by Sean Dooley
So the week before school started, armed with the Gould League Book of Urban Birds, given to me by the last of my mother’s surviving aunts, I started crawling around the local park trying to identify the common birds in my neighbourhood. I was able to identify Red and Little Wattlebirds, a New Holland Honeyeater and that Spotted Turtle-dove. There was even a bird not in the book – a Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike, the first even slightly exotic looking bird I ever found. Today I would hardly give this handsome blue-grey bird (that is neither a cuckoo nor a shrike) a second glance, but when you first start out birdwatching, nearly everything takes on the glossy sheen of novelty.
I think it was that thrill of discovery that made birdwatching so attractive for me. From the first I had been passionately interested in nature. Long after I had developed a taste for exotic sugary breakfast cereals like Coco Pops and Fruit Loops I would eschew such treats in favour of plain old Weet-Bix because each box contained an African wildlife card. But wildlife always seemed to be elsewhere. There were no giraffes in Larool Crescent, no rhinos charging unsuspecting riders down at the motorbike tracks. My attempts to dig up our gravel front drive in search of fossils were halted not so much because my parents told me not to, but because they explained there were no dinosaurs to be found in the suburbs. Birdwatching, however, was a window into an entirely new world that existed right under your nose. Even in dull, suburban Seaford you could find moorhens along the creek, wrens decked out in brilliant blue amongst the blackberry tangles of vacant blocks, stunning fire-breasted Flame Robin in the cow paddocks. It was magic: a world that brought you out of yourself. Even if your stupid football team (Collingwood) lost another Grand Final, even if you had an after-school fight scheduled with Leigh Bayliss over who loved Vicki Bleazby the most, this other world was always there, and something was always happening. It was endlessly fascinating.
Within a week all fears of the strap were banished. Rather than being an ogre, Jacko turned out to be inspirational. He had turned his classroom into a menagerie with fish, mice, turtles and lizards competing with prescribed Education Department texts for our attention. He’d bought thirty pairs of binoculars, one for each class member, and would, at the drop of a bush-hat, declare it to be science time and take us off to the edge of the swamp to see what birds were there. Within a few weeks some mates and I were spending most of our lunchtimes patrolling the fence-line next to the swamp recording all the birds we saw. Sure, we’d occasionally be distracted by the odd game of footy or British bulldog, and I did allow myself to be ‘caught’ by Deidre Campbell in a game of kiss chasey (I’d moved on from Vicki Bleazby), but in general you could always find me down by the swamp looking for birds.
And twenty-three years later I was doing the same thing.
That day I was joined by Groober who I’d birded with more often than anyone. I was with him at Seaford in 1994 when we found the exceedingly rare Cox’s Sandpiper. He was there with me when I saw my first Little Bittern. Unfortunately he was unsighted when it flushed from the reeds in front of me, and missed out on seeing it, something I remind him of every chance I get. But I think our friendship will survive because although he dipped on the bittern, he’s seen Fluttering Shearwater (a type of pelagic seabird) at the swamp and I haven’t. But then again I was there when a Spotted Redshank turned up and he wasn’t. And so it goes. We will keep on gripping each other off like this until we are in our dotage. And before you get all hot and bothered, I’d just like to point out that, in twitching parlance, ‘gripping someone off’ simply means stirring someone, giving them a bit of grief when they’ve dipped out on a bird that you’ve seen. I suspect that some twitchers are motivated as much by the desire to avoid being gripped off as they are by the desire to actually see the bird in question. I tend to only actively grip off friends (get your mind out of the gutter) who can take a bit of ribbing (oh, grow up) because I know how awful it can be to be thoroughly gripped off. (Right, that’s it, back to the main story. You are so juvenile.)
Groober shared not just a passion for birds (settle), but also a love of Seaford. In 1994, when I first started out doing monthly bird surveys of Seaford for Melbourne Water (the managing body for the swamp), I approached the local Friends of the Wetlands group to see if anyone wanted to assist. I got one taker, Helen, a woman approaching middle age who wanted to know more about the birds of the swamp. The trouble was, even on a dull day when there were no birds around, it took a minimum of two and a half hours to cover the entirety of the swamp. On a good day it could take up to six. And it was not an easy stroll. To get to where the birds were often required a great deal of bashing through choking reeds, getting spiked by needle-sharp rushes and sloshing your way through stinking sludge. The day Helen came out with me it was about 35 degrees, we hardly saw anything of interest and still the survey took over four hours. Helen never volunteered again.
Groober has been the only person idiotic enough to be roped into joining me at Seaford more than once. Our friendship was in fact cemented whilst birding Seaford together back in its halcyon days in the early eighties when, during a major drought, the water levels were kept artificially high. The resulting numbers of birds were spectacular, but it almost spelled the demise of Seaford as a viable habitat. The water filling the swamp originated from the Frankston Sewage Farm. It wasn’t the actual raw sewage itself, but there were still enough nutrients in the water to lead to an absolute explosion of Phragmites reeds, which proceeded to choke the life out of the formerly open water. Coupled with this, the drain that delivered this nutrient bonanza was connected to Eel Race Drain, which was connected to Patterson Lakes, which were connected to Patterson River, which was connected to Port Phillip Bay. End result: a massive salt injection turning the freshwater swamp into a dead brackish write-off, and the huge numbers of birds moved off elsewhere.
But with better management, conditions had begun to improve and that day we managed to see a very respectable 68 species, nineteen of which were new for the year, including good numbers of wading birds such as Red-necked Avocet, Sharp-tailed Sandpiper, and only the second record of Caspian Tern for the swamp. We’d timed our visit to perfection. The open water had started to recede, exposing muddy edges loaded with invertebrate goodies that waders like the Sharpie love to feast upon. Pretty soon the swamp would have dried out too much and the birds would go. In most years this peak time only seemed to occur during a two-week window so I was lucky it had lasted into the New Year as it got me 19 species for my year list. This enshrined Seaford Swamp a rightful place in the pantheon of Big Twitch hot spots, for this was a game of diminishing returns and already, after only four days, the opportunity to add nineteen birds to the list at the one time, in the one place, was drastically reduced.
I should have been able to add twenty more birds at Seaford had I not the previous day driven down to Port Fairy (about three hours southwest of Melbourne) on a film shoot of sorts where I’d ticked off several species I had been expecting to see at Seaford. I say ‘of sorts’ because I was making a short teaser film designed to entice investors into funding a fully fledged documentary of the Big Twitch. I had this crazy notion that I might be able to interest somebody in paying me to film myself chasing the record. The trouble with making a film about birdwatching is that birds make very uncooperative subjects. They tend to fly away. Unless you are a David Attenborough backed by the resources of the BBC who can afford to send someone to sit in a hide for a year waiting for that perfect shot of frogmouths mating, most films about birdwatching would involve some dude driving to a spot in a car, getting out, looking at a distant dot, ticking it off, getting back in the car and driving off. A totally riveting subject.
Hardly surprising, then, that no-one wanted to invest in my documentary idea. Undaunted I went out and bought a ten thousand dollar broadcast quality digital video camera in the vain hope that I might be able to film enough interesting footage to cobble together something watchable. For the rest of the year I was to lug my camera equipment arou
nd the country, filming where I could. The end result was forty hours of largely unusable footage of me shakily holding the camera, saying, ‘Here I am looking for the Rufous Scrub-bird’ (or Hooded Parrot or Chestnut-breasted Whiteface) and then not being able to actually show the viewer the bird even if I saw it. I think as much as anything I was looking for something to justify my year. Saying I was taking a year off to make a documentary seemed easier than saying I was spending a year birdwatching. In this society being a wanker is socially unacceptable. Filming yourself while being a wanker, however, seems perfectly legitimate.
If I was to make a film, Werribee Sewage Farm would feature prominently. If Seaford is my personal birdwatching mecca, then Werribee (or Western Treatment Plant, to give it its sanitised title) would surely hold that revered status for a majority of Melbourne’s birders. My first visit to Werribee took my breath away – no pun intended – for although ‘the Farm’ is so vast that most foul odours dissipate easily, there is always a slight whiff at Werribee, which I actually find most pleasant as I associate the smell with the excitement of seeing rare birds. And I’m not the only one. Probably one of the prime reasons birdwatchers are viewed as worryingly eccentric is that they get so excited about sewage farms, but the reason most people turn up their noses at the thought of sewage farms is the exact reason why wildlife finds them so attractive. All that nutrient concentrated in the one area provides a bonanza rarely found in nature. Birds love it. They come to feed on the little critters that come to feed on what we flush down the toilet.
Stretching for over twenty kilometres along the coast southwest of Melbourne, Werribee is on the opposite side of the bay to Seaford. It is similarly flat but, unlike the Carrum-Carrum, the wetland area has actually been expanded since the coming of white settlement. Alongside its mudflats, saltmarsh and freshwater wetlands have been added vast settling and filtration ponds. The largest of these is Lake Borrie. Apart from being home to thousands of wildfowl, Borrie has, in Melbourne at least, come to be known as a euphemism for pooh. Unfortunate for the family of EF Borrie, a civil servant whose vision for town planning in the fifties enabled Melbourne to become the livable city it is today, but I must admit the schoolboy in me does occasionally titter when I hear phrases such as ‘I’m just going down to Borrie to see what turns up.’
Make no mistake, a trip to Werribee is one of the most spectacular wildlife experiences this country has to offer. Almost three hundred species of bird have been recorded on the Farm itself, but even more impressive is their sheer abundance. Especially during a drought year, tens of thousands of waterfowl are drawn to the permanent waters of the Farm. As they wheel about the lagoons in fluid yet cohesive flocks one is reminded of the accounts of early explorers who wrote of birds in such numbers that they darkened the skies. With the granite pyramids of the You Yang hills framing the background, the view from the shore of Lake Borrie on a still day is simply awesome.
I was here specifically that day chasing up a report of Red-chested Button-quail. These enigmatic little critters are one of those birds that I would have to see if I was to have any chance of getting anywhere near seven hundred for the year. It was a bird I knew very little about, not only never having seen it before but also not knowing any reliable sites for it. Even up north where they are more common they are particularly elusive. To be honest I was buggered if I knew where to find one. It was one of the few species I had no real plan for; to have them virtually on my doorstep was a bonus indeed.
I was joined again by Groober, who had seen Red-chesteds before, but never in Victoria. Both he and I are avid state listers. In fact I was more proud of having seen four hundred species in Victoria than I was of having reached the six hundred mark for the whole of Australia. Though not an easy task by any means, any decent birder should be able to reach six hundred Australian birds, simply by going on enough trips to enough different areas. To see four hundred birds in Victoria means that you not only have to go to all corners of the state but that you have to keep at it for a decent slab of time in order to see all the vagrant species that turn up over time. It took me twenty years, but my Vic list now stood at 403. Groober was about twenty ahead of that and if he wanted to catch up to Mike Carter, the Vic list champ who was about twenty ahead of him, he needed to get every new bird he could. And I’m sure if truth be told he probably couldn’t bear it if I got one up on him.
Not that we had any luck. As is often the case, the birds were no longer there when we were. We had no reason to doubt the sighting but human nature being what it was, and twitchers’ natures being at the extreme end of that spectrum, doubts crept in. I had been burnt before with Red-chested Button-quail. I failed to follow up a previous report of this species in Victoria because the location seemed so incongruous. When somebody claimed to have seen several in the woodlands of Gunbower Island along the Murray River, I thought that the observer must finally have lost the plot – surely in that habitat they would have been Painted Button-quail. I didn’t bother chasing it up. Then more and more people kept seeing them and by the time I headed up there I’d missed the boat. Going on a wild-goose chase for a nonexistent bird is an annoying waste of time, but it is nothing compared to the earth shattering despair felt when you don’t chase something up and it turns out to be bona fide.
As consolation there was the rest of the Farm. A quick two-hour scoot around the major birding areas yielded over seventy species for the day, including eighteen for the year list. Highlights were the massive numbers of waterfowl, refugees from the crippling drought inland: Pink-eared Ducks, Australasian Shovelers, Hardheads, and nineteen of Australia’s rarest waterfowl, the Freckled Duck, a curious bird with a pointy head and plain brown-grey body that reminded me of the chocolate sprinkles on the top of a cappuccino. Many of the birds I added that day were more typical of inland areas. Normally, Black-tailed Native-hen, Red-kneed Dotterel and Wood Sandpiper would all be hanging around the billabongs of the outback. Yet there they were on the southern coast – a reminder that in a drought year birds’ normal patterns are disrupted and many of my plans may have to be altered to accommodate this fact.
By the end of the day I had my first major dip of the year but my total now stood at 110 species – over one-seventh of the way to the magical 700 mark. Sure, I could be further along, but it was still a start worth celebrating, so at night I headed out with a non-birding friend for a few drinks. The bartender didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm, and nor did the girls at the bar. For some reason, ‘I had a Freckled Duck today’ never seems to work as a pick-up line.
CHAPTER 6
13 January, Chiltern, Victoria:
160 Species
Many people proclaim the Hume Highway to be one of the most boring stretches of road in the country. I couldn’t agree less. Every time I begin the journey northwards on this main link from Melbourne to Sydney I feel like I am driving into history, driving into the heart of the country. Essentially following the route of the explorers Hume and Hovell, it hugs the boundary between the hills of the Great Divide and the endless plains of the inland. To me the Hume is a four-lane song-line with a burger stop every couple of hours, that sings of geological history, ice ages, Aborigines, explorers, bushrangers, politicians, disasters, courage and, especially, birds. Man, am I going to be an annoying dad, pointing out to my long-suffering kids so much boring crap that they will seriously consider throwing themselves out of the car before we’ve even reached Kalkallo.
My excitement was compounded by the fact that on 11 January with my list on 129, I headed off on my first major foray outside Melbourne. It was one of those petulantly hot days where the fierce north wind kicked up the dust in a final act of defiance before it finally met up with the cool change sweeping in from the south. Everything was bothered and unsettled. Everyone you met was shitty because they hadn’t had a good night’s sleep due to the heat. I loved days like this. I never feel more invigorated than during episodes of extreme weather, even my very discomfort was a visceral r
eminder that I was alive. And there were few better destinations for a birder to be alive in than the little town of Chiltern. Surrounded by one of the finest examples of Box-Ironbark forest in the country, Chiltern is home to a suite of sensational birds. Over the next few days I added such corkers as Rainbow Bee-eater, Diamond Firetail, Black-chinned Honeyeater, Crested Shrike-tit and Speckled Warbler. I also got onto one of Chiltern’s specialties, the Turquoise Parrot, a magnificent small, grass-green parrot, with blue face and wings, the male sporting a rich velvet-red shoulder patch. Once thought extinct, the Turquoise Parrot has bounced back and while nowhere near common, was a regular sight in the Box-Ironbark at Chiltern.
Box-Ironbark is a type of dry woodland. It occurs in a transition zone between the wetter forests of the Great Dividing Range and the scrubs and grassland of the vast inland plains. Some people may find the Box-Ironbark pretty ho-hum. There are no towering forest giants reaching to the skies, no luxuriant ferny glades shading clear, burbling streams. The understorey is so open that in order to have some privacy when answering the call of nature you have to walk for ages to ensure that when you squat down your camping companions don’t cop an eyeful. But I love the Box-Ironbark. It has a stately, dignified, almost melancholic beauty all its own. Dominated by flaky-barked Box trees and Ironbarks with their dark, deeply fissured trunks this is a uniquely Australian landscape. It is the country of the gold rush. It is the country of the bushranger. It is country that has all but gone.
In 1996 the then Victorian State Government declared the former Chiltern State Park a national park. Its official title was to be The Box-Ironbark National Park, a name intended to placate the small but growing surge of voices demanding this habitat be saved. ‘Protect the Box-Ironbark? Of course we have. Look at that dot on the map. “The Box-Ironbark National Park”. There, problem solved – it’s protected. Now, who wants tickets to the Grand Prix?’ The trouble is, especially in nature, things are rarely that simple. The Box-Ironbark once covered millions of hectares; the reserve at Chiltern comprises around four thousand. It is like proclaiming you have protected the works of Leonardo Da Vinci when all you have is one of the fingernails off the Mona Lisa. But as far as the government was concerned, the matter had been resolved and no amount of whingeing from those ratbag Greenies could change that. The Premier Jeff Kennett strode supreme on the political stage in Victoria, his authority unassailable. The decision had been made, the issue of the Box-Ironbark was settled, no further correspondence would be entered into. Jeff backed down for nobody. But then he hadn’t met Eileen Collins.