The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  Mike immediately identified them as Fairy Prions, making me realise I still had a long way to go before cracking this seabird thing. The reason one was lighter was because it was undernourished. I tried to release the birds down at the bay and the larger one immediately flew off. The other went nowhere and I was forced to take it to a wildlife carer. I never heard anything from them so I presume it didn’t make it.

  I drove back home and the girls never looked at me in quite the same way again.

  CHAPTER 16

  24 June, Pemberton, Western Australia:

  439 species

  To someone from the east of the continent the southwest of Western Australia is familiar yet different. Perth has echoes of Sydney, being a harbour city lying on a similar latitude and possessing a hell of a lot of outrageously expensive waterfront property, but the sun in Perth sets over the ocean, rather than rising over it as it does in Sydney. In other ways Perth is reminiscent of Brisbane, without the humidity. The eighties white-shoe brigade casts a long shadow over the two cities, both of which have been substantially rebuilt in the last twenty years and still have a shininess and sense of possibility to them. Or maybe I just draw the comparison because I saw an Osprey circling next to Perth’s main freeway – a bird that, though familiar to the two cities, always thrills a southern (or eastern) twitcher like myself.

  Beyond Perth the landscape is distinctly Australian: the eucalypts look the same, the pattern of settlement appears identical, even the birds are quite similar, yet something seems out of place. It’s as if someone has taken a photograph of your family and altered every fifth detail. At first glance all seems normal but then you notice your father now has a moustache, your mother is a foot taller, your brother now has a tattoo. The west is rather like Tasmania in this respect – you know you are in Australia but it is not quite the same. Though connected by land to the rest of Australia, the southwest corner is, biologically at least, as much an island as Tasmania. Where Tassie is separated by a mere two hundred kilometres of ocean, the southwest has over two thousand kilometres of desert country, including the famous Nullarbor Plain, between it and the next patch of similar country. It has had a long period of isolation in which to develop along a distinct path. Perhaps not coincidentally, both Western Australia and Tasmania harbour twelve species of bird found nowhere else in the world.

  The extreme southwest corner has the richest density of endemics, so on picking up my hire car at Perth Airport I immediately headed south. My plan was to spend around five days in the Albany area getting most of the area’s specialties, including that trio of elusive skulkers – the Western Whipbird, Western Bristlebird and Noisy Scrub-bird – three of the most difficult birds on the continent to see. First stop was in the Busselton area where a Grey Heron had been seen in May. There has only ever been one previous record of Grey Heron in Australia and that was claimed by John Gould himself back in 1839. It goes to show the suspicious nature of the birdwatcher that Gould’s record is now held to be quite dubious in spite of the fact that he was the seminal figure in Australian ornithology and would have known the bird well as it was a familiar sight in his English homeland.

  Reading about the life of John Gould, he comes across as an archetypal twitcher totally obsessed with birds to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, including his wife, family, collectors and artists. Hand in hand with his passion for birds was an enormous ego and, like many a twitcher, you get the impression that he would not back down once he had made a declaration of a sighting. Such is his standing that it was almost a century before doubts began to be cast on his Grey Heron record.

  No doubts are cast on the Busselton bird as it was photographed, even making the local paper. It disappeared before word had spread along the twitching grapevine, so nobody (myself included) had made the long flight across to Perth to twitch it. But seeing I had come all this way it seemed crazy not to check things out. Of course there was no sign of the heron but I did start seeing my first endemics – Western Thornbill, Western Rosella and Red-winged Fairy-wren, amongst others. Near the booming boutique town of Margaret River I stopped to watch a flock of Long-billed Black-Cockatoos using their deep bills to prise out gumnuts. Add to this a number of waterbirds on the lagoons around Busselton and the stunning vistas of windswept Capes Naturaliste and Leeuwin, and for the first time that year I actually had the feeling that I was on holiday rather than doing any kind of hard twitching yards.

  This feeling was enhanced by the quality of the food I was eating. Not unexpectedly for such an upmarket tourist destination, the focaccia I had for lunch at Margaret River was as good as you find in the cafes of Bondi or South Yarra, but I wasn’t prepared for the sensational Chinese dinner I had at Busselton. As a rule of thumb when travelling outside the big cities, I never eat at a restaurant that serves foreign cuisine of any sort. Even when it is run by genuine foreigners, to placate bland local palates they generally have to dilute the taste of their cuisine so much that the result is inevitably disappointing. My choice in Busselton was between the Chinese and the American style takeaways that line the highway so I opted for the Chinese. My expectations were fairly low, particularly when I saw they had a special ‘Aussie’ section on the menu – never a good sign when a Chinese restaurant also serves steak and chips. To my amazement, the meal I had was sensational, rivalling anything I’d eaten in Melbourne that cost less than fifty bucks.

  I was similarly blown away the next night by the mixed seafood platter I ordered at the motel in Pemberton. Washed down with a couple of quality Margaret River reds, I was feeling most relaxed and comfortable on returning to my motel room. The next day I’d be off through the tall forest of the Karri country to the coast at Albany to have a crack at those three skulkers. I’d be coming through the region again in October, so I was feeling confident that by year’s end I would have notched up all three species. I was feeling very peaceful about things.

  Then my phone rang. It was Mike Carter in Melbourne. ‘Where have you been?’ Mike asked.

  ‘At Busselton, looking for the Grey Heron.’

  ‘You’re looking in the wrong place, you know…’

  Well derr. But why would Mike bother to ring me just for that? His next sentence explained all: ‘It’s just been seen at Geraldton.’

  The Grey Heron must have been making its way back up the coast towards its Asian home as Geraldton is about six hundred kilometres north of Perth. My dilemma was that if I was to go for the heron I would need to head around eight hundred kilometres in the opposite direction and wouldn’t have time to come back and try for the Albany rarities. No-one had been to look for the Grey Heron since it was reported three days ago, so did I risk three probable species for only one possible, no matter how much of a crippler it was? You bet I did. As if I’d want to dip out on a bird that might take another hundred and fifty years to reappear.

  I left Pemberton at dawn, making a brief detour to check out the famous Gloucester Tree: you can climb a steel ladder that winds around it to the top of a mighty Karri for a canopy view of the forest. I took in the view of mist rising from the dew-soaked gullies and steeled myself for the ten-hour drive to Geraldton. The lush Karri forests give way to the coastal plain around Perth and then once out the other side of the metropolis the country starts to become noticeably drier. Sandy heaths start to thin out until the country around Geraldton has a distinctly desert-like feel; the roadhouse I stopped at for a dodgy curry dinner could just as easily have been a truck stopped in Arizona.

  Driving in or out of Perth gives you a profound awareness that this is the most isolated capital city in the world. No wonder Perth people are often fiercely parochial, because when you drive just an hour out of town in almost any direction you start to get an unnerving feeling of being under siege and isolated, the desert and the ocean pressing in on you. It creates a sense of self-reliance and I guess a suspicion of the world beyond the seemingly endless horizon. Perhaps it was just the nerves of a big twitching effort like
this that led to such thoughts. All this driving may turn out to be for naught.

  If I was feeling the pressure, imagine how Mike Carter must have been feeling. I’d just come up from Pemberton, whereas Mike was flying over from Melbourne. I had a morning to see the bird before Mike and Frank O’Connor got there. Frank is the local Perth birder who told Mike about the initial sighting. A relative latecomer to birding, Frank has been bitten hard by the twitching bug, and is determinedly aiming to build the biggest Western Australian list of all time. The Grey Heron would be as much a coup for Frank as it would for Mike. Hopefully I’d have the bird lined up for them when they arrived – or at the very least I’d have ticked it off so I’d be able to grip them off and show them where the bird had been just minutes before them. There was not a single bird on my Australian list that Mike hadn’t seen (and there were about a hundred and forty that Mike had ticked off that I hadn’t). Maybe if I do see the Grey Heron, I should look around for a rock…

  By the time Mike and Frank arrived the next morning, I’d spent hours scouring the banks of the Chapman River with no luck. We searched for the rest of the day, unsuccessfully. Like drowning men desperately clutching at straws, we kept looking for the Grey Heron the next day. Working on the theory that if the heron was the Busselton bird, it must have been heading slowly northward, back to Asia, we headed north to the next patch of likely habitat – the Murchison River at Kalbarri, one hundred and seventy kilometres away. No heron there but Kalbarri, with its swathes of heathland and surrounding dry country, provided many birding highlights, including Western Yellow Robin, Black-eared Cuckoo, Little Woodswallow and Tawny-crowned Honeyeater. The woodswallows were unexpected this far south and the cuckoo was most welcome as, although it has a wide distribution across Australia, nowhere is it easily twitchable. Not only was the robin a new bird but we were also privy to a pair of them mating. The female sat on a horizontal branch, quivering her wings seductively, and as the male approached she gave us a full view of all her bits before he hopped on and did the deed. Decorum prevents me from further description, but suffice to say the brevity of the proceedings gives hope to all us blokes – just compare yourself to a male Western Yellow Robin and you’re looking pretty darn good in the bedroom stakes.

  We agreed we couldn’t keep following the coast northwards in the hope of catching up with the bird. Frank decided to head back to Perth, while I managed to con Mike into coming inland with me. I figured that I might as well make the most of being that far north and try to tick off a few desert species. We had a couple of great days’ birding but we dipped on my two target birds. No Grey Honeyeater at Frank’s site at Yalgoo, and no Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush at the Mount Magnet ‘golf course’ which, aside from the pin flags, is indistinguishable from the surrounding gibber country. The greens would have been more aptly named reds for there was not a blade of grass to be seen and it appeared the greenkeeper must manicure them with a grader. I suppose it makes sense in such a dry, hot climate, as you would only need the one club – a sand wedge – in your bag, leaving more space for the ice-cold stubbies. I think even Tiger Woods would struggle on this course. We didn’t do too well: few birdies, just the one distant eagle and not even a sniff of an albatross. I would have settled for a mere quail-thrush.

  We made our way back towards Perth and once we hit the agricultural zone again I came across my first Western Corella for the year. Unfortunately it was fresh roadkill. As we were examining the corpse a few live birds flew over just as a couple of locals driving a ute pulled up and asked us what we were doing. We told them we were looking for corellas. Though threatened on a global scale, corellas can be locally abundant, a fact brought home to us by the women’s response. After they had stopped laughing they offered to show us where a colony nested on one of the women’s property, adding, ‘You’re welcome to take all those noisy buggers with you.’

  At Northam on the Avon River I picked up one of the more ridiculous ticks of the year with the Mute Swan. There is hardly a more incongruous sight than these all-white English swans in the middle of rural Australia, but this one remaining population of this English species is regarded as self-sustaining and therefore tickable. And though rather laughable, I didn’t mind as they are quite beautiful birds, really, and aren’t doing anybody any harm, apart from the little girl who got a bit too close while trying to feed one. Sure, a crocodile attack may be messier, but I doubt she’ll be approaching waterfowl with any enthusiasm in the near future.

  A genuine highlight followed a couple of hours later in the form of a bird that, for the present, I couldn’t even count on my official list. It is mooted that the western race of Crested Shrike-tit will be split out into full species status from the Crested Shrike-tit when the next official checklist is published, but back then I couldn’t tick it. Despite this I was absolutely over the moon when we found a pair feeding quietly in a gully in the Darling Range on the outskirts of Perth. They are top-notch birds, striking in appearance and becoming scarcer by the year, having really suffered more than most species from habitat loss due to overlogging. I was astonished at how joyous seeing this bird made me feel when it didn’t contribute to the immediate task at hand of adding ticks to the voracious list. A very un-mercenary attitude that could have me drummed out of the twitchers’ union.

  The next morning thirty eager sea-birders gathered at Hillary’s boat harbour hoping the weather didn’t turn any worse for the impending boat trip. Before the day’s end a quarter of them would be chucking their guts out but I had under my belt not only the Soft-plumaged Petrel that I had come specifically to see, but also a couple of unexpected bonuses including Kerguelen Petrel and superb views of a pair of Humpback Whales. And to top it all off I felt totally relaxed. Even Mike confessed that on the long bumpy ride back in he was starting to feel a little queasy. This was a breakthrough moment for me, a sign that I was getting truly hardcore in my twitching if I could enjoy a boat trip that knocked about even a veteran of hundreds of such trips.

  And to top the day off we saw a Salvin’s Prion, a bird I hadn’t even contemplated seeing at the beginning of the year. Prion identification is notoriously difficult and controversial with many top birders claiming they are impossible to tell apart at sea, but the bird that made a circuit around the boat showed enough distinctive features for us to be confident it was a Salvin’s. If I’d been alone I wouldn’t have been quite so confident but standing next to Mike who pointed out what features to look for made me feel a lot more comfortable. Who knows, this might be the most contentious bird in my entire year list, but being backed up by an expert kind of helps in rebutting the doubters. I remembered why I liked hanging out with the top rate twitchers – they might be freaks but they were awesomely brilliant freaks.

  As we pounded back through the swell we came back into sight of land. I was feeling bloody tired but extremely satisfied. Smiling I turned to look at the Finnish biologist sitting hunched by the rail. She feebly smiled back, pieces of vomit plastering her hair to her cheek, turned away and began retching over the side.

  Life was good.

  CHAPTER 17

  14 July, Port Augusta, South Australia:

  474 species

  As I sat in the departure lounge of Perth Airport on 1 July making silly faces at the snotty toddler sitting opposite and hoping to God I wasn’t allocated a seat anywhere near him or his frazzled parents, the clock ticked over to midday and I realised that the Big Twitch was now at the halfway point. Into the home stretch. Admittedly that stretch was tens of thousands of kilometres long, but for the first time a sense of the mortality of this venture kicked in. Six months might seem like a long time but suddenly it was beginning to feel claustrophobic. Although I had missed several species I was hoping for, it was only the summer east coast seabirds that I had most probably done my dash on. But even discounting them I was still on track for seven hundred, provided everything went to plan.

  That plan involved a change of strategy. Back in Melbour
ne I loaded up the vehicle, steeling myself for months spent basically alone, and hit the road. For the first half of the year I was never away from home for more than ten days at a time; from this point on, apart from a week or so in September, I would be anywhere but home. But before I left Melbourne I had some unfinished business.

  First up was another visit to Seaford Swamp where I finally caught up with Australasian Bittern, a large but very shy type of heron. They are usually at Seaford throughout the winter but their retiring habits mean you can walk right past them ensconced in the reeds and never know they are there. It was only now that the winter rains had filled Seaford Swamp that I finally managed to flush a bittern. As it disappeared over the reeds, its extraordinary green feet trailing behind it, I was very, very relieved – I’d be travelling through many areas where bitterns have been recorded, but they are not a bird that you often come across by luck.

  Luck was something I’d been desperately short of while trying to find an Orange-bellied Parrot. Since seeing that untickable, silhouetted bird in April I’d lucked out on every follow up. These tiny parrots (known as OBPs) breed only in the isolated southwest of Tasmania and migrate across Bass Strait to spend the winter along the coastal saltmarsh of Victoria and the extreme southeast corner of South Australia. Until recently the bulk of the population wintered at only two sites: Point Wilson near Werribee and Swan Island near Queenscliff. Seeing them was a matter of turning up at either place at the right time of year. But something had happened to the OBP’s age-old habits. While the breeding population stayed at roughly the same level, the birds stopped appearing at their regular mainland haunts and no-one can work out where they are going. Swan Island contains a secret service base, which means gaining access can be tricky, so I had focused my efforts on Point Wilson where, between the sewage farm and an armaments base, there is a narrow band of saltmarsh and grasslands perfect for OBPs. Well, it used to be.