You’ve heard it, I’ve said it, we all know that spending time in nature is good for us. 

But as I spent the last few days on tenterhooks, using my camera’s telephoto lens as proxy binoculars, watching a tawny frogmouth family of four swiftly dwindle to nothing but an empty nest, I began to second-guess myself.

My husband noticed by sheer accident a flimsy nest high up in the gums across the road. While he pondered who it belonged to, I ran out the front, camera in hand, and quickly confirmed it was occupied by one of the local tawnies with not one but two seemingly healthy, not at all newly hatched chicks.

They had already acquired some ‘big kid’ feathers, amongst the usually downy fluffiness. How lucky to have them so close to home, right? Well, not so fast. 

Sure, we’ve had the absolute thrill of ‘our’ tawnies moving their newly fledged kids into our yard. But we’ve also experienced the much darker side of closely watching nature: an egg tossed from the nest by a raucous pair of channel-billed cuckoos as we watched on helplessly, and finding a freshly hatched chick on the road, having fallen after the parent was taken by a predator during the night. 

I should know better than to get too attached and yet three days into this current nest watch,
I was taken totally by surprise when I could only spot one chick. I searched the surrounding trees, with no luck. The mother stood watching over the nest where the male and the remaining chick preened and stretched. I searched the ground, under ferns and down into the forest gully below. Nothing.

The next day, after a night of torrential rain and howling wind, the nest was empty. The second chick was gone and the parents were nowhere to be found. What was their fate? Cruelly taken? Safely fledged? And that’s the reality of nature watching; sometimes you don’t get an answer. Life goes on… and sometimes it doesn’t.

I stand looking out into the forest, hoping to see four pairs of eyes looking back at me. Instead the trees click back at me, cicadas are waking up and calling for a mate.”