The Big Twitch Read online

  THE BIG

  TWITCH

  THE BIG

  TWITCH

  SEAN DOOLEY

  ONE MAN,

  ONE CONTINENT,

  A RACE AGAINST TIME

  – A TRUE STORY ABOUT

  BIRDWATCHING

  First published in Australia 2005

  Copyright text © Sean Dooley 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given remuneration to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-publication entry:

  Dooley, Sean, 1968-

  The big twitch : one man, one continent a race against

  time – a true story about birdwatching.

  ISBN 1 74114 528 7.

  1. Dooley, Sean, 1968- . 2. Bird watchers - Australia.

  3. Bird watching - Australia. I. Title.

  598.072340994

  Cover design: Cheryl Collins Design

  Text design: Phil Campbell

  Typesetting: Prowling Tiger Press

  Author photo (front cover): Greg Elms

  Bird photos (front cover): in hand, Rohan Clarke; top, Chris Tzaros

  Author photo (back cover): Mike Carter

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Diane and Barry Dooley

  For their love, for their example and for giving me the

  opportunity to piss an inheritance up against a wall.

  Contents

  A foreword for birders

  A foreword for non-birders

  Glossowary

  Prologue

  1 New Year’s Eve 2001, Bunyip State Park, VIC

  2 15 July 1980, Nicholas Hall, Melbourne, VIC

  3 3 June 1996, Collingwood, VIC

  4 1 January 2002, Melbourne General Cemetery, VIC

  5 4 January, Seaford Swamp, VIC

  6 13 January, Chiltern, VIC

  7 19 January, Bunyip State Park, VIC

  8 26 January, Wollongong Pelagic, NSW

  9 3 February, Norfolk Island Botanic Gardens

  10 10 February, Hospital Swamp, VIC

  11 17 February, Slim Dusty billboard, Pacific Highway, NSW

  12 15 March, Christmas Island Detention Centre

  13 23 March, Gluepot Reserve, SA

  14 30 April, Barren Grounds, NSW

  15 9 June, Pirates Bay, Eaglehawk Neck, TAS

  16 24 June, Pemberton, WA

  17 14 July, Port Augusta, SA

  18 16 July, Stuart Highway, 19 km south of the NT–SA border

  19 30 July, Edge of the Simpson Desert, NT

  20 5 August, Yaningurie Waterhole, SA

  21 14 August, Cairns, QLD

  22 26 August, Saibai Island, Torres Strait

  23 9 September, Mission Beach, QLD

  24 16 September, Lamington National Park, QLD

  25 28 September, MCG, VIC

  26 17 October, Lord Howe Island

  27 1 November, Nullarbor Plain, SA

  28 7 November, Shoalhaven Heads, NSW

  29 16 November, Broome, WA

  30 21 November, Mount Carbine, QLD

  31 29 November, Kununurra, WA

  32 3 December, Kakadu National Park, NT

  33 14 December, Mount Isa, QLD

  34 20 December, The Green House, Iron Range, QLD

  35 24 December, Mount Lewis, QLD

  Epilogue

  Bird list

  Acknowledgements

  A Foreword for Birders

  White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike. Red-necked Phalarope. Forty-spotted Pardalote. There, now that the non-birdwatchers have lost interest and have skipped to the first page containing a description of an outback sunset, I can have a little chat. This is the story of my quest to break the Australian birdwatching record and as such is concerned primarily with birds. In order to keep the dude non-birdwatching readers interested, however, occasionally I have had to divert from a purely birding focus. I would love nothing more than to write a book solely dedicated to each and every bird I saw during my big year, but I fear that I would lose the non-birding audience if I attempted to outline such things as the morphological differences between the New Zealand and Australian races of Shy Albatross. Please bear with me at these times as I try and placate those weird non-birdo readers.

  To my many wonderful birding friends throughout the Australian ornithological community – an advance apology. You must remember that for most people, birdwatching seems a particularly unfathomable pastime. For their benefit I have at times exaggerated our behaviour for comic effect. If you feel you recognise yourself in these pages please remember that no malice is intended and it is all meant in good humour. I hope that I can still look forward to your friendly greetings in the swamps, scrubs and sewage farms around the country for many years to come.

  Thanks for taking the time to read this, and if you do know a non-birder, let’s just keep this bit between ourselves shall we?

  A Foreword for Non-birders

  Feelings. Relationships. Social interaction. Now that the birdwatch-ers have lost interest and have skipped to the first page containing a description of an immature Zitting Cisticola I can have a little chat. This is the story of my quest to break the Australian birdwatching record and is concerned primarily with birds, which keeps the nerdy birdwatching readers interested. Happily for everyone else there are plenty of non-birding diversions. I would love to have written more extensively about the landscape I travelled through, the characters I met and the emotions I felt during my big year but I fear that I would lose the birdy-nerdy audience if I didn’t occasionally lapse into outlining something technical like the morphological differences between the Australian and New Zealand races of Shy Albatross. Please bear with me at these times as I try and placate those weird birdo readers.

  I have many wonderful birding friends throughout the Australian ornithological community, but I feel I must apologise for them in advance because we are a particularly unfathomable lot. You may think I have exaggerated the behaviour of these birdy nerdies for comic effect, but in all honesty I dare only scratch the surface of this bizarre world lest they recognise themselves in these pages and fail to see the humour. Remember; I have to contend with these freaks out on the swamps, scrubs and sewage farms around the country for years to come.

  Thanks for taking the time to read this, and if you do know a birder, let’s just keep this bit between ourselves shall we?

  Glossowary

  A guide to a few of the more specialist terms in the book

  Glossowary: Glossary combined with cassowary, Australia’s second largest bird. The last stupid bird pun of the book. I promise. Well, almost the last one.

  Twitch: The act of chasing after a rare bird. Can be both a verb: ‘I tried to twitch the Grey Falcon’, and a noun: ‘I dipped when I was on the Grey Falcon Twitch’.

  Grey Falcon: A mythical bird that doesn’t exist.

  Dip/dip out: The most depressing term in birdwatching. To miss
out on seeing a bird.

  Birder/birdwatcher/birdo: Someone who watches birds. All are fairly interchangeable and fluid terms. I tend to describe myself as a birder as I think it is the least daggy of the three. Kind of like saying you choose cyanide as your favourite poison because it is the least deadly.

  Twitcher: An extremely dangerous creature with a nasty reputation. Essentially a birder who indulges in the act of twitching. Doesn’t have quite the same negative connotation in Australia as it does in places like Britain. In fact most birders here would admit to occasionally indulging in a little of bit of twitching behaviour and if they don’t they are most probably dirty rotten liars or total dudes.

  Dude: A non-birdwatcher. Often used as a term of derision especially when applied to someone who is actually a birder.

  Tick: What a twitcher does to a bird: reduce its beauty, majesty and wonder to a mere tick in a checklist.

  Stringer: The greatest villain of the birding world. Someone who makes claims of non-existent birds (the act of stringing). Not to be confused with simply making a mistake of identification. Rarely done deliberately (one hopes), stringing usually occurs when a birder doesn’t see a bird well enough, jumps to the wrong conclusion and is either too proud or stubborn to back down. To be labelled a stringer is to lose all credibility.

  Lifer: A bird a twitcher has never seen in their life before. Also what many birders would like to turn a stringer into for their crimes.

  Grip off: Not as grubby as it sounds but still an unpleasant experience. When one birder teases another after having seen a bird the other one hasn’t.

  Pelagic: a) Oceanic. b) a type of oceanic seabird. Note: Pelagic seabird is not a tautology as some species of seabird are usually found in coastal waters such as Pacific Gull and Black-faced Cormorant while others such as albatross are almost exclusively oceanic. c) Boat trips organised to go out to look for pelagic seabirds.

  Seabirders: Birders who pay money to go out to sea in tiny boats in the middle of the ocean in order to get a closer look at pelagic species such as albatross. Idiots in other words.

  Chum/berley: The fish guts and offal that seabirders cut up and throw overboard to attract seabirds to the back of the boat. See I told you they were idiots.

  Bins: Binoculars. Also the receptacle that your housemate makes you throw the dead birds you’ve been keeping in your freezer into.

  Jizz: The intangible essence of a bird that helps to identify it.

  Jezz: An old school friend who first makes an appearance in Chapter 19.

  Jazz: A form of music that I am sure many birdos are into.

  Jozz: Now I’m just being stupid.

  Breeding/non-breeding plumage: Some birds grow a distinct set of feathers during the breeding season to attract a mate. The bird can look totally different in each plumage, the avian equivalent of Pamela Anderson without her make-up.

  Twitchathon: A birdwatching race where teams of twitchers try to see as many birds as possible in 24 hours. The crack cocaine of birding.

  Flush: What you do with your crack cocaine if you are busted by the cops. Also what you do when you make a bird fly from where it has been standing.

  Bird hide: What rare birds usually do when I am looking for them. Also the structures that birders use to hide in so as to observe birds without flushing them.

  Pash: Kissing passionately. Something about as common as Night Parrot sightings when you spend a year twitching.

  Night Parrot: A rare desert species that has not been authenticated alive in the wild for almost a hundred years.

  Collingwood/The Magpies/The Pies: A Melbourne based Aussie Rules football team with a tendency to break the hearts of their supporters.

  Pill: Another name for a football. What a twitcher soon becomes if they don’t get to see the bird they are looking for.

  PROLOGUE

  13 December 2004, St Kilda, Victoria:

  721 species, 0 girlfriends

  The date was going well. A good choice of restaurant. I hadn’t made a goose of myself while ordering the wine. She had beautiful, soft blue eyes and was laughing in all the right places. We had discovered a mutual appreciation for saganaki, that artery busting, salt laden, fried goat’s cheese. I really liked this girl. Then she asked me the question.

  ‘So, Sean, what do you do in your spare time?’

  ‘Um…’ ‘What do you do for fun?’

  Oh dear.

  When I was ten, birdwatching seemed cool. I grew up in a fairly rough area – the local high school regularly featured on current affairs programs throughout the seventies as the toughest in the state – yet bizarrely enough being the best birdwatcher at primary school gave me a big man on campus status. Now that I am in my thirties, however, I kind of know that unlike my bogan primary school chums, most people don’t actually think that birdwatching is cool. They think it’s weird. Some people think it’s a cute weird in a quirky way, some a creepy weird in a stalkerish, he’s hiding bodies in a barrel way. But they all think it is weird.

  This had been thumped into me from my first day at high school (not the scary ‘as-seen-on-TV’ school, but an exclusive private establishment that my parents had made me sit a scholarship for). I didn’t know a soul at this new school and stupidly, on the enrolment form where it asked for your hobbies, did I put footy or cricket or petty vandalism like all the other kids? No, I put down birdwatching. And the sadist of a form teacher on the first day when he was introducing me to the class said, ‘And you’ve got a special hobby haven’t you Sean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes you have. Sean’s a birdwatcher, everybody.’

  Thirty pairs of scathing schoolboy eyes bore into me as the whispered cry, ‘Poofter!’ wafted through the agonisingly silent classroom. That was it. I was stained with a stigma that would take me the rest of school to shake for this was Homophobe High, where any difference was immediately stomped upon by that most conservative of bodies – the teenage peer group. I shared a locker with a guy who went on to play a few games of AFL footy and a couple of months later as we were packing our things away at home-time he turned to me and said, ‘You know, Dooley, when you first came to this school, we all thought you was a poofter. But you know what, you’re not, you’re a good bloke.’ And with that he gave me an affectionate dead arm. It was his way of saying I was accepted – just don’t mention that weirdarse birdwatching thing again.

  Birdwatching was not an attempt to be weird. I just liked doing it. It was fun. It got me outdoors, got me interested in the wider world. What’s so weird about that? I was (and still am) into a lot of other things – sport, politics, music, culture. I spent a lot of time at the racetrack. I did a lot of theatre, particularly comedy, and ended up making a living out of writing for TV comedy shows. I even managed to squeeze in a law degree and did honours in English lit. Yet because over the years birdwatching was one of the things I’d most enjoyed doing, my date’s simple question put me on the back foot, feeling like I had an awful lot of ground to make up just to prove that I was not a weirdo.

  ‘Really, you’re a birdwatcher? Like one of those twitchers?’

  Her eyes had widened when I mentioned the birdwatching thing but I still thought I was in with a chance. And what amazing eyes – the same soft blue as the undertail coverts of a Bourke’s Parrot.

  ‘So are you like one of those anorak wearing trainspotter types?’

  ‘No… well I do have an anorak, but I only wear it when it’s pouring with rain or when I’m on a boat trip.’

  ‘You’re into fishing too?’

  ‘No, I go on fishing boats out to the continental shelf to look for seabirds like albatross.’

  ‘That’s a long way to go just to see a bird.’

  ‘I guess so, but it’s about the only way I can see a new bird these days. Unless some vagrant species turns up somewhere like Broome or Darwin, then I’d have to fly up there to see it.’

  ‘And you’ve done that? Just for a bird?’

  I
was drowning here. Yes I had done that, just for a bird. Earlier in the year I’d flown to Townsville for a day; an eight-hour return flight just to look for a seagull that had turned up from Japan. I didn’t see it.

  A couple of months later I was on another last minute flight across the country to look for Australia’s first Rosy Starling when it turned up in Broome. That time I saw it and while it was a gorgeous pink and black creature, it wasn’t so much the aesthetics of the bird but the thrill of the chase that appealed. That’s not weird, just having a bit of fun doing something that I enjoyed. It wasn’t like birdwatching ever got in the way of my functioning as a normal human being. Well sure, the day before I had my first law exam I had skived off studying to drive three hours south of Melbourne to see my first Arctic Tern. And yes, I spent my twenty-first birthday by myself, getting lost in the Mallee trying to rediscover a colony of Black-eared Miners. And I lost my first job as a bartender because I had missed the vital New Year’s Eve shift when I’d rushed off to Adelaide to twitch the Hudsonian Godwit. But I wasn’t one of those obsessive birdwatching freaks. I was just having a bit of harmless fun. If only I could have convinced my date.

  ‘So even though I go birdwatching I don’t really think of myself as a birdwatcher as such. I mean, they’re generally very nice people, but they’re just a bit too obsessive for my liking.’

  I scanned her face to see whether she was buying it. Actually, her eyes were more silvery blue, like you’d find on a Red-winged Fairy-wren.

  ‘So you don’t have any birdwatching friends then?’

  ‘Well, I guess there’s only two birders that I’d consider I was good mates with. We actually do things together outside of bird-watching, like seeing bands and going to the footy. In fact we hardly ever go out birding these days. Except for the Twitchathon.’

  ‘The what?’

  Oh God. Why had I mentioned the Twitchathon? A birdwatching race in which teams of twitchers roam the countryside trying to see as many birds as possible in a 24-hour period. Even to me it seemed a bit weird. But with the Twitchathon I always had the excuse that it was for fundraising purposes – you’d get people to sponsor you a certain amount for every bird you saw, and the money raised would go to conservation projects. Still, that didn’t explain how much I actually enjoyed cramming myself into a car laden with a bunch of birders and their assorted gear and driving around the state for twenty-four hours of nonstop birdwatching action. We wouldn’t sleep, we wouldn’t stop for food or even toilet breaks as we needed every spare moment for birdwatching. Or more precisely, driving to the places where we try and find the birds. We figured that the optimal way to see the most species was to drive to as many different habitats as possible and tick off the different birds in each of them rather than sticking to just a couple of areas and trying to see every bird that was there. The price for this strategy was that we spent more time in the car driving between sites than we actually did birding. This usually meant driving fourteen hundred kilometres or so in that one twenty-four hour period.