by Sean Dooley
Now approaching seventy, and a woman of slight frame, I would, however, not wish to be the subject of Eileen’s disapproval. The Premier was on ABC radio, talking about the casino or the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in town or the new Lloyd Webber to be performed in the casino…on ice, whatever the topic, he certainly was not talking about the environment. He was more than happy to take a call from Eileen of Chiltern, a town in his coalition’s heartland. She challenged him about the naming of the new national park. He was dismissive. She fired up. For possibly the first time in the history of his government, Jeff backed down and by the end of the week the signs for the new Chiltern Box-Ironbark National Park were going up. (Perhaps Eileen’s encounter with Jeff Kennett was the first chink in his previously impervious armour, for within three years of their tete-a-tete the electorate gave his government the boot.)
I met up with Eileen out at the remnants of the Magenta Gold Mine in the middle of her park. It is not only that she had such a pivotal hand in its naming that I call it her park, but since Eileen moved to Chiltern with her fellow schoolteacher husband Roy in the late sixties, she has probably spent almost every day out in the forest in some capacity. No one knows the forest better than Eileen. I got the impression that upon arriving at Chiltern, each bird’s first port of call was to drop in at Eileen’s place to report for duty, as she seemed to know the whereabouts of every bird in the forest. I dreamt that one day I would be able to tell her of a bird at Chiltern that she didn’t already know about. We checked out the area in the hope that the exceedingly rare Regent Honeyeater might have turned up. Chiltern is the last stronghold in Victoria for this enigmatic species and by stronghold I mean in a good year as many as ten birds can be found in the forest, usually about nine more than anywhere else in the state. But not that day. It was still too early in the year for the trees those nectar lovers feed on to have started to put out any blossom and Eileen pointed out that with things so dry, it was likely to be a very poor year for flowering which translated to a diabolical year for the Regent Honeyeater. But I knew that if any turned up they would not escape Eileen’s vigilant gaze and I should be able to tick this rarity off on my list without too much trouble.
I’m not sure that Eileen’s self-appointed policeman’s role has necessarily made her all that popular with Chiltern people over the years – she doesn’t seem to mind who she offends if she thinks they have been out of line when it comes to her forest. This is despite the fact that her standing up for the town in her encounter with the Premier has led to a small economic boom for Chiltern. The declaration of the national park has put it on the Australian eco-tourism map becoming for many birders a must-visit destination on an Australian birdwatching tour. It is a long, slow process but over the years I have felt the antipathy amongst locals towards interlopers with environmental sympathies softening. I hate wearing my binoculars in public. It singles you out as an unmitigated dork. Even Keith Richards would not look cool with a pair of bins around his neck. And to wear them in a country town invites hostility as people think you are either a rabid Greenie or a pervert. Or both. But I kept forcing myself to wear them at Chiltern to visibly demonstrate to the locals that I was here for what the forest has to offer. After years of incredulous looks and sneers I was for the first time recently greeted with a cheerful, ‘Going birdwatching are you? The forest is great at the moment.’
After bidding Eileen farewell I headed back to my block. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was passionate about Chiltern. So passionate I even invested here. Not necessarily in a financial sense as the block I bought is primarily for conservation purposes but if the property boom ever reaches Chiltern I may, unintentionally be sitting on quite a good investment. I bought the land from a conservation organisation called Trust for Nature who run what they call a Revolving Fund where the money they make from selling the property to me goes to buy the next block of important bush that comes up for private sale. I am yet to build and may never get round to it, but thanks to council rates I have one of the most expensive camping grounds in the country at my disposal. People always told me that owning property was a big turn-on for many women – a sign that a bloke has got it going on financially – but they don’t seem so keen when I ask them if they want to come back to my place and we have to drive three hours and pitch a tent.
None of the locals I met could understand why I hadn’t immediately built on the land, the mentality being that if you weren’t putting your land to any discernible economic use then it was wasted land. Forget about aesthetics, forget about environmental values, unless you were running something on it, ploughing something into it or extracting something from it, then it was just a waste of space. When I was in the process of purchasing my land the block next door was also for sale. I rang the local real estate agent who was handling that block. Bear in mind that it was a couple of hectares smaller, and had no tree cover on it whatsoever. As one local commented to me about the cleared land, ‘It’s barely big enough to keep a horse starved. Wouldn’t kill the horse, but it would keep it starved.’ So using it as a hobby farm was out of the question.
Both blocks were being offered as ‘lifestyle’ properties. So assuming that you were buying it for a nice place in the country, which block seemed to offer the better lifestyle? For someone from the city I could guarantee it would be the block with shady trees, lots of wildflowers, birds calling throughout and even your own mob of kangaroos wandering about, not the bare paddocks on that ridge exposed to the unrelenting sun. But the agent didn’t seem to see it that way. Pretending I was an interested buyer in the lot next door I found out that it was actually going for $20,000 more than mine despite its smaller size and grimmer outlook. I casually asked if there were any other bush properties available in Chiltern and he said he didn’t know of any. Then he remembered one.
‘Actually, right next door. Some nature mob has got it up for sale.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. But it’s got all these bloody trees on it. You’d have to be a fair dinkum Greenie, into birdies and trees and that crap to want to buy a joint like that,’ he snorted contemptuously down the line.
‘Yeah, I guess you would mate, I guess you would.’
I bought the property that afternoon.
Just up the road from me, on the edge of the forest, I visited Chiltern’s last viable population of Grey-crowned Babblers. I often get asked what my favourite bird is. I usually say the next new one I am about to see. But if pressed I always plump for the Grey-crowned Babbler. They are fascinating birds, a bit bigger than a blackbird, full of beans, always bouncing around, thick tails half-cocked. They live in family groups of up to a dozen, and are always in constant contact with their weird array of yabbering chatter. I guess in a way they are the most human of birds. Not the grim humans who struggle clench-jawed into work each day, more like a boisterous bunch of mini-humans let loose in a child’s playground – free, rambunctious, just happy to be alive and in the moment. I have a particular soft spot for them as a colony inhabited my high school (one of the last colonies in Southern Victoria) and I would try and follow them around the school grounds at lunchtime – no easy task as they are pretty active and I had to disguise my interest somewhat so that I didn’t give the other kids fuel for another barrage of ‘poofter’ taunts.
That colony has now gone. Not just moved up the road gone but disappeared off the face of the Earth gone. Even though they are still quite common in woodland across northern Australia, down south they are rapidly going the way of the birds from my schoolyard. A bird of open woodlands, they seemed to survive the initial impact of settlement reasonably well but the colonies became isolated in often marginal habitat. They persisted at places like Chiltern for many decades and did quite well. Eileen remembers up to thirty colonies in the district just after she first arrived in the early Seventies. Now there are only a couple left and they are reaching critically low numbers where the colony cannot sustain itself and though the individual adults may live o
n for years, they lose the capacity to successfully rear young and the population is doomed to extinction. This is a process called extinction debt, where the birds are essentially a kind of zombie, still existing in this world, but effectively the walking (or flying) dead. One event such as a fire or a predator like a fox can wipe out even just one or two of the last survivors and with no recruitment possible from anywhere else, they cannot successfully breed and are lost forever.
Chiltern has had its fair share of these flying dead. Bush Stone-curlew, Hooded Robin, Gilbert’s Whistler, Southern Whiteface; they are all species that are on their way out at Chiltern, all species that I would have to travel further afield to see. For so many years we have had the mentality that no matter what we do to the country there will be always somewhere else for things to go. We have reached that time in our history where the eternal frontier is at an end and for many creatures there is nowhere left, no refuge to which to retreat and hold the fort.
I might have known this in the abstract previously but in my travels over the year time and again I saw evidence of these processes. Birdwatchers for the most part are a conservative, placid bunch. You rarely see gangs of drunken birders tearing up a resort town on one of their ‘Birdies Week’ rampages. But they are one of the few groups of people who regularly get out into the bush and are confronted with the reality of what is happening. Even twitchers who are supposedly meant to care more about the numbers game than the birds themselves make the connection that without habitat there are no birds to see. It is enough to turn the most docile bird-watcher radical, and birdwatchers were amongst the many who supported the campaign by green groups to properly protect the remnants of the Box-Ironbark.
Leading the campaign were two friends of mine, Chiltern residents, Susie Duncan and Barry Traill. I have known BJ (as Barry is universally known) since the eighties when he was a self-proclaimed rabid anti-twitcher so it was ironic that he and Susie took me out to the Barambogie Ranges that overlook Chiltern to try and find a couple of species, Peregrine Falcon and Barking Owl, for my list. Though not purely Box-Ironbark the Barambogies share many of the same species that are found in Chiltern and are actually the best place in Victoria for the Barking Owl. Part of their campaign was to have the Barambogies incorporated into the national park. Lining up against them was a loose coalition of interests groups who claimed that Ironbarks needed to be harvested like wheat. They claimed that after around eighty years (the timber harvesting cycle) the trees of the Box-Ironbark reached senescence and began to die. The idea that an Ironbark tree took hundred of years to mature was entirely a Greenie fiction and no such colossal trees ever existed, they argued.
In one sense they are correct. No such trees exist in the forest because they were all taken out long ago and any replacements were logged before they could reach their full potential size. But BJ and Susie took me to a roadside just outside the forest that the timber cutters were never able to access. Standing there was a gargantuan Ironbark tree, several times larger and broader than the regenerating trees a hundred metres away in the forest. BJ explained that this tree was estimated to be at least three hundred years old. I’m not sure how the existence of this tree was ever explained. All I know is that studies of the flowering capacity of these giants show that even when they are only twice as big they produce up to five times the nectar of their smaller cousins when they flower. If there were a few more of these trees there would be a few more Regent Honeyeaters.
We failed to find either the owls or the Peregrines and typical of the perversity of human nature, I left Chiltern after four days not thinking about the thirty-five birds I had added to the list, but the ones I had dipped out on. There would be plenty of other opportunities to see all of these species. I was beginning to worry though that if I was setting this trend of missing out on stuff this early, how would I go later in the year when I had little time for a second crack at anything? Only two weeks in and already I was doubting whether I could pull this thing off. If I kept dipping at this rate over the next few weeks I would have to seriously contemplate abandoning the whole thing.
CHAPTER 7
19 January, Bunyip State Park, Victoria:
175 species
I first heard that maniacal cackle back on a hot summer’s night in December 1983. A series of whoops that get quicker and higher pitched as they go along, this laugh could easily have made it onto Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon. But it didn’t belong to some stoned roadie; it was the property of a mysterious night bird, the White-throated Nightjar. Many times since I’ve heard that cackle, but I had yet to see the actual bird from which it issues. I’ve seen them in silhouette, I’ve even had a pair lined up in the car headlights, but at the crucial moment I turned to make sure my companion, a novice birdwatcher, had also seen them. He had and was getting crippling views of them at that very moment. First rule of twitching – like the oxygen mask dropping from the ceiling, make sure you see to your own needs first. By the time I turned back to raise my binoculars, the White-throated Nightjars had flown. I heard them calling in the first few hours of the Big Twitch, and one had flown past me in the dark at Cyanide Dam in Chiltern, before I had a chance to get my spotlight onto it. This is what is known in the caper as a bogey bird.
But not for much longer. All that was going to change for 17 January was the day I would finally get this bogey off my back. I was heading back out to Bunyip for another crack and joining me was Stuart Cooney and my old partner in crime, Groober. Groobs was with me back in 1983 at the beginning of my nightjar-mare, but Stu was a relative newcomer to the birdwatching scene. Though around my age, he had only started birding a year or two earlier and had the sort of infectious enthusiasm that I remember when I was a teenager and the training lenses had just come off my bins. Sometimes his enthusiasm got the better of him and he would muddle up the names of the birds he was looking at. For instance he might see a White-eared Honeyeater, a not uncommon bird in the heathy areas at Bunyip, but in his excitement to call it, something in his brain scrambled and came out as: ‘White-cheeked Honeyeater!’ White-cheeked Honeyeater is an absolute stonking crippler in Victoria, but Stu was not actually trying to string a rarity, he’d just got such a flood of new information swirling around his brain that sometimes it got jumbled up. I actually found this enviable as it brought back the excitement of those times when I would sit up all night dreaming of seeing the birds I was reading about, when the magic of something new was potentially there every time I raised my binoculars.
Stu hadn’t seen a nightjar, nor had he seen any of the owls we might see there. Groobs, well he was just along for the ride, constantly reminding me all night that his year list was already bigger than mine. We arrived in the late afternoon and the forest was uncharacteristically slow. Even on Twitchathons when Murphy’s law dictates that things will be quiet, we usually saw more birds than this. We did manage to see a few wet forest birds, including Scarlet and Rose Robins, Rufous Fantail, Crescent Honeyeater and, right on dusk, using the spotlight for confirmation, a male Australian King-Parrot. But it was dark that we had been waiting for. Tonight was the night…
Three hours later we admitted defeat and headed home. Whereas the day had been too hot for bush birds, with the coming of night the temperature in the mountain air had plummeted and with it our chances of seeing the nightjars, which many believe go into torpor if the night is too cold. As the large insects such as moths that they feed on are not very active on cold nights, it was more likely that they probably just couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed.
The next day I heard some very interesting reports of waders at the top end of Westernport Bay, about an hour and a half south of Melbourne. They sounded too good to be true: Broad-billed Sandpiper, up to seventeen Terek Sandpipers and, most tantalisingly of all, a Little Stint. As small as a sparrow, the Little Stint is almost identical to the more numerous Red-necked Stint. To identify it correctly we would have to have exceptionally close views and, even then, without a photo
some would be suspicious. Make no mistake, stint identification raises passions. The debate over the identity of the first Little Stints seen in Australia was a catalyst for one of the darkest and, to my mind, most hilarious episodes in Australian birdwatching history – ‘Stint Wars!’
I arrived on the scene just a couple of years too late to witness it myself and most of the participants seem very reluctant to talk about it now but suffice to say the twitching community was soon divided into two camps: those who believed that these birds were Little Stints, a new record for Australia, and those who thought they weren’t. As with any war there were other issues and subtexts at play, including generational and cultural change and, of course, a certain amount of ego, pride and obstinacy on both sides. It even came to blows. Apparently one day out at Werribee Sewage Farm the two opposing camps faced off and while punches may not have been thrown, physical contact was made. I can see it now, the two sides emerging from the mists that rise off the settling ponds, warriors clad in anoraks and beanies, their weapons – telescopes mounted on tripods. Fiery words are exchanged about tertials and attenuated rear ends. Someone snaps and the pushing and shoving begins. Oh the humanity.