The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  The money I inherited was not a huge fortune, but it was enough to buy a comfortable house in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, as my brother had done. My Dad in particular had been very keen for this money to help set us up in the real estate market so that he could rest easy knowing that at least we wouldn’t have to worry about a roof over our heads. The trouble was, I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Their deaths were sobering not merely because of the searingly unbearable wrench of losing those two wonderful people, but because it left me exposed as rudderless. I had lived most of my life in my head, never attaching to the corporeal tangibles of the world. I had no sense of my place within the world. The idea of putting down roots was so disorienting to me because I still didn’t know where I belonged. A year after receiving my inheritance I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with it.

  For almost as long as I could remember, I’d fantasised about running away – hitting the road and losing myself in the wider world. Not that I had anything to run away from, quite the opposite, for I had a fantastic childhood, but the idea of engaging with the world, being completely free to go wherever I chose, do whatever I wanted, was intoxicating. I was always way too responsible for such nonsense, however, and those thoughts remained the stuff of musings to drift off to sleep to. Suddenly, there was no impediment to following that dream. No family, no job, no ties. I was in the rare position where I could run away without leaving behind an unresolved mess. The record beckoned. I might never have this sort of opportunity again in my life, at least not until I retired and by then would I have the energy to bother? For so many years going for the record had seemed a sensational thing to do, yet when faced with it as a palpable option, I was daunted to the point of inertia. ‘Be careful what you pray for, you just might get it.’ The idea of actually pursuing a dream, the prospect of going after something I’d always wanted to do, in fact filled me with the direst dread.

  The matter was decided for me in one of those embarrassing moments when you say something that you desperately wish you could just take back. I was returning to Melbourne with a birding friend after a trip to central Victoria. The long conversations about birds had finally petered out and we had moved on to talking about our personal lives. I started rabbiting on about my predicament and found myself uttering the words, ‘Sometimes having money is a curse.’ What a dick. My friend was planning to start a family, was worried about being able to pay off his mortgage and raise a child, and here was I wallowing in self-pity because I didn’t know how to spend my cash. It was like someone complaining about the cost of a manicure to a double amputee.

  I couldn’t believe I’d said something like that. This was not who I was. Perhaps my inertia sprang from the fact that my inheritance was a last link with my parents, perhaps I was frightened to waste it on a mad scheme they wouldn’t have approved of. I would have given anything for my parents to still be alive so that I didn’t have to deal with their money, but that was not going to happen. This inheritance had been their last gift to me and I know that they intended for it to make my life better, help me make my dreams come true. Owning a home had never been a dream of mine. So rather than putting a deposit down on a funky inner city pad, I bought a four-wheel drive, a new atlas and began planning. And on the last night of 2001 I left a message on the Internet declaring to the world my intention to break the Australian birdwatching record. There, it was public now, no going back.

  In a cemetery in suburban Melbourne, an odd spinning noise could be heard coming from the graves of Barry and Diane Dooley.

  CHAPTER 3

  3 June 1996, Collingwood, Victoria:

  19 species

  Tell a birder that you are trying to break a birdwatching record and their first question will be something like ‘Where do you plan to get Buff-breasted Button-quail?’ Confide to a non-birder and they invariably ask, ‘How can you prove it?’ I guess technically there was nothing to stop me from staying home all year, and pretending I saw a whole stack of birds other than the fact it would be a really stupid and pointless thing to do – unlike chasing after birds for a year which is, of course, not stupid or pointless in the slightest. Actually, I think that is part of the appeal of birdwatching for me – you come away from an encounter with a bird with absolutely nothing tangible to show for it other than the memory of the experience and maybe a tick in your notebook. You indulge in the experience merely for the nature of the experience. It is conquering without violence, hunting without the kill. There are no trophies in birdwatching. Well, one birder I know of makes up a little commemorative plaque for himself every time he discovers a bird not previously seen in Australia, but generally the rewards of birdwatching are far more esoteric. What I am particularly charmed by is not only the encounter with what is inevitably a beautiful creature but also that every correct identification is like uncovering a little kernel of truth. Every bird that you see has to belong to some species and there is immense satisfaction in working out exactly which species that is.

  Not that you could always convince others of that. And with the task I had set myself I would somehow have to find a way to prove the truth of my convictions on 633-plus occasions. One obvious way would be to photograph each species I saw. While I would have a camera with me on my travels, it was hard enough just seeing the buggers in the first place, let alone getting close enough for long enough to focus a nicely framed shot. Some, like the aforementioned Buff-breasted Button-quail, have never been photographed in the wild. To take a happy snap of every species I intended to see would have taken considerably longer than a single year.

  For every bird I couldn’t photograph I could always try to ensure that I had another credible observer along with me to verify each sighting. That would entail spending the entire year in the company of at least one other birdwatcher. I go birdwatching for the birds, not the birdwatchers. The thought of spending a year in close company with twitchers chilled me to the core. Not that I have anything against them, I am terribly fond of the members of the tribe, it is just that basically, they are a bunch of obsessive freaks.

  There is a form of autism known as Asperger’s Syndrome in which the sufferer, most often male, becomes so fixated on one particular subject that everything else is excluded, especially normal social interactions. Often the only way they can interact with others is through the medium of the obsession that consumes them. Some argue it is nothing more than an extreme form of maleness, coming from the same part of the brain that enables a bloke to sit totally absorbed in a game of football, oblivious to everything around him. The argument goes that such a narrow focus on the one subject was an essential skill for our early ancestors when on the hunt. People with Asperger’s are simply unable to switch off this trait.

  In Britain Asperger’s is sometimes known as the ‘trainspotters’ disease’, but it could just as easily apply to birders. I’ve known some twitchers for twenty years and still have no idea about their family life or what they do for a living. All I know about them is whether they have seen the Blue Rock Thrush, or if they can identify a White-winged Black Tern in non-breeding plumage. In Mark Cocker’s excellent and illuminating book, Birders, he describes a classic example of a birder’s inability to communicate on any level other than birds. America’s most famous bird watcher, Roger Tory Peterson, was in England with a party of pre-eminent birders. Cocker writes: ‘Lord Alanbrooke, keen birder and Chief of Imperial General Staff during the Second World War, was expanding on his relations with Sir Winston Churchill. But in the midst of the Field-Marshal’s historical monologue, Tory Peterson turned to the group and said, “I guess oystercatchers will eat most any kind of mollusk”.’

  Having spent years associating with birders I find this anecdote amusing but totally unsurprising. Just after my mother died I received a call from a birder friend. He had enough awareness of the forms of social intercourse to greet me with a perfunctory inquiry as to how I was. I told him that in fact I wasn’t all that great as Mum had just passed away.
There was an uncomfortable silence at the other end of the line. After about twenty seconds he managed, ‘There’s a Broad-billed Sandpiper at Werribee Sewage Farm.’

  If my only option for verifying my record was to spend a year constantly in the company of these people, then I thought I’d rather not bother, for while I’ll put my hand up and admit to certain Asperger’s tendencies, even I have my limits – they usually kick in after the first half-hour of intense discussion of wing moult sequences in wading birds.

  Not that I would be able to have a twitcher chaperone me at all times even if I wanted to. I couldn’t find any takers to accompany me on my New Year’s Eve owl quest. What a depressing thought – all the tragic Asperger’s cases had somewhere more interesting to spend the evening. Even my two closest birding friends, Puke and Groober, turned me down. Puke’s real name is Paul Peake and with a propensity to be sick every time we go out on a boat, it’s easy to see why he’s been saddled with that nickname. I’m not quite sure why we call Groober Groober, we just do. A couple of years older than me but with a similar sense of humour (not necessarily a free flowing commodity amongst what is often a very earnest group) they are about the only birders with whom I have a relationship that extends beyond birding matters. In fact apart from our annual Twitchathon pilgrimages, I rarely even get out birding with them anymore. So I thought they would have jumped at the chance but no, it seemed they had actual lives that involved going out and being with people on New Year’s Eve. Freaks.

  I soon realised I could never have my total officially verified. There was no official body to monitor the verification anyway. To try and give my quest some credibility in the eyes of others I would have to rely on my reputation. In the birding world, reputation is everything. And like virginity, reputation can only be lost once – well, maybe twice in the right circumstances. As far as I knew my reputation was still intact in the sense that I had no dodgy records in my past that other birders questioned. Every rare bird I had ever seen had been above reproach, usually backed up by a photograph or somebody else confirming the sighting. But that didn’t mean that I had much of a reputation amongst the upper echelons of the twitching world as a good birder, more that I didn’t have a reputation for being a stringer, someone who makes spurious claims about which birds they have seen. To be honest, though I had been on the fringes of the birding scene for the past twenty years and knew many of the main players, I was probably regarded as little more than a twitching dilettante. Even if I’d had the gravitas Roy Wheeler used to have, there was still no practicable way I could verify my sightings.

  It all came down to a matter of honour. People would either have to believe me or not believe me. Ultimately I didn’t really care who believed me as long as I was happy with the sighting. To this end I took it upon myself to set some kind of parameters for my task so that I could be satisfied within myself that I really had seen each species. And besides, it gave me the opportunity to make another list. I liked lists. So here were the five basic rules I developed for the Big Twitch.

  1 Only actual birds that are wild and free flying can be counted.

  2 All birds must be seen within a calendar year.

  3 All birds must be seen within Australian Territory.

  4 A species can only be counted in accordance with the official Australian Bird Checklist.

  5 All species have to be seen well enough to establish their identity.

  Simple enough, I thought. But each category raised a veritable Hydra’s head of questions and dilemmas as a quick exploration of each of the rules demonstrates.

  1 Only actual birds that are wild and free flying can be counted

  This may seem rather self-evident but some birders do in fact keep a list of birds they have seen on television or in movies or on the Internet. Even to me this seems a bit odd. Sure there might be a bit of skill involved in working out which bird is calling out in the background of that Tarzan movie but, really, what was the point of such a list? (By the way, the birds you most often hear in old Tarzan movies are Australian kookaburras and Indian peacocks, which seems rather incongruous considering the loin-clothed one is supposedly barrelling around the African jungle.) As surprising as it may seem, there are circumstances where the temptation might exist to tick off a video image. For example, if there was a camera set up on a feeding station at the breeding grounds of the endangered Orange-bellied Parrot in Tasmania, I could have tuned in via a webcast to see the actual birds live in real time without ever visiting Tasmania. This rule knocked that possibility out. It also stipulated a very basic criterion that each species must be an actual bird. Not the nest of a bird, or even an egg. Questions of when life begins don’t enter into the equation here, for although there may be a bird inside the eggshell, we couldn’t see it yet. In twitching it doesn’t matter which comes first, the chicken or the egg, because the egg doesn’t count. Yes, you could x-ray the egg to see the bird inside but rule number one stipulated that you must see the actual bird with your own eyes.

  The wild and free-flying clause ensured that I just didn’t head down to the local museum and tick off a number of stuffed and mounted specimens. It also meant that any bird I found dead I couldn’t count. But what exactly qualified as dead? I know one very reputable birder who for years had Masked Owl on his list because one night he found a freshly road-killed specimen. He swears that as he picked it up the owl blinked – proof, he said, that the bird was still alive for that split second and therefore countable. Made me wonder whether I should invest in a portable MRI unit to monitor birds about to join the choir invisible for any signs of brain activity.

  This rule also voided any birds seen in captivity. So visits to zoos generally wouldn’t be that useful to me although sometimes, especially in the case of waterfowl, it is very hard to pick which are the wild birds and which are part of the collection. Generally there are subtle differences that can distinguish a domestic bird from a genuine wild bird: they may have bands or other identifying marks. The domestic bird may have had its wings clipped. And if it flies onto your shoulder and asks for a cracker, chances are it is not a wild bird. Similarly, work for the dole kids dressed in chicken costumes advertising inner city carparks don’t count either.

  The term free-flying didn’t preclude flightless birds such as emus or penguins or even lazy ducks who just couldn’t be bothered with the whole flying thing. It simply meant that the wild bird must be unrestrained. You could count an injured bird that couldn’t fly so long as you found it and it hadn’t been brought to you by someone else. How to determine what was free-flying could actually be quite difficult. The rule of thumb is that for a species to be countable it has to be part of a wild and self-sustaining population that has existed for more than ten years. Ostrich is on the Australian list, having escaped from failed ostrich farms at the turn of last century, but I was assured by an expert that these birds have never been truly wild and in the eighties the last supposedly wild population was rounded up and corralled for a while. So I didn’t even bother looking for this one remaining population. I found out later that many people disagree with this expert’s view and most twitchers include Ostrich on their list. I may have cost myself a tick before I’d even started. Damn those rules; it was supposed to be birdwatching, not moral philosophy.

  2 All birds must be seen within a calendar year

  I guess there was nothing stopping me from choosing my year to run from 27 May to 26 May, but it seemed so much easier to confine my efforts to a calendar year. I guess if I’d chosen 27 May and then didn’t see as much as I’d hoped I could then delay the starting date until I got a good run of sightings. And so on and so on. There would be a very real risk that I would never actually get started and this thing could go on forever. I refused to allow myself to be a freak for more than one year so for the sake of convenience, simplicity and my own sanity, my big year would be the calendar year 2002, not a day before and not a day after. Having decided on this rule late in 2001, it didn’t give me much tim
e to prepare.

  3 All birds must be seen within Australian territory

  Mike Entwhistle’s record of 633 was seen on the Australian mainland but the official 1994 checklist includes the birds seen in Australia’s external territories – Norfolk, Lord Howe, Christmas, Cocos-Keeling, Macquarie and Heard islands, though not Australia’s Antarctic Territory. Why Antarctica doesn’t cop a guernsey I don’t know but as I was not planning on going down there the point was moot. By convention most twitchers also include the external territories when they tally up their Aussie lists so who was I to argue with convention? Especially when it took the number of potential species up to over 830, at least thirty more than for the mainland alone.

  Not that all those juicy Southern Ocean seabirds that nest on Heard and Macquarie islands were much use to me as I had no way of getting there. A tourist boat does call in at Macquarie but by the time I made inquiries the only cruise available for the year was already booked out. And as the cheapest berth cost around US $8000, which, given the exchange rate at the time, translated to something like nineteen million Australian dollars, I wasn’t too sorry to have missed out. It meant I would have to take a heap of boat trips within the 200 mile limit in order to see some of the ocean going birds.

  4 A species can only be counted in accordance with the official Australian Bird Checklist

  In 1994 the RAOU published what is considered to be the official checklist of Australian birds. There is no more controversial issue amongst birdwatchers than taxonomy. Even what constitutes a full species is a matter for hot debate. Passions are so aroused that some people have barely spoken a civil word for years over the issue of albatross taxonomy. The 1994 checklist created disquiet because some species of bird were deemed to no longer officially exist in their own right as a species, being regarded as only a race or form of another species, a process known as lumping. (The reverse process where a bird hitherto thought of as a race is given full status is known as splitting.) In general a twitcher is in favour of splitting as it gives them more species they can tick off on their lists but I figured, what did I know about taxonomy and genetics so I’d go along with what the experts said. At least it meant I was singing from the same songbook and people could compare like against like when comparing my list with others.