The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  The long distance strategy suggested by the organizers, Richard Baxter and Phil Hansbro, had paid dividends. They had gone out the day before and managed to see both Gould’s and Cook’s Petrel, two birds I would have killed to see. Expectations were high. Within a few minutes we started to see our first seabirds. Many on board were relative novices to pelagic birding and there was much excitement and many questions directed at the experts. I could understand why they kept going to Phil for advice – he is a major seabirder who had far more experience than anyone else on board; an ebullient Geordie, Phil cut his teeth in the hectic world of British twitching in the eighties and early nineties and was rapidly closing in on his ambition to see every pelagic species in the world but what was really surprising was that people were also turning to me for advice. I still felt like I had a lot to learn but I did have a recognisable name amongst the birding community now, so people automatically assumed I knew what I was on about. As I attempted to answer a few identification questions I suddenly realised that all these boat trips were paying off, and I almost felt like I really did know what I was talking about.

  As we headed out one old boy kept wanting advice on the dark birds that were following the boat. They were Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, the most common shearwater along this part of the coast. Phil and I explained to him how to tell them from other shearwaters, such as Sooty and Flesh-footed. Periodically he would ask one of us, ‘Is that a Fleshy-foot?’ It was always a Wedge-tailed and we would explain the differences again. After this had happened about five times he approached me with a twinkle in his eye, pointed to the all-dark shearwater flying past the boat and pronounced confidently, ‘Wedge-tailed Shearwater.’ It was the first Flesh-footed Shearwater of the day. I almost didn’t have the heart to tell him.

  Some of you might be thinking what does it matter what kind of shearwater it was? If he wanted to call it a Wedge-tailed Shearwater – or a Marzipan Nipple-clamp, for that matter – where’s the harm? Well, apart from the innate desire of humans to identify the world around us – the first act Adam carried out according to the Bible was to name all the animals and birds – there is a very good reason for us all to be singing from the same hymnbook: there needs to be a common parlance so that everyone can agree on what they are looking at. A case in point happened just a few minutes later when, at our first stop, Phil called a Buller’s Shearwater. This was the first of this New Zealand species to been seen in Australian waters for the entire year so naturally I was very keen to see it. Unfortunately everyone else was crammed down at the aft of the boat and my view was blocked by about a dozen heads with binoculars clamped to their eyes. For a terrifying minute I couldn’t find it.

  Buller’s Shearwater is probably the most handsome of its family. Most shearwaters are a plain dark colour above; Bullers sport a striking design of grey with a dark ‘M’ pattern across the back. They are pretty distinctive so it was disturbing that I couldn’t get onto it.

  The bloke standing next to me was having similar trouble when suddenly he exclaimed in delight, ‘Ah, there it is, I’ve got it. Buller’s Shearwater.’ I followed the direction of his binoculars as he traced a path around the front of the boat towards our side, but I couldn’t see anything remotely resembling a Buller’s. The guy next to me was oohing and ahhing and saying he’d still got it. I was frantic, almost screaming, ‘I can’t see it, I can’t see it.’

  Phil came over and stood next to me, watching. ‘What can’t you see?’

  ‘The Buller’s!’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It’s over there,’ he said, pointing to a patch of ocean on the port side. I scrambled over from starboard and managed to get onto the Buller’s just as it flew off. What would have been a crippling view turned out to be not much more than a fleeting glimpse. I don’t know what the guy next to me had been calling a Buller’s Shearwater but it certainly wasn’t the same bird I eventually saw.

  The Buller’s was an unexpected and most welcome bonus and the day just got better from there. Well past the shelf break we picked up both Gould’s Petrel and Black-bellied Storm-Petrel, two species I had written off for the year. I wouldn’t have got the Gould’s at all if not for Phil’s hawk-like vigilance. After a thirteen-hour drive the day before I was starting to nod off and most of the others had similarly lost interest in proceedings. Not Phil. His cry of Gould’s Petrel jolted me from my slumber and got me a bonus bird. Back at Phil’s place later that night I mentioned his doggedness in keeping vigil out on the ocean to his girlfriend Nicole, and she rolled her eyes, telling me that when she and the other twitching widows get together she wins the ‘my partner is the more fanatical than your partner’ competition every time. Phil grinned triumphantly. I’m not sure it’s a mantle I’d be happy to accept as there are some extreme freaks out there in the twitching world.

  Not that I’m complaining. He got me two extra species for the year. On my last trip to Tasmania I thought I needed five year ticks to have a chance of seven hundred, and I only picked up two. With the three bonuses off Newcastle I was back in the running. Armed with information from Phil and Richard Baxter I spent the next day trying to run down some of the remaining birds that I needed for this part of the country: Spotted Quail-thrush, Common Koel and Little Bittern. I failed on all of them even though they’d all been seen at the sites I visited only days before.

  The last time I’d been on the Central Coast was for my grandmother’s funeral. I squeezed in a visit to her and my grandfather’s graves. Before you get too impressed by my familial piety, I should probably point out that there was a baser motive for my visit. At the funeral koels constantly called from the bush gully next to the cemetery, so I thought it might be worth a shot this time. No luck. If God did exist, surely my grandparents would have had a word in the big fella’s ear and convinced Him to send over a koel or two. Or perhaps it was proof of eternal life – my grandparents could just as easily have arranged for the koels to keep silent to pay me back for not visiting them sooner.

  Sacrilege aside, this was but another example of how twitching had permeated my everyday world. I remember as a child, before I could read, staring at traffic signs and knowing that once I learnt to read I would never not be able to look at that sign without knowing what it said. (I was a far more profound child than I am an adult.) Birding had become like that for me. It is a language that, once learnt, I have been unable to unlearn. Everywhere I go I am automatically birding in my head whether I am conscious of it or not. Everywhere I go I am tallying up a bird list for that location. I went to a friend’s wedding in the Solomons, held in the grounds of the Honiara Botanic Gardens. In every single photograph of me in the congregation during the outdoor ceremony my head is craned skyward, looking for birds.

  On Lord Howe my birding was anything but subconscious. I did nothing but look at birds. It truly is a magnificent place for wildlife. The tragedy is that it was once so much better. By the end of the nineteenth century hunting pressures from the first settlers and visiting whalers had seen larger birds such as the Lord Howe Swamphen, Parakeet and Pigeon become extinct, but the forests were still alive with a whole suite of smaller birds. Then, on 14 June 1918, the steamer Makambo ran aground just offshore, liberating rats on the hitherto predator-free island. Within five years at least five species of bird had become extinct. Wherever I went on Lord Howe I was haunted by a line from a local naturalist quoted in Ian Hutton’s book on Lord Howe Island, written only two years after the rats’ arrival: ‘the quiet of death reigns where all was melody’.

  My accommodation turned out to be next door to Ian Hutton’s house. Though he was down with a serious flu he was still happy to chat about his beloved island. Ian came to birding a bit differently to most in that he first fell in love with Lord Howe and then with its birds. After many visits he eventually moved here and now knows more about the island’s birds than anyone else. He suggested that I should try the area around Little Island for the one remaining endemic, the Lord Howe Woodhen.

&nbs
p; The story of the woodhen is one outstanding conservation triumph in a plethora of tragedy. Probably too big to be much affected by rats (which are now subject to a major control effort), the wood-hen was hit hard by a number of other factors: mainly hunting for the pot by the early settlers and competition with and destruction by the animals they introduced, including goats, cats and pigs. By the late 1970s fewer than forty birds survived on the inaccessible slopes of Mounts Gower and Lidgbird. A concerted pest eradication effort and captive breeding program have brought the Lord Howe Woodhen back from the brink and it is now estimated around two hundred birds roam the island.

  They even turn up in the main settlement. Indeed, while I was out looking for them at Little Island one wandered out onto the lawn of the lodge where I was staying. It spent half an hour parading in front of Gloria and Leslie, two older birders I had met who were also staying at the lodge. They had decided to take it easy rather than bust a gut going all the way out to Little Beach, and they took great delight in telling me all about it when, all hot and bothered, I got back.

  For the first hour or so it looked like I’d pulled the wrong rein with Little Island. There was simply no sign of the birds. Apparently they are very curious and are attracted by any loud noise, such as the banging together of two rocks. I was clanking rocks together until they crumbled to sand, and not a peep. I began to suspect that the whole rock-banging thing was just a ploy by the locals to create fresh topsoil for the island. I remembered reading an account by an early hunter who attracted the curious birds to their doom with ridiculous ease simply by producing noises the birds had never heard before. I decided to do an experiment to see which modern noise a woodhen who had spent its entire life on a small South Pacific island would never have heard.

  I thought I’d give hip-hop music a try. Sadly, no success with the impromptu rap stylings of MC Doolio. Perhaps another form of music? I tried a bit of James Brown, followed by everything from Monty Python to Kylie, but nothing seemed to work. Apart from Neil Diamond. Not just any part of Neil Diamond, but the bit at the end of the musical intro to ‘Crunchy Granola Suite’ where Neil proclaims, ‘Good Lord!’ As soon as I uttered those words (in the style of Neil Diamond, of course) a pair of woodhens came running. They were ridiculously tame birds so every time I hit them with a ‘Good Lord!’ they would respond with up to ten seconds of shrieking. If you are ever on Lord Howe and woodhens are proving elusive then a bit of ‘Crunchy Granola’ might not go astray.

  No matter how loudly you sang Neil Diamond, the White-bellied Storm-Petrel couldn’t hear it. An easy target for the rats, they only nest on inaccessible offshore islets so the only way to see them is to take a boat out into the deep offshore waters where they feed. As soon as I arrived I’d inquired about getting out on a boat. I’d been given the name of a skipper, Jack Shick, who had a reputation of being birder friendly and would go out in all but the roughest of weather. Instead I had been railroaded by the owner of the lodge I was staying at to join a group going out with another skipper called Bondy two days later. The weather was perfect until, naturally, the day we were meant to go out.

  As I sat forlornly looking out at the angry white caps of the stormy ocean, Bondy came down and joined me briefly to check out conditions. Maybe I learnt something from my Norfolk Island experience; in any case I’d begun to assert myself more, letting nothing get in the way of seeing a new bird. Taking pity on me Bondy swore he would get me out to sea before I left on Saturday.

  To take my mind off things I headed out to Ned’s Beach on the other side of the island to watch the spectacle of the Flesh-footed Shearwaters coming in to their nesting burrows for the evening. This is one of the more dangerous pastimes in the birding world as the birds don’t seem to have any kind of braking mechanism. They just barrel in at great speed and seem to crash-land on the edge of the forest, whereupon they emit a triumphant, chipmunk-like ‘Yippee!’ Several times careening birds missed me by a matter of inches.

  Ian Hutton told me I was not guaranteed Little Shearwater out at sea and promised he would take me out one night to visit the new colony he had recently found, the first Little Shearwaters to breed on the main island since the arrival of the rats: a sure sign that the eradication program was already bringing results. On the designated night he looked dreadful, wracked with flu, but he insisted on taking me out. There are few cars on Lord Howe; everyone gets about on bikes. So in the teeth of a howling gale Ian rose from his deathbed and we cycled into the night across the island. The rain was so thick I lost sight of him as soon as he got ten metres ahead. We arrived at the breeding ground thoroughly sodden but managed to find a couple of adults and a healthy, fat Little Shearwater chick which looked as close to a penguin as anything can get without actually being a penguin. Very cute.

  The next day dawned with slightly improved weather but it was still grim. Bondy assured me we’d get out that afternoon regardless. We gathered at noon. The wind had eased somewhat but the waves beyond the lagoon were still capped with foam. Three people took one look at the conditions and immediately pulled out. Seven of us decided to risk our luck. The only other birder was Leslie; she was spending her retirement travelling the world and, having recently been to Antarctica, these conditions weren’t going to put her off. I was worried about the others though. The aim of the trip was to get out to Ball’s Pyramid, twenty-three kilometres to the south of the main island. Between the two is a deep oceanic trench, a favoured feeding ground of storm-petrels. I needed to get out to this spot for a shot at the bird.

  As soon as we passed out of the lee of the island I could see most of the non-birders starting to turn green. I had taken a pill and felt totally confident about the conditions but I estimated the first person might start chucking in a matter of minutes. If they did so before we got out into deep water, Bondy might feel compelled to bring the boat back in and I’d dip. For the next half-hour I kept a tense vigil, one eye scanning for storm-petrels, the other watching for the first signs of heaving on board. It was a neck and neck race. Right at the halfway point I saw the first of about eight White-bellied Storm-Petrels. Exactly one minute later, the first of the passengers lost their lunch over the side.

  When I left the island the next morning, I looked back from the plane and the sun broke though the clouds shining exactly as it had in my dreams all those years.

  CHAPTER 27

  1 November, Nullarbor Plain, South Australia:

  625 species

  Sighting the Australian landmass as the plane from Lord Howe approached Sydney, I was struck with the daunting reality that in the next few weeks I’d be crossing that vast expanse, and then some. But before I did there were still a couple of birds from the southeast corner of the continent that I hadn’t connected with and I wasn’t going to leave until I did.

  I drove straight to the Capertee Valley for my last ditch attempt at Regent Honeyeater. Heading up over the Blue Mountains, the precipitous range that had hemmed in European settlement for twenty-five years, I encountered the first bushfires for the season. These were not merely prescriptive burn-offs, they were full on, out of control wildfires. In a typical season you might expect a couple of these conflagrations in December or January, but in mid October? After years of below average rainfall the bush was so dry that we were in for one hell of a fire season.

  The drought was responsible for the extreme difficulty I’d had finding Regent Honeyeater throughout the year. The few surviving Regents had had to go even further afield to find sufficient food as the trees failed to blossom in district after district. There were still meant to be a couple of Regents lurking around the Capertee. One or two had even been seen attempting to build a nest but when I arrived the entire area was even drier than it had been only a month earlier. Any tree that had been promising to flower in early September had been chastened by a month of hot, dry weather, joining the wilted throng.

  Even the grasses had failed to seed, meaning there was little food around for my other target specie
s, the Plum-headed Finch. I didn’t even know where to start looking for it. Several times small birds flew up from the side of the road as I drove past but every time I went back to check up on them they always turned out not to be Plum-heads. Towards the late afternoon a group of four birds flew up from a ditch I had driven past half a dozen times already. I almost didn’t stop but, with a sigh of resignation, I turned the car around for another look. Sure enough, four Plum-headed Finches popped their heads up; the only time I’d see this species for the year.

  With only an hour of light left I made my way back down to the bridge over the dry river bed, the last reported place Regent Honeyeater had been seen and the only spot in the entire valley where anything was in flower. Not that it was much, just a bit of mistletoe in some of the streamside River Oaks. In a drought of this magnitude in the past, the Regents would vacate the valley for somewhere within their vast range where there were pockets of habitat that could support at least part of the population. This survival strategy was perfectly suitable when there were vast tracts of Box-Ironbark and other types of woodland available for them to move about in. They were like the touring cars of the bird world. They would move through the country using certain areas as refuelling stops. When one of these filling stations had no fuel available, they would use their extensive knowledge of the network to make their way to the next stop. Today those tracts are just not there and most of the filling stations in the chain are missing. So when their core refuge areas such as the Capertee Valley fail to produce, they have to travel a hell of a long way to the next station, running on empty.

  And by this stage, having been at it since 5 am, I was as stuffed as a Regent Honeyeater. I was out of energy and ideas, the sun was sinking and nothing was calling. I packed up to leave but thought the better of it. I figured I might as well wait another half an hour – I had very little hope of seeing a Regent, but if I was travelling out of the valley in the car I’d have no hope at all. So I just stooged around, soaking in the peace of a bush sunset.