The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  But this still doesn’t fully explain Mike’s birding success. Watching him on Christmas Island I think I finally figured it out. Mike has an innate curiosity for just about everything. He is always wanting to know how things work, or more precisely how they fit together, be it the feather structure on the wing of a White Wagtail or the plumbing system at the hotel. His nature is such that he isn’t satisfied to simply accept what he sees, he wants to know the ‘why’ behind what he sees. This fascination for things can often mean he becomes oblivious to everything else aside from the object of his fascination. This is not to say he has no interest in things other than birds but when he is concentrating on them there is very little space left for anything else. It also means he can be quite a frustrating travelling companion as he is always stopping to look at or comment on something, often with much more intensity than seems warranted: ‘Look at that crab!’‘Look at that butterfly!’ ‘Good Lord, look at that swiftlet, it’s got two primaries missing from its left wing!’

  Particularly when it extended to statements about what I’d ordered for breakfast – ‘Baked beans and mushrooms. Good Lord!’ – I couldn’t help but wonder if he was being critical or taking the piss. Then it dawned on me that Mike is only stating the obvious because it seems fresh to him. I began to envy his capacity to see the wonder in almost anything. It is curiosity, it is engagement, it is, I am sure, the reason why, though approaching seventy, Mike can easily pass for someone twenty years younger – he has a refreshingly boundless enthusiasm for the world and all that it contains. This is why he is such a top birdwatcher; he is always on the lookout, always engaging directly with what he sees. It also explains why he is one of the most positive, refreshing and seemingly happy people I have ever met.

  But after five days without a new bird I could see his enthusiasm was starting to flag. The night before he had declined to head out spotlighting around the airport in the hope of turning up an Asian nightjar or two. I was beginning to feel guilty that I’d dragged him all the way there for no reward. Then, on our second last morning, it looked as though we might have hit the jackpot.

  We were again heading out before dawn to look for the Night Heron when the car headlights caught the unmistakable form of a bittern flying up from the gutter. There seemed to have been an influx of bitterns and herons on the island because, apart from the Night Heron and Cinnamon Bittern, we had seen six species, including the Asian form of Black Bittern. Slamming on the brakes we grabbed our spotlight and managed to flush it once again. Even though we’d had only two brief glimpses, we were pretty convinced it was a small bittern, most probably either a female Cinnamon or Von Schrenck’s, both absolute cripplers. The second time we flushed the bird it landed on a grassy patch and ran toward the edge of the forest. In the pre-dawn gloom we could see its outline where it stopped to strike a typical cryptic bittern pose, its neck skyward, making itself as skinny as possible.

  We debated our next move. Shining the spotlight might have disturbed it and as it was only a few metres away from the edge of the forest, we wouldn’t get another shot at it if it bolted. As it was only twenty minutes till dawn we thought we’d keep vigil until the light got good enough to identify it. As long as it didn’t move. There was an abandoned building nearby and we figured one of us could use it for camouflage to approach more closely. Mike moved off using the building as cover while I kept my stare fixated on the dark shape poking up from the grass. Hordes of mosquitoes swarmed in but to slap them away might have frightened the bird so I just had to let them have their way with my bare arms.

  Eventually Mike signalled he was in position and I began the painfully slow crawl to join him. By the time I reached him the first morning songsters were starting up and it was almost light enough to see the bird. We focused our binoculars and the first light of dawn revealed the bird. It was a stick. The bittern had run behind the stick and straight into the forest. In the dark we hadn’t seen the second part of its mad dash and had spent the last twenty minutes stalking a stick.

  It looked like being a miserable flight home. I stared out the window for a last glimpse of Christmas Island. The sky was full of gathering storm clouds, the sort of sky you would expect in the tropics.

  Mike leant over me to look out the window and burst forth in exclamation: ‘Good Lord, look at all the clouds!’

  CHAPTER 13

  23 March, Gluepot Reserve, South Australia:

  373 species

  I’m sure if I had something named after me I’d be quite chuffed. I imagine Louis Pasteur got a little tickle of satisfaction every time he bought a bottle of pasteurised milk, Dr Parkinson a small lump in his throat whenever he watched a Katharine Hepburn movie and Thomas Crapper must have really enjoyed his visits to the toilet. The only person I know that has had anything named after them is John Cox and interestingly he is rather embarrassed that the Cox’s Sandpiper bears his name, but as it stands, it will forever be associated with one of the greatest controversies in Australian birdwatching history.

  From the 1960s onwards the occasional odd looking sandpiper would turn up in wetlands around Melbourne and Adelaide. It seemed different to every other type of sandpiper then known. Nothing is more infuriating to birdwatchers than a bird that refuses to be categorised. Australia’s leading birdwatcher of the time, Fred Smith, had a stab at it and though he wasn’t completely happy, he declared these rogue birds to be Dunlin. It was a reasonable theory: although Dunlin hadn’t ever been seen in Australia before, these birds looked pretty close to what Dunlins were supposed to look like. Nobody had a better solution and so for quite a few years Dunlin was on the Australian list.

  John Cox, having recently emigrated from England, had seen Dunlin before. They are one of the most common waders of his homeland. When he started seeing these Australian birds, he wasn’t convinced. A correspondence began between John, Fred and other leading birders and over the years they all agreed that these probably weren’t Dunlins, but what they were no-one was exactly sure. Throughout the seventies John found more of these mystery birds in the Penrice saltfields immediately north of Adelaide and he became the leading expert on them. John had his theories, as did others, and at this stage they were all cooperating with each other to solve the mystery. Then the late Shane Parker of the South Australian Museum jumped the gun and published a scientific paper proclaiming that these birds were not Dunlin but in fact an entirely new species which he named Cox’s Sandpiper after the man who had contributed so much to solving the mystery.

  People were not happy. Professional and personal relationships were soured, some felt their contributions had been ignored, and simmering rivalries burgeoned into vicious semi-public slanging matches. John Cox wasn’t too happy either. He hadn’t asked for his name to be used, and was more than a bit embarrassed that it was, particularly because he didn’t think the bird deserved a species name at all. His suspicion, since confirmed by DNA testing, was that the Cox’s Sandpiper was actually a hybrid of the Curlew and Pectoral Sandpipers. As John says, ‘Waders are randy little buggers,’ and will attempt to mate with practically anything they can mount. The breeding range of these two species has only a small area of overlap in the Siberian tundra and occasionally such interspecies trysts will produce a hybrid that, when it migrates to the saltfields and sewage farms of Australia, really sets the pulses and imaginations of bird-watchers racing.

  John would have preferred not to have been so intricately involved in the entire sorry business; he is able to garner enough controversy on his own without the aid of a third party. He is very forthright in his opinions and calls a spade a spade. This may not endear him to some, but I find it refreshing that, on greeting me when Groober and I arrived at his place, his first words were, ‘Christ, you’ve put on some weight!’

  I hadn’t seen John since I went to Adelaide to (unsuccessfully) twitch the ’87 Northern Shoveler, when I was a skinny, eighteen-year-old kid. So, yes, I had put on weight. I countered his forthrightness by telling him t
hat I may have gotten fat, but he’d lost a hell of a lot of hair. He was momentarily taken aback, but then a broad smile appeared across face and I knew we were going to get on just fine. The next thing he said to me was, ‘What the bloody hell happened to your finger?’ as he looked down at the bandage and sling on my left hand.

  Basically the story was the latest in a long line of disasters that have befallen many a Groober-Dooley twitching expedition. We were on our way over to Adelaide to twitch the Hudsonian Godwit that had been found at Penrice saltfields via Gluepot Station in the Murray Mallee where we hoped to see the extremely rare Scarlet-chested Parrots that were coming in to drink at a dam near the homestead. I had been planning to head over to the Eyre Peninsula at Easter for this species and if I didn’t see it there my only option was to mount an expedition into the Great Victoria Desert, so I jumped at the chance of looking for the bird relatively close to home. One measure of the Scarlet-chested Parrot’s rarity is that it is one of the few Australian species that Groober hadn’t seen, so it was easy to talk him into coming along for the ride.

  I should have known something would go wrong as Groober and I have an atrocious record of disaster when twitching together. Outcomes of our previous expeditions include: writing off a car in Western Australia when we hit a kangaroo at over a hundred kilometres an hour; blowing up an engine on New Year’s Eve in East Gippsland; and getting bogged in the Big Desert during a thunderstorm. We were crossing the Nepean Highway in Seaford once when Groober was run down by a horse. This is one of Melbourne’s main thoroughfares, mind you, and as we crossed at the pedestrian lights to get to the beach to look for beachwashed Common Diving-Petrels, a rider appeared from nowhere, tried to jump the pedestrian safety barrier and managed to land the horse right on top of Groober.

  At the beginning of that ill-fated Western Australian trip we had reached the South Australian border and the fruit fly inspection station. Rather than throw out the entire esky of fruit and veg we had bought the day before, Groober decided we should try to eat as much of it as possible there and then. It was 39 degrees and the fruit fly inspector stood dumbstruck as he attempted to demolish bags of apples, peaches and bananas. A queue was forming behind us so the attendant asked if we could move the car. While scoffing down an orange, Groober threw me the keys. I put the wrong key in the ignition and it snapped off, meaning we had to hotwire the car for the rest of the trip…until we hit the kangaroo. I know I’m pretty hopeless but when we get together we seem to dramatically ramp up the incompetency factor. Over the last ten years or so we hadn’t had any major disasters and Groobs had travelled extensively throughout Asia without major incident, so I thought we must have been improving with age. Or perhaps our luck was due to run out.

  Things began to unravel fairly quickly. We had hoped to arrive at Waikerie in South Australia around midnight. There we would sleep in the car then first thing next morning collect the key for Gluepot from the service station, catch the first ferry across the Murray and be lining up with the parrots at around 7.30 am. After stopping for dinner and supplies (no fresh fruit this time), and generally dawdling, we were running way behind schedule. Around 1 am I pulled in at the 24-hour servo in the Mallee town of Ouyen to grab a drink and have a stretch. I didn’t really need a drink but as we still had around three hours to go to Waikerie, I wanted the chance to freshen up. I tell you, it does not pay to be safety conscious. If I had just driven straight through, none of the following would have happened.

  In pulling off the road at Ouyen I managed to puncture one of the rear tyres. This was already my third flat for the year and the thought of changing it in the middle of the night did not put me in the best of moods. With my documentary in mind I brought out the video gear and asked Groober to film me changing the tyre – get some mileage out of wimpy bird boy trying to fix the wheel of the monstrous beast. After struggling for a good twenty minutes, as much from tiredness as from the physical exertion, I finally lugged the now expired tyre up onto the mount designed for it at the back of the car.

  Groober had stopped filming by this stage and suggested that the sight of me trying to haul the tyre up would make hilarious footage. So I unhooked the tyre and set it back down on the ground. When he was ready I lifted the hulking tyre up again. This time as I tried to screw the first nut in, the tyre slipped and crushed my finger against the steel mounting, ripping a fingernail right out of my finger. It’s all on video: me mugging to the camera, the crash of the falling tyre, my initial recoil, then the blood draining from my face as I look down and discover the fingernail gouged out of my flesh just dangling there cadaverously.

  Instead of seeing in the dawn at Waikerie we found ourselves watching the sunrise from the emergency department of Mildura hospital. They bandaged me up and made me stick around for precautionary X-rays, so that by the time we finally made it to Gluepot we were around twelve hours behind schedule, and I had a throbbing, disfigured finger. It would take four months for the nail to grow back. Luckily for us the parrots did not come in to drink that morning. It would have been all the more excruciating if we had missed them.

  Gluepot, which is now run as a conservation reserve by Birds Australia, has some of the best unburnt, mature mallee habitat in the country. We managed to see some much sought after dry country birds species – Pied Honeyeater, Striated Grasswren, Chestnut Quail-thrush, Gilbert’s Whistler and Regent and Mulga Parrots – without any trouble at all, but it didn’t make up for not seeing the Scarlet-chesteds. After we’d set up camp and rested, we made our way to the homestead dam for our evening vigil – the theory being that the parrots get very little moisture from their diet of seeds and need to drink every day. Scarlet-chested Parrots, being desert dwellers, have probably adapted to going without a drink for longer than other parrots but, particularly in hot weather, will partake of the water available in manmade dams. The five days the birds had been seen coming into this particular dam had been excessively hot, the day of our arrival relatively cool, perhaps explaining why they had failed to show that morning. Still, hope springs eternal and we positioned ourselves in the bird hide alongside the dam an hour and a half before dusk and waited.

  And waited. Apart from a Common Bronzewing, a type of large brown pigeon, nothing came in to drink at all. We had another visitor in the form of a birdwatcher who had spent the past few weeks working as a volunteer on the reserve, a kind of birding busman’s holiday. She had seen the parrots over the past week and we listened totally gripped off as she described a party of seven, including males with the stunning scarlet sash across their chest. She told us that as they hadn’t come in that morning, she didn’t like our chances in the evening. I thanked her for her honest assessment but said we’d stick around and try our luck. She seemed incredulous that we would even think about continuing our vigil and started chiding us for hanging around when we clearly had no chance of seeing the birds. What she didn’t appreciate was that after travelling that far, disfiguring myself and ruining my potentially lucrative hand-modelling career, we weren’t about to give up. Her incredulity turned to irritation and she countered with the news that a famous birder had come all the way from Canberra to see them and if such an expert had missed out on them, what chance did we have?

  There again was that hierarchic deference that I had first encountered at the bird club meeting twenty years ago. Because this expert was known as someone who had seen over five thousand birds around the world, if he dipped out then we mere mortal birders had absolutely no hope of finding the parrots, did we? Frankly I didn’t give a shit that the expert hadn’t seen them. If he’d missed out that was his tough luck, it wasn’t going to stop me. Luckily the painkillers had just kicked in so I didn’t say anything like this to her face, just that we would take our chances. She walked off in quite a huff, muttering loudly under her breath, ‘You’re not going to see them!’

  We didn’t see them.

  After a stunningly clear night serenaded by boobook owls and owlet-nightjars we were ou
t the next morning before dawn, slightly less optimistic but unbowed nonetheless. I took up position in the bird hide and Groober went and secreted himself over at the next dam for our dawn vigil. Just after sunrise a Peregrine Falcon came flashing through, scattering all the birds coming in to drink. ‘That’s it,’ I thought, ‘show’s over.’ No parrot in its right mind would come in now with such a predator in the vicinity.

  I wandered out of the hide and joined up with Groober. We stood on the open wall of the dam discussing our next move when suddenly a female Scarlet-chested Parrot flew in, circled around our heads giving us a superb view, wheeled around and flew off in the direction it had come from. No stunning male counterpart flew in, but there we were – one of the hardest birds to find in Australia had just made an exhibition flight around our heads. We were stoked. Oddly enough, when we bumped into the volunteer on our way out, rather than being pleased for us she seemed somewhat put out, as if a certainty in her view of the birdwatching world had been shaken – these punks succeeded where the expert dipped? Impossible. I wonder whether she even believed we’d really seen it.

  ‘Well, you better come in and have a beer then, sounds like you’ve earned it,’ John Cox responded to our tale. ‘High tide’s not for a couple of hours and you won’t get the Hudwit coming in before then.’

  John’s house was a maelstrom of rambunctious chaos. David Harper, the birder who discovered the Hudsonian Godwit (Hudwit), and his family were visiting John and his wife Heather. Unlike most birding get-togethers, which are usually subdued affairs, when the Cox and Harper families gather the atmosphere is raucous and celebratory. David and his wife Sue’s two daughters treat John and Heather like grandparents, and while John is somewhat of a father figure to Dave, it would probably be more accurate to say they are more like brothers, because although there is obviously a deep affection between the two, there is also a lot of rivalry and an endless stream of taunting and ribbing of each other.