The garden's birdlife

Kiloren is not just a haven for people, it's an oasis for birds and other creatures.  

Walling said, "A garden should, I always feel, be just a little too big to keep the whole cultivated, then it has a chance to go a little wild in spots, and make some pictures for you". In Kiloren, the birds adore the densely planted (and less cultivated) edges of the garden, finding here safe nesting sites and places to hide their fledgling offspring until they are ready to venture into the garden proper.

Resident superb blue wrens raise their babies in these sheltered shrubberies and the magpie family struts the lawns. Flocks of scrub wrens, thornbills, silver eyes and cheeky fantails move through the garden daily. Eastern spinebills and wattlebirds feast on the nectar of winter flowering clematis, daphne and camellia, and a pair of black ducks return to the same nesting site to hatch a dozen ducklings every spring.

Seasonal migrants arrive, spend time and move on - gang gang cockatoos and king parrots join the resident crimson rosellas, yellow-faced honeyeaters enjoy japonica blossom, an elegant grey heron suddenly appears at the reflecting pond, and autumn is  announced by the beautiful song of the gentle grey shrike-thrush.