The Big Twitch

by Sean Dooley

  With a few hours of daylight left, I realised that I had enough time to get to Two Peoples Bay for the last of the skulking triumvirate, the Western Bristlebird. Back in 1987 this was the easiest of the three to find and as I pulled up at the carpark at Little Beach things were looking pretty good. I saw what was probably a bristlebird dive from the top of a bush into the dense coastal heath. It would only be a matter of minutes before another one showed itself.

  Minutes turned to hours and I had nothing. As is often the case with birding, the easy becomes difficult and the difficult easy. Then, just as the sun sank behind the granite hills that surround this most picturesque stretch of coastline, a Western Bristlebird popped back up onto the same bush and I had done it – three of the most infuriatingly hard to see birds in Australia all on the same day. How good did I feel?

  I took a motel room in Albany and planned my next step. In the morning I’d look for Rock Parrot and then, having seen all the southwestern specialties, I’d head north where I’d break the record somewhere in the Pilbara in a few days’ time. I plugged in the laptop to catch up on emails and check out Birding-aus. A Canada Goose had turned up near Sydney.

  I called Mike Carter, who of course had already gone for it and ticked it off. He and most of the Sydney twitchers I subsequently talked to were all of the opinion that it was a genuine wild bird and not some escapee from a collection. They all urged that this was one I should definitely not miss out on. It seemed ridiculous to fly across the country for a bird that I might not even see (it had first been reported a week earlier), but there was something so deliciously perverse about the concept that I couldn’t resist using up the last of my frequent flyer points to go for it.

  No matter where I looked around Albany I simply could not find Rock Parrot. I wasn’t sure if they were all that common around Perth, but that is where I’d now have to look after I got back from Sydney. It would be incredible to miss out on this bird and yet pick up a Canada Goose, a vagrant from New Zealand where English colonists had brought it following its introduction from North America to England in the seventeenth century.

  Driving up to Perth I listened to an emotional Damien Oliver give his speech after just riding the winner of the Melbourne Cup. His brother, also a jockey, had died in a race fall not long before. It got me thinking about all the Melbourne Cups I worked at with my dad over the years. Dad was a bookie and writing down bets for him was the job that got me through my long stint at uni. For most the Melbourne Cup is the racing event of the year. For me it was a total pain. It was crowded, and I spent the day working my butt off while drunken yobbos around me were having a good time. And that was just Dad and my other co-workers – you should have seen the punters! Mainly I hated working at the Cup because it meant I could never take the holiday long weekend to go birding. Ironically, here I was twitching on Melbourne Cup day and would have given anything to be back there working with Dad again.

  I began the next day looking out over the Indian Ocean and ended it facing the Pacific. I had been told that the goose was easy to find – I just had to head down to the river at Shoalhaven Heads and look for the Black Swans. The estuary of the Shoalhaven is particularly huge and I spent the rest of the following day searching it without seeing a single swan, let alone a goose. By five o’clock I was back where I’d started and resigned myself to coming back the next day. I set up the scope one last time and forlornly scanned the estuary. There in the middle, was the Canada Goose swimming about five hundred metres offshore, and not a swan in sight.

  Seeing the goose saved me having to spend the night at Shoalhaven and I made my way back to Sydney where there was a bit of a twitchers’ shindig at a city pub. Who would have thought it, twitchers actually capable of socialising? Oh well, being Sydney they must all have been pumped up on some sort of love drug or something. It’s not natural, I tells ya.

  The next day I was back in Perth and, unexpectedly, two birds closer to the record total, having also seen Common Koel in Sydney. I hadn’t been able to get onto this chook of a bird all year and then on the one day I saw seven. Sometimes I wonder whether the birds have meetings, devising schedules to mess with twitchers’ minds. I now needed just one bird to equal the record, two to break it. I dipped out on Little Bittern at Herdsman Lake, a fantastic wetland just north of the city, and headed for another site, this time a little further north at Joondalup. As soon as I got out of the car I could hear a bittern booming. I saw a dirty big black Tiger Snake in the grass next to me, but the bittern remained hidden. Probably creeping out the neighbours, I hung around until it got dark then, armed with a spotlight and tape player, I headed off into the swamp determined to finally nail this sucker. Come sunset the bird started calling almost continually. Not that it made itself any more obvious.

  There was nothing for it but to enter the murky water and head off into the reed beds to try and get up close and personal. The stinking water got deeper and deeper until it was over the top of my gumboots. Still the bittern boomed. I went in deeper. Eventually the black water reached to that critical point that every male swimmer knows – where your testicles can contract no further. I started playing the tape – bugger the bird’s sensibilities. By this stage, particularly after I’d extracted a two-inch leech from my bleeding leg (God, I hope Tiger Snakes aren’t attracted by blood) I was more than happy to disrupt this bird’s routine – hell, I was tempted to burn the reed bed down. For about an hour there was a bizarre Mexican standoff between me and the bittern. I played the tape. It answered. I could see the top of the reed the bird was on swaying in the moonlight every time it called, and though it was almost within touching distance, still the bird wouldn’t show. Eventually my spotlight battery ran out before the booming bittern did and I retreated to the car defeated.

  The next day up the coast at Lancelin, about as far north as Rock Parrots go, I was standing down by the windswept beach almost being decapitated by kite surfers. Fit, tanned and muscular, the kite surfers looked askance at this figure in mismatching shorts, shirt and stupid hat scanning the offshore island with binoculars, not taking the slightest bit of notice as they primped and preened and struted their stuff. I’ve only got eyes for Rock Parrots, not rock-hard abs. As I arrived a couple of parrots flew across to the island but I couldn’t be sure they weren’t Elegant Parrots. So I waited and scanned, scanned and waited. In calmer weather I would have swum over to the island. I even contemplated hitching a ride with one of the kite surfers. Instead, after a couple of fruitless hours I drove down to a beach south of the town where there is another island just offshore that looked suitable. Here I was able to drive onto the beach and get as close as I dared to the water’s edge. The binoculars revealed nothing. Using the window for stability I peered through my telescope. The first place I looked there was a Rock Parrot sitting unobtrusively on a rock ledge. Bird number 633. I had equalled the record. It was 10 November. Every bird I saw from then on would be the new record.

  Lesser Noddy was next on my list and the only place you can find it in Australia is near its breeding grounds on the Abrolhos Islands, sixty kilometres off the coast of Geraldton. To get there I’d have to find a dive boat, but after ringing around the news was not great: the next boat wasn’t going out for another two days and would be spending two full days out at the islands. There used to be a hydroplane that would land in the lagoon next to one of the breeding islands. I gave them a call and they told me they’d taken the skis off the plane and didn’t do those trips anymore. They were happy to fly me out to the island though with no airstrip we wouldn’t be able to land.

  In a normal year the wet season doesn’t really kick in until December but it can start as early as November – if it kicked in before I got up north it would cut off access to several species of birds and I’d have blown the whole timing of my run. I simply couldn’t afford four days to look for the Lesser Noddy so I forked out the money for a flight and on the morning of 12 November we took off in a light plane from Geraldton Airport.
Half an hour later the green lagoons of the Abrolhos loomed out of the deep blue of the ocean and we set a course for the cay where the Lesser Noddies breed.

  I instructed the pilot to circle the island rather than fly over it – the last thing I wanted to do was disturb the birds from their nests. Very quickly I found that when we circled low enough to get a close view we were travelling too fast for the birds to remain in view for long enough. When we swept higher the view was steadier but the birds were too far off to adequately identify. Finding a happy medium was extremely difficult. I opened the window and was kind of half hanging out of it as we circled a few more times. I almost had enough on the birds – a dark, almost black body colour contrasting with a strong white cap, fine, delicate wings; the fact that I knew this was the Lesser Noddy colony below me – but not quite enough to prove I wasn’t looking at the similar, larger Black Noddy. Then I saw a group of four Common Noddies. They looked bulky and massive, approaching twice the size of the other birds. There was no way a Black Noddy could have looked that small in comparison. Lesser Noddy, bird number 634. The record is mine.

  The pilot congratulated me and as we swung back to the mainland I finally started to get a sense of real satisfaction. Crossing over the coastline the mix of cooler sea air and the warm mass coming off the dry, hot continent created a band of turbulence that sent my head crashing into the ceiling of the plane. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘I live to hold the record for a full half an hour.’ We landed without mishap and I allowed myself to pump the air in triumph, making a goal signal like an AFL umpire and breathing a huge sigh of relief. In the grand scheme of things it was only a pointless, trivial record but geez I was glad to have done it.

  But it was not over yet.

  CHAPTER 29

  16 November, Broome, Western Australia:

  638 species

  I sat in my car at Geraldton Airport, watching the pilot move the plane back into the hangar, and considered my options. It was 12 November, with fifty days remaining till the end of the year. Ahead lay the entire sweep of northern Australia: the Pilbara, the Kimberley, the Top End, Cape York – some of the toughest and most remote roads in the country at the hottest, most dangerous time of year. It was going to be lonely. There was no guarantee I wouldn’t be cut off by cyclones. My money was starting to run short. Maybe if I got back to Melbourne I’d be able to give a certain woman a ring and see if we had a future. To call it quits now was no disgrace; I had the record, after all. I started the engine and pulled out of the airfield. The next intersection would dictate my life’s path: turn right towards Perth and I’d be home in a week; turn left towards the furnace of an Outback summer and I wouldn’t see Melbourne until the New Year.

  I planted my foot down and headed into the blazing interior. Hitting the mulga belt near Mount Magnet for the second time that year I was struck by the difference the heat made. Back in June it was quite pleasant to be out in the scrub in the middle of the day. Now even the Emus were doing it tough, and at every stop the bush was deathly silent. I set up camp in The Granites just north of Mount Magnet, having failed yet again to find the Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush. This, the Chiming Wedgebill and Spinifexbird were the last three species found in the southern half of Australia that I had yet to tick off and I was determined not to leave this part of the country until I’d nailed them all.

  It was a warm night and I took advantage of this to sleep out naked under the stars. The further north I headed the further into mosquito country I’d go, so I savoured the moment. Staring up at the incandescent Milky Way, sucking back an ice-cold stubbie courtesy of the car fridge I picked up in Perth, life seemed pretty good.

  Next morning I was greeted by a dawn chorus of deafening silence. Barely a bird and definitely none of my target species greeted the morning so I cut my losses and headed north through the staggeringly vast emptiness of the Outback. This was still marginal pastoral country so every ten or so kilometres I whizzed past a startled bunch of raggedy sheep that kicked up little clouds of red dust as they scrambled away into the scrub. It was hard to believe anybody could make a living out here, yet in each remote town magnificent civic buildings and private residences stand, though often empty – evidence of a more optimistic time when it was thought that human endeavour could conquer all.

  Just outside Cue, one such creaking, dusty town, I headed into the desolate scrub to search for the quail-thrush. This is one of Frank O’Connor’s favoured sites for this bird but after an hour kicking my way across the stony ground I was beginning to have my doubts. It wasn’t yet seven in the morning and already the plains were heating up. A brisk hot wind carried away any of the thin peeps the quail-thrush might have been making. Things were not looking promising. But then I spied movement a hundred metres ahead of me and cautiously approached. Expecting a lizard or a rabbit, I was amazed to see a female Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush huddling beneath a small acacia. Finally, after all those days in western Queensland, this last of the quail-thrush, those surprising little jewels of birds, was accounted for.

  And that turned out to be the birding highlight of the day. Enormous distances were driven. A lot of dry country rushed past the window, every stop hotter than the last, each with fewer and fewer birds. Nowhere could I find a Chiming Wedgebill. They were meant to be all through this country, but not wherever I stopped.

  The other species I was after was the Spinifexbird. This is the little bastard of a thing that had me scrambling up every spiky, spinifex-covered ridge within two hundred kilometres of Alice Springs for no reward other than an improved fitness level and thighs as hard as roadhouse pasties. Rolling into the mining town of Newman about an hour before dusk, having been on the road for twelve hours, I was finally back in Spinifexbird habitat. Behind the caravan park was a spinifex-covered ridge that looked promising. Within minutes a medium-sized brownish bird with a distinctly longish tail hopped up onto a distant bush and started singing. This had to be Spinifexbird. I continued tracking it as the light began to fade until eventually I got close enough to identify it not as a Spinifexbird but the Pilbara race of Striated Grasswren. While happy to see it – this is a seriously cute bird, a distinct race that few birders have caught up with and which might one day be split out to a full species – it was still not a Spinifexbird.

  By this time it was almost dark and I trudged back to my car disconsolate and tired. I was out before dawn again the next morning and finally, after just fifteen minutes, I was within touching distance of a Spinifexbird. After all the anguish I’d suffered, this bird seemed ridiculously obliging. I wished the same could have been said for the wedgebill. As I trundled on through the Pilbara I was almost oblivious to its harsh beauty, focused as I was on this one stupid plain brown bird.

  I came out the other side of the Pilbara near Whittenoom, site of one of Australia’s most shameful industrial tragedies. The town was established for the workers at the asbestos mine in the nearby Whittenoom Gorge. No-one from the company told the miners or their families that the dust being carried from the mine on the scorching wind was laden with blue asbestos fibres that would lodge in their lungs and, years later, leave them dying an unspeakably horrific death from asbestosis and mesothelioma. The mine is now closed, yet a handful of people obstinately cling on. They said that since the cleanup there was no longer a health threat but I found the place creepy nonetheless. There is always a sadness associated with ghost towns, but at Whittenoom it resonates far more ominously, and I felt compelled to get out of there.

  This feeling of doom was compounded when I checked my references at Whittenoom and realised that I had actually driven out of the territory of the Chiming Wedgebill. If I wanted to see the bird I would either have to backtrack through country where I’d already dipped, or head to the west and then south again, a detour that would cost me hundreds of kilometres. This was the last bird I needed from the southern half of Australia. I could easily have forgetten about it and headed north, where a whole swag of tropical species await
ed, but I just couldn’t let this one go. To miss out on a clean sweep felt like a failure, so I was determined to complete the set.

  Another entire day driving. It is absolutely impressive, stark country out here, made more so by the spectacular storm that swept in. One minute I was driving through a searing, parched landscape that looked like it had never seen rain, the next I was in the midst of a blinding torrential downpour that brought roos and Perenties (lizards second only in size to the Komodo Dragon) out onto the road for a drink, and I had to swerve all over the place to avoid colliding with them. I made my way back down through the Pilbara, past the stunning, twisted rock formations of the Hammersley Gorge, past the sweltering iron ore town of Tom Price and hit the coast at Onslow, a mere five hundred kilometres in the wrong direction.

  Onslow is the cyclone capital of Australia. It has been knocked down more times than the narrator of that Chumbawamba song but like those idiots in Hurricane Alley in the US Midwest, people keep rebuilding. Tonight all was calm and the sunset over the Indian Ocean idyllic, but I couldn’t really enjoy it, afflicted as I was with the agitation of wedgebill fever. The references I had said that Onslow is the northern extremity of its range but the habitat didn’t quite look right – too flat and open for my liking. This was borne out the next morning when, again rising before dawn, I searched the surrounding country with no luck. There was nothing for it but to head south.