29 June 2010

I REMEMBER getting a letter from a birding friend, back in 1987 or so. Among other things, it told me that Mike Carter had just seen a Citrine Wagtail, his 700^th Australian bird. It was an unprecedented feat at the time, and Mike continues to set the standard – 23 years later, he has well and truly surpassed 800. He is has still seen nearly 30 more species on Australian soil than anyone else.

I remember as a young birder that 600 species was the generally accepted benchmark for keen Australian twitchers. In the early 1980s, the late guru of Victorian birding, Roy Wheeler, had managed to see 600 species in a calendar year, when he was in his 70s. But those kinds of goals seemed out of reach for most ordinary birders. In hindsight it was a sign of things to come.

You’ve got to remember things were very different then: although there were more birds around (many species, tragically, have slipped onto threatened species lists since that time), information about them – and how get your hands on that information – was not so easy.

This was the pre-internet age. The late, great John McKean had put together the first birding magazine catering to twitchers, Cosmic Flashes. (If you don’t know why it was called that, track down a copy of Bill Oddie’s classic Little Black Bird Book and see his glossary of terms.) But by the time it appeared, recorded sightings would invariably be old news.

There was no email, no Birding-Aus; no Google Maps. Birders relied on being hooked into to a phone network of contacts, and on hand-drawn mud maps with scrawled directions on where to see both vagrants and rare local finds. Many species were still extremely little-known: until Rob Drummond’s chance sighting near Lyndhurst, no one knew where or how to find a Chestnut-breasted Whiteface.

It was also before the age of affordable air travel. Twitchers would pile into cars – four or five at a time – and drive as long as it took to see some new blow-in, like Australia’s first Laughing Gull on the Cairns Esplanade. That occasionally still happens, but not as often – with fuel at stratospheric prices, it’s often cheaper to fly.

But driving had its own perils. Neither cars nor roads were what they are today: a trek up the Strzelecki or Birdsville Track, let alone the Canning Stock Route, was a serious adventure. Mike and his wife Tricia were infamously stranded for two weeks on the now much-travelled road to Jupiter Well in their first serious expedition in search of Princess Parrots. They were lucky to survive.

And it was before the frontiers of Australian birding had been well and truly pushed back. When I started birding as a young teenager, pelagic trips were still quite a novelty – a fact reflected in Peter Slater’s early field guides, which assumed that anyone who needed to identify a seabird would be staring at a carcass on a beach.

No one knew about Ashmore Reef. The Broome Bird Observatory, established in 1988, was just a fairytale concept. And while a few birders had been to Lord Howe, it was long before anyone seriously began travelling to offshore territories like Christmas Island to boost their lists. Again, Mike Carter was the pioneer, but by then, he’d long since run out of birds to twitch on the mainland.

I chalked up my 600^th bird in 1996 (for the record, it was a flock of Superb Parrots near Darlington Point in New South Wales). At that time, 700 seemed a fantasy, even though I still hadn’t made it to the south-west of Western Australia, or Tasmania, and my list of seabird sightings was growing rapidly.

By then, though, the list of birders to attain the new magic milestone was booming. And in 2002, one of my oldest birding buddies Sean Dooley upped the ante set by Roy Wheeler, when he tracked down 703 species in a calendar year! This was getting silly. By then, I was well over 650. It was clear anyone with sufficient time and resources could make it to 700.

Sean Dooley's route to see 700 birds in Australia during "The Big Twitch" (Published by Allen and Unwin).

I decided to make things a little harder for myself. I would attempt to do things the old-fashioned way: I would not count birds from offshore Australian territories towards my list. I simply couldn’t reconcile the idea that birds seen on far-away Heard, Christmas and Cocos Islands were genuinely part of the Australian avifauna.

Then I thought: what about excluding Lord Howe or Norfolk Island too? Do I count the birds seen on my single trip to Ashmore Reef – is that part of continental Australia? How about introduced species? How far can I take this madness before I just get bored and head overseas for better (and possibly cheaper) birding thrills?

Don’t look for too much logic or consistency here – this is purely quixotic.

As things stand, I’m up to 694 species now, with over a dozen breeding species still to see in mainland Australia. I’m in no hurry to make Barbary Dove one of them: in fact, the plan is to remove all introduced species once I get to 700, and then try to reach the mark again! In the meantime, if anyone has a mud-map for a Red-lored Whistler site, let me know…

Andrew will address the questions of biogeography raised in this piece in his next blog.