The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  Before I left Melbourne I’d rung John to ask if there were any other waders about that I needed. Aside from the Hudwit there were also Pectoral Sandpiper and Long-toed Stint literally, John assured me, over his back fence. When we arrived he had some bad news – he hadn’t seen the Pec since the day I’d phoned, but not to worry, the Long-toed was still about, two of them that morning in fact. We grabbed our binoculars and went out to check the wetland that really does lie just beyond his back fence. Of all the birders I know, nobody looks more at home with a pair of binoculars than John Cox. He is the birdwatching equivalent of a great hunter, striding along the edge of the swamp with an almost leonine confidence, his large hands gripping his binoculars like a gunslinger wields a Colt 45. It didn’t help that day, though. The Long-toed Stints had decided to up stumps and begin their migration back to the Northern Hemisphere – that morning’s sighting turned out to be John’s last for the year. I’d missed them by a couple of hours.

  This dip did not bode well for the Hudwit. We made our way over to the saltworks and, when it had not come in after an hour it looked like it too might have begun the long journey north. For over an hour there was little to look at but the saltpans. Small flocks of waders kept arriving as the tide rose out on their feeding grounds on the mudflats of the Gulf of St Vincent, but there was no Hudwit amongst them. The flock of Grey Plovers that the Hudwit had been associating with arrived without it. Oddly enough, the Hudwit had been giving the flock of very similar Black-tailed Godwits a wide berth, so when they flew in, the last birds to do so because their longer legs and bill mean they can feed for longer on the rising tide, nobody particularly bothered to check them out. Then someone noticed the telltale black armpit of the Hudwit amongst the pale of the Black-taileds’ underwings. Another bonus bird for me.

  Back at John’s place for victory celebrations, Dave Harper confessed to me that he’d become very stressed when the Hudwit didn’t show. As the bird’s discoverer, he somehow felt personally responsible for me seeing it. I assured him that I’d been birding long enough to know that there were no guarantees with birds and I wouldn’t have held it against him if I’d dipped. Of course we both knew that if I had dipped, I’d see to it that his name was mud in the birding community, but as it did turn up, I can say without equivocation that he is a top bloke and a brilliant birder. Foolishly he said he could help me out with another bird, the Grey Falcon, as he knew a reliable site for this species in the South Australian desert and was planning a trip there later in the year coinciding roughly with the time I would be in that area. We made a plan to hook up.

  My year was beginning to take shape quite nicely and on 24 March, with the total on 382, I headed back to Melbourne feeling very satisfied and optimistic.

  CHAPTER 14

  30 April, Barren Grounds, New South Wales:

  405 species

  The quietest time for Australian twitchers is probably late autumn–early winter. Most of the migrants have returned north, the locals have generally finished their breeding cycles and though the southern coast starts to be buffeted by cold fronts coming up from the Antarctic, they are generally not sufficiently strong or frequent enough to blow in most of the sought-after Southern Ocean species. My 350th bird – halfway to the target – was Java Sparrow on Christmas Island, yet it wasn’t until 9 April that I reached four hundred, a Flame Robin, at ever reliable Seaford Swamp. By the start of June the total would only creep up to 416.

  While I still continued birding, getting out into the field on twenty-six days, much of my time was spent on other matters. As I would be on the road for most of the second half of the year, staying in my comfortable but very expensive house by myself was financial madness, so I moved into a share house in North Fitzroy with an old friend. Moving in with her had several advantages. I had somewhere safe to store my stuff, my rent immediately dropped a thousand bucks a month and, most importantly, as I had lived with Indra in another share house twelve years earlier, I didn’t have to break her in to the sick and twisted world of birdwatching. She’d been through the ordeal before and, while not exactly enthusiastic, could at least tolerate the vagaries of my behaviour with stoic acceptance.

  I also attended the first match of the footy season where I witnessed my team, Collingwood, go down to a far less skilful side. Given such a shambolic performance on the part of the Magpies it looked like I’d picked the right year to be on the road.

  In the midst of my preparations I even managed to pick up some real employment of sorts, two weeks working on a pilot for a new sketch comedy show for Channel Nine. As all the unemployed writers gathered for the first meeting, someone jadedly welcomed everyone to ‘Generic Sketch Show Pilot Number 417’. We had all been through this roundabout so many times before that nobody had much enthusiasm for the task, taking the job for the pay rather than with any hope of the show getting the go-ahead and actually making it to air. I jokingly countered that with this attitude the show would actually get commissioned and turn out to be a huge hit.

  Perversely, professional success was the last thing I wanted at that moment. If the pilot was to get up, the network might go into production immediately and there was a fair chance I’d be offered a good position. To turn it down would have been professional suicide. To take it would have meant saying goodbye to the record. It dawned on me that I was much more committed to breaking the record than I was to furthering the long-term prospects of my career. For the first couple of months I thought I could always call it off if things got too much. By this point, though, I was too steeped in blood to turn back. Even though I knew it was absurd, chasing that record meant too much to me.

  As it seemed to mean to others. Thanks to the agency of the Internet my essentially personal quest had become rather public. I spent as much of this period dealing with birdwatchers as I did with birds: thanks to my postings to Birding-aus, people were following my progress with much interest. I was starting to receive emails of support and advice, both helpful and maybe not so helpful, and whenever there was a lull in my regular postings, speculation mounted as to my whereabouts. I even had a fan club, though from what I could gather it only comprised two members. My birding odyssey had become a spectator sport.

  Essentially a loner when it comes to birdwatching, I found the attention a little surreal. While I had been birding for over twenty years I was not a huge part of the scene and I could go about my birding activities relatively anonymously. While I knew enough of the key players to be kept in the loop I was hardly the guy they went to to discuss tarsus length on Golden Plovers or the morphological differences in cranial structure of the Wandering Albatross complex. Now they were suddenly confronted with constant updates about my record attempt. My initial suspicion was that they might think I was a bit of an interloper who didn’t deserve to have a crack at the record. What I found was quite the opposite, with birders from all over the country, both experienced and novice, showing me nothing but support. At times this was almost disquieting as some birders seemed almost obsessive in their efforts to help me out – the case of the Black-breasted Button-quail being a prime example.

  It all began with a Laughing Gull turning up on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, appropriately enough on April Fool’s day. This was serious news as it was probably only the sixth record of this North American species in Australia. I waited by the phone for news.

  At ten o’clock the next morning I got a call from Andrew Stafford on his mobile: ‘Dools, I’m just looking at the bird now…’

  You little beauty.

  ‘…disappearing over the horizon on Moreton Bay. Sorry about that.’

  Oh well, at least I’d saved myself an airfare.

  A couple of hours later, Andrew called back with news that Paul Wallbridge had just seen the Laughing Gull come back in.

  Game back on. I touched down at Brisbane Airport around five thirty the next afternoon and with the aid of Paul managed to see the Laughing Gull after a few hours’ frustration. As a bonus he a
lso got me a Broad-billed Sandpiper, an uncommon wader that was no dead cert. I had allowed two and a half days to try for the Laughing Gull and with success on the first day I had to work out how best to spend my remaining time in Brisbane.

  I retired to the house of a local birder who had kindly put me up and we indulged in a night of victory celebrations. Things were going very festively until the mood changed and I began to get an inkling of just how involved people wanted to be with the whole Big Twitch concept. The local birder had been incredibly generous in his hospitality but obviously felt he could do more. He had to work the next day but he assured me that he should be able to find me a species or two on Saturday morning before I flew out. I still needed Black-breasted Button-quail, having dipped out on it with Andrew in February, and I floated the idea with my host that I might try for it up the coast at a place called Inskip Point, where people had reported seeing them recently.

  He didn’t seem impressed with this plan. ‘Have you been there before?’ he asked with concern.

  I told him I hadn’t.

  ‘Yeah, well if you haven’t been there, you could be wasting your time.’

  ‘Why, have you been there? Isn’t any good?’

  He hadn’t, and that was troubling him. As he didn’t know the site how could he could he give me any advice? He seemed pained at the prospect of me going up there when I could have been picking up some other species with his guidance. No, if I was to have a chance at the record it would be much easier if I accepted his help, so I’d probably ‘want to give Inskip a miss’.

  The topic of conversation moved on. A couple of drinks later he asked abruptly, ‘So what are you doing tomorrow?’ and before I could answer added, ‘You’re not still thinking about going to Inskip, are you?’

  ‘Maybe. If I can get them there, it saves me having to look when I’m here again in September. There’ll be no second chances then.’

  ‘Nah, you don’t want to go to Inskip,’ my host declared. ‘I don’t know anyone who’s been there. You’d be wasting your time going there at all. Why don’t you wait until you’re back this way and I’ll take you out to my Black-breasted site? They’re virtually guaranteed there.’

  He became so insistent that I began to feel it would be taken as a personal betrayal if I did go. Eventually I decided to call it stumps and the last thing he said to me as I retired to his spare room was, ‘So you’re not going to Inskip are you?’ I answered that no, he was right, I wouldn’t go and he tottered off happy.

  At 6 am I awoke to the first birdsong and opened my eyes to see my host standing in the doorway of my room. First thing he said after I had let out a startled expletive was, ‘You’re not going to Inskip, are you? That would be a stupid idea. You don’t want to go to Inskip.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t think so. I think I might just have a bit of a sleep-in, actually.’

  Placated, he readied himself for work. After he had gone I had a spot of breakfast, packed my things and headed for Inskip. After a few detours for other birds in and around Brisbane – such as the Bush Stone-curlews that stand like eerie, goggle-eyed sentinels over one of the carparks at the University of Queensland – I didn’t roll into the campground at Inskip Point until just before dark.

  I immediately realised I should have listened to my host. Even if there were button-quails here, it was the school holidays and the area was overrun with families camping. Man, was it going to be humiliating to have to tell him this. Then I noticed that in the middle of the camping ground, dodging kids on bikes and families playing cricket, was a covey of Brown Quail. I’d already seen this fairly common species on my previous Brisbane trip but if they could be amongst this seething mass of holidaying humanity, why couldn’t a button-quail? I parked the car and wandered down the track to the point. There, right on the track in the fading light, was a male Black-breasted Button-quail having a dust bath. It was in exactly the same spot again the next morning. I kept in touch with my host but we never spoke of Inskip again.

  At least my host was trying to be helpful. Though I had no evidence, I suspected that quite a few birding experts were sniggering behind my back at the audacity of my 700 target – they were all too polite to snigger directly to my face. All except for one. In April Stu Cooney and I headed out to Werribee in the hope that we might pick up an early arriving Orange-bellied Parrot. We did manage to get onto one, heard above the din of the engine as we drove along the coast. Jumping out of the car I could see the bird silhouetted against the sun giving its characteristic buzzing call which reminds me of the sound of marbles being rubbed together. Unfortunately we could get no better view and even though it was clearly an Orange-bellied, I didn’t feel justified in ticking it. As it disappeared it flew over a carload of other birders. We drove down to ask whether they had seen it land. They’d missed it but we got talking. I knew one of them, and he asked me how the record attempt was going.

  Another birder in the group, someone I’d never met before, hadn’t heard of my record attempt. When I explained that I was hoping to top seven hundred, he burst into laughter. Not the kind of good-hearted, incredulous chuckle that I had come to expect; this was a vicious, scathing guffaw that lasted for minutes. I was reminded of a sitcom in which a bunch of characters see someone fall over. They all laugh for a minute until they realise the person is actually injured, but there is one Homer Simpson type who only laughs harder when he sees the blood spurting from the victim’s head. Everyone else shifted uncomfortably as this guy continued his derisive laughter and proclaimed my quest the most idiotic thing he’d heard in his life. His contempt was totally unbridled, as though my goal was a personal affront to him and all humanity. Sure, secretly I might have agreed with him – it was a fairly idiotic venture – but to have someone spit that back in your face so venomously was quite confronting.

  ‘Well even if I don’t get to seven hundred,’ I said with a smile, ‘at the very least I’ll keep cynical bastards like you amused.’

  After we got back in the car Stu erupted: ‘If that was me I would have punched that arsehole’s lights out.’ I laughed it off, saying it was probably what everyone thought and he’d been the only one honest enough to come out and say it. Stu couldn’t believe I was so unfazed by the whole incident, though inwardly I resolved that I wouldn’t let this bastard have the last laugh. Whenever things were getting on top of me over the year to come – the birds not showing, the distances too vast, the weather and the fatigue too overwhelming – I would think back to that anoraked figure quivering with derision and use the image of his smirking mug to keep going, determined that one day I would bump into him and quietly say, ‘I did it.’

  Most of my energy, however, was spent picking up as many species as possible during this relatively quiet period. This meant as many boat trips as I could muster. In March, the weather over Port Fairy cleared long enough for us to finally get out to sea. I saw my only Sooty Albatross for the year and managed to forget to bring along waterproof pants. The sea was quite lumpy, the spray constant; I got soaked through below the waist and remained that way until I finally arrived home in Melbourne fourteen hours later. While hanging on grimly as we bobbed about in the Southern Ocean, Mike Carter and I also saw a Grey-headed Albatross but it was so distant I declined to add it to my list because I wasn’t happy with the views I’d got.

  If I had been on board the April Port Fairy trip I would have seen not only another Grey-headed Albatross but also South Polar Skua and Great Shearwater. The shearwater would have been extra special as it was only the third record of this species in Australian waters, it normally being a denizen of the seas off southern Africa and the Atlantic. I missed a truly remarkable day at sea; a tragedy compounded by the fact that I actually should have been on board. Mike Carter thought I was still up in Brisbane with the Laughing Gull when a vacancy opened up for the trip, so he didn’t ring me, although I’d specifically come back to Victoria in time for just such a contingency. Because of this mix-up I dipped on three specie
s I would not see for the rest of the year.

  I went on five more pelagics during this time and while I added at least one new species on each trip, none matched the excitement of the ones I’d missed. Not that there weren’t highlights. Having both a Royal and a Wandering Albatross sitting side by side behind the boat for close comparison on one Port Fairy trip definitely qualified. As did the voyage back to Port Fairy in mid May when, in the soft afternoon light on a glassy green sea, we were surrounded not only by massive feeding flocks of gannets, shearwaters and Yellow-nosed Albatross but by a pod of around one hundred frolicking common dolphins. I didn’t let on to anyone, but I was actually beginning to enjoy these pelagic trips.

  With the lack of unusual birds and a growing sure-footedness at sea, I certainly had plenty of time to look around and observe the behaviour of that mental seabirding bunch, and how parochial they all seem to be. The boys from Wollongong think their patch of ocean rules; the Brisbane crew won’t hear a bad word about their trips. Even on a local scale this rivalry can be intense. I’ve seen Portland aficionados pour scorn on trips out of Port Fairy even though they are only about seventy kilometres apart. A similar rivalry occurs between Sydney and Wollongong, which lie approximately the same distance from each other. This parochialism reached its ridiculous zenith when on one pelagic I commented to someone about the size of the shark liver being used as berley. Without a hint of irony, this person turned to me and boasted, ‘Yeah, I bet you don’t get shark liver that big down your way.’ I couldn’t believe it, he was actually using the ‘my shark liver’s bigger than your shark liver’ line.

  I wasn’t buying into the argument. I didn’t care what trip I was on as long as I was seeing new birds. Put simply I’d become a pelagic slut, would take a ride on whatever was on offer as long as it gave me every possible opportunity to see each species.