The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  After a couple of days’ hard slog on Boigu and a fairly rough overnight crossing, the group was a little low on energy on our first morning there, at least until we got onto some more Collared Imperial-Pigeons down past the village cemetery and everybody finally saw them. Saibai had as many species as Boigu, but it didn’t seem alluring. Perhaps it was just the tiredness. I did manage to add two new species, Little and Shining Bronze-Cuckoos. I expected to see both further south later in the year, particularly the quite common Shining Bronze. I’d actually heard one in January near Port Fairy and hadn’t bothered chasing it up, figuring I’d see it at some stage during the year. I didn’t. When I told the others this they couldn’t believe I’d missed it. To shatter my credibility even further I admitted that I hadn’t seen either species of triller. Again, I’d heard White-winged Triller in January, this time at Chiltern, and again I’d been too lazy to chase it. The others were astonished at this, particularly Chris Lester, who claimed he’d seen both species on this trip and hadn’t bothered telling me because he assumed I’d have knocked them off ages ago. To rub it in, a few minutes later he pointed to a female Varied Triller in the bush in front of us. Ross and Jan Mullholland saw it immediately but I couldn’t. Eventually the whole party was onto it and I still couldn’t see it and this bush was only ten metres away. Either they were all in on an elaborate joke or I have a blind spot when it comes to trillers. I looked stupid either way.

  For a few years after my twenty-first birthday when I turned my back on a typical party and went searching for Black-eared Miners instead, I always tried to see a new bird on my birthday. That lasted until I was twenty-six and failed in my attempt to see King Quail on French Island. Since then I’d never bothered and celebrated my birthday in the usual way: work colleagues singing a half-arsed version of ‘Happy Birthday’ and a few drinks at the pub. But in 2002 I hoped it would be different. Unfortunately I’d accidentally let slip that it was my birthday to the others. The boat’s chef immediately said that he could make me a birthday pav and with the promise of another half-arsed rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, I prayed that at least I might get a new species.

  My prayers were answered. Waiting for the tinnie to take us ashore on the morning of my birthday a pod of Irrawaddy Dolphins breached the surface right next to the boat. I had never seen this tropical species before so it was a birthday tick, even if it was only a mammal. Once ashore, the schism in the group finally cracked into open rebellion. Mike had suggested we return to the cemetery area as that was where the Red-capped Flowerpecker, the main bird we were after, had been seen in the past. Some of the others decided they’d had enough of Mike calling the shots and announced they were going to the opposite end of the village. I preferred Mike’s option, as did Bill Watson and Neil McCumber. As we started to walk away, Warwick Pickwell, who had more mates in the other group, changed his mind and joined us, saying to me, ‘I’m going to stick with Mike like glue. Wherever he goes, that’s where the rare birds turn up.’

  For the first hour or two we saw nothing new and then a heavy downpour forced us to retreat to the newly built shelter in the middle of the cemetery. Before the rain had fully eased, Bill’s ants got the better of his pants and he was up and out birding while the rest of us stayed in the shelter chatting. Suddenly Bill yelled, ‘What’s this flower-pecker with a red breast and red cap?’ There is only one thing it possibly could be: a Red-capped Flowerpecker. This is another New Guinea species known previously from only two records, both at this exact location. Sensational. We tried contacting the others on the radio but there was no response, and as the village on Saibai stretched out for a couple of kilometres, there was no way I was going to run that far to tell them this time. They didn’t find out until a couple of hours later and I must say they took the news with great magnanimity. They spent the entire afternoon at the cemetery but the bird failed to show. We had to leave for Darnley Island that night, and the tragedy is that on the follow-up trip a week later another party saw the flowerpecker on the same branch at exactly the same time of day. I felt terrible for those who had dipped out, especially Fred. It had taken Fred almost eighty years to get here, and it was probably his only chance for a Red-capped Flowerpecker. All that night as we ploughed through the heavy seas to Darnley which sits on the edge of the Coral Sea I noticed that Fred was poring through the New Guinea bird book, returning time after time to the flowerpecker page.

  Dawn finally arrived to reveal a real Robinson Crusoe–style island. The village was on the opposite side of the island to our mooring, and looking up at its hills and untouched beaches it was easy to fool ourselves into thinking we were the first people ever to lay eyes on it. This illusion was shattered once we were on the island. A big funeral for a community leader was taking place and the airstrip, perched on the tip of the island, was in constant use as light planes dropped off dignitaries from all the other islands.

  There were far fewer birds than on Boigu or Saibai, but there was still plenty of interest. Doves were everywhere, hundreds of Bar-shouldered Doves, a common bird on the mainland, and dozens of Rose-crowned Fruit-Doves, much more scarce back in Australia. There were also familiar birds such as orioles and white-eyes that seemed to show so much variation, some of us felt we might be looking at different species. Maybe days and days in the tropical sun were playing tricks on our eyes.

  It had certainly taken a toll on the bulk of the group. After our first foray into this steeply inclined island, many decided to take it easy and spend the day on the beach or on the boat. Neil McCumber and I even took some time out from birding to go snorkelling on the coral reef around the island. It was such a sensational experience – the amount of life in these waters was simply astonishing – that I found it hard to drag myself away, but Neil and I finally headed off in a halfhearted attempt to track down Bill, who had not returned from the morning’s sojourn. I think the constriction of being with the group had finally got to him and he needed to do a geographic away from everyone. We found him, late in the day, red-faced but otherwise fine. He had walked most of the island, finding a wild paw-paw tree that provided his lunch, and was as happy as Larry is often reputed to be.

  Still, Neil and I had a great day of it. As lovely as the rest of the group were, they were all much older than me and although Neil was well into his forties, he and I share a similar juvenile humour and many cultural reference points. While I appreciate the dry humour of Chris Lester and have much in common with Mike, in some ways Neil was my release valve on this trip – I even found myself enjoying his improbable, bawdy stories. Not only is Neil a great storyteller, he is also the jammiest twitcher I’ve ever known. On more than one occasion he has been the last person to see a rare bird. Someone coming along even minutes later would dip out as the bird would have flown off just after Neil had seen it. I’m not saying he’d throw rocks at these birds to scare them off before anyone else could see them, rather that he had the amazing knack of turning up at the last possible moment.

  But the cosmic forces that rule twitching have a way of evening things out and we were just about to miss out on what could have been the bird of the trip. The three of us were heading back when we bumped into Fred and Mike. We stopped to ponder the identity of a raptor, eventually deciding it was only an immature Pacific Baza, the common bird of prey on the islands. During our deliberations Fred had wandered away and when we came across him on the track a few minutes later he asked us if we had seen the strange dove. For two minutes he had been watching a bird the likes of which he said he’d never seen before. He hadn’t called us over because he didn’t want to scare it. It had flown off anyway, apparently in our direction, but the rest of us had missed it. Back on the boat Fred picked up the New Guinea book he had forlornly been flicking through the previous night and very quickly found the bird he was after – Black-billed Cuckoo-Dove, a new species for Australia.

  We tried for it again the next day, with no luck. Fred later submitted his record to the rarities committee, w
ho narrowly voted against accepting the record, not necessarily because they didn’t believe Fred but because it is very difficult for an individual observer to get a sighting through without corroborating evidence, no matter what their reputation. If only he had been able to alert us to the bird’s presence we all could have ended up with quite a coup.

  The rest of the trip felt a little anticlimactic after this despite visiting two more islands: Dove Islet, a small, uninhabited cay where we found breeding terns, including my old friend the Bridled Tern, and Warraber Island, which had good numbers of waders for us to sort through. Our final night celebrations were curtailed somewhat by the rough conditions. At one stage the wind registered thirty-seven knots and the waves rose to three metres. Most retreated to their cabins for the bumpy overnight ride home, leaving a rather flat ending to what had been some extraordinary birding. Despite a couple of disappointments everyone had seen at least two lifers and got to experience an amazing part of the world that very few get to see, and we’d done it in relative comfort and style. I added eight lifers and twenty-two new birds for the year, four of which I couldn’t possibly have seen elsewhere.

  The Jodi Ann was a delight to sail on – a beautiful yacht of almost seventy feet, it looked just like a tropical cruise boat should, though cabin size was a bit of a shock. I was sharing with Mike and despite ours being slightly larger than some of the other cabins, the only way I could stand up was to leave the entrance hatch open, so that my head poked out, gopher-like, onto the deck. But after spending weeks alone in the Outback, I’d been grateful to spend rare time in the company of people I liked who all shared the same passion I did. For nine days it was nothing but looking at birds, talking about birds and thinking about birds. It was all so pure, so intense. And now, I couldn’t wait to be alone again.

  CHAPTER 23

  9 September, Mission Beach, Queensland:

  599 species

  After nine days of glorious drifting about the Torres Strait I was thrown back into the depressing reality of the modern world at Cairns Airport, where I had only minutes to spare before my flight to Weipa was due to take off. The ever so helpful guy at the check-in informed me that the Weipa flight was closed and that even though I had a ticket I was too late. I’d have to wait for the next day’s flight. When I forced the issue he admitted that he could get me on the plane but not my luggage. I informed him through gritted teeth that I had to drive to Hobart, the absolute opposite end of the country, in exactly twenty-two days, and I had a hell of a lot of birdwatching to squeeze in between now and then, so I couldn’t afford any delays. He seemed shocked into action, and maybe just a little bit frightened, and checked my luggage in.

  It turned out the plane was delayed by more than half an hour. I actually had time to eat a leisurely breakfast, read the paper and go for a Tosca. At the terminal I bumped into Tony Palliser, who was about to board the flight to Horn Island to join the second of the Torres Strait birding trips. He was simultaneously relieved to hear we’d seen some good stuff and also panic-stricken because now the pressure would be on to emulate our success. Tony was third on the twitchers’ tally and to dip on things like Red-capped Flowerpecker would see Fred and Mike move even further ahead of him. Sitting that high up in the twitching order is enough to give you an ulcer. Everyone below you has more options for new birds than you and when one does turn up that you haven’t seen, if you blow it you may never have the chance to catch up with that bird ever again. The flow-erpecker may turn out to be a resident on Saibai and may be a relatively easy get. Or it may never be seen again. For me the Blue Rock Thrush is just such a bird. I was in one of my non-twitching phases (probably due to poverty as much as anything else) and failed to go for it when it turned up at Noosa in Queensland in 1997 – the first Australian record of a bird that normally winters only as far south as Indonesia and the Philippines. There was conjecture that it had overshot its migration due to the massive fires in Indonesia that year, a set of conditions that may never happen again. At the time I wasn’t so concerned that I’d missed it, but now, as my list started to rocket past many twitchers, I know that it is a bird I will never get back. When I think of Blue Rock Thrush now I feel the anguish of regret.

  Before I left Weipa I quickly checked out the sewage ponds and sure enough, now that I didn’t need them for the list, there was a flock of eighteen Spotted Whistling-Ducks as well as my first Sarus Cranes of the year, and I also found my first Eastern Grass Owl, though unfortunately this one was dead, squashed flat by one of the mining juggernauts making its way down to the port. Now for the main course, somewhere I had really been looking forward to all year – the rainforests of Iron Range. One of the few areas of the country I had never visited, this place has at least sixteen species I had never seen before. The road to Iron Range is only about a hundred kilometres, but it took three bone-jarring hours to drive. Such was my enthusiasm to get there, I probably went faster than was prudent over such a dodgy road, but by the time I arrived the only damage was that the glove compartment had rattled loose. An exceptional reprieve considering I was already down to only the one spare tyre.

  Iron Range was every bit as magical as I’d imagined. The largest area of lowland rainforest in the country, Iron Range was teeming with wildlife. Within just three days I added twenty species, half of which were lifers: Palm Cockatoo, White-faced Robin, Magnificent Riflebird, Yellow-billed Kingfisher, Trumpet Manucode – until this moment they had only existed for me in the bird books I would read before going to bed. Now they were before me in all their vibrancy. For once reality matched fantasy. I even caught up with that bloody Varied Triller, but of course nobody from the Torres Strait trip was around to witness that I was not completely hopeless and could actually find these birds.

  What really distinguishes Iron Range from much of the rest of Australia is the amount of activity at night. The forest is literally crawling with creatures all night, including some really good birds such as Rufous Owl and Marbled and Papuan Frogmouth. On my second night I was planning to head out again for some more spotlighting. I sought permission to search the grasslands around the Lockhart River airstrip, hoping to flush the exceedingly little known Buff-breasted Button-quail. It had just gone dark and I was finishing up the last of my dinner when I heard three blasts from a shotgun echo through the forest. In the rainforest the thick canopy overhead cuts out all starlight and it is pitch black. The cicadas had yet to crank up and in the humidity of the still tropical night it was impossible to tell how close the shots were.

  Never is the vulnerability of travelling in the bush alone brought home more viscerally than when someone starts shooting firearms around you. Trying to be rational about the situation I figured that it was either (a) rangers shooting feral pigs or (b) some of the traditional owners out hunting some bush tucker. Either scenario made it too dangerous to go wandering off into the rainforest in the dark where I might be mistaken for said pigs. What kept irrationally playing on my mind, however, was option (c): that the lone gunman who had recently held a German tourist and her mother hostage in the Northern Territory had somehow made his way two and a half thousand kilometres to end up directly at my campsite looking for a new victim.

  After half an hour there had not been another human sound. The cicadas had started up and the night animals were on the move. Still wary, I decided to go and check on the couple I’d seen camping about a kilometre up the road at the next campsite. It turned out that Fran and Bob, from the Whitsundays, were birders themselves and we ended up talking about all the fantastic birds we’d been seeing. There were no more gunshots so, after an hour or so spent chewing the fat, I bid them farewell and jumped back in the car to head out to the airstrip for my spotlighting session.

  As I was passing the turnoff to my camp a glint in the forest caught my eye. Thinking it was the eyeshine of an animal, I turned the spotlight on it. Rather than a startled cuscus staring back at me, it was the blade of a knife thrust into the trunk of a tree. My knife. Or at
least the same type of knife that I had just been preparing my dinner with. Same size, same coloured handle. I went back to my camp. No-one was around but my knife was missing from the rest of the cooking implements. As was my lantern.

  It didn’t make sense. Why would someone plunge my knife in a tree? Was it some kind of warning? Had I disturbed them and they wedged it into a convenient spot where they could come back for it later to finish the job? Why would they steal my lantern? Did they want to put me at a disadvantage, groping around in the dark? Thoughts of Marbled Frogmouths now furthest from my mind, I was totally wired, waiting for the onslaught, occasionally scanning the surrounding jungle for anyone lurking about. After about an hour with no attack forthcoming, I became aware that I was incredibly tired and with a resigned, fatalistic shrug I decided I might as well retire to bed – if anyone out there had malicious intent there was very little I could do about it.

  I opened the tent and sitting there were both my knife and my lantern. In all the excitement I’d forgotten that I’d put them and some other valuables out of sight in the tent when I’d headed off to visit the neighbouring camp. On closer inspection I realised that the blade on the other knife was quite rusty. It had probably been stuck in that tree for years.

  I had to content myself with searching for the button-quail during the day – unsuccessfully. I continued to see more new birds, though, including Frilled Monarch, White-streaked Honeyeater (found only in this part of the world) and, thanks to a tip-off from Steve Murphy, a PhD student who was up there studying Palm Cockatoos, Fawn-breasted Bowerbird. Steve had said that the bowerbird could be very tricky but as I pulled up at the site there it was sitting atop a bushy tree, belting out its rasping call. I love it when a plan comes together. It happens so rarely.