The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  I had at least eight sites for Spinifexbird in the MacDonnell Ranges. I missed it every single time. Having no luck with what I thought would be a fairly straightforward bird I figured I may as well try for a really tough one – the Grey Honeyeater. So unassuming is this bird in both its dull plumage and preference for remote habitats that there are many very good twitchers who have never seen it. I had some recent gen that they had been seen quite recently at Kunoth Well, a little dot on the map on the edge of the Tanami Desert. I was heading out there early one morning hoping to beat the heat of the day when, just on the edge of mobile range, my phone rang. It was David Harper, his message brutally simple: Franklin’s Gull, Adelaide, I better get down there pronto.

  I swung the car around and headed straight for Alice Springs Airport. This American gull very rarely turns up in Australia and when it does it seldom stays very long in the one place. I simply couldn’t miss it. The first plane to Adelaide wasn’t until that evening so I booked my spot and headed out to Kunoth Well again.

  I didn’t like my chances now that the day had heated up but when I arrived at the site I had one of those rare, golden birding moments for as soon as I got out of the car a pair of Grey Honeyeaters flew into the nearest tree. This was a bird I had been expecting to spend days trying to find, one that has eluded some of the best birders in the land. And yet I still couldn’t see a bloody Spinifexbird.

  Next morning I was in Adelaide standing at a suburban football oval amongst a throng of thirty or forty excited twitchers lapping up the antics of a Franklin’s Gull in full breeding plumage. It even accepted breadcrumbs from a happy fan – what a performance. It was quite a surreal scene. This is how twitching in England must be. Here such gatherings are still a novelty. Just as surreal was my arrival in Adelaide. As I came through the arrivals lounge I was descended on by a massive media horde. I didn’t know my Big Twitch had become such big news. But it turned out the passenger next to me was the former leader of the Australian Democrats, Meg Lees. She was just about to announce her resignation and the establishment of a new political party, and I got caught in the middle of the impromptu press conference. Even more surreal was that by the next day I was back in the Alice, hauling my sorry carcass up yet another escarpment in another unsuccessful Spinifexbird hunt, not a hundred per cent sure I hadn’t dreamt the whole Adelaide thing.

  I needed to move on so I decided I would have to look for Spinifexbird in Western Australia later in the year. It wasn’t until I was driving past the Santa Teresa Mission heading toward the Simpson Desert that I suddenly realised I had also missed out on Chiming Wedgebill a bird I had figured I would pick up somewhere along the way and hadn’t made any particular effort to search for. Oops. Just outside Santa Teresa (aptly named as the village sits on the side of a mesa looking for all the world like it is waiting for Sergio Leone to start filming one of his spaghetti westerns) I stopped in what seemed like the last suitable habitat for both of these species and failed to find either, yet I had great views of Rufous-crowned Emu-wren, a species that most birders struggle with.

  Heading south along the Old Andado Track the country becomes drier and drier as it skirts the western fringe of the Simpson Desert. After clearing the last of the mulga woodland the vegetation becomes stunted and sparse, perfect habitat for desert species such as Cinnamon Quail-thrush, Gibberbird and Banded Whiteface. All three species are regarded as hard to see but I got them whilst driving along the track, indicative, I suspect, of the fact that birders hardly ever get out into this remote country.

  By nightfall I was well and truly alone. I found a bore to stake out hoping that the elusive Flock Bronzewing would come in to drink. Apart from a few curious cattle, nothing came in and as night fell I moved back to my camp and lit a fire to cook my dinner. The utter silence was amazing. Unlike many who feel compelled to build enormous bonfires every time they camp, I use just a few pieces of wood, enough to build up some good cooking coals and provide a modicum of warmth and light. As the fire died down the peacefulness of the chilly desert air took over. I suddenly felt very insignificant. The thought occurred that if a psychopathic killer were to pull up just then, no one would ever find my body. I could so easily have disappeared into that vastness forever.

  I found that strangely comforting and slept well, wrapped up in my sleeping bag under the incandescence of the Outback sky, awoken only briefly by the distant creaking of the bore’s windmill which, in the inky night, sounded suspiciously like a serial killer sharpening his implements.

  I survived the night unscathed and next morning travelled along the edge of the Simpson Desert. Fingers of red sand dunes ran parallel to the track, clumps of cane grass on their sides. This is the habitat of the Eyrean Grasswren. So remote is the habitat of this bird that after its initial discovery in 1874 it wasn’t conclusively seen again until 1961. I stopped several times with no luck; it felt like it would take me eighty-seven years to find it too. I pulled up yet again, this time armed with a shovel and toilet paper as I had to make a pit stop. Though I hadn’t seen a vehicle all day, as soon as I went to drop my pants one rumbled into view, forcing me to move further away from the track. As usual, I dug a little hole and was squatting over it when I heard a barely audible squeak. It hadn’t come from me (my campfire cooking is not that dire), but from a party of small birds moving about in the cane grass a few metres away. My binoculars were laid out just beyond my reach so, like a scene from Carry On Birdwatching, I struggled, pants around ankles, to reach for the bins without scaring the birds. Finally, bouncing out in front of me was a pair of Eyrean Grasswrens. I think I may have stumbled across a sure-fire method to see these elusive birds.

  And so it was back into South Australia to meet up with Dave, birding all the way of course. I passed the five hundred mark with a group of four stately Australian Bustards. It was nice to have these big turkey-like birds as the milestone bird. At the time of European settlement I could have got them on the outskirts of Melbourne but these slow-moving creatures apparently taste delicious and were quickly shot out. Even in these remote areas where their habitat has-n’t gone under the plough, they make a nice meal for the locals, who can easily pick them off from the back of a four-wheel drive. They are now only commonly found in conservation zones and in fact the birds I saw were within the borders of a national park.

  From there it was in for a welcome dip at the thermal pools of Dalhousie Springs and then down the Oodnadatta Track, camping along the Aglebuckina Waterhole, which rang with the croaking calls of cormorants, Darters and other waterbirds attracted by the permanent waters, and then on down past Lake Eyre. Both the largest lake and lowest elevation point in Australia, almost a third of the continent drains into Lake Eyre. Not that you could tell when I visited as it was totally dry, one enormous shimmering expanse of salt, a stunning sight nonetheless. At this point it occurred to me that I was knocking off more places I’d always wanted to visit than I was target species. The Flinders Ranges were another such place. This impressive chain of mountains features in plenty of tourism ads for Australia because they are so spectacular, but I had never made the effort because until recently there were no birds in the Flinders that didn’t occur elsewhere. But word was that in the new checklist the Flinders Ranges form of Striated Grasswren was to be promoted to full species status. Now I had a reason to go. And after spending one of the coldest mornings of my life stuck out on the all too exposed slopes of Stokes Hill, I finally tracked one down. I was now free to move on to the rendezvous point at Lyndhurst on the Strzelecki Track where after a long morning’s search I added another grasswren, the Thick-billed, to the list.

  Lyndhurst is the traditional site for Chestnut-breasted Whiteface, a bird I no longer needed, which was looking kind of lucky as for a while there I saw no sign of them. It wasn’t until Dave and his travelling companion Marco arrived that their vehicle disturbed a group of four whitefaces which were conveniently herded towards me for my second up-close encounter with this bird in a mont
h. As Dave pulled up I asked him what his secret to conjuring the whitefaces was. He loudly exclaimed, ‘Because I’m a South Australian mate!’

  Bloody South Australians. It’s as if they are fearful that they’re going to be forgotten by the rest of the country (too far from the action on the east coast but not as far west as Perth to claim a distinct identity) so they try to make up for it by crowing about every minor triumph. Now normally I love to see such Croweater cockiness shot down in flames, especially on the football field, but not out there. There were too many important target birds to get, most importantly, the Grey Falcon. All year Dave had assured me we would see it on the Strzelecki. The moment of truth had arrived.

  CHAPTER 20

  5 August, Yaningurie Waterhole, South Australia:

  501 species

  Sitting atop the dune above Yaningurie Waterhole at dawn was a lesson in contrasts. The temperature was just on freezing yet I was in the middle of a dry, sun-scorched desert. The dune itself is a mighty blood red serpent commanding a view over the dull grey of the Strzelecki Creek floodplain. The surrounding countryside, having missed out on rain of any description for over a year, was dry and desolate, but water from previous years’ thunderstorms had percolated through the big red bulk of the dune to seep out in tiny pools at its base attracting masses of wildlife. Supposedly, it also attracts the rare Grey Falcon, a predator that swoops in to feed on the throngs of parched birds that gather of a morning to slake their desert-created thirsts.

  The Grey Falcon is an almost mythical bird. In fact, I am of the firm opinion that it doesn’t actually exist. I have a theory that a cabal of evil twitchers got together to play a prank on unsuspecting birders and came up with a new species of raptor they called ‘Grey Falcon’. Sure, there are photographs of alleged Grey Falcons in existence, but if you look closely you can see that they have obviously just taken a regular (and much more common) Brown Falcon and spray-painted it grey. As you can probably tell, I have never seen a Grey Falcon. Once I do I will happily join in the conspiracy but for now I hold firm that the Grey Falcon is about as real as Donald Trump’s hair.

  As a matter of fact in 1981 I did see a Grey Falcon. Well, I think I saw one. But Dad wouldn’t stop the car. It was a family holiday in northeast Victoria and I was twelve. Like all summers of youth it seemed so much hotter than the summers of today. The family was cramped and miserable in our tiny Valiant Gallant, lost in the back-blocks of Benalla, the same countryside that the Kelly Gang had roamed eluding police a century before. Dad was particularly irritable that day as he was the one who had got us lost and was copping it from all quarters. My brother and I were playing up in the back seat and my mother had banned Dad from smoking in the car. These factors combined with the first stirrings of an undiagnosed duodenal ulcer and bowel cancer led to, as Bart Simpson would put it, ‘one unhappy pappy’.

  Dad’s mood was further dragged down by my incessant demands to reverse the car to check out every bird we saw. Rather than uttering that ubiquitous paternal catch-cry, ‘Why didn’t you go before we left?’, he found himself repeatedly asking, ‘Why do you want to stop here? It’s just another bird.’ What he could never understand was that it was never ‘just another bird’. It always could have been something new, something rare. Sure, every bird we had stopped for inevitably turned out to be quite mundane (or chooks, as they are known in birding parlance), the pale bird hawking over that parched field was surely the jackpot. But Dad would simply not stop.

  That was a pivotal moment in our relationship; that adolescent catharsis when you realise your parents cannot sustain you as they once did – the moment you leave the nest. I began to drift apart from my father. I sought out other birdwatchers and they took me under their wing. He was one of those real Aussie blokes who loved his footy, his beer and his races, and he had a total mistrust of other men who were not interested in the same. And things only got worse when he actually started to meet my new, adult birdwatching friends. I guess, looking back now, I can see why he might have had some grounds for concern. Here was his twelve-year-old son going off to all sorts of out of the way places with strange, pasty, unshaven men wearing thick coats with binoculars draped around their necks, who always seemed to be talking about things like boobies, tits and shags. God knows what he made of ‘We had a Fairy Tern down the Mud Islands.’

  I was never so embarrassed as on Christmas Eve 1982 when my two worlds collided rather catastrophically. That day my father had arrived home from the annual work Christmas bash with considerably more than a skinful, just as university professor and birdwatcher Aidan Sudbury was focusing his binoculars on a male Black Honeyeater in the flowering gum trees of Seaford North Primary School. My local patch. Aidan immediately raced off to ring Mike Carter who, before he frantically dashed off to see the Black Honeyeater for himself, thoughtfully rang to tell me there was a mega rarity just around the corner. I was the second person to see this amazing bird, normally a denizen of the dry country north of Victoria, driven to the coast by one of the worst droughts in recorded history. Mike was the third. He was ecstatic. This was a new bird for his Victorian list. For me it was new bird full stop.

  This was in the days before mobile phones, and rather than use a phone box to contact the birdwatching grapevine, as Aidan had done, Mike asked to use my home phone. My elation was immediately wiped as I remembered the state Dad was in. For an agonising hour I had to endure the naked clash of the two most influential adult men in my life. There was Mike going absolutely nuts over the phone, telling various birdwatchers about the exceptional plumage of this rare visitor, totally oblivious to my Dad’s seething drunken animosity. And to top it off, Mike had broken a cardinal rule of the Aussie male etiquette by having the temerity to ask for a light beer when offered a drink.

  From then on I assiduously kept these disparate elements of my life well apart – until one fateful day, a couple of days after Christmas 1998, when it was all brought horrifyingly close to home. I was staying with Dad. By this time my parents had moved from humble Seaford to the affluent canal development of nearby Patterson Lakes. Two kilometres and three tax brackets away from where we lived in Seaford, Patterson Lakes lay atop the corpse of the former bird haven, Carrum Swamp. My parents had built their dream home by the water but, cruelly, Mum was robbed of much time to enjoy it, having passed away the year before after a long struggle with cancer. Dad had been amazing in caring for her and that experience, as well as his own successful battle against bowel cancer, had certainly mellowed him. But this mellowness was to be fully tested the moment I laid eyes on the bird sheltering from the storm on our jetty.

  I commented, ‘It must be pretty windy out in the bay, Dad, that Crested Tern’s come in to rest on the jetty.’ I casually grabbed my spare set of binoculars fully expecting to see the pearl grey back, black cap and yellow bill of the Crested Tern, but instead the bird was a dark, chocolate brown tern, the kind you just don’t get in Victoria. In fact it was the first Bridled Tern ever seen in Victoria. A dinky-di Christmas miracle right in my own backyard, this was my shot at twitching immortality.

  Then the fear took hold. The only thing worse than dipping in the birdwatching world is if you actually see something and no-one believes you, so I raced to the phone and frantically dialled all the other twitchers I knew. But being the Christmas break they were all out twitching, hoping to find a rarity. Well suckers, the rare bird was right here! Finally I managed to rouse Mike Carter from out of the bath, of all places, and he was already on his way, still half naked and dripping I imagine.

  In the meantime a thought even more horrible than a dripping, naked twitcher occurred to me: what if the Bridled Tern flew away before Mike arrived? I grabbed my bemused father and made him look at the poor bird while I directed him to its diagnostic features. Luckily Mike arrived with a couple of local birders, the indomitable Peggy Mitchell and her daughter-in-law and partner in crime, Bette, so I never had to rely on my father’s dodgy birding credentials as a back-up. W
hen Dad realised twitchers were pulling up in the drive, he exclaimed, ‘Not those bloody freaks – I’m off to the pub,’ and scarpered out the side door as they came in through the front. My sighting was duly confirmed, photographed and copiously noted. Then for no discernible reason, the Bridled Tern decided to brave the storm and flapped off towards Port Phillip Bay, never to be seen again.

  Until my quest for twitching glory with the Big Twitch the Patterson Lakes Bridled Tern had been my greatest birding triumph. But this wayward bird is even more important to me for another reason. Within two years of this momentous sighting, my father would be dead. He had beaten bowel cancer outright, but at the time of the Bridled Tern he did not know that he was already harbouring a fatal case of lung cancer, the product of a thirty-five year, pack-a-day smoking habit. His decline was rapid – a matter of six months from diagnosis to death. In those months, as he suffered the combined ravages of the disease and the chemotherapy designed to cure it, one of his greatest sources of solace was to sit by the window and look out at the birds going about their business on the lake.

  About a week before the end as he sat there, breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank, my father turned to me and said,