The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  Such identification differences fall into the realm of ‘jizz’. Jizz is the indefinable quality of a particular species, the ‘vibe’ it gives off. Though dismissed by many as a kind of birding alchemy, there is some physical basis to the idea of jizz. Because every species is built differently, the way a bird holds itself physically can be just as important for identification purposes as the way its plumage looks. Feathers are the most variable part of a bird, so to rely purely on them can occasionally be misleading. A case in point is the Short-tailed and Sooty Shearwaters, two species that look so superficially similar that laymen simply call them all ‘muttonbirds’ (supposedly they taste like mutton but to me they taste like chicken injected with a super-concentrated solution of cod liver oil – definitely one of the most revolting things ever to have passed my lips).

  Most birders will look for the silvery underwing panels on the Sooty to clinch an ID but in bright sun the underwing of the Short-tailed can look just as pale. And while the Short-tailed does indeed have a shorter tail than the Sooty, which means its feet stick out slightly further from under the tail, we are only talking a centimetre or two at most and there is always the chance a Sooty’s tail might be in moult or the ends of the tail feathers have been worn off, giving it a longer legged appearance. The same goes for their bills – the Sooty’s is longer than a Short-tailed’s by a whole 1.5 centimetres! If you can discern that difference at fifty metres as you lurch around on a rollicking boat you are doing very well indeed.

  The wingspan on a Sooty, however, is about ten centimetres longer than on a Short-tailed. Again, this measurement can be difficult to detect at sea, but the longer wings do give the Sooty a different jizz as it flies. That’s an extra ten centimetres (around ten per cent) of wing surface with which to fly so the Sooty doesn’t have to work quite as hard to travel at the same speed as a Short-tailed. This means the Short-tailed Shearwater tends to flap its wings more often, whereas the Sooty has a more languid jizz in flight, something that you can pick up with practice almost every time. But jizz is a rather nebulous and subjective concept and gives rise to many a dispute. Everyone knows what you mean when you say a bird is black or white or grey, but how exactly do you define ‘lazy’ or ‘loafing’ or ‘indolent’ when referring to the flight of a bird? The concept of jizz relies on an innate sense of how a bird is rather than truly testable criteria, so it can lead to an awful lot of arguments.

  And as seabirders are about as fanatical a bunch of birders as you are likely to get, (their motto is ‘Sea Birders are Real Birders!’) the arguments come thick and fast. Birding at sea is tough work, you’re bouncing around and the birds are wheeling past at speed, disappearing behind waves. Just to get your bins to a bird is a feat in itself. The absolute guns pride themselves on their ability not only to do this but be able to distinguish, in a split second, that some speck on the horizon is not just a Jaeger but a sub-adult, intermediate phase Arctic Jaeger. I’ve seen them do it time after time. They are almost never wrong. Almost. With such enormous powers comes the risk of hubris – a belief in one’s own infallibility and distrust of anybody else’s powers. Because glimpses are often only fleeting and the birds rarely hang around to settle disputes, there is a tendency to not back down once a call has been made. The resulting debates over the correct identity of an immature albatross or a distant storm-petrel make the Middle-East peace talks look like a love-in.

  Luckily this day there were no contentious calls. There were also none of the target species I was hoping for – Tasman Sea and South West Pacific specialties such as Buller’s Shearwater, White-necked and Gould’s Petrels. We did see some more tropical species such as Brown Booby and Tahiti Petrel, the latter a new bird for me and one that I identified before anyone else. Usually I have to have a new seabird pointed out to me so I was quite chuffed to get this one myself. Both the booby and the Tahiti are birds I expected to see on the following month’s Brisbane pelagic, so the excitement of adding them to the list was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that my opportunities for the Tasman birds were already running out.

  Still, by the time we pulled into dock around five o’clock I was somewhat triumphant. I’d added fourteen species out at sea and, most importantly, I hadn’t spewed! I just had to make sure I kept that record going on the fifteen or more pelagics I’d have to endure in order to get my quota of seabirds. One thing was for certain: Dramamine wouldn’t be going out of business that year.

  CHAPTER 9

  3 February, Norfolk Island Botanic Gardens:

  219 species

  The plan was very simple: roll through Australia’s first three convict settlements in order to rack up a swag of new species for the list. Straight after the Wollongong pelagic I was to head to Sydney (established January 1788) to catch a plane on Sunday 27 January to Norfolk Island (founded March 1788) then fly down to Hobart (convict settlement number three, 1803) for another pelagic. The first tourists to do this trip were clad in leg irons, crammed below decks in rotting hulks, suffering scurvy, malnutrition and body lice, and while modern airlines are trying their utmost to emulate such conditions, they were still going to deliver me to my destinations quickly and efficiently. I couldn’t go wrong. Or could I?

  By Wednesday 30 January I was still stuck in the long-term carpark at Sydney Airport, where my car had been parked since Sunday, when I should have been sipping cocktails from my Norfolk Island balcony as angelic White Terns fluttered past. The hitch? For the previous four days no-one had been able to get in or out of Norfolk Island. Anchored in the South Pacific more than a thousand kilometres from the mainland, Norfolk was fogged in and essentially the planes couldn’t find it. I was left to cool my heels in Sydney, Australia’s biggest and most exciting city. So naturally I turned my back on it and tried to make use of my time to pick a few extra species. This involved a quick dash down to Melbourne when I heard of a possible first for Australia, a Least Sandpiper being found. It turned out to not be a Least Sandpiper but its near relative, the Long-toed Stint, still a difficult species and no certainty for me to pick up that year, so I still decided to go for it. Of course I didn’t see it and then found myself back in Sydney cooling my heels in the airport carpark with nothing to show for it other than a loss of 20,000 frequent flyer points.

  Finally word came through that the fog had lifted and just before midnight the plane touched down on Norfolk Island. What was supposed to have been a leisurely week’s birding now had to be three days of frenetic activity as I charged around making sure I saw everything I needed in time. Norfolk was the first place for the year where there were no second chances. There are birds there that live nowhere else in the world and if I missed them, I’d missed them for the entire year. For the first time the chill wind of a major dip was upon me, but as I headed out on my first morning, I was filled with an optimism fuelled by the excitement of birding in a new area.

  Norfolk Island is simply beautiful. With its mix of lush green fields, stately Norfolk Island Pines, steep valleys and impenetrable bush set against the backdrop of a vivid blue ocean, Norfolk is far more reminiscent of New Zealand than anywhere in Australia. In fact some Kiwis claim it should be part of New Zealand, not least the members of the twitching community who include Norfolk for the purposes of their New Zealand bird lists. They say it’s because Norfolk’s birds have more of an affinity with New Zealand’s avifauna but I suspect the real reason is that it gives them a couple of extra Australian species for their lists that they would otherwise not have.

  Talk to many locals and you’ll find they’re adamant that the island belongs to no-one but the Norfolk Islanders. A curious mix of Aussies, Kiwis and Pitcairners – the descendants of the Bounty mutineers who moved here from Pitcairn Island in 1856 – Norfolkers possess a fiercely independent streak. The island has a slightly odd ambience to it, because although everyone is very friendly and laidback, there is the palpable ‘us and them’ sense found in all insular communities. Tourism is now the mainstay of the island but you
get the sense that there is a lot more going on beneath the smiling welcome that greets the average tourist. My twitching quest was to bring me directly up against this more complex side of island interpersonal politics.

  Overall, Norfolk is like a type of South Pacific Lite. It has all the beauty of an idyllic tropical island without any of the nasty, bitey stuff. The weather’s not too humid, there is no malaria, and as most of the accommodation sits atop the main plateau one hundred metres above sea level, tsunamis shouldn’t be much of a nuisance. There is a limit placed on how many tourists are allowed to visit at any one time, so there is little congestion.

  Birds far outnumber the island’s human inhabitants, including hundreds of White Terns flying about the island, while stunning Red-tailed Tropicbirds hang motionless on the breeze above the clifftops, red tail streamers protruding from their snowy bodies as though they have remote control antennas attached to them. The White Terns are remarkable not just for their beauty – they are elegant, long-winged birds that, apart from their black bill, feet and eyes, are so translucently white that with the sun behind them you can see the outline of the main bones of their wings – but because they have seemingly the most ridiculous nesting habits of any bird. Each year they lay a single egg on a horizontal branch of a tree usually more than ten metres above the ground. They make no attempt at a nest, merely depositing the egg on a notch in the bark that will supposedly stop it rolling off. It must be a successful strategy as there are plenty of terns on Norfolk, but I found one fluffy grey chick sitting on the ground, apparently having been blown out of its alleged nest. In the past this may not have been such a problem as there were no mammalian predators to knock off fallen chicks. I intervened in the cycle of nature and placed the bird in the care of a local wildlife handler, because I doubt the poor ball of fluff would have lasted the night amongst all the newly arrived cats and rats.

  The mammals that settlers brought with them, particularly the rats that made it to the island when the first airstrip was built in the forties to help with the Pacific war effort, have wreaked a dreadful toll on Norfolk’s wildlife. It may seem like a natural paradise today teeming as it is with fantastic seabirds such as Black-winged Petrel, Black Noddy and Masked Booby, but after a while you notice that most of them nest only on offshore stacks and islets where the rats can’t reach them. The remaining forested areas still have a number of birds including Norfolk endemics such as the Norfolk Island Gerygone and Slender-billed White-eye, but it has also lost a clutch of unique species.

  One such unfortunate bird is White-chested White-eye of which there has not been a confirmed sighting for over ten years. They keep being reported but every official search for the species since the 1980s has failed to detect any birds. The Norfolk community is now split into two camps: those who consider it extinct and those who believe it is still hanging on in some inaccessible slice of the island. On one side are the locals (though not all of them) who feel yet again their unique on-the-ground knowledge is being dismissed by arrogant, out-of-touch authorities, a classic case of (possibly justified) small town paranoia. Opposing them are some locals and some (though not all) off-island conservationists who believe that most recent reported sightings are misidentifications of the similar Silvereye. The self-introduced Silvereye, which is now the most common forest bird on the island, is a remarkably variable species so you’d have to be mighty careful to make sure what you thought was a White-chested wasn’t in fact an odd looking Silvereye.

  But merely calling into question somebody’s claim can have dramatic reverberations on Norfolk Island. Resident bird enthusiasts constitute a doubly insular community – a narrowly focused interest group within a small local community – so that any difference of opinion is immediately known and can seriously affect the relationships between members of both groups. Luckily I didn’t have to get involved in this particular debate, as despite scrutinising every bloody Silvereye I came across I saw nothing that remotely resembled a White-chested White-eye. My taste of the murky, internecine rivalries of Norfolk’s natural history community would be served to me in my quest for two other species.

  There are no full blood Norfolk Island Boobooks left. Rats may have had an impact on their population but the largest toll was most likely caused by land clearing and the loss of nesting hollows once all the largest trees were removed. By 1986 there was only one Norfolk Island Boobook left, a female. Essentially it was too late. In an attempt to save at least some of the genes, two male New Zealand Boobooks (the closest genetic relative to the Norfolk birds) were shipped in and the female mated with one. Though she died sometime around 1996, there are now thirty or so hybrid Boobooks still haunting the night with their calls.

  Even though the Norfolk Island Boobook wouldn’t count for my official Big Twitch list as it is currently considered by authorities to be a subspecies of the more widespread Southern Boobook, I was keen to see one. I dropped in to the national parks office to ask for advice on where I should look for the owls. Unfortunately most of the staff were on annual leave, including the person in charge of the boobook recovery program. The remaining staff members were strangely reluctant to give out any advice on where to look for the owls. I can understand them being reluctant to pass on information about where this critically endangered bird was nesting but they wouldn’t even advise on a good place to just listen for them without getting the okay from the principal researcher.

  The staff softened slightly when I returned the next day asking to borrow a spotlight to look for them myself. They didn’t divulge any further information, but kindly provided me with a powerful torch for which I had to buy a battery at the island’s one supermarket. I spent the next two nights clambering and sweating in the dark along the island’s forest tracks, trying to save the juice in the torch battery for when I really needed it. Walking underneath the forest canopy at night was a slightly unnerving experience. All light from the stars was blocked out making it pitch black, aside from the glow of the luminescent fungi clusters on the ground. The ocean winds seemed to be magnified in the branches of the pines overhead creating an incessant sighing noise, pierced only by the demented cackling of nesting seabirds. Though I knew there had not been a violent death on Norfolk since the days of the convict settlement a hundred and fifty years ago, an irrational feeling of being in the presence of malevolent spirits began to take hold of me. Being in the bush at night by yourself, these sorts of feelings can creep up on you, but usually I am able to rationalise them away. That night it took all my strength to stop myself from wasting precious battery power by keeping the torch on the entire time, trying to ward off the ghost of a revenge-seeking convict.

  I started to feel myself spiralling into my own ‘Blair Witch’ scenario, especially when I heard the distinctive real-life whoops and yelps of teenagers coming from somewhere deeper in the forest. Forget about the malevolent spirits that lurk within the dark recesses of the mind, the real terrors of the night I have found are more likely to spring from a bunch of young blokes in a small town who, having drunk their own body weight in beer and lucked out on scoring with the ‘chicks’, are looking to vent their frustration on something else. An out-of-towner wandering the bush at night with binoculars and a torch is a perfect target. As the banshee cries approached along the darkened track I braced myself for what was to come and shone the beam of the torch on them.

  ‘Who are you?’ one cried, startled.

  ‘Who are you?’ I fired back, trying to sound capable of handling myself in a stoush without seeming too aggressive.

  ‘We’re the Norfolk Island Christian Community Youth Group.’

  ‘We’re out on an evening ramble!’ volunteered another chirpy kid.

  Forget about broken-bottle-wielding delinquents braying for blood, those kids were straight out of ‘The Famous Five’. They were fantastic. Bright eyed and well adjusted, they seemed too good to be true. They were fascinated to know why I was out in the forest and we spoke for about half an hour before the
y bounded off into the darkness hollering like Indians as they sought out their next rambling adventure, leaving me alone again with the owls. Or not. For two nights I hauled myself up and down the highest part of the island without so much as a ‘boo’ from the boobook. The Parks staff needn’t have worried. The researcher’s birds remained completely unscathed from a Dooley encounter.

  It was in my attempt to see a White-necked Petrel that the intricacies of local politics were to fully confront me. The bird was as good as in the bag for me as one or two pairs breed on Phillip Island, six kilometres to the south of the main island. They nest in burrows that they only enter or leave at night, so finding them would normally be a problem. However, the researcher who had discovered the species on Phillip Island had placed a perspex tube over the burrow so that he could simply slide the cover open to check on the progress of the nesting bird without having to pull it out. A twitcher had recently reported that he had been out there and seen the bird through the window. All I had to do was get out to the island with a guide who could show me the burrow, and the White-necked Petrel was under my belt.

  Getting to Phillip Island was proving problematic. For five days there was so little breeze that the fog had not cleared from around the island, but then the wind ripped through so fiercely that no charter boats dared go out to sea. By the third day I was desperate and luckily one operator, Mike Simpson of Land and Sea Charters, came to my aid. He has a reputation for being the only skipper to go out in rough weather so I was particularly lucky: as we approached Phillip Island, he said to me that if he’d known how rough the crossing would turn out to be he wouldn’t have left the safety of the wharf. As I was the only tourist foolish enough to risk the conditions I had to pay the entire charter and guiding fee of $130.