The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  I was hooked. I immediately set about compiling my first list, counting up all the birds I had seen to that point in 1980. Roy’s article coalesced my passion for birds with my near autistic obsession for list making. I had been into birds for about a year, but now it dawned on me that I could order the birds I’d seen in all sorts of ways – year lists, life lists, state lists, day lists. The possibilities were endless.

  OK. It’s at this point I have to stop the story to address a certain issue. For those of you who were tempted to titter at the phrase ‘I had been into birds for about a year’ it’s time to clear some things up. Yes, ‘birds’ is a classic sniggering euphemism for women. And guess what? You’re not the first to make that connection. And it is not only in English that the joke applies. For some reason birds serve as double entendre in many languages. Apparently the German word for bird, vogeln, is the same as their slang word for having sex. In Australia we tend to use the word ‘root’. Makes you wonder what that says about our respective cultures; they associate the act of making love with winged creatures that soar above this earthly realm, we with a bit of wood that stays stuck in the ground, away from the light and covered in dirt.

  From the very first moments I began birding I was assaulted with these ‘fnar fnar’ style comparisons – I’m sure you can imagine the sort of thing: ‘Birdwatching, hey? I’m a bit of a birdwatcher myself. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.’ My dad was particularly fond of that one. Coming home from work one night, he told me that he’d seen a couple of interesting birds out of his office window in Queen Street, Melbourne. This was possibly the first time he had taken much interest in my new hobby so my ears pricked up and, eager to make a connection and solve his identification problem, I naïvely asked him to go into more detail. I still didn’t twig when he started talking about these birds’ long legs, and it was only when he got to the stage of saying one was a blonde that the penny finally dropped. Since then I’ve put up with those kinds of jokes countless times, and you know what? It hasn’t got any funnier.

  I’ve actually got used to the jibes in the same way, I guess, someone with the surname Treblecock or Sidebottom lets people have a bit of a snigger and then move on. But there is one thing I just can’t let go, and that is when someone I’ve been introduced to says, ‘Birdwatching, hey? What, the two legged kind?’

  Now let’s stop for a moment and consider this. Never mind the dubious nature of the humour, focus rather on the fact that both an Albatross and Kylie Minogue have got two legs. So unless the speaker is specifically referring to Paul McCartney’s second wife, the joke makes no sense. If you feel compelled to make this kind of witty remark, for accuracy’s sake it should go something like this.

  ‘Hi, my name’s Sean and I’m a birdwatcher.’

  ‘Birdwatching? What, the feathered kind!?’

  It won’t win you many marks for originality but at least it will be biologically correct. No wonder I call myself a twitcher…actually that has an entirely new set of connotations.

  But getting back to Roy. In his article he stated that he saw a total of 545 species, breaking the previous record held by Darwin’s John McKean by ten species (and almost 400 ahead of my ultimate 1980 total). Until this time very few people would even have seen this many species in Australia in their lifetime, let alone in the one year. Birdwatching has been around since the First Fleet, but for much of the two centuries of European occupation, the opportunity to look at birds on a continental scale was rather limited. The 730-odd species that had been found to that time were spread across the entire continent. The only place you could ever hope to see a Golden-shouldered Parrot, for instance, was on Cape York Peninsula; to get onto a Red-capped Parrot would require a trip to the opposite end of the continent, to the southwest of Western Australia. In a country where the main highway between the two major cities of Sydney and Melbourne had only been fully sealed in the 1960s, the opportunity for the average punter to travel these vast distances was severely limited. Birdwatchers tended to be either enthusiastic amateurs who were generally limited to looking at the birds of their local regions, or they were professional ornithologists such as the legendary John Gould, who had the opportunity to study birds from all over the country, though usually dead and laid out on a museum table.

  By the turn of the last century, some birders began to put down their shotguns and pick up their field glasses, contenting themselves to merely look at the birds rather than obliterating them. The first bird clubs began to form, such as the Royal Australasian Ornithological Union (now known as Birds Australia) in 1901, BOCA in 1905 and the South Australian Ornithological Association in 1899. The exchange of information about birds began to flow more freely and with the development of good optical and photographic equipment, field guides, and improved communication and transport, a more comprehensive picture of Australian birdlife began to emerge. By the 1970s strong networks of birdwatchers had become well established and news of rare and interesting birds spread like wildfire. Predating the Internet, the birding grapevine could disseminate information faster than anything previously known to man.

  I’ve had first hand experience of this. In 1998 I found a Bridled Tern by the lake outside my parents’ house, probably the rarest bird I’ve ever personally found. In terms of worldwide rarity, the Bridled Tern is a long way from Dodo status. There are millions of them in the tropical seas of the world. The thing is, until that fateful December day there had never been any in the state of Victoria. The bird I saw had been blown in by the same ferocious storm that had killed a number of Sydney to Hobart sailors in that year’s yacht race. This wind was so fierce that my Bridled Tern may have been blown in from its nearest breeding grounds – about four thousand kilometres away in Western Australia.

  Knowing it was a first for the state I immediately tapped into my portal into the birders’ matrix. Sadly the Bridled Tern only stayed long enough for three other birders to see it, but over the next day many others turned up, including, within two hours of the bird being sighted, a birdwatcher from Britain whom I had never met. Now I am not saying that he managed the 13 000 kilometre trip from England in supersonic time just for this Victorian rarity – most likely he’d been birding locally when he bumped into someone who’d mentioned a Bridled Tern had shown up nearby – but the lengths to which birders will go to see a new bird can be quite surprising.

  Such birders are known as twitchers. Twitchers are the hard core of the birdwatching world. If you were likening birdwatching to extreme sports, your kindly little old lady who puts out a few crumbs for the pigeons would rate at about the same level as a game of coits, whereas twitching would be more akin to parasailing off a Himalayan cliff-face whilst blindfolded, drunk and wrestling a shark. Put simply, twitching is actively chasing after birds to add them to your list. Very early on in your birdwatching career, this may entail a simple walk to your local park. But once you’ve seen all the common birds in your area, you have to search further afield in order to see new ones. Eventually there will come a point when you’ll have seen nearly everything there is to see. This is when twitching comes into its own. If you’ve seen nearly every bird in Australia, whenever a new one turns up you simply have to go see it, no matter if it is in Tasmania or Townsville, Broome or Bermagui. It is not unknown for a twitcher to fly from Sydney to Darwin for the day just to see a vagrant Asian duck.

  The word twitching itself suggests action, liveliness, as opposed to the more static form of birdwatching. The term originated in England in the late 1950s. Amongst the first birders there to get into this new form of birdwatching were two blokes from Norfolk. Upon hearing of a rarity, they would jump on their pillion passenger motorbike and burl across the countryside in pursuit. Being Britain, of course, it meant that they would often arrive at their destination frozen stiff, shivering massively – twitching, if you will – from the cold. Amongst their friends they became known as ‘the Twitchers’ and thereafter their birding excursions as ‘being on a twitch’. The term caught
on, apparently much to their eternal embarrassment.

  Roy Wheeler was probably not much of a twitcher as such. It’s pretty hard to dash off after every rarity when you are in your seventies and reliant on somebody to drive you everywhere. But after sixty plus years of birdwatching Roy had travelled a fair deal and seen an awful lot of birds. All he had to do was to put all that knowledge together and call in a few favours to get people to take him out to the best birdwatching sites. Over his lifetime Roy had met countless numbers of birdwatchers from around the country and there were plenty of people more than happy to oblige. By all accounts, Roy was an extremely generous, enthusiastic and engaging fellow. So by the end of the year, a lifetime of goodwill had netted him the record. Perhaps not the greatest adventure in the world, but try telling that to me as an eleven year old sitting in a draughty old hall in Melbourne listening to Roy speak of his travels.

  I learnt a lot that night. Not merely about the birds of Australia and where they occur and how to see them, but also about the politics of the birdwatching community. Before Roy’s talk the secretary of the birdwatching club called for any reports of interesting sightings from the audience. As the old ladies around me reported on the various birdies spotted in their gardens, I got swept up in the moment and stuck my young hand up.

  ‘Glossy Ibis at Seaford Swamp.’

  The secretary paused briefly and then shot back, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a young Straw-necked Ibis?’

  Of course I was sure. You’d have to be an idiot to mix up a Glossy and a young Straw-necked. Oh…that was her way of saying she thought I was most probably an idiot. I should let the grown-ups get on with their business. Shut up and I might learn something.

  But I was a slow learner. A few minutes later, the secretary was calling for people to report on any sightings of the Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater, a common desert bird that sometimes appeared in the suburbs of Melbourne during the winter. Again, all around me blue-haired ladies and balding gentlemen were divulging observations of a Spiny-cheeked at Montmorency in April, another at Beaumaris in June. Each contribution was greeted by a little cooing of approbation by the crowd. Down at my patch at Seaford we’d been seeing heaps of Spiny-cheeks that winter. Foolishly I raised my hand again.

  ‘There’s been quite a few at Seaford this year.’

  ‘Yes, well they are quite common on the peninsula,’ she snapped in reply.

  She was partially correct. They were common along the southern coastal areas of the Mornington Peninsula, where there was an isolated population. Seaford, which wasn’t technically even on the peninsula, was almost fifty kilometres from the nearest of these birds. It was only fifteen kilometres from Beaumaris, where apparently a Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater was colossal news, yet my sighting had been summarily dismissed. It was kind of humiliating for an eleven-year-old kid making his first foray into the adult world, but I learnt an invaluable lesson that night. In the world of bird-watching, reputation was everything. If Roy Wheeler had claimed those birds, no problem – he had decades of experience to back him up. I was just a kid, I had no reputation. Why should they believe me? Actually, I bear no grudges from that moment for it indelibly imprinted on me the notion that before I claimed to have seen any bird I had to be damned sure about it as humiliation was only one condescending cluck away.

  Interestingly, I didn’t have to defend my sightings to Roy. On meeting him after his talk he asked me about the Glossy Ibis, saying he hadn’t seen it at Seaford before but had seen a flock of them once in a nearby swamp. He asked me to describe the bird and when I had he said with a twinkle, ‘It must have been pretty exciting to see it.’ Who knows if he really believed me, but to be taken seriously for that moment by such a figure meant the world to me. I was glad Roy had the record.

  But he didn’t have it for long. In 1982, one of the new generation of twitching birdwatchers, Kevin Bartram, smashed Roy’s record and saw an unprecedented 607 species in the one year. It was only a few years earlier that the first birders had reached six hundred in their entire lifetimes. And yet here was an unemployed, hard-core music fan (Kevin’s other obsession is punk music – he even hosts his own garage and hard-core show on a Melbourne public radio station under the moniker ‘Kev Lobotomi’), often bedecked in ripped jeans and t-shirt, hitching his way around the country birdwatching. Kev’s strategy was different to Roy’s in that, plugged into the emerging twitching network, he made sure he chased after as many rarities as possible snaring, on top of the birds Roy saw, such unusual vagrants as Black-tailed Gull, Oriental Reed-Warbler and Buff-breasted Sandpiper, ensuring he passed the magic six hundred barrier. The birding world was agog. Surely this record would take some beating. For almost a decade no Australian birder was able to surpass Kev’s feat. It would take an interloper to snare the record.

  Mike Entwhistle was an English twitcher of the new generation. Rather than content himself with chasing after the latest rarity to turn up amongst the relatively depauperate bird populations (species wise) in the British Isles, he had sought to see as many of the world’s ten thousand species as possible. As part of his world birding quest he set up camp in Australia during 1989 and managed to travel so extensively that by year’s end he had seen a record 633 species. I don’t think Mike actually intended to break the record rather, like most dedicated twitchers, he just wanted to see as many birds as possible.

  I’m unable to ask Mike about his intentions or anything else associated with his record year, because after Australia he moved on to South America where he was killed in Peru by Shining Path guerrillas. You may have thought I was jesting when I likened twitching to an extreme sport, but twitchers seem to place themselves in life-threatening situations in the pursuit of birds with alarming regularity. The area where Mike and his birding companion, Tim Andrews, were killed was in territory so dangerous even the CIA were reluctant to send in operatives. But despite warnings from the locals, the lure of potential new ticks for their world lists proved far greater than common sense. Most people would say it is not worth risking your life to see a bird. Plenty of twitchers would disagree.

  And so the record stood. Nobody seemed to be much concerned with it, unlike in Britain or the States where Big Years are hotly contested amongst twitchers. In Australia, it seemed no-one could really be bothered. The distances were too vast, the potential cost too enormous, the absurdity too great. Why bust a gut spending a year seeing all the stuff you’d seen before when you could be pooling your resources to go for birds that you hadn’t ever seen? A Big Year remained a very low priority for Australian twitchers. And to top it off, the precedents set by the record holders were rather off-putting as by 2000 the champs were all dead. Mike as outlined above; Roy in 1988 after illness had confined him to a nursing home for several years; John McKean unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1995, and though Kevin is still very much alive and kicking, he does work in public radio, which is kind of like being dead. Only joking, Kev – I’ll have to take out a subscription to his show to make up for that one.

  But for me, the record remained a Holy Grail. Throughout my teenage years in those idle, daydreaming moments when I wasn’t thinking of kicking that winning Grand Final goal or pondering how I could strike up a conversation with Naomi Stephens on the school bus on the way home, I would contemplate how you could break the birdwatching record. Where would I go? Should I make two trips to the Top End, one in the dry season, another in the wet? How many boat trips would I need to take? How was I going to find a Night Parrot? Though I never admitted this to anyone, the primary reason I took a year off between school and university in 1987 was to have a crack at the record. Well, that’s an exaggeration, as I didn’t feel I was worthy enough to be the record holder. I still had so much to learn about birds. But I was determined to become the youngest person to have seen 600 birds, whether in the same year or not.

  My plans were railroaded somewhat by a bout of unexplained nausea that lasted three months. I also got my first girlfriend, which made it real
ly hard to drag my sorry, lovesick carcass away from Melbourne, and not having any money didn’t help, nor did being hopelessly inefficient in general. It wasn’t until the next year, after a trip to Kakadu, that I even passed the five hundred mark and it took me until early 2001 to get to six hundred. It wasn’t that I’d stopped birding – in fact the older I got, the more important birdwatching became to me. It went from just a hobby to being fundamental to my sense of self and a vital component in maintaining my mental health. Birds became my access point to something larger than the problems of a gawky, law student-cum-comedian. Birding gave me the excuse to get out into the bush, to lose myself in the wider world of nature, detox my mind of everything that was going on. Without birdwatching who knows what sort of basket case I might have ended up? My God, I could even have become a lawyer.

  Luckily (more for my potential clients than anything else) I didn’t become a lawyer but managed, somehow, to earn a living for a few years as a television comedy writer. By 2001, however, every show that I had ever worked on had been cancelled due to poor ratings and I think television producers around the land were beginning to twig that it might have been me that was the common factor. My employment prospects for the coming year were not looking good. With no work on the horizon I had to assess my options. By now, at thirty-three, I was beginning to grow up and be a bit more far sighted in my life – sure, I was only thinking of the upcoming twelve months, but for someone who was reluctant to commit to Friday night drinks more than an hour out from the event, twelve months was a big improvement. I could try and get a real job, perhaps even return to law or I could, of course, always try for the record…

  It was a daunting prospect but I was far better positioned to go for it than I had been as a callow eighteen year old. While I was still hopelessly inefficient, at least I’d shaken those bouts of nausea. I no longer had a girlfriend to worry about leaving behind, having only months before successfully buggered up yet another relationship. And despite the lack of a job I didn’t have money troubles this time thanks to the really crap genetic hand my parents were dealt, both dying of cancer within two years of each other.