The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  I should have been flying high but in reality I was exhausted in both mind and body. Perhaps it was the sudden humidity of the coast, or maybe sheer exhaustion after driving an average of two thousand kilometres a week for the past six weeks, but I was starting to feel fluey and one of my glands had swollen into a rock-hard lump in my throat. I dropped in at the doctor’s to see what shots I’d need for the Torres Strait. This was predominantly a clinic for travellers so the doctor usually only treated ear infections, coral cuts and various backpackers’ social diseases. He’d never had a patient heading to Torres Strait before so was a bit flummoxed as to what I would need to take. Looking up the books, he told me that while there had been recent cases of Japanese encephalitis they generally occurred only in the wet season. As I was leaving too soon for any precautionary shots to be effective, he suggested I simply avoid being bitten by mosquitoes. Easy for him to say; he wasn’t going to be spending his time trudging through mangrove swamps trying to find new birds for Australia.

  He gave me a shot for Hepatitis A and asked amid the general conversation if I had any other health problems. I told him about my travels and how tired I was and mentioned the swollen gland. He felt it, looking very serious, and inquired whether I’d ever had mumps. Mumps? That can make you sterile. I figured that with all the DEET-based insect repellant I’d been slapping on my body over the year (not to mention lack of a partner) my chances of becoming a daddy were pretty shaky anyway, but mumps? This was serious.

  Unfortunately the doctor didn’t finish his sentence. Sidetracked by my story about catching the plane with Senator Meg Lees, he proceeded to launch into an impassioned tirade on the leadership of the Democrats and barely drew breath for ten minutes. I never found out what he thought the lump might be and I left for Cape York Peninsula wondering whether I should have got my sperm frozen before I embarked on this adventure.

  One of my longest held dreams (apart from the one in which I am transformed into a cartoon character and get to hang around with the Scooby Doo gang – that Daphne, she’s a fox!) had been to make it to Cape York. And as I left the bitumen north of Lakeland, after yet another blowout, I was finally there in one of the great frontiers. Pity I was feeling so crappy. The swelling had hardened into a golf ball in my throat and I winced in pain every time I turned my head to take in another stunning vista.

  Many imagine that Cape York is all jungle and are rather disappointed when they first get there to realise that ninety per cent of it is woodland. To me this is what makes this place so special. Cape York is roughly the size of Victoria yet only a fraction of it has been cleared. The woodland seems to stretch on forever, an absolutely thrilling sight for someone who has grown up amongst fragmented remnant blocks of habitat. The bird life was incredible. Some, like the White-throated Gerygone, will spend the summer down south at places like Chiltern while others – the Yellow Honeyeater and Black-backed Butcherbird, for example – don’t get much further south. And then there is the Golden-shouldered Parrot.

  Hammered by trapping for the aviary trade, and the introduction of cattle grazing and the resultant change in fire regimes, this exquisitely beautiful parrot is now found in only a fraction of its former range. The only site I knew of was adjacent to the main road. When I arrived several hundred of the smelliest cattle I have ever come across were crowded around the dam where I had been told the parrots also liked to loaf during the heat of the day. I usually don’t mind the smell of cattle – quite invigorating, really – but these beasts reeked so badly I couldn’t get near the dam without gagging. Instead I wandered through the woodland, scanning the ground ahead for feeding parrots. I should have been looking above me for when I did there was a group of about eight Golden-shouldered Parrots sitting quietly in the trees, occasionally calling softly to each other, a kind of laidback chuckle. All the birds I could see were females or imma-tures, lovely birds in themselves but without the wow factor of the adult males. I would have stayed longer but the golf ball in my throat throbbed with every pulse of blood. Reluctantly I headed off and reached the mining town of Weipa just before dark.

  Weipa is the Cape’s largest settlement. Built on the back of an enormous bauxite deposit, the town has a shopping centre, motel and sports clubs to cater for the miners and their families. I had been planning to camp out in the rainforest for a couple of days but decided my body needed some dude comforts. I ate in the hotel’s restaurant, slept a lot and did the odd bit of birding. Such is the abundance of birdlife in the tropics that over a couple of days I managed to see around eighty species without having to work too hard, though I dipped out on the Spotted Whistling-Duck, a New Guinea species that has snuck into the northern tip of Australia and can usually be found near one or more of the three wastewater ponds around Weipa. It’s typical of my quest that, while most people drive to the top of Australia to visit the spectacular waterfalls and gorges, I spend my time hanging around the shit pits.

  Miraculously, a couple of days’ rest was enough to clear my symptoms and, come 21 August, I was at the airport waiting for my flight to Cairns and then Horn Island, where I’d begin a nine-day cruise through the Torres Strait. For most people a tropical cruise would involve snorkelling, sunbaking and fishing. Me, I’m looking forward to mangroves and mudflats with a bunch of other freaks who are into the same things. I was raring to go, because I’m a twitcher, that’s what I do. Or maybe my enthusiasm was due to the golf ball moving from my throat into my brain.

  CHAPTER 22

  26 August, Saibai Island, Torres Strait:

  561 species

  With the stroke of a colonial pen in 1879, it was decided that the islands of the Torres Strait belonged to Queensland despite the fact that some of them were less than a decent drop kick away from the New Guinea mainland. One hundred and twenty-three years later a group of ten twitchers gathered aboard the yacht Jodie Ann II at Horn Island hoping to exploit this historic anomaly in order to add some New Guinea species to their Australian lists. When I originally compiled my list of 705 species I hadn’t included any birds from this part of the world so anything that wandered over from New Guinea would be a bonus.

  I had already added two new birds to my list before we set sail, having come in to Horn on the morning flight. I managed to bump into Bill Watson, who had already been on the island a couple of days, and he showed me a good spot in the mangroves where I picked up Red-headed Honeyeater, Shining Flycatcher and my first mozzie bite. Most of the other participants were arriving in the afternoon which is when I thought I’d be arriving too. I’d been planning a big night out in the fleshpots of Cairns, thinking I could sleep in the next morning. I’d even confirmed with Mike Carter that I’d see him on that flight. Just as I was heading out the door I checked my ticket and realised I was actually on the early flight, too late to get in touch with Mike and inform him of my error. Mike almost got himself thrown off the plane as, thinking I was running late, he tried to hold it up to allow me to board.

  When Mike finally arrived with the others in the afternoon he had some very bad news. We were meant to be going to Ashmore Reef in October in this same boat. I knew that they were one short, and so desperate was I to get out there that, if worse came to worst, I was going to offer to pay for the other berth myself – my chances of getting to seven hundred were negligible without the minimum of five species I could get out at Ashmore and nowhere else. But Mike’s news was that the skipper had accepted another charter. No other skipper was mad enough to ferry a bunch of tick-hungry twitchers out on the ocean for a week at a time, so it was goodbye seven hundred. It was a rather inauspicious start to what should have been one of the highlights of the year. There was nothing to be done so I had to surmount my disappointment and make the most of what I had – nine days cruising in the tropics. Perhaps I’d pick up an unexpected five species and wouldn’t need Ashmore anyway.

  By the afternoon all ten of us had gathered on the dock at Horn Island ready for our assault on the Torres Strait Islands. Perhaps a
ssault is too strong a word as I doubt that a posse of middle-aged teachers, accountants, engineers and public servants would strike fear into anyone’s heart, though the residents of Dauan Island, our first destination, looked quite shocked as we stormed their beach at first light the next morning. We were all loaded up in camouflage gear, wielding an awful lot of hardware and raring to go. The entire village turned out to bemusedly watch us come ashore on the Jodi Anne’s dinghy.

  Dauan Island is a picturesque, continental island with a white sand beach and a dominant central mountain. The tides only allowed us to spend a couple of hours there, so we hustled our way over to the uninhabited side of the island to check out what was around. Though quite close to New Guinea, the birds still had a distinctly Australian flavour but I managed a few newies, including Mangrove Golden Whistler and Eclectus Parrot, calling loudly as it flew over the island as if in some sort of traditional island greeting.

  It was quite an esteemed party that the Eclectus greeted. All ten of us had seen well over six hundred and fifty Australian birds (hence the need to visit the extremities of the country in order to find new ones), and there were some serious birdwatching heavyweights on board, including the two people with the biggest lists in the country, Mike Carter and Fred Smith, who between them have almost a century of Australian birding experience. In comparison the rest of us were relative newcomers, although Bill Watson had been on the scene for a while, having been part of the first generation of twitch-ers, in the seventies, who regarded birding as a sport as much as a deadly earnest study and Bill still birds with that same spirit of fun. A school principal used to getting his own way, even on this first morning he was starting to get a bit antsy over the drawn-out debates as to the identity of a particular kingfisher or whether the Little Bronze-Cuckoo that one person claimed to have heard was actually a Broad-billed Flycatcher.

  It was a long time since I’d been birdwatching in a group and I’d forgotten just how charged the dynamics could become. Especially amongst really good birders, a sense of competition inevitably develops. Sometimes it can be a fine line between healthy competition and a sniping battle of personalities and egos. Within minutes the race to be the first to call every bird was on, some coming the occasional cropper with a rash early call. It had happened to me before and it can be very embarrassing, especially if you mistake something very common for a rarity. The fear of this embarrassment has probably made me too conservative and often I’ll sit on a sighting until I am absolutely certain, by which time somebody else has usually seen the bird and is incredulous that I hadn’t been able to identify it.

  Others hold what they have seen close to their chests for other, more competitive reasons: waiting for the moment they can trump somebody else’s sighting. ‘Well, Mangrove Golden Whistler is nice, but didn’t you see the Flame-crested Ooomidoodle Bird? It was just back there in that tree. It was so obvious I thought everyone must have seen it.’ On more than one occasion a statement such as this forces the rest of the group to substantially backtrack for a bird they have missed. It is a risky strategy, however, for if the bird has flown off, which birds tend to do, the deprived twitchers start to question whether it was ever there in the first place. Especially if they twig that there is no such thing as an Ooomidoodle Bird.

  All this, just in the first couple of hours. The next few days were set to be very interesting.

  Whereas Dauan had that tropical paradise feel, Boigu Island, our next port of call, is a big flat swampy blob of land surrounded by shallow, muddy seas. The only village clings to the one substantial beach on the whole island. The rest of the coast is forbidding mangrove swamp filled with crocs and in the wet season the interior of the island becomes a massive lake that is also filled with crocs. Just across from Boigu is the New Guinea mainland but, try as I did, I was unable to see any birds flying above its intimidating land mass to get my New Guinea list kick-started.

  We arrived with enough time to check out the lay of the land before sunset. The little tin dinghy (tinnie) was the only way for us to get ashore but it only held half of us at most so usually we were ferried in two or three groups. The first party landed and almost immediately saw a Singing Starling, a highly sought-after New Guinea species. By the time the rest of us arrived it had flown. Those of us who didn’t see it rushed around the village desperately searching every tree, much to the amusement of the locals who rarely have white people visit, aside from white bureaucrats and doctors – and now these crazy birdwatchers. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to secede. Everyone eventually got to see the Singing Starling and the irony is, every other time we visited the village it was about the most common bird. All that angst for nothing, aside from providing some free entertainment for the villagers.

  I was about to provide a whole lot more. On our final day at Boigu we were all coming back from a day birding the interior of the island. I had finally landed Pectoral Sandpiper, but aside from that the afternoon’s birding has been hard work for little reward. As we headed back to the dock, Mike, Bill and I straggling at the rear, two large pigeons flew in from the general direction of New Guinea. As they passed overhead the rosy glow of the setting sun really showed up their plum-coloured bodies. They were Collared Imperial-Pigeons, one of the species we were specifically hoping to see. By this stage the others were strung out along the length of the village, too far away to be able to see what we were looking at. For all my selfish sins, I must have a certain dash of altruism because I immediately worried that they’d miss out on these cripplers. It is one of the paradoxes of twitching that it is those who don’t get a crippler that wind up in agony.

  So, barely having time to look at the birds as they flew over, I began sprinting after the others, yelling for them to turn back. But as I reached each person with the news, they simply charged off in the direction of the birds rather than passing it on to the next person down the line, which meant I had to run the entire length of the village screaming, ‘Collared Imperial-Pigeon! Collared Imperial-Pigeon!’ The others might have had difficulty hearing me but the villagers certainly didn’t and they all came out to see what this crazy whitefella was up to. To make matters worse, as I ran along the zip on my backpack came undone and its contents began to spill out. By the time I got to the last member of our group I could barely speak. They’d bolt off after it and I was left panting on my hands and knees, my gear strewn along the length of the village and the entire population of Boigu collapsing with laughter.

  Of the others, only Fred was able to get a tickable view of the pigeons, which made for a rather subdued evening aboard. And this was not the only little storm cloud brewing over us. There was also the pratincole protocol. The Australian Pratincole is a graceful wader that spends most of its time marching along the ground but when it takes flight it does so on elegant swallow-like wings. At the end of each day we did what is referred to as a bird-call, in which someone goes through the list of birds and whoever has seen that species yells out. I find it can be a rather tedious process at times. For Bill Watson it was like pulling teeth. Mike, who organised the trip, automatically assumed the role of recorder and led the bird-call, a situation that I’m not sure everybody was completely happy with.

  When Mike got to pratincoles everybody agreed on Australian, but then somebody chimed in that they’d seen an Oriental Pratincole as well. Another couple of people concurred. Oriental Pratincole was quite unusual for the time of year and so far east – there are very few records for coastal Queensland. Mike and I had been through the flock of pratincoles with the telescope and hadn’t seen anything but Aussie Prats. Mike grills the Orientalists, who’d looked at it through binoculars and noticed a much darker bird, which would suggest Oriental. I volunteered that we had scoped those birds for a better view and while there was a darker one it lacked the distinctive throat pattern of an Oriental. One of the others immediately and without any problem backed down saying they must have made a mistake. The others remained adamant that the bird was too dark to hav
e been anything but an Oriental.

  Looking for a way around the impasse and not wanting to antagonise anyone by directly challenging them, I offered the old two-bird theory: ‘Maybe there was another darker bird and it had flown away before we could scope it?’

  ‘Yes there must have been,’ came the grim-faced reply.

  Who knows if there was a second bird? There may well have been but I think Mike put Oriental Pratincole down with a question mark, a move that I suspect wasn’t too warmly received as after that night two bird-calls were held. Officially it was done because people worked to different time frames. Mike liked to have a shower and freshen up before he settled down to write up his notes for the day; others liked to get it done straight away. But a schism was definitely developing and as a result we had the phenomenon of the double bird-call. This drove Bill absolutely bonkers as now he had two lots of tedium to rail against.

  Things could have got worse. The next day, with half of us in the Jodi Anne’s tinnie and the rest of us in a local’s boat, we explored the Boigu River, a mangrove lined channel that splits the island in two. Our deckie managed to spot what ten pairs of birders’ eyes had missed: a juvenile Spotted Whistling-Duck hiding on the bank amongst the mangrove roots, desperately trying not to wind up in the dinner pot of our guide. This was the bird I had gone specifically to Weipa to see so I was particularly relieved. The trouble was that the other boat was further up the creek and it was a tense wait indeed before they got back to see the bird.

  After this incident and another, in which one group got onto an unusual bird of prey that could well have turned out to be a new bird for Australia, it was decided that whenever the party split in two we would use the yacht’s walkie-talkies to keep in touch in case one group found something interesting. The first test of the technology came when we headed to the other main island in the northern straits, Saibai Island.