by Ian Fraser
For Lou, who shared with me so many of the encounters in these pages,
and so much more. Thank you.
© Ian Fraser 2018
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Contents
Prelude
Introduction
1 Deserts
Warrigal Waterhole, north-west Queensland: an oasis
Desert seed eaters
Budgerigars
South-west Queensland: locust swarms
Woodswallows and nomadism
Flock Bronzewings and Fairy Martins
The Sahel: arid woodland
The Quail-plover: of birding and twitching
Waza National Park and its panting birds
Waza: guineafowl and sandgrouse
The Atacama: the driest desert
Flamingos
Other memories of deserts
References
2 Rainforests
Western Cameroon: lowland tropical rainforest
When birding is tough: Picathartes
When birding is tough: Mt Kupé Bushshrike
Julatten, north Queensland: a magnet for birders
Mount Kinabalu, Sabah
Bamenda Highlands, Cameroon: vanishing birds
Mindo Valley, Ecuador: a jewel in the crown
Paz de las Aves: positive ecotourism news
Aguas Verdes, northern Peru: more positive ecotourism news
Acjanaco Pass Road, southern Peru: cloud forest
Andean Cock-of-the-Rock: leks
Top End, Australia: monsoon forests
Pittas: old passerines
Kibale Forest, Uganda: more pittas
Paluma, north Queensland: fragmented rainforest
Riflebirds and speciation
Cairns, north Queensland: hovering sunbird
Other memories of rainforests
References
3 Oceans and islands
The Galápagos: oceanic islands
‘Darwin’s finches’
Darwin’s beach
Tasmania: a continental island
Island endemism
Tasmanian Scrubtit: an older endemic
The ‘turbo chook’: a cautionary tale
Lord Howe Island: a volcanic speck
Island extinctions
The Lord Howe Island Woodhen: almost not there and back again
Island breeding colonies: from Fernandina to Cape Town to Victoria to Chile
Chile’s Chonos Archipelago: prolific seabirds
Wind soaring
Other memories of oceans and islands
References
4 Mountains
Torres del Paine NP: Andean Condors
Featherless heads
The awesome alula: making flight possible
Can birds smell?
K-selected breeders: ‘have one kid, make sure it survives’
Colca Canyon: high-altitude birding
Soaring: ultimate flight
The Drakensbergs, Lesotho: snow in Africa
Bearded Vulture: digesting bones
Torres del Paine again: New World vultures
Unexpected origins
Flying high: how do they do it?
Other memories of mountains
References
Colour plates
5 Wetlands and rivers
Gum Swamp, New South Wales
r-selected breeders: ‘have lots of kids, hope a couple survive’
Grey Teal and breeding triggers
Musk Ducks: a story of a duck’s luck
Showing off in the water
Cocha Salvador, Peruvian Amazonia
Single-species Families
Birds eating their greens
Muscovy Ducks, and birds in service
Jerrabomberra Wetlands, Canberra
Preening
Other memories of wetlands and rivers
References
6 Suburbia
Canberra: crafty cockies
Learning to live in town
Canberra again: the Great Koel debate
Birds in a warming world
Melbourne Cricket Ground: a groggy gull
When birds collide
Canberra yet again: hybrid parrots
Becoming a species: it doesn’t happen overnight!
Still in Canberra: pardalotes
Birds in burrows
Dinosaurs in my garden
Other memories of suburbia
References
7 Woodlands and grasslands
Great Western Woodlands, Western Australia: Emu family
Ratites, and the mysterious case of the flying elephant birds
Feathers: a bird’s best friends
A bird’s leg: a wonder of redesign
Extinction
High Veld, Wakkerstroom, South Africa: Widowbirds
Tall tails and true
Barkly Tableland, Northern Territory: grassy expanses
Wind hovering
Other memories of woodlands and grasslands
References
Bird species index
General index
Prelude
The First Time. That’s the name of surely one of the most beautiful love songs ever written in English, Ewan McColl’s evocative ballad to Peggy Seeger, charting gently and intimately the key stages of a developing relationship. I guess most of us could do that, albeit perhaps more privately and probably less lyrically. But what about our ‘other relationship’? Nothing sordid implied there – I’m talking of the love affair that we all share … with birds. What else can you call the passion that leads us to follow a single bird, not necessa
rily a ‘new’ one, for an hour or so to absorb all of its subtle nuances, or just muse in a hide for ages, watching life potter along? Or indeed plan your holidays (or at least attempt to, loved ones permitting) around birds you’re hoping to see? Can you trace the tentative beginnings of awareness, through to the full flowering of publicly proclaimed commitment? Was it an epiphany for you, or a gradual and inevitable development? Just pause for a moment there and try to remember.
It seems, when I rescanned their books, that for well-known birders Sean Dooley (The Big Twitch), Simon Barnes (How to be a Bad Birdwatcher; to the Greater Glory of Life) and Bill Oddie (Little Black Bird Book), birds were always part of their lives. For Simon, and perhaps Bill, it was apparently with family encouragement; for Sean it seems to have been despite his father.
For me, I always knew I wanted to do things that involved animals. (I told an infant school teacher that I wanted to be a zookeeper when I grew up; she suggested that a zoo director might be a more appropriate goal. I’ve no idea still if she was right, but I did become a keeper for a year, though never a director.) My first memories involve following tolerant Sleepy Lizards – which I’ve learnt to refer to as Shinglebacks since I moved east – through the paddocks north of Adelaide, while Peter the bull terrier kept an eye open for less benign reptiles. He was somewhat neuronally challenged but utterly faithful, and very good at his other job of protecting dad’s ducks from stray cats. (My younger sisters were restricted to following caterpillars round the verandah, but, because they too were curious children, it didn’t always end well for the caterpillars.)
Being a small boy, what I was really interested in was big African mammals, but by the time I was 12 I was keeping day lists of birds seen on a family holiday. I have the booklet now, all written out in Best, a page per day. It reflects a more relaxed approach to nomenclature – Blossom Parrot, Mountain Duck and Peewee, for instance (though I still use the last two). The only guide, apart from dad, was Cayley’s somewhat rudimentary What Bird is That?, which might help explain why I recorded Black-breasted Buzzard along the Coorong. The rest of it looks pretty convincing and comprehensive though. Being a thorough boy, I also noted ‘Rabbit’ and ‘Fox (dead)’.
But my epiphany had come shortly before that when we spent a week in a shack at Milang on Lake Alexandrina at the mouth of the Murray River. There was a White-headed Stilt breeding colony just down the road and I was entranced by them, visiting daily to see their impossibly spindly red legs trailing as they whirled crossly into the air, yapping like puppies. To this day, one of my very favourite activities is pottering around wetlands.
It’s strange to those of us immersed in the awareness of birds (because after all, it’s so much more than just ‘watching’, isn’t it?) that others are – or even could be – unaware of and unmoved by birds. I’m a fan of Simon Barnes’ How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, in which he says ‘I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching.’ It’s not an obscure philosophical credo, but a simple statement of fact that we all know intuitively. Wherever we are (outside at least), there are birds. So whether we’re walking to the shops, or hanging out the clothes, or having brunch with friends, or at the footy or cricket or an outdoor concert, we’re immediately aware if a raptor or swift whips over, or if a Grey Currawong or Gang-gang Cockatoo calls. It’s not something we just go and do sometimes – it’s an integral part of our entire existence. Just like being in love really.
So, how was it for you, the first time?
Introduction
One of the wonderful things about birding is all the amazing places it takes us to and I’ve been pretty lucky in this, especially over the last decade or so. I spend a lot of time wondering while wandering, not only about the birds but about other animals, about plants and, of course, about the places themselves. This book is something of a synthesis of some of those wonderings, in the context of an attempt to share some of the remarkable landscapes and habitats I’ve found myself in, as well as their inhabitants. I love it when I think I’ve found some sort of understanding of what I’ve seen – usually through someone else’s insights – but I also love it when I realise that I really can’t seem to grasp just what I’m looking at. We are by nature a pretty arrogant mob, and a bit of forced humility does us no harm at all.
The key thing is to acknowledge where we’re ignorant – I think the concept of compound ignorance is a significant one. I’ve seen it described as ‘a state in which one not only does not realise his ignorance but considers himself to be knowledgeable’, but a friend of mine put it more pithily; ‘he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know’. I might suggest that this is the cause of many of our global problems, but it’s probably not my place to do so. However, I’m convinced that it’s good to be reminded, for various reasons, how trivial we are in the greater scheme of things, how much there is still to learn about this very wonderful world.
Admitting what we don’t know, while simultaneously struggling to make sense of it, is a very important start and perhaps a part of being human – it’s certainly a most significant part of birding.
The book is thus also an attempt to share my own understandings, such as they are (mostly, as I say, by reading and trying to assimilate what those wiser and more qualified have to say on the topic), as well as my lack of them. If any part of it sparks a responsive train of thought in you then I’ve done something worthwhile. If any of the birds and places here bring back memories for you, then that makes me happy. And if by any chance there’s anything new in here for you, and you’re encouraged by it to go and meander down an unexplored thought track, or go and experience a new place or habitat or bird, then so much the better! Maybe I’ll see you out there one day.
Much of what follows reflects my Southern Hemisphere origins and inclinations. I actually think of myself as a Gondwanan, and those lands attract me most. I did spend time some decades ago in Europe, and briefly stopped off in North America on the way home, but since then my wanderings have been almost all south of the equator. If this isn’t your part of the world, I really hope you won’t be deterred: the principles are universal, many of the fascinating studies I talk about are from the Northern Hemisphere, and anyway isn’t it good sometimes to explore somewhere new?
Taxonomy
I have opted to use the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) taxonomy and common names throughout, simply because one needs to be consistent, they are widely adopted, and they provide quarterly online updates, with justifications. I’m using Version 7.2 (as retrieved from http://www.worldbirdnames.org/classification/family-index/ on 18 May 2017).
Acknowledgements
In reality, many people over many years have contributed to the experiences and thoughts herein, not least of them Chris Carter who has sent me to South America many times for work. To a few, however, I owe a more immediate debt, during the actual writing process. If you detect any errors, then they survive despite the best efforts of these people!
• Dr Janet Gardner of the Australian National University read most of the text and tutored me expertly and patiently in the complexities of how birds deal with surviving in a warming world.
• Julian Robinson provided invaluable assistance and advice in preparing my fairly ordinary photos into a state approaching suitability for publishing.
• Associate Professor Naomi Langmore of the Australian National University cast her eye over the material on koels, and told me something that absolutely delighted me!
• Professor Dave Rowell of the Australian National University gave me some excellent tips on the mysteries associated with magpie hybrid zones, thus rescuing me from years of frustration.
• Louise Maher, my partner, read it all as I produced it, casting a very usefully beady eye indeed over the grammar and general presentation. Even more importantly, she was always there for me.
• As I’ve come to expect, the people from CSIRO Publishing have been encouraging, supportive and helpful from the start. Among them I am especially gratefu
l to John Manger, Briana Melideo, Lauren Webb and Tracey Kudis. Peter Storer, scientific editor, combined tact and ruthlessness to make this a better book; it was a pleasure and an education to work with him.
1
Deserts
Warrigal Waterhole, north-west Queensland: an oasis
Just east of Mount Isa in arid north-west Queensland, a faded sign by the highway indicates a track to Warrigal Waterhole. It is erosion-rutted and at the time we weren’t in a four wheel drive, so we left our vehicle to walk the 2.5 km through an ancient bony red landscape of folded hills and plains thickly strewn with gibbers, rounded wind-polished rocks eroded from the hard crust on the hills above. They had been swept from the track to some extent by vehicles, but still posed a rolling threat to the ankles of walkers distracted by a Hooded Robin swooping between bushes. In the distance, the ever-frustrating Crested Bellbird, a key element of the soundtrack of inland Australia, proclaimed eternally ‘dee-dee-dee-DEE-dee’, constantly turning so that the mellow notes rose and fell, defying us to pinpoint him.
The plains between the hills were punctuated with big red termite mounds and scattered shrubby eucalypts above blonde tussocks of Mitchell Grass and huge spiky hummocks of Porcupine Grass. The termites live by harvesting the grass; it has been said that they are the antelope of Australia and the lizards are the lions and hyaenas (see Photo 1). Arid Australia has a greater diversity of lizards than anywhere else on Earth.
It doesn’t sound much like a desert as most people probably interpret it – drifting dunes of burning sand with the only vegetation being date palms around a rare oasis and animals represented by the odd camel train and scuttling scorpion. However, a desert can be any dry place, be it hot or cold; the Antarctic plateau is the world’s biggest desert (followed by the Arctic, the Sahara, the Arabian and Gobi Deserts – so, three of the Big Five among deserts are cold). As a rule of thumb, a desert is defined as any place receiving less than 250 mm of rain a year; more than that, but less than 500 mm, and it’s a semi-desert (e.g. USGS 2016). I find the terms arid and semi-arid to be less loaded, but in the end these things are just human conceits. By these criteria, the Mount Isa area, with 460 mm of rain a year, is near the moister end of semi-desert, but a simple statement of annual rainfall isn’t the whole story: 85% of The Isa’s rainfall comes in the Southern Hemisphere summer months of November to March, when the average daytime temperature is 36°C, so most of the rainfall evaporates before becoming available.
