Does this make you think differently ?

[jusdeb]

Just wondering what this makes people think after reading it .

Up until a little over 200 years ago Aussie native birds both parrots and softbills and others had never seen a fruit or vegetable . They didn't exist here before white man .

Birds lived on seeds , grasses and flowering native trees shrubs etc .

[finchbreeder]

As I feed mine almost completely on seeding grasses and seed. No.
LML

[mattymeischke]

Hi Deb,
I have to disagree.

Our native fruits and vegetables are often much smaller and less impressive, but were also much more widespread before european colonisation.
The fruits and vegetables we have cultivated have been selected and 'improved' (from the human perspective) over millenia.
Before this process began, apples were crab apples, peaches were almonds and so on.
Native fruits and vegies include hundreds of rainforest fruits and lots of smaller and plainer, but nonetheless fruity, temperate fruits.
Examples of fruits in my area include the delicious bush lychee, which grows on an Allocasuarina here, native raspberries and melons, and the fruit of the saltbush.
Examples of vegetables include the tubers of the little pink orchids in our lawn, which the cockies and galahs gouge out of the ground with their beaks leaving hundreds of grooves, and any number of green leafy forbs for native salad.

The ranges of many birds have expanded radically since we came, mainly because we provide water sources and year-round gardens (think rainbow lorikeets in Dubbo and Wagga).
The country which would have been richest in fruits and veg. was often the first land cleared for farming, so we rarely see the native flora of river banks or rich fertile valleys.

I do sometimes wonder what gang-gangs raised young on before we planted Cotoneaster, or the superb parrots before we planted elms. If you want to find platypuses these days, look for willows: the dense root structures in the river bank are perfect for their burrows. The pre-existent river bank vegetation was most often cleared with the old ABC (axe, burn, cocksfoot), then trashed by livestock.

That's just my two bobs worth, of course. I expect others may have very different opinions.

[Craig52]

Wow Matty,you certainly put a stop to this post Craig

[Pete Sara]

Well my 2 cents worth. Here goes . They have always had access to native fruits and seeds , just that we have ripped up there environment and plant what we need to eat so they have had to adapt , some for the good some for the bad. We have just given them more options to choose from.

The only thing that I can think of that they may have become less migratory as they don't need to follow the fruiting/ flowering trees or wild grasses ...Pete

[Tiaris]

The forests where I live contain dozens & dozens of fruiting trees, vines & small plants, all of which our wild birds eat. At any one time of the year there are at least a handful of plant species fruiting which the wild birds concentrate their attention on. Local Pigeons, Bowerbirds, Honeyeaters, Parrots, Figbirds, and others depend very heavily on native fruits.
Before the widespread clearing of native forests by white man they were no doubt all more prevalent due to the far greater food resource. Before widespread regular burning by black man, rainforests were far more widespread throughtout Australia with a far greater range of fruiting species of plants (and hence more habitat for fruit-eating birds and for omnivorous species to eat). This regular burning contributed greatly to the reduction of rainforest area and the expansion of eucalypt dominated (fire adapted) forest area with less (but still some) fruiting species.

[jusdeb]

Maybe I should have posted domestic or modern fruit and veg as intended .

Finchbreeder was thinking along the same lines as me in that it made me want to grow and give more native foods than store bought and non native foods .

Kinda wasn't looking at a debate into the availability of natives fruit / veg but it was interesting reading and always expect at least one person to disprove my comments ....which by the way were borrowed form a lost article I was reading about aussie natives and , food and breeding .

[Tiaris]

I agree Deb, that we should make some effort to provide natural foods whenever we can to our birds as opposed to those which are easiest to obtain in the local supermarket. Natural stuff is usually much cheaper to get & a good excuse to go bush regularly.

[Myzomela]

And natural stuff is usually much fresher and contains less pesticides/chemicals.

And Deb, before 200 years ago, none of our birds had seen a sunflower seed, millet, corn, plain canary seed etc either.

Fresh vegies and fruit are merely a more convenient substitute for some of these wild foods that aren't readily available to all.
can we all provide the 70+ foodtypes that some of these species consume in the wild? probably not.
Domestic fruits & vegies aren't the ideal; but they are better than just seed alone.

[jusdeb]

totally agreed but the statement has made me want to use less store bought and more native foods so have been googling a bit and keeping an eye out for plants , trees etc but with not much luck . What we want and what we get are often not the same .