by Sean Dooley
I wandered back down to the bridge and as I did a largish hon-eyeater flew up into the top of a lone tree in the paddock to have a good look around. Without much expectation I put my bins up to it and there was a Regent Honeyeater. At a casual glance the Regent Honeyeater appears rather ugly – predominantly scaly black and white markings with a pink, warty face. It is an aggressive little mongrel, constantly interrupting its feeding to chase away any other bird that dares go within a sniff of its feeding tree. Not much to recommend it, really. But then it opens its wings and what has been just a hint of yellow explodes into a glorious display of rich gold, particularly striking in this instance where its luminescence was highlighted by the glowing rays of the setting sun. Like so much of Australia’s wildlife, it is stunningly beautiful once you look beyond a seemingly drab exterior.
As with the Rufous Scrub-bird I was ecstatic but it was a poignant joy. After the bird flew off I stood on the bridge looking along the river in the enveloping darkness contemplating the fate of this quintessentially Australian species. How long will its call continue to ring through this valley? If I was to do another Big Twitch in thirty years time (I think it will take me that long to recover from this one) Regent Honeyeater would be the bird I would most expect to no longer exist in the wild. I could be wrong. There is a massive effort being undertaken to help this species recover but I wonder if it is a case of too little too late. Perhaps it is the pessimism borne of spending an entire day out in the parched landscape, but as I turned back to the car I realised twilight had merged into night and I was astonished to find that I was crying. As I said, it had been a very long day.
And it was but the first of many such long days. Following a tip-off from Sydney birder Dion Hobcroft I altered my course by a couple of hundred kilometres to pick up Black Honeyeater near West Wyalong. Having travelled through Central Australia I should already have seen this desert species but the drought had so disrupted the normal patterns that nothing was certain anymore. I made my way back down to the Chiltern area where Barry Trail had recently seen Spotted Quail-thrush. BJ was celebrating the declaration of the new national parks after years of campaigning and had treated himself to a three-day bushwalk through the Barambogie Ranges, soon to be combined with the Chiltern Box-Ironbark National Park. That’s how environmentalists celebrate for fun – deprive themselves of creature comforts.
BJ cautioned that in three days of walking this was the only pair he had seen. Undeterred I headed up into the range and at the first likely patch of suitable woodland with a tussocky understorey I pulled up and within ten minutes had located a pair showing very well indeed. After dipping on this bird all year I seemed to get them with ridiculous ease. I earmarked this spot for future reference but it didn’t do me much good as three months later this site was completely obliterated in the devastating bushfires that engulfed much of this part of the world.
I returned home for a couple of days to refresh my supplies and prepare for my final onslaught. Nancy was away and when she returned I was just about to leave.
She seemed slightly taken aback: ‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you, I guess.’ By the time I got back in the New Year, Nancy had bought a house of her own and moved out. Even though we shared a house for almost a year I can’t recall having had more than a dozen conversations with her.
I took the coastal route out of Victoria, managing to dip on Little Bittern at Cranbourne, Masked Owl at Lorne, Cape Gannet at Portland and Sanderling at several coastal sites. Not a promising start.
Once I reached South Australia I headed inland in order to seek the only two birds in all of southeastern Australia I still needed. The first of these, Red-lored Whistler, I was rather surprised to pick up at Comet Bore in Ngarkat Conservation Park. This site used to be a great spot for Red-loreds but a major fire went through a few years ago destroying most of the suitable habitat. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but it made a convenient camping site. While on a walk the next morning I found what looked like a patch of old growth habitat – perhaps somewhere the fires had missed – and to my astonishment saw a female Red-lored Whistler accompanied by an immature. A couple of weeks later the area was again destroyed by fire.
The other bird I needed was Malleefowl. After failing to find it at what I was assured to be a ‘dead cert’ site at Pooginook Conservation Park I was thinking of heading out to Gluepot for the third time and not moving until one of the bloody birds showed up. Then I heard of a place called Eromophila Park, a working wheat farm that had retained substantial patches of mallee. Stella Mack, the amazing woman who runs the property has been throwing grain to the local Malleefowls for over thirty years and they have become quite tame. At one point she had up to seven birds coming in for a feed and there were as many as seventeen of these rare birds in the general area. Many of the surrounding properties, however, cleared their mallee blocks to make way for more wheat paddocks and the Malleefowl have nearly all died off. Currently in the grip of drought, those cleared paddocks stand denuded of cover, their precious topsoil lying heaped against the roadside fence-lines whilst the Eromophila Park, with much of its original vegetation still intact, seems to be in much better shape.
Now in her seventies, Stella took me out the next morning to meet her favourite pair of Malleefowl. They were working on their nesting mound and approached her like domestic chooks for a handout. Normally these birds are extremely cagey but here they went about their business totally oblivious to our presence. At one point the male bird started displaying to the hen. He raised a small crest on his head (I had no idea they even possessed a crest), stuck his head between his legs and made a deep, resonant booming sound. Very impressive. I must remember that move.
And that was it for the southeast. After three hundred days I had seen everything I wanted in this corner of the country. Anything I’d missed I could see further west or north, so that’s where I was headed. It’s all part of Australia but in so many ways it is a different country altogether. For starters the next town is rarely less than a hundred kilometres away and at that time of year there is substantially less traffic on the road. It is too hot. Many tourist places close down, especially up north where there is no business over the monsoon season. The locals try to keep out of the heat or find reasons to do business down south in the cities. It is truly a lonely road.
Especially at places like the Birdsville Track. No-one wants to be out there at this time of year, not even me. But after consulting Dave Harper on my way through Adelaide (where one of his daughters gave up their bed for me to sleep in – stealing a child’s bed, how low can this twitcher go?) I decided it was worth the 1200-kilometre detour to the start of the Birdsville as he had seen Inland Dotterel there after we had gone our separate ways back in August. It was a long way to go for a long shot but the only other site I had was out on the Nullarbor and if I missed it there it was seriously unlikely I would fluke across it anywhere else.
I arrived at the dusty outpost of Marree at the start of the Birdsville Track right on dark. As I was heading into the pub for a meal a bunch of women called raucously from the balcony of the old brick hotel, insisting I come up and have a drink with them. I felt like John Wayne rolling into some town in the Old West, but instead of showgirls with a heart of gold these ladies turned out to be a Kiwi nurse and her aunties…with hearts of gold. The niece had been working in an Outback hospital further north and was heading home to New Zealand. Her aunties, who lived in Australia, had decided they would go up and drive her down to Adelaide, giving them all a holiday.
They certainly were festive and within seconds had thrust a cold beer into my hand. When I told them what I was up to they thought I was pulling their leg. I had come all this way to look for just one bird? No, there had to be another reason. Perhaps I was on the run from the law. I had to bring up my bird books and spotlight to show them I seriously was going to head out onto the Birdsville Track to spotlight for the dotterel. They asked me where I planned to spend the night. Out on the
track, most likely. They wouldn’t stand for it and the niece kindly offered for me to sleep in her room. I graciously declined but they were very insistent. As I finally dragged myself away, one of the aunties took hold of my arm and said, nodding knowingly, ‘You really should stay the night here with my niece. Look at her, you’d be mad not to.’ I laughed it off and left them to their merriment.
I drove along the Birdsville for about an hour, unsuccessfully scanning the gibber plains for any signs of life. I was quite exhausted and pulled over by a creek to sleep for the night. As I was laying my sleeping bag out in the back seat of the car I thought, ‘What are you doing, Dooley? You’ve had an offer to spend the night with a buxom nurse. It would be discourteous to turn down her hospitality.’
I arrived back in Marree and the party on the balcony had broken up. I snuck up to the nurse’s room and knocked. I could hear her snoring. I knocked louder. She stirred. As I stood there waiting for her to get to the door, the manager of the pub came up the stairs.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, I’m just visiting my friend,’ I stammered. ‘She asked me to come up.’
Thankfully the door opens and there was my saviour, my refuge. She looked at me blearily and said, ‘Who are you?’
Two evenings later I was out on the Nullarbor Plain looking for Inland Dotterel. This is extraordinary country. Totally flat for hundreds of miles, no stick of vegetation rising taller than knee height. I doubt there is anywhere else in the world where you can be in such an open space – even the remotest ocean has waves with their peaks and troughs. It is an astonishing place, made all the more so by the fact that creatures actually thrive here. The only other time I’d been here was driving back from Perth with Groober in 1987. With us was one of my mate’s mates who needed a ride back to Melbourne. We were trying to do the run nonstop in two days.
About the only place we did stop was out here in order to see the Nullarbor race of the Cinnamon Quail-thrush, which back then was considered a full species. Arriving a couple of hours before dark Groober and I raced out across the heat of the plain trying to track them down, leaving the mate’s mate to cool his heels in the car. Once it got too dark to see we returned hot and dejected only to find the mate’s mate asking about a bird that he’d seen feeding around the car. The description he gave fitted the Nullarbor Quail-thrush perfectly. They still haven’t found his body.
This time round I did see the quail-thrush, now that it didn’t count as a full species. Typical. I stopped to look for it anyway as maybe one day it would be split out again and I could add it to the official Big Twitch list. As I got out of the car I was greeted with a blast of furnace-like air so fierce that it seared the soft membranes inside my nose, and every morning for the rest of the year I woke up to find my nose clogged with dried blood.
As I headed further into the Nullarbor a massive thunderstorm hit. I later heard on the radio that scientists estimate lightning struck the ground in South Australia two hundred thousand times that day. I don’t know how they worked that out but it felt like half those strikes were around me. In those conditions sitting in a metal box in the middle of a vast plain where nothing else around you for miles is taller than a few inches is not exactly my idea of fun. Later someone told me about the Faraday Cage, a physics principle that claims you won’t be struck by lighting if you are in a moving vehicle. That reassurance would have come in handy at the time and by the time I made it to the tiny railway siding of Cook on the Trans-Australian Railway, I was quite rattled.
Cook was once home to quite a community of railway fettlers but today all the labour is brought in from further afield and Cook has become a virtual ghost town. I saw out the storm with a bunch of railway workers waiting for their changeover with the Western Australian crew. They’d been waiting a long time as the wind had blown live wires across the carriages of the goods train they were supposed to be crewing. We chatted for a couple of hours and I gained a little insight into this fascinating world. I felt like I’d been cast back into a Charles Chauvel film of the 1940s.
The front eventually passed and I tentatively headed out onto the plain once more. In all that time not a drop of rain had fallen. And not an Inland Dotterel was to be found either, even out at the airstrip where they are supposedly relatively easy to see. I was, however, treated to the most extraordinary sunset, not just for the intensity of colours but because there is nothing to interrupt the panorama. The sense of scale was unrivalled by anything I had seen before.
Not having seen even a hint of an Inland Dotterel on the drive in, heading back the hundred kilometres to Highway One at night my biggest problem was not running them over. I almost hit at least twenty. They must have all been there as I barrelled past, yet not one of the buggers had deigned to show itself. Now they were everywhere. By the time I reached the bitumen I’d quite had my fill of this bird I had been yearning to see for so long. I pulled off the road, trying to keep out of sight of any passing psychopath cruising the highway looking for fresh meat – not an easy task when there is no vegetation to obscure your vehicle. In the end I didn’t care because I was absolutely buggered. Two and a half thousand kilometres in three days. Tomorrow I’d have to do it all again. Oh God.
CHAPTER 28
7 November, Shoalhaven Heads, New South Wales:
632 species
When you hit the Western Australia border after crossing the Nullarbor Plain, there are still another 1400 kilometres to go before you reach the outskirts of Perth. That’s why Esperance, the first major town you hit if you choose the coastal route, seems like such a great little town. After thirteen and a half hours of driving – with virtually no stopping – it felt like heaven to me. Well, I did make one exception and stopped at the border to kick the footy across. With the difference in time zones I was able to defy the laws of physics and kick the ball two and a half hours into the past, when I booted it into Western Australia, then two and a half hours into the future, by kicking it back into South Australia. Spooky but true.
Equally spooky was my arrival in Esperance. It was the Dick Smith at Innamincka scenario all over again as I drove into town to be greeted by the shenanigans of the local ‘Festival of the Winds’ carnival. After days spent alone I was now surrounded by throngs of families and platoons of street performers. Seeking refuge I entered the pub to book a room and was greeted by a giant mascot that looked for all the world like the Capital City Goofball from the Simpsons. I’m sure all those people were having a great time, but they were freaking me out.
By the next night things were back to normal and I was sleeping in the car alone once again, this time camped in the backyard of the ranger’s residence at the Fitzgerald River National Park. On the Perth pelagic back in June, Peter Wilkins, one of the park’s rangers, had told me that he sees Western Whipbirds virtually from his kitchen window and that if ever I was coming through, I should drop by and check them out. Foolish words, really. Wisely Peter and his family had gone to a cricket club function in Jerramungup, the nearest town. Arriving at his place just before sunset I searched the scrub for the whipbird, hearing one distantly but not getting anywhere near it. By the time the Wilkins family returned from Jerramungup I was bedded down and, only half awake, could hear kids saying, ‘Daddy, there’s a man asleep in our backyard.’ Or maybe I dreamt it. Next morning I was up at dawn which, due to the recalcitrance of the Sandgropers, who refuse to move to daylight savings, meant that was around four thirty. After a couple of hours’ searching in the scrub I’d still had no luck and Peter took pity on me. Though quite hungover he chipped in to try and get me the bird.
There is a bit of a trick to seeing Western Whipbird. Not only are they very reluctant to show themselves, preferring to remain hidden in the densest scrub, they only call on average once every half-hour or so. This can make for a hell of a time trying to track one down. The key to success, Peter assured me, is to not pussyfoot around but move as quickly and quietly whe
n you hear the bird start to call. While it calls it is less likely to hear you approach and you may have a chance. We tried this a couple of times with no luck whatsoever, partly because whipbirds are notoriously ventriloquial and we could never agree on where the call was coming from.
Eventually we got onto a male calling halfway up a small mallee tree. In the books this bird looks particularly drab, a kind of dull olive. In the flesh I think it looks damn sexy, though I may be biased, having wanted to see this bird for fifteen years. As it called we could see why it is so difficult to pinpoint. When it turned its head even slightly to one side, the call seemed to be thrown metres away in the direction it was looking. Mission accomplished, I left Peter to nurse his hangover and moved further along the coast.
En route I finally managed to get onto a White-winged Triller, ten months after first hearing one back at Chiltern. I was filled with as much relief over this relatively common species as I had been over the whipbird because if I had failed to see the triller this year I would never be able to show my face at the bird club ever again. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing…
The Noisy Scrub-bird is reputedly even harder to see than its Rufous counterpart. Thought to be extinct within a couple of decades of its discovery by John Gilbert in the 1840s, it wasn’t until 1961 that it was confirmed to still exist. At that time Two Peoples Bay, the only site on which it had survived, was earmarked for a township and a concerted campaign was undertaken to protect the area. One of the scrub-birds’ greatest supporters was Prince Philip. There is a plaque at Two Peoples commemorating his visit to the site a few years later, though it turns out he dipped on seeing the bird. I guess I am a bit of a republican at heart but I would love to be introduced to the Prince just to be able to grip him off about seeing the Noisy Scrub-bird. It did take me an hour crawling around in the undergrowth, not at Two Peoples Bay but at Cheynes Beach, where there is a translocated population, but I did see it. The Noisy Scrub-bird is aptly named because its main call of several sweet notes is ear-piercingly loud. For twenty minutes it called within five metres of me but the scrub was so dense and the bird so wily I couldn’t see it, even though it felt like my ears were bleeding. Eventually it popped up onto a branch just above my head and stared at me with its head cocked for a full five seconds, as if to say, ‘Are you happy now?’ Then it was gone. Take that, Prince Philip.