by Sean Dooley
The first time I came through Mount Isa was on a hellish fifty-hour Greyhound bus ride from Townsville to Alice Springs during which I was seated opposite the toilet. We had a dinner break at a pub in Mount Isa. A fight broke out amongst some white mine workers and Aboriginal stockmen. One bloke smashed a pool cue on another bloke’s head. I couldn’t wait to get out of the joint. Now, fifteen years on, I still felt the same way about the place. I filled up with expensive juice at another servo and headed back out to the Carpentarian site.
Next morning I was defeated yet again by a grasswren. Attempting to compensate with the Kalkadoon, I headed out to Mica Creek once more. This time there were no motorbikes but there were also no Kalkadoons. Eventually I climbed to the top of a spinifex-covered mountain, scrambling across the steep, boulder strewn ridges like a rock wallaby. Right at the top – when I was about at the end of my tether – a Kalkadoon Grasswren hopped out onto a nearby boulder, gave a smirk as it checked me out and hopped away again.
I was free to move on. I looked towards my car in the valley below. I figured the quickest way down was not to backtrack along the tortuous path I’d taken coming up, but to head straight down the steeper slope direct to my car. This plan was working well until I jumped onto a massive boulder that broke loose and started to slide down the slope, carrying me with it. I jumped onto another boulder that also dislodged, and again I was rapidly descending – headfirst this time – towards the sharp rocks below. Pulling a manoeuvre that would have done an Olympic gymnast proud, I somehow managed to do a mid-air 180-degree spin and grab onto the side of the mountain, halting my downward momentum. In doing so I plunged my hands directly into the spikes of a spinifex clump. Days later I was still removing spines.
Before heading to the coast I thought I’d continue the misery by having one last try for Grey Falcon. John Young had seen them at Bladensburg National Park, not far from the Outback town of Winton. It would only add about four hours to the trip so I decided it was worth a shot.
I arrived an hour or so before sunset, which John had assured me is the best time to search as the Grey Falcons make a sweep of the waterholes trying to snatch an unsuspecting bird that has come in to drink. There hadn’t been a drop of rain since January, though, and the whole area was totally parched. The ranger told me that only one waterhole in the entire park still had any water so that was where I’d be searching. If I could get away from the ranger, that is. The last visitor must have come around the same time as the last rain, and with his family seven hundred kilometres away on the coast, man, was this bloke eager for a chinwag.
I should have stayed chatting. The waterhole was just a sludgy brown puddle, and apart from a couple of very cautious Common Bronzewings there was hardly a bird to be seen. That was it. I was done with Grey Falcon. I was done with grasswrens. I was done with the deserts. All that was left was the sweltering tropical rainforests of North Queensland in the wet. Bring it on.
CHAPTER 34
20 December, The Green House, Iron Range, Queensland:
693 species
Once the wet kicks in up north, you can be stranded for months waiting for swollen rivers to subside to a crossable depth, but visiting Cape York at this time of year was unavoidable for me, as the wet season is the only time of year that the Red-bellied Pitta and Black-winged Monarch are present, spending the rest of their time in New Guinea. All along I had factored in the early arrival of the wet and had been planning to fly into and out of Iron Range. Given the heat it would involve an arduous ten-kilometre hike from the Lockhart River airstrip to the camping area, but I was resigned to doing it. There seemed to be no other way.
I thought I had it all worked out but then I hadn’t factored in the cost. By the time I arrived in Townsville on the 16th and checked my finances, I realised that my budget had almost dissipated. I didn’t have to worry too much, though, as to my amazement the comedy pilot I helped write early in the year had been commissioned by Channel Nine. I had to be back in Melbourne to start work on 6 January. If I had stayed in Melbourne that year I probably wouldn’t have picked up an extra day’s work, yet on my return I’d be walking straight into a job that should last a minimum of four months. With that financial buffer I was able to extend my credit card limit by another couple of thousand to cover the flight. Everything seemed to be falling into place perfectly. That had to be a worry.
Remembering that David Harper and his family were in the area for Christmas holidays I gave him a ring. When I told him I was in Townsville, he replied, ‘Well I’m at Townsville Common looking at an Oriental Cuckoo as we speak. Do you still need that?’
Did I ever. I raced across town and was standing beside Dave less than fifteen minutes later. The cuckoo, of course, had gone. We headed out there again the next morning and managed not to see it. During our search we bumped into a local birder, Steve Guerrato, who told us there had been a few hanging around Anderson Park in the middle of Townsville. This was like coming home for me as my cousins used to live just around the corner. I saw many of my first tropical birds in these very tame looking gardens. My first ever Great Bowerbird and its bower were still in the same position after twenty years. The entrance to the bower, two avenues of sticks, was festooned with white shells and shards of green glass while the side wall was decorated with the blood red of plastic Coke bottle tops. A feature wall! Even bowerbirds seemed to be watching home renovation shows. A little further on we found a loose group of Oriental Cuckoos. I’d never managed to see this species in more than twenty years of birding, and now I was seeing nine in one shot.
By the time I arrived in Cairns I was all set to book my flight. Then it occurred to me that every local I’d met bemoaned the lack of rain and how, for the second year in a row, the wet might fail. I made a few calls to Cape York and everyone I spoke to said their part of the track was perfectly drivable – in fact all roads were still open. If I drove I’d save hundreds of dollars and could follow my own timetable. Of course if the monsoon kicked in I could be stranded until April. I decided stuff it – it’s splash through or splash.
Despite yet another flat tyre before I had even left the bitumen, I arrived at Iron Range safely. There had been virtually no rain and the creeks were lower than they had been at the height of the dry season. I managed to lock onto a Black-winged Monarch and Green-backed Honeyeater fairly easily, but there was no sign of the pittas. Perhaps they hadn’t left their base in New Guinea yet. By walking into the forest with my spotlight that night I was able to track down one of the many Marbled Frogmouths that had been calling frustratingly out of sight. I only needed four more species and I could head back south.
The next day I dropped in on Steve Murphy, whom I’d met back in September. Gathered at his hut were three other PhD students studying various forest creatures. The hut was pretty rudimentary but it did have a generator to run a fridge large enough to keep their home brew cold. In such oppressive heat that is all you need and I welcomed his offer to share a few. We sat on the verandah looking out over to the adjacent rainforest. A young Double-eyed Fig-Parrot poked its head out of a nesting hole just above us and its parents came in at regular intervals to feed it. It was a truly serene and glorious situation.
Steve grilled me on how the twitch was going and I mentioned I still needed Northern Scrub-robin. He replied, deadpan, that it was calling right then. I hadn’t even registered what the repetitive piping sound coming from the nearby forest might have been. The bird made its way onto a nearby termite mound and called its heart out for a good two minutes. A cold beer in one hand, binoculars in the other – this is how birding should always be.
Another bird I needed was the Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo. Steve thought I might have needed Gould’s Bronze-Cuckoo. I did, and told him I’d have a better chance for it around Cairns. Steve replied that that might be so but as one had just flown into the tree above us, perhaps I wanted to check it out. And he was right – just above our heads sat a Gould’s Bronze-Cuckoo. I invoked the names o
f everything else I needed but sadly the magic wore off and we didn’t see any more from the convenience of the verandah. Steve recommended I talk to John Young, who’d recently got the three species I was still after, so I phoned him and it looked like I was all set for the next day.
For the time being I kicked back and stayed for dinner with Steve and his gang. To me this was heaven. I’ve always had huge admiration for the people I’ve known involved in field studies. I always thought they were so cool. They often work under extremely difficult conditions and there is never enough funding to go around, but I can’t help wondering what if… Sitting out on the verandah under a tropical sky, in company with people who are dynamic and passionate – it really doesn’t get any better than this. I seriously could have stayed forever.
Instead I reluctantly dragged myself off so as to be up early to hit the road in pursuit of the last few species left on my ridiculous quest. John Young’s gen is pretty spot on because within a couple of hours I have all three targets under the belt: Yellow-legged Flycatcher, Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo and Red-bellied Pitta, the last an exceptionally beautiful bird with shining red plumage emblazoned across its front, contrasting with a dazzling blue back and breast.
And that’s all, folks. Apart from Buff-breasted Button-quail, a bird that nobody has sighted for a couple of years, there was nothing left to see at Iron Range. After two days in paradise I was driven out by my own hand. Maybe one day I’ll return, buy Steve’s hut and sit there on the verandah sucking back a coldie, watching my vanilla beans grow as fig-parrots and scrub-robins and pittas flit about me. For now I had a more pressing dream to fulfil. As I drove the bumpy track back to civilization, I was sitting on six hundred and ninety-six species. Only four to go.
Three after I stopped north of Mount Molloy to check out what looked like suitable habitat for Buff-breasted Button-quail. No button-quail, of course, but I did bump into a pair of Black-throated Finches, one of the most underrated of all the family. Even in photos they appear rather dull but in real life their front is the most delicate peach colour. Hell, as bird number 697 they could have looked like old turds and I still would have got excited.
And so on the evening of 22 December I rolled into Kingfisher Park once more. First on the agenda was Bush-hen, a bird I’d never seen in Australia. It was one of the two birds I missed back in Brisbane in February. During the dry season they are so quiet and seen so infrequently that many think they actually migrate out of the country. In the wet they become a lot more obvious with their loud braying and screaming calls. This wasn’t a very good wet, however. There hadn’t been enough rain to bring on the Bush-hen’s usual breeding season antics, and as a result they were extremely difficult to locate.
Carol from Kingfisher Park told me they’d been seeing Bush-hen down by the river around five every evening. I wandered down at the appropriate time and as I set foot on the bridge I caught something large and black out of the corner of my eye as it flew up from the river bed to my right. I wheeled around expectantly and was disappointed to find a Black Bittern, a bird that normally would have really turned my crank. As I lowered my binoculars I heard a rustle to my left and looked over just in time to catch a Bush-hen erupting from the streamside vegetation to make a desperate flight across the river, giving me bird number 698.
On to 699, the Red-necked Crake. For the past forty years Kingfisher Park has been the place to see this secretive inhabitant of the rainforest floor, so like generations of birders before me I made my way down to the pool by the orchard at the back of the park and settled in for my vigil. I waited as dusk fell. And waited. It got darker. Grey-headed Robins come down to drink. The marvellously ridiculous looking Orange-footed Scrubfowl settled noisily into their night-time perches. Not only do they look ridiculous, resembling dinosaurs as much as birds, they also sound ridiculous with their deep maniacal cackle, like a rooster on steroids. But still no crake.
Eventually it was too dark to see properly so I called it stumps. I’d just have to undertake the vigil every evening until I got it. As I disappointedly meandered back through the orchard a Red-necked Crake casually strolled past me in the gloom. If it hadn’t almost walked over my feet I wouldn’t even have known it was there. Our crossing of paths reminded me of that Warner Brothers cartoon in which the wolf and the sheepdog clocked on for every shift. The Red-necked Crake walked by so nonchalantly that I fully expected it to look up at me and say, ‘Morning, Ralph.’
CHAPTER 35
24 December, Mount Lewis, Queensland:
699 species
When, at the start of the year, I mischievously posted on Birding-aus that I was hoping to see seven hundred birds in the one year, I never really thought I would actually get there. I always thought it was achievable – just not by me. Now, almost twelve months later, the seven hundred mark was set to tumble. Only one more, and I knew what I wanted it to be – Blue-faced Parrot-Finch. Over fifteen years I’d made the pilgrimage to Mount Lewis on five separate occasions. Each one had seen me return with an empty space on the checklist. Others had been seeing them recently at the famous clearing but there had only been one or two and they had been very difficult to get onto.
I rose before dawn on the morning of Christmas Eve, determined that this time it would be different. To be honest I was feeling rather sick from lack of sleep – or maybe it was the dodgy noodles I’d cooked the night before, more likely it was from a year’s accumulated tension focusing in on this one moment. Bleary eyed I drove up the mountain and parked the car at the concrete causeway where a party of Red-browed Finches were feeding. The parrot-finches will supposedly forage with the Red-broweds, but not this time. Too nervous to risk the sound of the engine scaring off the birds, I tremulously walked the rest of the way to the clearing. Again there were more Red-broweds, again no Blue-faced.
After a couple of minutes I thought I saw something a bit bigger fly down to the base of the grass. I could see one stalk of grass waving about far more wildly than the ones the Red-browed Finches were perched on. This had to be it. Slowly the bird on the grass stem moved up towards the waving seed-head. Like a fisherman who can tell by the strength of the tug on the line that he’s got something good, I knew this was the business. Suddenly the bird popped into view. Plump, bright green body, blue face, red rump: a Blue-faced Parrot-Finch, bird number 700.
Rather than dance with elation or pump the air in triumph I was almost taken aback by a sense of anticlimax. Maybe it was because, although the Blue-faced Parrot-Finch sports amazingly bright colours, it was kind of a dopey looking thing. More to the point, I think my muted reaction had more to do with a sense of sheer relief – the pressure was finally off. Suddenly I could empathise with Cathy Freeman after she won the 400 metres at the Sydney Olympics: the weight of a nation’s expectations was finally lifted off her shoulders. All right, I didn’t have one hundred thousand fans cheering me on, just myself in the rainforest with no-one to share the moment. But as it had been me putting the pressure on myself all year the feeling was, I imagined, somehow analogous… Well, perhaps not quite the same.
Perhaps seeing seven hundred birds in a year is not particularly significant in the grand scheme of things. When you consider everything else going on in the world, the real issues – terrorism, poverty, environmental catastrophe, cancer, relationship break-ups, people texting the wrong number, Brad and Jennifer, hipster jeans – my little achievement doesn’t seem terribly relevant. All I know is that as I came down from the mountain, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
You’d reckon that after three hundred and fifty-eight days of almost continuous birdwatching I could have afforded to put the bins up and take a well-earned rest. The target that nobody believed achievable had been reached. I didn’t need to prove anything more. I could have just kicked back, relaxed and, for once, not had to worry about where the next tick was coming from.
I could have, but I didn’t. I decided to celebrate the best way I know how: I went birding.
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br /> To this end I headed down to the coast to chase up a report of Red-rumped Swallow. Del Richards, a bird tour operator up this way, had seen one about a week earlier at a place called Newell Beach. On the approach to the town I saw a large group of swallows roosting on some telephone wires above a cane field. Along with the three common species of swallow – the Welcome Swallow and the two species of martin –there were up to fourteen Red-rumped Swallows. This rare Asian migrant wasn’t even on the Australian list twenty years earlier. It was on mine now.
On the way back to Kingfisher Park I grabbed a bottle of champagne and shared a celebratory toast with Andrew and Carol. They asked me about my plans for Christmas Day. I hadn’t thought about it. There I was, alone, no family, no friends. What to do? Just for a change I thought I might go birding. I decided to do a Big Day and see how many species I could get. I joined Andrew on the morning bird walk and had seventy-five species before I even left Kingfisher Park. Up on Mount Lewis the Blue-faced Parrot-Finches that had eluded me for years now wouldn’t leave me alone. I had a pair feeding on the track in front of me and each time I got too close to these supposedly shy birds, they merely flew about ten metres further along the track. This is obviously their true demeanour and they had just been messing with my head for years. My progress was hindered somewhat by the twelfth flat tyre of the year whilst driving down from the mountain and the interminable wait for a Christmas lunch of a prawn sandwich at the only shop open in Port Douglas. Despite not making it out to the drier inland areas I still managed to see 158 species for the day. Best Christmas ever.