from all this though, it’s important that you stay friends with people, especially those with better observational skills than yourself 😉 Huge thanks to Melissa for pointing out, as it turns out, the obvious, to me! I’d love to know how common this is, so let me know if you’ve ever come across a double bower or even twin bowers, two separate ones side by side.

Satin Bowerbird double bower – Northern Illawarra