The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  New Year’s Day is one of my favourite days of the year. Not New Year’s Eve, which I invariably find anticlimactic, for no matter where you end up, you always feel like you’d be having more fun if you’d gone to that other party. Certainly for much of the night during those owl-less hours when the rain was teeming, I would have preferred to be anywhere else, even those appalling teenage New Year’s parties of my youth where everyone threw up from a lethal mixture of rocket fuel and cough mixture. For me the thrill of the first day of every year was that each bird I saw, no matter how common, was a new tick for my year list. Everyday birds in the back garden that I would pretty much ignore the rest of the year, such as starlings and blackbirds became interesting again, at least for one brief moment, as they take up their positions on the list.

  A twitcher’s list is very democratic. Each bird counts as one tick. There are no extra points for beauty or rarity. The humble sparrow counts just as much as a Wedge-tailed Eagle or a Paradise Parrot. Sure, encountering a Wedgie can be an exhilarating experience and seeing a Paradise Parrot would be somewhat mind-blowing considering it has been extinct for eighty years, but in terms of the list these factors do not privilege them above the House Sparrow – they are all worth just one tick. If I wanted to break the record it was as essential that I saw every common garden bird as it was that I saw every rarity.

  So it was to the gardens of Melbourne that I turned to get the year list kicking along. It might not be the most exotic of locales, but you had to start somewhere. One of the attractions of birdwatching is that you can see birds no matter where you are, from the edge of the polar icecaps to the middle of a teeming concrete metropolis. Aside from the odd rodent scuttling out of sight as we enter the kitchen, the modern human rarely encounters a wild mammal in our daily lives but birds seem to be everywhere. City birds may often seem pretty lacklustre but even the most familiar can fill me with a sense of wonder. I have a soft spot for the Spotted Turtle-dove which was bird number five for the year, seen feeding in my tiny backyard. A very common species, introduced from Asia in the nineteenth century, the Spotted Turtle-dove is quite a handsome bird on close examination. Possessing the sweet, innocent features of a dove with a wonderfully subtle pink hue across the breast, this was also the first bird I remembered tracking down to identify.

  I was around four years old and was woken one morning by the incessant cooing of a turtle-dove. Thinking it might be an owl hooting I had jumped out of bed and, in my pyjamas, followed the sound down the street to a large tree in the yard of the house on the corner. I remembered being disappointed that it wasn’t an owl calling but I did have the satisfaction of making that discovery for myself. And my mother had the joy of entering my room and discovering her son missing from his bed, the first of many bird-induced disappearances she was to have to get used to over the coming years.

  Just as I would get used to seeing Spotted Turtle-doves. In bird-watching terms, familiarity can breed contempt and birds that once delighted and fascinated can become easily overlooked. But each bird is unique. They all have a story, even common city trash birds. Most introduced species were deliberate releases designed to make Australia feel more like ‘home’ (i.e. England). Introduced species come in for quite a panning from birders – they are often referred to as ‘plastics’, meaning they’re not as authentic as the home-grown item. Some twitchers don’t even count them on their lists. I am generally sympathetic to this line of birding apartheid but at times can’t help but feeling that this view is just a tad overzealous. Introduced species are bad news, no question about it. They don’t belong here and can create rampant havoc when let loose upon local ecosystems, the Cane Toad and the Prickly Pear being two infamous non-bird examples. But there is very little of a ‘natural’ ecosystem left in the cities. If all the introduced species were somehow miraculously removed, I seriously doubt whether many native species would be able to fill their niche and our cities would fall silent of birdcalls – lyrebirds aren’t really into feeding on human refuse.

  The real trouble occurs when the introduced birds build up in such numbers that they break out into surrounding habitats. A classic example of this is the Common Myna. Introduced to Melbourne from India in the 1860s, for most of the next century it remained relatively uncommon, confined to small pockets of suburbia and industrial areas. But Common Mynas are canny opportunists well adapted to living with humans and as the tentacles of suburbia spread, so did their opportunities. Over the last thirty years they seem to have reached a critical mass in the cities and have begun spilling over into the surrounding countryside, utilising the emerging freeway system as a…well, freeway system. Fuelled by the phenomenal waste produced by our throwaway society, the Common Myna has muscled its way into the bush fringes where it competes with hollow-nesting natives such as rosellas and other parrots. It took a hundred years to reach the western fringes of Melbourne, but only a decade or so to leapfrog to the outskirts of Ballarat along the recently upgraded Western Freeway. Locals in the small northern Victorian town of Chiltern are talking about forming myna vigilante posses to keep them from invading. It will be a battle on two fronts as the mynas inexorably wend their way along the Hume Highway corridor, from Sydney and Canberra in the north and Melbourne in the south.

  But it is not only introduced species that are to be found in the inner city; a surprising number of natives still persist here. Some even thrive in what you would expect to be a biological desert. But if you think about it, the resources of the countryside all funnel into the cities and are then spat out again by the consumer society creating a bonanza of riches for an opportunistic bird. It is not only Common Mynas that thrive in such circumstances. Native species such as ibis, currawongs and ravens do a roaring trade, not to mention the Silver Gull. Back in the 1950s there were a few Silver Gulls nesting on Mud Islands, a group of small sand heaps at the southern end of Port Phillip Bay, about fifty kilometres from Melbourne as the gull flies. Fifty years later that colony has grown to over a hundred thousand; a phenomenal population explosion fuelled by the rise of the takeaway society. There are a cluster of small islands off Wollongong piled high with the bones of thousands of birds…mainly leg and wing bones, because the source of this birding graveyard is the local KFC outlet on the mainland opposite. Silver Gulls breed here and the parent birds take the remnants of thousands of family meal deals across to feed their voracious young, resulting in an upsizing of their population.

  Yet you don’t have to be a scavenger to do well in the cities, though being aggressive is certainly an advantage. Thanks to the cultural shift that occurred in the Australian consciousness from the 1960s onwards, when we stopped trying to turn our homes into little patches of England and began planting indigenous species, many native nectar-feeders have returned to the suburbs – the White-plumed Honeyeater, Noisy Miner and the Red and Little Wattlebirds. But they are all aggressive little buggers and none more so than the magnificent Rainbow Lorikeet, a stunning burst of colour that now wheels about most Australian cities in raucous flocks. I have seen a British twitcher fresh off the plane weep at the beauty and abundance of these birds. They are now back in such numbers that even in the inner city they are giving the Common Mynas a run for their money.

  It’s amazing just where birds can thrive in the city. I headed to Melbourne General Cemetery to see a few extra native species. Death may never take a holiday, but funeral directors occasionally did and luckily for me there were no burials being conducted on New Year’s Day. When birding there in the past, I have more than once stumbled out from a tangle of headstones, slap bang into a funeral party lowering their loved one into the ground. Everyone mourns in their own way but I was pretty sure that having someone with binoculars barging into the middle of Aunt Louise’s funeral didn’t figure in most people’s bereavement itineraries.

  In fact birdwatching anywhere in the urban area can be fraught with such potentially awkward moments. Binoculars make bird-watching so much easier, but they also make you
look like a pervert, especially when combined with the sort of camouflage gear that birders tend to go in for. People just don’t expect birds to be in the city and they certainly don’t expect birdwatchers to be chasing after them. My suburban birding activities have attracted the attention of the police several times and I have freaked out joggers by emerging unexpectedly from the undergrowth on many occasions. But where it gets really awkward is when a patch of useful habitat coincides with a homosexual beat, which happens more frequently than one would expect. I guess the same attributes that attract birds – quiet, leafy, out of the way spots with lots of hiding places – also attract those looking for discreet encounters. In places as diverse as Melbourne, Canberra and Paris I’ve stumbled onto such places and found myself having to convince eager cruisers that I really was there just for the birds.

  In a wooded glade in Madrid’s Parque del Retiro I garnered quite a collection of men trying to pick me up. Quite flattering, I suppose, but I didn’t have the requisite Spanish to tell them I wasn’t interested so I made a big exaggerated show of trying to look for birds through my binoculars. Trouble was, any birds had been scared off by the fruity conga line trailing behind me, so to them it must have seemed as if I was putting on some kind of floorshow for their viewing pleasure. Fearful my admirers might turn nasty when I didn’t finish off with a bang, I thought it would be best if I removed myself from the scene and so, like some adult version of the Pied Piper, led a merry band across the park to the exit.

  Luckily there were very few members of the public for me to spook as I wandered about the cemetery grounds looking for a few additions to the list before the sun went down on the first day of my quest. Melbourne Cemetery is a surprisingly good place for birds, especially when they let the weeds grow amongst the headstones. There were plenty of hiding places for small birds to shelter and lots of feeding opportunities in what was, for wildlife, an oasis in the middle of a busy city. I loved coming here to birdwatch as oddly enough I felt a great sense of calm as I wandered amongst the gravestones and there was something delicious in the notion that so many birds are living on top of humanity’s graveyard when, for them, the rest of the city was a graveyard. They say the best revenge is to live well, and in the cemetery this day I spied birds such as the Red-rumped Parrot, Silvereye, Superb Fairy-wren, and Yellow-rumped Thornbill all doing a splendid job of living it up amongst the bones of the society that wreaked such havoc on their ancestors.

  By day’s end my list stood at twenty-five. Not a particularly awesome figure, especially when I heard later that Keith and Lindsay Fisher from Cairns saw a lazy 160 species on New Year’s Day, but as I have said, you had to start somewhere. And if I could keep adding 25 species per day I would have broken the record by Australia Day (26 January), but of course, things are never that easy.

  CHAPTER 5

  4 January, Seaford Swamp, Victoria:

  92 species

  Imagine you are standing on a small rise at the southern end of a large plain. To the east are three wooded hills. Distant forest-clad mountain ranges mirror each other in the northeast and southwest. To the northwest are lower, drier escarpments. The whole area is in fact a giant basin, collecting water from the surrounding highlands. Herds of animals graze amongst the grassy woodlands by the lazy river that meanders through the centre of the plain. Though not heavily populated, small family groups make a comfortable living from the plain’s bounty. Here they live, love and make stories.

  Around ten thousand years ago – give or take a few minutes – the basin filled with water through a gap to the south as the great polar icecap thawed, creating what is now called Port Phillip Bay. By the time the first Europeans sailed into the bay, the territory of one people, the Bunarong, straddled much of the coastal strip around the almost landlocked body of water, suggesting that perhaps these areas were the fringes of their original territory, to which they had to seek refuge as the plain was inundated. Part of their jurisdiction took in the flat country on the easternmost arc of the bay. Over the centuries as sea levels have risen and fallen, the sea and land have done battle, each skirmish leaving a scar on the land in the form of a residual sand dune. These dunes act to block the waters draining from the northeastern mountains (which we now call the Dandenongs) and a vast swamp known as the Carrum-Carrum formed behind the sand barrier.

  Here the Bunarong people continue to live. Their stories now tell of the abundant game attracted by the sweet waters of the Carrum-Carrum. Among them is a new tale about the spirit of a recently dead warrior who returns in the form of a white-skinned man with the odd name of ‘William Buckley’. Thirty years later more white men arrive and claim Buckley as one of their own – an escapee from a failed convict settlement who, on the run, had picked up the spear of a recently buried warrior leading to a case of mistaken identity. The return of Buckley’s mob signals the end of the stories of the Bunarong, for unlike Buckley the new arrivals are incapable of sharing the land. The last of the original Bunarong clan, Jimmy Dunbar, dies in 1878, a mere forty years after permanent white settlement. The Carrum-Carrum dies with him for in 1879 the Patterson River channel is completed, draining the swamp into the sea.

  New stories emerge. Small fishing settlements transform into beachside holiday destinations once they are connected to the new settlement of Melbourne by the railway. Market gardens and dairies are established, the fertile soil of the former swamp now feeds the population of the growing city. The mighty Phar Lap builds up strength on the lush grasses of the former wetland in preparation for his successful 1930 Melbourne Cup campaign. And in 1953 at a local youth group badminton night a skinny young larrikin of Irish Catholic origins meets a demure girl whose strict family of Protestant matriarchs has moved from the city into their bayside holiday house. Between smashing the shuttlecock smack bang into the faces of his ‘proddo’ opponents, the freckle-faced young bloke takes a shine to the tall, quiet girl, declaring that one day he will marry her. She thinks he’s an uncouth yobbo and won’t have a bar of him. Twelve years later he finally wears her and her cabal of misanthropic aunts down and they marry in a small fibro church on the edge of the old swamp. They build a house in the coastal scrub of the old dunes where their eldest son begins to ramble and splash his way through Seaford Swamp, one of the last remnants of the Carrum-Carrum. And so the stories continue.

  Seaford Swamp was where the Big Twitch really began: not just because it was the first day of proper birding that I put in for the year, but because this suburban patch of wetland had been as important in shaping my story as any single person or event. Even by most other birdwatchers, Seaford isn’t regarded with huge amounts of affection. As a wilderness experience it pales in comparison to the Amazon or the Serengeti, being only a hundred-odd hectares of mainly thick, tangled reed beds broken by the occasional open body of shallow, stagnant water. It’s hard going just to get through; a typical foray leaves you with scratches, spikes and boots full of the foulest black muddy water. But even though it is hemmed in on three sides by urban development, even though at times it can be seemingly devoid of birds, Seaford Swamp does it for me like nowhere else.

  In this country we tend to ignore landscape as a factor in developing our character. You will hear people banging on about how the boundless frontier forged the American sense of optimism, how the Mediterranean sun fuels the passions of those who live under its blazing influence, yet in Australia it’s as though we are ashamed of our landscape. Rather than embrace it we have for the most part of our short history denied the reality of the landscape like a shameful family secret, expending an awful amount of energy in European makeovers or simply willfully ignoring its existence altogether.

  For me, the impact of landscape has been as pivotal to my sense of identity as have my parents, my education or any other aspect of my life. Rather than deny it, I am proud to proclaim that the landscape has forged me. I see the fact that I grew up alongside Seaford Swamp as critical to my personal development. I am a product of that lands
cape and it manifests in my personality. Thank you, Seaford Swamp, for making me what I am today – flat, featureless, a bit soggy below the surface, with the occasional malodorous whiff.

  Actually, Seaford Swamp’s greatest impact on my life is that it made me a birdwatcher. That and my grade five teacher. Well, that and the fact that I was a little suck who was petrified of getting the strap from my grade five teacher. My first school, Seaford North Primary, was perched right on the edge of the swamp. The swamp figured large in my primary school imaginings. It was the source of much drama. In summer we had bushfires, tiger snakes and the occasional flasher. In winter we would have floods on the oval, infestations of frogs in biblical proportions, and the occasional flasher. It was a generator of local childhood myth. No-one knew what was hidden in its depths, but there were stories of secret stashes of everything a kid would ever want to get his hands on – money, slingshots, nudie pictures, canoes; there was even supposed to be a ‘graveyard of the cows’ lurking within the depths of this mystical realm. And like all mystical places there had to be a resident troll.

  Peter Jackson was his name. Part teacher, part bunyip, he looked like a straighter version of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, sporting a bushy beard, thick, tinted prescription glasses and oftentimes a daggy green bush hat. ‘Jacko’ was the first birdwatcher I knew. He was also the first vegan, the first Mazda driver and, as one of the few male teachers in the school, Jacko was allowed to deal out corporal punishment, which was then still legal. According to the lore of the schoolyard, Jacko wielded the strap with particular relish. As with all legends, there was only a small kernel of truth at its heart but I fully expected to be getting the strap on a regular basis in his class, unless, I thought, I could get on his good side. I knew he was a science and nature nut, particularly when it came to birds…maybe if I was into birds, Jacko wouldn’t be into me with the strap.