by Sean Dooley
If ever I had a bogey bird it was the Rufous Scrub-bird. An ancient relative of the lyrebird, it is only found in the remnant patches of Antarctic Beech that sit on a few remote mountaintops along the east coast. A link with a prehistoric Gondwanaland past, Antarctic Beech forests are straight out of Lord of the Rings. The massive trunks of these ancient trees are covered in a thick layer of moss that seems to absorb any sound, creating a cathedral-like atmosphere on the forest floor. Out of the dense fern cover that spreads along the ground you half expect to see a few hobbits and dwarves emerge. There was probably as much likelihood of that happening as there was of me seeing a Rufous Scrub-bird.
The nearest suitable habitat is a six-kilometre hike from the campground. It is actually one of the most beautiful paths you could ever walk but having done it so many times before, it took on the proportions of a forced march. On the first day there I bumped into Geoff Walker, who was also birding his way down the coast after completing the second of the Torres Strait cruises. It is theoretically easier to see Rufous Scrub-bird when there is more than one of you: when a singing bird is located one person secretes themselves away somewhere with a good view of the forest floor while the other sneaks around behind the bird and gradually moves it on. For the beater there is no hope whatsoever of seeing the bird, but for the ensconced observer there is a good chance the scrub-bird will dash past. As Geoff and I didn’t even hear so much as a peep from a scrub-bird we were saved the stress and indignity of having to toss to see who would be the beater and who the fortunate observer and after an hour or two Geoff had to head back, leaving me to fruitlessly search for the rest of the day. I remembered talking with Geoff on the first Port Fairy pelagic back in March, when he’d seemed totally flummoxed that I was presumptuous enough to say I was going after seven hundred species for the year.
Later he confessed to me that until that day out on the Lamington track he had not only been sceptical but a little peeved at my attempt, fearing if I did manage to reach seven hundred on my first try it would somehow devalue it for everybody else. But as he left me on the mountain that day feeling quite knackered after his recent birding efforts, his attitude to my quest was turned around. He couldn’t believe I was still out there trying to chase this recalcitrant bird down and thought, ‘If Sean’s going to put that much into it, he’s welcome to the record.’
At that moment I couldn’t quite believe how much effort I was putting in either. Walking out the next morning at dawn my leg muscles were in agony. I was so tired. At least I had better luck – I actually heard a bird calling. I crouched down behind a log and tried to pish it in. Pishing is the process of either sucking in air to make a kissing sound or blowing it out to make a harsh ‘pshh’ noise. These sounds are supposed to emulate young birds in distress and are meant to bring in small birds to investigate whatever the threat is. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t – the only guarantee is that you end up looking like a total nerd. Suffice to say the scrub-bird wasn’t fooled. Though it kept singing only five metres in front of me, the undergrowth was too dense for me to locate it. It didn’t call again for the rest of the day.
Morning three and as I hauled my sorry, aching carcass out along the track I calculated that I would have walked over fifty kilometres for this wretched bird by the time the day was through. The first time I did this trek in the eighties I managed to snub one of Australia’s biggest movie stars. They were filming the TV movie The Riddle of the Stinson starring Jack Thompson. As I was jogging along the track in the pre-dawn I was startled by a nine-foot monster emerging from rainforest. It was actually the sound recordist holding a boom mic to record some ambient birdsong for the movie. We talked for a while as I explained why I was out before dawn. I later had a scrub-bird scurry between my legs as I sat on a log but it went by in such a brown blur that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a marsupial mouse or a low-flying brown meteor.
Trudging dejectedly back to camp I passed the entire film crew heading out to their location. I got sick of saying g’day to the first twenty people and completely ignored the twenty-first, who happened to be Jack Thompson. Immediately behind him was the sound guy so I stopped for a chat to tell him how I’d gone with the bird. At that stage of his career I don’t think Jack was used to being snubbed because he backtracked and introduced himself. Even though he was the most famous person I’d ever met I was too tired to care and Jack slunk off looking quite hurt that I seemed to prefer the sound guy to him. Sorry, Jack, twitching does that to you – turns you into an animal.
On day three I heard a male bird singing. Dispensing with the pishing technique I decided to try and stalk the vocalist. I hit the ferny deck and with careful sloth-like movements began crawling along on my belly toward the singing. For twenty minutes I was down below fern height, among the moss and lichen and leeches, petrified that the bird would stop singing and move off. Eventually I halted, a small clearing just ahead of me as a male Rufous Scrub-bird hopped into view. Oblivious to my presence it continued bouncing along within touching distance, probing in the moss for insects. It was easy to see what an ancient bird this is – no fancy mod cons on this model, just short, stubby wings, plain brown and grey plumage and a basic beak curving simply out of its head. After thirty seconds it was gone, and so was I. I removed myself from the undergrowth and started to dance. I sang and hollered in a victory stomp. At last the bogey was off my back. I couldn’t remember ever feeling that relieved. The long trek back to camp that had seemed like such a chore now felt like a skip through the park.
I was still delirious with relief when I arrived at the New South Wales border further down the range at a place called Natural Bridge. There is a house right on the border that looks like it might have been some sort of customs building. As I pulled out the football to kick it across the border, a bloke in the house peered out in utter incomprehension. He even picked up the phone at one stage, and then thought the better of it. After all, who was he going to call? The police? ‘Ah yeah, g’day, it’s Bert at the customs house. There’s a guy here with binoculars filming himself kicking a football. Better send out the tactical response unit. Maybe the drug squad too.’
Two days later my mood was not quite so festive. I was in the Capertee Valley in central New South Wales, the heart of Regent Honeyeater country, and had not had a sniff. Driving down across the Great Divide from Grafton to Armidale to add the New England race of Forest Raven – in case it ever gets split out as a separate species – I rang David Geering, head of the Regent Honeyeater Recovery Team, hoping he would have a few leads. He told me that if I’d rung a week earlier I could have come out with him to Warwick in Queensland where he banded a few. Having just come from Queensland, that was not welcome news. There had been a couple of reports from the Capertee, the core remnant of their range, but due to the dry conditions nothing much had flowered and they’d been pretty thin on the ground there of late.
After a couple of days searching in extremely windy conditions I could confirm they were very thin on the ground indeed. I saw plenty of good birds, including Square-tailed Kite, Speckled Warbler and Turquoise Parrot but no Regents. And no Plum-headed Finch either. Driving here I had probably passed dozens of Plummy sites but had kept ploughing on, confident I would see them in the Capertee. Wrong.
By this stage it was Thursday and I had to be in Tasmania by Saturday. It looked like I’d have to come back for these two stop-outs another time, which could put a serious dent in my schedule. As the business end of the year rapidly approached I could ill afford to keep missing species that I’d have to come back for a second crack at. Prospects didn’t seem to be improving when the next day I dipped out yet again on Little Bittern on the swamps near Deniliquin, and by mid afternoon I still didn’t have Superb Parrot, the one bird I really needed in the Deniliquin area. To the south of Denny the open plains of the Riverina give way to the largest red gum forest on the planet, centred on the Murray and Edward Rivers. This is the breeding ground of the Superb Parrot and
after hours of fruitless searching it looked like I would have to spend the night here, look for the parrots in the morning and head straight to the airport to catch my plane to Tassie. I noted with dismay that there had been a fair bit of logging activity in the vicinity of a known Superb Parrot hot spot. Perhaps this was why I was having trouble getting onto them. Just as I was about to pull the tent out of the back of the car a pair flew overhead and though I only managed a decent look at the duller female, Superb Parrot was on my list.
All that was left for me to do was to kick the footy from New South Wales into Victoria – no mean feat as to do it I had to kick the ball across the Murray River, seventy or eighty metres wide! Then I remembered that the actual border runs right on the edge of the waterline, so I found a log in the river (New South Wales), jumped over to it and kicked the ball back onto shore (Victoria). Now I could finally head home.
After almost three months I finally got to sleep in my own bed. My housemates were out when I got home and I was asleep when they came in so I didn’t get to see them until breakfast time.
‘Oh, you’re back,’ said a slightly surprised Nancy.
‘Yeah. Gotta go,’ I replied.
‘Where?’
‘Airport. Flying to Hobart. See ya.’ And I was out the door.
‘You know you’re mad,’ Nancy yelled after me.
What was mad was that while I was away Collingwood had had their best season in ten years and had made the finals. Andrew Stafford, who’d just arrived from Brisbane, picked me up at Hobart Airport and instead of going birdwatching we found a pub with a telly so that we could watch the Collingwood–Port Adelaide preliminary final. Andrew is a fellow Collingwood tragic and we spent the afternoon annoying the locals as we whooped and cheered those mighty Magpies to victory. We were in the Grand Final! There was no way I’d be anywhere else but Melbourne the following Saturday.
The omens were looking good. The Pies were in the Granny and the boat trip hadn’t been cancelled despite some ominous looking weather. If it had been called off again, I think I would have slashed my wrists. This was my last chance for Southern Ocean seabirds and I needed as many as I could get. I figured I had about an even money chance of snaring five, and there was always the possibility of something even more spectacular turning up. Without them my goal of seven hundred was all but kaput.
It was a glorious day out at sea, and with twenty-four species of seabird observed everyone agreed that it was a highly successful trip. Except me. I only got two additions to my list. Finally I had a satisfactory view of Antarctic Prion and late in the day a gorgeous Southern Fulmar snuck up alongside the boat. Andrew and Chris Lester managed to see a Blue Petrel barrelling past for the briefest of moments but sadly it didn’t show itself again.
Andrew and I tried to compensate that night by twitching the Masked Owl at the Waterworks Reserve site, only it turned out that Andrew didn’t actually have a ‘site’ as such. When he was last here he just happened to turn his torch on and, as with my Eastern Grass Owl at Ingham, managed to shine it directly at a Masked Owl. We wandered about in the dark with no success until it was time for us to catch our respective planes.
As we took off I could see the snow reflecting the starlight off the surface of Mount Wellington. A little more than a week ago I was in the tropics. A little more than a week ago I thought I had a chance at seven hundred.
CHAPTER 25
28 September, Melbourne Cricket Ground, Victoria:
611 species
After nine months of constant birding, three months of it on the road, I collapsed in a total heap on arriving home. I was exhausted. I was over it.
To make matters worse, I sat down and reassessed my tally. Taking into account all the birds I had dipped out on, including the five crucial species I was counting on seeing during the now-cancelled Ashmore Reef cruise, I wouldn’t even reach seven hundred. Whichever way I looked at it, the maximum total I could reasonably expect to see was 699 species. Mike Carter had been right. Barring a major catastrophe I would easily break the record but the thought of falling short of the magic seven hundred left me in a deep funk.
Not helping things was the fact that the Pies didn’t win the flag. I really thought we had a chance. I managed to get standing room tickets to the Grand Final. We were the underdogs against the Brisbane Lions, a clearly superior team, full of champions. But Grand Final day turned out to be very wet. The rain never let up and the ground was soaked, making skilled football difficult, perfect conditions for us. I’d screamed myself hoarse singing the club theme song even before the first ball was bounced. It was a tight, ferocious, magnificent contest, the greatest game of football of my life. Except for the ending. Going down by nine points when we seemed to have the run of play was shattering.
For weeks I was haunted by the loss. Not only because it brought back a flood of memories of sitting bereft in front of the telly as a kid watching another team whip our sorry butts on Grand Final day, but because I saw a parallel with my own predicament. Being a Collingwood supporter had forged my psyche as much as growing up in Seaford. Barracking for the Pies throughout the seventies and eighties inculcated in me that working class doubt that, no matter how hard you try, no matter how worthy you are, you’ll never really be quite good enough. Like the Pies I felt I could punch above my weight, put in a good effort, but I would always just fail to bring home the prize. It took me a good couple of weeks to rise above the nihilism of it all.
I only went birdwatching twice, once to the old stomping ground at Seaford, where conditions looked favourable for a very good summer, and once to Port Fairy for a pelagic. While down there we heard that an Eastern Grass Owl had turned up nearby and though it wouldn’t be a year tick for me, it would be an addition to my Victorian list. We failed to find it. Similarly, at sea the next day, despite seeing a whole swag of great seabirds in superb conditions, for the first time that year I failed to add a new species on a boat trip. I was feeling about as flat as the muted ocean.
I managed to catch up with friends and family but that only reinforced that once more I was about to head off alone. As much as I enjoy my own company, there is something to be said for having someone to come home to. I was facing almost three months in some of the remotest parts of Australia at the absolutely fiercest, hottest time of the year when I could have been at home in comfort. I didn’t much want to leave again, but, though I’m not sure I exactly understand why, I just knew I had to rev up again to play this thing out. There were less than three months of the year left. It was a race against time, against the heat, the monsoon, great distances, and loneliness. But mainly, it was a race against the birds. Or Jack Lemmon, to see which jalopy can make it to Paris first.
No, hang on, it’s definitely a race against the birds.
CHAPTER 26
17 October, Lord Howe Island:
616 species
Lord Howe Island has always held great allure for me. The image of Mounts Lidgbird and Gower, great rectangular chunks of rock imposing themselves majestically above a lush green island and sparkling blue lagoon, burned in my brain. That it was also chock-a-block with birds only increased its appeal. For years I’d dreamed that one day I would gaze up at those two sentinels rising dramatically out of the ocean and soak in their magnificence.
Finally I was here. But as I sat looking across the lagoon at the mountains, something wasn’t right. The waters weren’t sparkling; they were grey and sullen. All but the base of the mountains was completely enshrouded in dense cloud. The wind whipped off the ocean with ceaseless ferocity, bringing with it squalls of stinging rain. This was not the island paradise of my dreams. This was not the inspiring kick-start to the remainder of the year that I had been counting on.
And it had taken me so long to get to here. I actually thought I would be on Lord Howe around Easter to take advantage of the small window when both the summer and winter breeding seabirds are present, but vagrants such as Hudwits and Laughing Gulls had changed my plans.
The only other time this overlap occurs is around late September–early October, so I sat down to book a flight on the Internet. Fortunately, as I did I happened to notice that a vacancy had opened up on a pelagic off Newcastle to the north of Sydney. Suddenly an opportunity had arisen for me to have one last crack at the East Coast seabirds I’d missed earlier in the year. A quick rearrangement of plans saw me delay Lord Howe by a couple of days, loading up the truck and heading off.
Thirteen hours later I rolled into Swansea where the boat was to set out the next morning. I slept in the car, and dawn broke with unseemly haste. Still groggy I noticed the first of the birders arriving at the dock. I asked one of my fellow passengers if I’d need wet weather gear for the boat. He started to rave about the catering on board and how the sausage rolls were to die for.
‘Sounds good but will I need wet weather gear?’
‘Oh no, it’s a great boat. Really comfortable. I’ve never got wet once,’ he assured me.
So the plastic pants and anorak stayed on dry land.
We boarded the boat and the bloke I’d spoken to immediately made his way up to the sheltered fly deck from where he didn’t move for the whole day. Of course he never got wet as he never set foot outside his dry little cocoon. For me it was another story. The boat was a zippy cabin cruiser used for big game fishing. It went like the clappers, which meant we could get a lot further out from the shelf than a typical pelagic cruise, increasing our chances of turning up something good. But as it was designed for fishing not bird observing, the only place to stand if you wanted a proper view of all the birds was right at the back of the boat, which meant you’d get wet – very, very wet. Within ten minutes I was soaked, and remained that way for the next ten hours.