In a town perched atop the rainforest hinterland of the Gold Coast, one of Australia’s most charismatic birds is suddenly and mysteriously dying.
Rumours and misinformation are swirling around Tamborine Mountain to explain the spate of satin bowerbirds deaths, with fingers pointed at everything from rat poison to 4G phone towers.
And some conservationists are questioning what authorities have identified as the most likely cause – and fear a more sinister culprit is at large.
Male satin bowerbirds are renowned for adorning avenues of twigs with blue objects to impress females, pinching everything from pen lids to bottle caps and pegs to decorate their bowers.
So when apparently healthy bowerbirds began falling ill and dying in recent weeks on Tamborine, this trait raised the suspicion they had inadvertently collected a blue poison.
Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science has said it suspected as much in a media release and Facebook post, describing “reports attributing the recent deaths of a number of regent bowerbirds to blue/green snail bait”.
Shared more than 760 times, Sunday’s post includes a picture of a regent bowerbird, whose yellow and black plumage is markedly different from its satin cousin.
But neither the owner of the property where most of the dead birds have been found, the wildlife rescuer picking them up nor one of Australia’s leading birdwatchers believes this a likely theory.
In the past few weeks, seven satin bowerbirds have died on Elli McDonald’s two-acre block. An eighth bird was found sick this week and euthanised.
The most recent death was a glossy blue-black male, the others were green – either females or juvenile males.
McDonald has become intimately familiar with her resident bowerbirds over the 17 years she has lived on her acreage. They help themselves to her vegetable garden, fruit trees and the pellets she feeds to her chickens, ducks and geese.
So she noticed when one became ill and died in the same spot a few days later, but didn’t think to report it. Then the situation repeated itself, again and again.
“They were all healthy looking birds,” she said. “It’s horrible to see them dying like that, without knowing why”.
When McDonald posted her observations on a community Facebook page, several neighbours replied with similar stories. It was here the snail bait theory appears to have emerged.
So McDonald checked the bowers on her property but found no blue pellets. She is stumped, but can’t see how snail pellets could be to blame.
Nor can Tamborine Mountain biologist and wildlife rescuer Robin Rowland. So far Rowland has documented at least 15 dead bowerbirds in a small area on Tamborine – “not a large number in the grand scheme of things” but one that has her worried for several reasons.
First, it could be the tip of an iceberg. Second, whatever is killing the birds could soon spread. Because Rowland suspects either the use of illegal poisons or the outbreak of disease.
“When you get a hyperlocal mass die-off like this you think: ‘Could this be the big one?’” she said.
The environment department said an “initial gross postmortem” at the Currumbin Wildlife hospital on four of the satin bowerbirds “wasn’t definitive and found no evidence of the blue dye in the stomach contents of the dead birds”.
“However, the postmortem could not rule out the presence of metaldehyde which is found in snail bait, as small doses can kill birds,” a department spokesperson said.
Birdlife Australia’s Sean Dooley said in the absence of a toxicology report “we can only speculate” as to what is killing Tamborine’s bowerbirds.
He too “would be surprised” if snail pellets were to blame and suspects disease.
Which has Dooley concerned. Because not only is the satin bowerbird one of Australia’s “most unique and fascinating” birds, it is also one of the few species that “actually appears to be doing well”.
“Fingers crossed this is a one-off event and not a harbinger of something worse,” Dooley said.
• The subheading of this article was amended on 29 August 2022. Authorities believe snail poison is to blame for the bird deaths, not rat poison as an earlier version said.
