The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  One bird I hadn’t been able to get onto was the Red-cheeked Parrot. Several times I’d heard them above the canopy making their incredibly frantic songflights but I hadn’t been able to get a decent, sustained view. Even so, their flights were hilarious events. They manically burst forth from the canopy screeching as if petrified that their rapid, shallow wingbeats will send them crashing into the forest below. Their flight has the same quality as the movements of someone who’s fallen into the water but can’t swim. As I was packing up my camp on the last morning I heard that now familiar cry but this time it got closer and, as if offering himself as a parting gift, a male Red-cheeked Parrot landed in the fig tree above me.

  As I was gawping at the parrot in gratitude the campsite’s resident male Australian Brush-turkey swung into action. He had come to learn that the pesky humans that kept turning up in his territory were a free meal ticket. Curse the camper who first fed this eating machine, as they have created a voracious, tenacious monster. All foodstuffs had to be safely stored away because it would quickly raid whatever was lying around. As soon as I got anything out of the car to prepare a meal it would be in like a shot. When it realised I was not forthcoming with a handout it would target my rubbish bag, tearing through it and scattering rubbish across the campground. I put a bag around the first bag and hung it in a tree. That went too. So eventually I had to store my rubbish in the car – triple bagged, but still not the greatest vehicle deodorant in the world. As I was glassing the parrot (through my binoculars, not with a broken bottle) the brush-turkey jumped into the open car and ripped into the triple bag, strewing crap all through the car and leaving a smelly deposit of his own on the front seat.

  All rubbish has to be taken out of the national park so the drive out was extremely bumpy, slow and whiffy. Halfway along the track out I thought the rotting fumes must have been causing hallucinations as I came across the most surreal scene of the entire Big Twitch. In the middle of the tropical woodland, hundreds of miles from anywhere on this heavily rutted track, was a classic old-time carnival troupe. One of the trailers carrying a carnival ride had broken an axle and the convoy had halted while repairs were made. They must have been heading to the Lockhart River Community where I suspect the carnies would outnumber the locals. I didn’t see any bearded ladies or dwarves but I fully expected David Lynch to walk out on set at any minute.

  Normally coming back from a place such as Iron Range is akin to coming down. But the next few days promised almost as much action, though I didn’t know whether it would involve a carnival. First on the agenda was Red Goshawk, on a par with Grey Falcon as Australia’s most elusive bird of prey – they had eluded me for years and defeated many a better birder than I. From two different sources I had been given directions to a nest in the vicinity of Lakefield National Park. This is really a dude approach to twitching: just follow the map and the bird should be sitting there. Well it was. A magnificent imperious female on her massive stick nest in a tree overhanging the road. I felt like I was in the presence of a rock star. I was so overawed with this creature that I dared not move any closer to the nest lest I disturbed it. It looked unfazed by my presence but I remained about a hundred metres away, thereby losing a superb photographic opportunity. I had put virtually no effort into finding this rarity yet I was totally overjoyed. Absolutely elated. This was a bird I’d had no confidence of seeing and now, having got it so easily, I felt anything was possible. For the first time in the whole year reaching seven hundred seemed a tangible prospect.

  That elation was dented somewhat when, half an hour later, I took a pothole a bit too exuberantly and the vehicle was thrown across the road. The oil gauge suddenly lurched to empty, and a quick check under the vehicle revealed a reddish liquid leaking out from somewhere near the rear. This was not good. Rather than head through the national park I backtracked the forty kilometres or so to the main road and the Musgrave Station Roadhouse. Once there I launched myself under the car for the grim assessment. It turned out the leakage was coming not from the fuel tank or oil sump but was actually water leaking from the punctured tyre stored under the car. At every creek crossing it had filled with muddy water which was now harmlessly dripping out. The oil indicator had resumed its normal position too. Suitably chastened I decided not to risk the rough track through the national park and headed down the comparatively benign and quicker main track. Even so by the time I rolled into my next destination it was right on dusk and I had been on the road for an exhausting twelve hours.

  Julatten is a tiny village in the hinterland behind the coastal tourist mecca of Port Douglas. It has none of the glamour, none of the luxury hotels or eighty-foot pleasure cruisers. No white shoes, white sands or fake tans. Stretched out over a couple of kilometres are a school, a couple of houses, a tavern and that’s about it, but to birdwatchers there is probably no more revered place in the entire country. The one thing Julatten does have is a caravan park, now known as Kingfisher Park Birdwatchers Lodge and the one thing the caravan park has is birds. Plenty of them. In the grounds of Kingfisher Park itself is a small patch of rainforest alive with birds. You can spend the day stooging around and easily see seventy plus birds without leaving the boundaries of the park. Foremost amongst these is the highly sought after Lesser Sooty Owl.

  My previous attempts to see this bird here had all been failures. The best I ever did was to find a freshly dead bird, still warm, its skull crushed by a truck taking sugar cane to the refinery. Thanks to Carol and Andrew Iles, the guides at Kingfisher Park, I managed to see it. They were so intimate with the routines of all the local wildlife that they could pinpoint the precise moment when a fledgling young bird poked its head out of the hollow and sat on the edge for a couple of minutes before flying off. I would have spent night after night wandering around forlornly in the hope that a Lesser Sooty would fly into the beam of my spotlight.

  The other great advantage of Julatten is its proximity to Mount Lewis, an area of upland rainforest that is a one-stop shop for all the North Queensland endemics. Over a couple of days I completed the set with some really great birds such as Golden and Tooth-billed Bowerbird. The male Golden Bowerbird is a beautiful bird that builds one of the greatest structures in the natural world, a maypole up to three metres tall constructed of sticks and festooned with decorative clusters of flowers and lichens. Or so they tell me. You’d reckon something that big would be pretty easy to find. Even when I’ve had directions I’ve always managed to overlook them. On Mount Lewis I managed to find a female on the nest. The female was just a plain brown bird and the nest was a small cup hidden behind a vine in the darkness of a crevice of a road culvert. I could find that all right, but a bloody great three-metre structure? No chance.

  I found the bower of the Tooth-billed Bowerbird after a great struggle up a steep, vine-clad rainforest slope. There’s actually not much to see. Tooth-billeds don’t build elaborate structures, merely scratching out a space on the rainforest floor that they decorate fussily with soft green leaves. I sat quietly by one of these platforms and waited for its owner to return. After a few minutes he did, carrying a freshly plucked leaf of the wild ginger plant. Initially startled by my presence, he darted behind the buttress of a rainforest giant. Then he cheekily poked his head around one side of the trunk and began to act rather like a child in a game of peek-a-boo. It craned its thick neck around one side of the trunk, waited until we made eye contact, then pulled back away out of sight, only to emerge on the other side to peer at me again. This went on for several minutes, an incredible cross-species interaction that brought a delighted smile to even this hardened, callous twitcher.

  Though not a huge tourist destination, Kingfisher Park had a steady stream of visitors coming through. It has a deserved international reputation as a great place for birds and during the four nights I stayed I bumped into people not just from Australia, but from the UK, Europe and the States. The only other person camping there was a German woman. She and her husband had planned to migrate to
Australia to set up a new business. He had sent her on ahead while he sorted out a few things at home. Weeks turned into months with no sign of him arriving. Then one day she got a call saying he would not be coming to Australia, wanted a divorce, and was marrying someone else. She was up here trying to clear her head and take stock of this bombshell.

  On hearing her story I reacted the way a decent, caring Aussie bloke should: I offered her a beer. She accepted, saying it was her first alcohol in years, as she and her husband were part of the raw food movement. They would not eat any food that had been cooked or processed in any way. There must be something to it as she looked at least ten years younger than she actually was, but she did seem rather fragile, an impression furthered when, after half a glass of beer, she staggered off saying she was a bit dizzy and needed to lie down. She accompanied me on a trek up to Mount Lewis but after an hour or two suddenly became listless and I thought she must have been bored. She replied that no, she was having a good time, but if she didn’t munch on her handfuls of raw vegies every couple of hours she started to pass out.

  John Young didn’t strike me as a raw vegetables kind of guy – perhaps he did chomp down on a few raw vegies but they would probably have been accompanied by a chunk of crocodile that he’d killed with his own hands. Dressed in khaki shorts, shirt and bush hat with an enormous Merv Hughes–style handlebar moustache, John makes Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin seem like a pale impostor. One of the most remarkable naturalists going, John is also one of the biggest personalities. A wildlife tour guide, environmental consultant and natural history filmmaker, he turned up with gear and assistant in tow to do a bit of filming around Kingfisher Park, giving me the chance to finally meet this legendary character. When he found out about my quest his interest was piqued and within minutes he had provided me with loads of information on species I still needed to get, including about five sites for Grey Falcon along the route through the Outback I had just travelled.

  It is rather appropriate that John has such intimate knowledge of such a mythical bird, as he has a mythic quality himself. There are more rumours and stories floating around this guy than anyone else in the entire birding scene. Talk of a dodgy past and run-ins with the authorities abound. Whether these stem from actual incidents or from the fact that people wonder what he must be up to out there in the bush all that time, I don’t know. What I do know is that if you ever need to find a bird, any bird, particularly at its nest, John Young is your man. He has an uncanny knack for reading the country and finding birds and animals in it. You’d expect someone who spends so much time in the bush to be something of an introverted hermit. You’d be wrong. John is a total extrovert. After telling him of my encounter with the Tooth-billed Bowerbird, he just happened to have a leaf of the wild ginger in his truck and he brought it out, taking enormous delight in regaling the women present with a demonstration of the sensual delights of the soft leaf. His laugh is so infectiously raucous I am surprised he gets within cooee of any wildlife.

  The night we went out spotlighting he had set up his camera gear at a feeding station hoping to get some good footage of mammals. His battery ran out ten minutes before the Greater White-tailed Rat, one of the species he had come specifically to film, turned up. Comparing this dip with some of mine over the past few months, we resolved to make a nature documentary entitled ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’, which would feature shots of the perches that rare species had just vacated only moments before.

  By now it was time to head south. The total when I left Julatten was 597 so the big question was what the milestone six hundredth bird would be. In the drier country around Big Mitchell Creek I fairly easily picked up White-browed Robin, an uncommon and much underrated bird, but I dipped out on Black-throated Finch, meaning that the special bird I had lined up as the six hundredth would actually only be 599. That’s if I managed to see it.

  For such an enormous bird (third only in size to its relatives the Ostrich and Emu) the Southern Cassowary is notoriously difficult to see, being remarkably adept at disappearing into its rainforest habitat. And to compound matters, most of its rainforest habitat has been lost to sugar cane fields. There is something romantic about the sugar industry. The fields of green cane glistening in the morning dew are a terribly pretty sight and the image of the cane cutter is right up there with the Man from Snowy River in terms of Australian bush iconography, but man they’re bad news for cassowaries.

  The one area of remnant lowland rainforest that is large enough to support a population of cassowaries lies between the towns of Tully and Mission Beach. Once in the forest zone there are roadside signs everywhere warning motorists to slow down. Not many drivers take heed and an average of four cassowaries a year get wiped out, not a great figure when it is thought only forty adults survive in this part of the world. I tried the walk along Lacey’s Creek hoping to pick up a Pied Monarch as bird number 599 and then a cassowary as 600. I saw neither and moved on to the Licuala Forest where I had never missed on cassowary before. This time I did.

  Looking for cassowary is just that bit more exciting than looking for other birds, not only because of their scarcity and magnificence, but because they are so bloody big. If you come across one unexpectedly in the rainforest, one kick to the guts from those enormously powerful legs with their razor sharp claws and it’s bye-bye bowels. So every rustle in the undergrowth creates an extra frisson of tension. The first time I saw one was back in 1987. I was so intent on watching it wandering along the track toward me as it picked at the ground for fallen fruit that I wasn’t aware how close the bird was getting until it filled the lenses of my binoculars. When I looked up it was only a couple of metres away. I began to back off slowly. The bird followed. The quicker I moved, the quicker the bird, almost as tall as me, would move. In the end I was running backwards as fast as I possibly could and the bird just kept coming. It didn’t seem aggressively predisposed but I wasn’t keen to confirm this and I was particularly relieved when it ran off the track and into the forest. There were no such hair-raising incidents this time, and after unsuccessfully searching the tracks I headed back to the car to reconsider my options. There at the carpark was a male cassowary and his half-grown stripy chick wandering down the entrance road. Bird number 599 under the belt.

  At the mangroves near the town of Cardwell I found bird number 600, a Mangrove Robin, a cute enough little black and white bird, but no Cassowary. Having clocked 600, and with nobody else around, I cut loose and did a little dance around the mangroves. It was not only a dance of joy but one of vindication, for no matter how I did for the rest of the year, I’d at least made it to this stage. It had taken me twenty-two years to see my first 600 birds in Australia; this year I had reached that tally in just 252 days. Very few people had achieved this in their lifetime, let alone a year, so I afforded myself a moment of feeling satisfied. I only needed thirty-four to break the record and a hundred more for my real goal.

  I got back in the car and started the long drive south. I was still pumped but the longer I drove the more it hit home that I didn’t have anyone close enough to share the excitement of the moment. As the beautiful green exuberance of the tropics flashed by, I was reminded that when you choose to follow a lone path, you end up alone.

  But still I’d seen 600 birds in a little over nine months. That’s all that really matters isn’t it? Isn’t it?

  CHAPTER 24

  16 September, Lamington National Park, Queensland:

  608 species

  Rolling south now, target Tasmania, and the end of my first lap of the continent. As I headed down the east coast it was a matter of picking off the few remaining species I needed. I got Eastern Grass Owl at the Tyto Wetlands on the outskirts of Ingham, courtesy of a John Young tip-off. I arrived at dusk and walked the fifteen minutes to the viewing platform overlooking the area’s swampy grasslands in the dark. When I got to the observation deck I was greeted by a glum British twitcher who had been waiting forlornly for over an hour for one
of the owls to pop up from the thick grass.

  With the typical moroseness of a dipping twitcher he turned to me, looking cynically at my spotlight, and said, ‘I don’t like your chances, mate.’ I replied nonchalantly, ‘We’ll see about that.’ On went the spotlight and in one of those brilliantly serendipitous moments the beam pointed directly at an Eastern Grass Owl in flight. The Brit was gobsmacked. That’s how we do it in this country, mate.

  For a few days my luck seemed to hold. Pied Monarch at Jourama Falls National Park, Cotton Pygmy-goose at Ross River Dam near Townsville, a detour up onto the Eungella Range near Mackay managed to snare me the little-known Eungella Honeyeater and I finally connected with Mangrove Honeyeater on the outskirts of Brisbane. After five solid days of driving I was winding my way in the dark up to the Lamington Plateau on the border of New South Wales. I love long distance driving – the sense of freedom, being out on the open highway as one landscape folds into the next – but the intense concentration involved in keeping two tonnes of machine on the correct part of the road exacts a demanding mental and physical toll. If I have been driving for five or more hours (which I had for five of the past six days) by the end of the day I am quite shattered.

  Arriving at Lamington, one of my favourite places on the planet, would normally have been just the tonic for such exhaustion. The plateau overlooks the high-rise developments of the Gold Coast whose towers from this far away resemble the bones of some beach-washed sea creature bleaching in the sun. Covered in the most wonderful rainforest, and with a surfeit of bubbling creeks, waterfalls and spectacular vistas, Lamington couldn’t be further from the crass, commercial world visible in the hazy distance. Within minutes of entering this heavenly green realm I usually sense a feeling of calm wash over me. But I knew what was in store, and the thought of it merely caused my already tense, exhausted body to clench just a little tighter.