The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  The trouble was that as soon as the 1994 checklist was published there was a revolution in genetics thanks to new DNA techniques that turned much of the previous taxonomic orthodoxy on its ear. A new checklist incorporating these changes was promised as early as 1995. By late 2001 there was still no sign of it coming out so in a sense I was operating in the dark. I had an idea of what the changes were but nobody was really sure. This might mean that I waste vast amounts of time searching for a species only to find that it no longer counted when the new regime is in place. All that effort spent backing the wrong horse. Conversely it meant that there were birds that were currently considered subspecies that might well one day be classified as fully-fledged ticks. So as well as trying to find as many species as I could I would now also have to put an effort in for as many races of species just to cover me for future taxonomic changes. As there were some hundreds of different races of the 830 current species, I had my work cut out for me.

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

  Not that I am privileging sight above hearing. Hearing is one of my all-time favourite senses – certainly in the top five, at least. I know that under the American Big Year rules and even in our Twitchathons, hearing a bird counts as much as seeing it. In many cases this makes sense because a bird’s call is often every bit as distinctive as its looks. About the only way to tell a Chirruping Wedgebill from a Chiming Wedgebill without taking a slice of its DNA is to listen to it sing. The Chirruping sounds like a happy sparrow, the Chiming’s call is reminiscent of a musicalised squeaky bicycle wheel. There is also the fact that I trust my eyes more than my ears. When you see a bird, unless you’ve dropped some acid you can be sure that what you are looking at is a bird. Things I’ve mistaken for bird calls in the past include dogs, cats, babies, mobile phones; even the rumbling stomach of a birding companion. Put simply you never can be sure just what is making a particular noise until you see it making the actual noise, as illustrated by the cautionary tale of Puke and Groober on Mount Lewis.

  The rainforests of Mount Lewis in North Queensland are a well-known haunt for Lesser Sooty Owls, the smaller, tropical cousin of the Sooty Owl. Groober and Puke were up on the mountain one night trying to spotlight them. To aid them they had a tape of owl calls. They were having no luck. Puke wandered down the track in one direction, Groober in the other. After another unsuccessful playback session, Groober forgot to turn the tape off. The next call on the tape was a Barking Owl. These birds do actually make a barking noise. It’s normally a bird of open woodlands, so Groober was surprised to hear one respond from across the dense rainforest gully. He played the tape again and was immediately answered. So ensued a tense duet as Groober moved toward the sound that was getting closer by the second. Eventually the call was so close it was coming from just around the bend. Groober jumped out with his spotlight only to have another spotlight shone into his face. The Barking Owl was actually Puke imitating the call he was hearing from Groober’s tape. For ten minutes they had been stalking each other, drawing one another closer with their fake barks.

  When it comes down to it, just hearing a bird is not the same experience as when you see it, particularly when you see it well. To see some birds I would have to travel hundreds, even thousands of kilometres and expend a great deal of time and energy. A fleeting glimpse or hearing a snatch of a call is not exactly what I was after. I wanted the total experience of seeing a bird and that meant being able to recognise what the hell it was I was looking at. If I am walking through a gorge in the Kakadu National Park and a large, dark pigeon flies off, there will be little doubt the bird is anything but a Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon. But if all I see is a brown blur, well it’s hardly a valid experience of the essence of the bird, of what makes it a unique creature. I won’t be satisfied putting it on my list until, at the very least, I have seen the diagnostic feature of the chestnut wing patch that makes it a Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon. This will help me stand up to anyone who doubts I saw a Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon but, more importantly, it means that I will be happy within myself that I truly experienced the bird. And ultimately, for me, that’s what counts.

  With those parameters ironed out it was time to turn my attention to more practical matters. A year may seem like a long time but there was an awful lot of territory to cover. Australia is a bloody big place. It has mountains, oceans, rainforest, deserts and everything in between. Birds have adapted to every one of these habitats. Some were specialists found in only one habitat; others were jacks of all trades who will find a niche almost anywhere. I had to work out a route that covered the diverse territory that all these different species occupied.

  Complicating matters was the tendency of some birds to use their wings to full effect and not stay in the one place. Like Peter Allen, about a hundred thousand Sharp-tailed Sandpipers call Australia home and, like the flamboyant singer, they spend much of their time in more exotic climes, though not in this case, Rio; along with almost fifty other wader species, they go to Siberia. Look for a Sharpie in Australia in the middle of June and you’d be hard pressed to find a single bird. Conversely, most species of albatross come up from Antarctic waters when they start to freeze and are most easily seen off the Australian coast during the winter months. So in order to see everything, I needed to work out a schedule where I visited not only all parts of the country but all parts of the country at the right time. For instance, the best time of year to see many rarer Asian migrants is in our summer when a few overshoot their South East Asian wintering grounds and make it to the fringes of northern Australia. This also happens to be the peak time for visitors from New Guinea to come down along the east coast to breed. How to cover two ends of the continent at the same time?

  Other permanent residents are less predictable, moving about the country in response to rain and good conditions. The Letter-winged Kite is a bird of prey that for the most part sticks to a core range in the backblocks of the channel country in Western Queensland. Following a good season their main prey, the Longhaired Rat, has a population explosion and the kites have a baby boom of their own and soon spread out across much of the country. They will appear in a district in huge numbers, hang around for a while and then disappear again, not to return for decades. There is often no pattern to such movements and in a year such as 2002 when much of the country was suffering the worst drought in recorded history, the movements were all the more erratic. Still others, like the Red-lored Whistler, remain almost invisible for much of the year and only emerged during the whirlwind of the mating season.

  It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with over 830 pieces to fit together. With twenty years’ experience I felt I had a handle on recognising the pieces and knowing where most of them should go but I had never been particularly good at fitting jigsaws together, especially under pressure. A year may seem a long time but as I sat down to work out my strategy it seemed alarmingly restrictive.

  In the past I hadn’t exactly been the most successful twitcher. When a Hudsonian Godwit turned up at Werribee Sewage Farm I went out looking for it five times and never found it. Everybody else seemed to. A New Zealand species, the South Island Pied Oystercatcher, appeared in Australia for the first time on a beach in northern New South Wales. Every twitcher worth their salt went up and twitched it, no worries. Every twitcher but me. I walked up and down that goddamned beach for two whole days and didn’t see a thing. That same trip would have to go down as the greatest dipping fest in Australian birding history. I had five target species and never saw one, despite spending a week looking for them.

  With that track record, I knew it wouldn’t be a case of simply turning up and instantly ticking off the required species. I had to try and estimate how much time I could afford for each one. There was no point spending five days looking for one species if it was going to cost me five others in the process. To this end I crossed one species off my list of potentials. The Princess Parrot lives in the remotest deserts and is only ever regular
ly seen in one place along the Canning Stock Route, which is about as far from anywhere that you can go and still be on Earth. Just getting there and back from Alice Springs is almost a week’s round trip and that doesn’t include any time spent searching for the birds. There was nothing else on the Canning that I couldn’t see elsewhere so I ruled out an expedition there. As much as I would have loved to see a Princess Parrot, for they are as beautiful as they are rare, I simply couldn’t afford to take that much time out of my schedule for just one bird.

  The first logistical task was to decide exactly how many birds I realistically had a chance of seeing. Of the 830-odd birds that have been recorded in Australia and its territories, quite a few have been one-off sightings. When I eliminated such extreme vagrants it still came out at around 710. That didn’t seem right. No-one could possibly see seven hundred birds in Australia in the one year. The record was only 633.

  I decided I needed expert advice on this to see whether my assessment was realistic. I sent my proposed schedule to Puke and Groober. I trusted their judgement and knew that we were close enough for them to say to me, ‘Get your hand off it Dooley, you’re dreaming.’ They assessed my itinerary, ruled out a couple of species, pointing out that at least one of the birds I had listed was actually extinct, but in general were as surprised as me to find that it was theoretically possible to see 705 species in a year. Possible in theory. Whether it was possible for me to do it was another question entirely. Off the top of my head I could think of at least twenty birders who were far better at the caper than me. This was a job for a ‘real’ birdwatcher.

  A real birdwatcher is someone who dedicates their entire lives to studying birds. They are the sort of person who gets out at every possible opportunity and when they can’t they spend every spare moment reading about birds, studying them in minute detail. Real birders know all the birds and all the parts of the birds. They know what each feather is called and how it should look for every bird. They can look at a particular bird and not just recognise what species it is but what sex, age and how many feathers are missing from its wing. In other words they are freaks. A real birder possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject as well as a phenomenal eye. Not only can they look out over an open expanse of ocean and see a bird from a distance of a couple of kilometres, they can immediately pick it out as a Soft-plumaged Petrel and be proven correct ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The most impressive example of this skill I’d ever witnessed was on Stradbroke Island in Queensland. I was walking through the bush with a birder named Chris Corben, when he stopped and casually said, ‘Look, there’s a frog.’ I couldn’t see anything. Chris pointed to a tree about thirty metres away. Sure enough, when we walked over, there was a small camouflaged tree frog the size of a ten-cent piece sitting frozen on a leaf. And to top it off, he had correctly named the species from that distance. Next to guys like this I am an absolute duffer.

  But most importantly, the real birder has a single-minded tenacity. That’s why they are freaks. That’s why they are so damned good at what they do. These are the sort of people whose very sense of self revolves around their ability to separate a Wandering Tattler from a Grey-tailed Tattler by being able to spot its longer nasal groove at a distance of two hundred paces. The sort of person who has virtually constructed their moral universe around how good someone is at identifying birds. I have actually heard comments such as, ‘Bruce is a nice bloke but he couldn’t tell a Phylloscopus warbler from his elbow,’ in such a tone that brings into question Bruce’s legitimacy as a fellow human being. When your entire world revolves around one thing, to master that thing is to invite a certain arrogance. It’s good to be the king. Even if the kingdom is rather small. It is amazing how often really good birders are borderline megalomaniacs. Because with birdwatching you are, in a sense, mastering nature itself. By identifying and listing a thing you are satisfying that deep-seated psychological need to impose some order on an otherwise chaotic and baffling universe. It gives people who probably don’t have much control in other aspects of their lives at least some illusion of control. There is nobody more frightening than a nerd in total control – think Hitler…kind of nerdy; very scary. Cool people don’t bother becoming dictators; they’re too busy getting laid.

  If I was to go after 700 I had to want it, had to become one of those people I had always found daunting yet amusing. Was I one of those people? I seriously doubted it. But then I began thinking. For twenty years I’d stuck to birdwatching despite the embarrassment and risk of social stigmatisation. My bedtime reading usually consisted of bird books. After two weeks without getting out birdwatching I start to get a little bit ratty. And of all the hard-core twitchers I knew I was the only one who kept a daily bird diary, writing down every bird I saw every day. It had become a compulsion.

  Opening an old bird diary at random, Monday 3 June 1996, I noted that I saw nineteen species that day in Collingwood and Yarra Bend. Just from the fact that I saw Red-rumped Parrot and White-browed Scrubwren evoked in me a fairly strong picture of what that day was like. It was cold but clearing. I spent the day working from home desperately trying to come up with some comedy ideas. I was working at my first TV job on a show called Full Frontal and I was floundering. I hadn’t got a sketch to air for something like six weeks and if I didn’t improve my strike rate this would probably also be my last television gig. I’d gone for a walk across to Yarra Bend Park to clear my head and seek some inspiration. I was pretty sure that was the day I’d almost walked over a couple fornicating under a blanket. I didn’t know what connection that triggered in my mind but I remembered coming back from the park with an idea for a sketch. Jason Donovan, fresh from his River Phoenix tribute collapse outside the Viper Room, had just landed the part of Frank’n’Furter in a revival of The Rocky Horror Show. I thought it might be a neat idea to have Jason sing a parody of ‘Time Warp’ with a chorus that included the line ‘Jase hit the sidewalk again!’ The producer went with it and my flailing career had a revival of its own. I remembered all that from a date and a list of nineteen birds. My whole life seen through the prism of birdwatching. Calling Dr Asperger!

  But there was still the question of how the real twitchers would regard my effort. Would they see through the facade and pick me as a fraud? Puke and Groober thought my plan was doable but I decided I should spread my net further. I went right to the top and took my proposal to my birding mentor, Mike Carter, the man who has seen more birds in Australia than anyone else. I figured if anyone was going to have an objection it would be him, for even though he didn’t bother with year lists I might be stealing his thunder just a little bit. To my relief Mike was very supportive about my plans, even enthusiastic. He warned me against aiming as high as seven hundred as he thought it an unreachable target and that even if I fell only one short what would be a great achievement would always be tinged with disappointment for me. He told me that he was organising a boat trip to the Torres Strait at the end of August and another on the same boat out to Ashmore Reef in the Indian Ocean in October and reserved a place for me on both trips. Having those to anchor my plans around, my agenda began to take shape.

  Within a week I had been contacted by Chris Lester, who organises the boat trips off Port Fairy, asking me which months I wanted to book. Chris didn’t believe I could see seven hundred either but he was certainly willing to help me try. Soon I had similar trips booked on boats off Brisbane, Wollongong, Tasmania and Perth. I was taken aback at how nearly all of the ‘real’ twitchers were more than happy to support my endeavour. Sceptical they may be but they were not hostile and many adopted me for the year, making it a special project to help me out whenever they could. It was really quite overwhelming and I almost regretted calling them megalomaniacs and freaks. Almost.

  And so the wheels were set in motion. I even gave the project a name, the ‘Big Twitch’. The plan of attack was fairly straightforward. As I still had much to organise I would spend the first half of the year based in my home in Melbou
rne trying to see as many species as close to home as possible so that when I did head farther afield I wouldn’t have to waste my time on the more common stuff and could focus exclusively on the harder to see birds. Any major trips I did in this period would be no longer than a week or ten days to allow for maximum flexibility if I needed to alter plans so I could go chasing after vagrants as they turned up. From July onwards I planned to be on the road till the end of the year, essentially circumnavigating the country twice. The biggest risk in this strategy was that I had planned only one crack at the majority of northern Australia, towards the end of the year. There was a chance the monsoon may start early, stymieing my access to species that would have been easier to see earlier in the year during the dry season. It was not ideal but it seemed to be the most workable solution to a myriad of permutations.

  So on that last night of 2001 I headed out into the darkness and steeled myself to becoming a total birdy nerdy – but only for a year mind you, just one year.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 January 2002, Melbourne General Cemetery,

  Victoria:

  25 species