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ShareThis9 August 2010
IN the previous piece I penned for this website, I revealed my purist’s vision for seeing 700 birds on Australian soil. It was clear [that] anyone with sufficient time and resources could make it to 700 … 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.
British bird listers only count things that occur in Britain and Northern Ireland but nothing from the UK dependent territories (area shaded red). Australians however, think nothing of counting anything seen on surrounding islands or territories (shaded blue). Click to expand.
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.
In this column I’m going to continue the quite possibly pointless little argument I’m having with myself, and ask for your help in attempting to resolve some of the questions begged by this slightly fanciful form of twitching. What, for birding and twitching purposes, actually constitutes “continental Australia”? I had always considered that as the mainland plus Tasmania, bound by the 200 nautical mile limit of our Economic Exclusion Zone recognised under the law of the sea (of course, this extends well outside continental shelf waters, but is a very handy concession for a pelagic freak to make).
That quirk aside, my vision of the “proper” list of Australian birds is a conservative and frankly outdated one: in essence, by not including birds from external territories on my list, I’m not playing by the same rules as anyone following the standard list set down in Les Christidis and Walter Boles’ latest Systematics and Taxonomy of Australian Birds (CSIRO Publishing, 2008). (Should I follow that list, I would in fact have already seen over 700 Australian birds, owing to a handful of species I’ve recorded in two visits to Australian Antarctic Territory.)
Lord Howe Island Woodhen were often omitted from Australian field-guides, yet Lord Howe is part of New South Wales. How confusing for birders, when Abbott's Booby and Christmas Island Frigatebird, endemic to a distant Australian dependent territory, are ordinarily included.
One of the questions I find most troubling is that of birds recorded from the Torres Strait Islands. Geographically, Boigu and Saibai Island are barely a stone’s throw from New Guinea, and of course have become magnets for twitchers hoping to find new Australian birds, which seems a bit like cheating to me. Then again, I’m not even sure if these islands are officially classed as an external territory in the first place, since most of the islands are considered part of Queensland (as Lord Howe Island, 600 kilometres off our coastline, is part of New South Wales).
Of course, Boigu and Saibai are a mere paddle away from Australia compared to Christmas, Heard and Cocos-Keeling Islands, which as I noted previously are so far away it’s hard to reconcile that the birds recorded there are a valid part of the Australian avifauna in anything other than an abstract political dimension. This is where things start to get tricky, inconsistent, and hard to resolve. It’s why my decision for now has been to exclude all these offshore island territories. It also begs another question: what are the approximate boundaries of Australian biogeography?
You’d think our field guides might help solve these problems; instead they’re a reflection of greater confusion, and perhaps reluctance. Perhaps the daunting numbers of birds being added to the Australian list (and the speed with which they are being added) is just too big an ask for artists, authors and publishers to keep up with. Our field guides are only just beginning to bother illustrating the Lord Howe Island Woodhen! This is an understandable source of annoyance for new birders who are constantly reading about new Australian birds being added to our official checklist, but can’t find them in a book.
In essence, I’m in a muddle here. I’m no closer to answering the questions I set out to answer a month ago. So with that, I’d like to throw discussion of these quite complex issues – which take in questions of governance, history and geography – over to you. In particular, the posers above: what constitutes continental Australia, and the limits of our avian biogeography?
Comments below, please!
I think the Australian biogeographic region is based on the continent on the Sahul shelf.That is from West Papua,through New Guinea,Australia,and to Tasmania.Queensland flora and fauna have much more in common with New Guinea than with Tasmania.Its only political boundaries that draw the line through Torres Strait.The tide is up at this point but when it drops its birds from West Papua to Tassie.That gives a nicely expanded list and also makes sense biogeographicaly,I feel.It makes more sense than including Christmas Is. and Ashmore Reef on an Aussie list.I would tend to include them in sub-lists.
Andrew. It truly is a personal problem! You just have to make up your own mind and go with it. I have to agree that the inclusion of anything outside Norfolk, Lord Howe and Macquarie seems a bit strange – a bit like a British birder including the Falklands, but wierder things have happened…. the inclusion of Norfolk Island in the new NZ Checklist for example!! (We already had Macquarie by the way!). The book should have been called “A Checklist of the birds of New Zealand and bits of Australia”.
Our (Wrybill) NZ list will continue to include political NZ – but not Australia.
I think biogeography is ridiculous in this context. Should the French list include Belgium, Spain, Germany? Should the ABA region of Canada and USA also include Mexico?
The Australian list has always been a dog’s breakfast as far as I’m concerned, it’s absurd to have an entirely different faunal zone (Christmas and Cocos in the Oriental region) being counted on the Oz list, it’s like the pom’s counting Gibraltar or the Falklands; I’d also exclude the Australian Antarctic Territories, Macquarie and Heard, and I’d argue that a far better definition for an Oz list is simply the mid-point of the Torres Strait, not those islands which are administratively Australian but actually lie within PNG waters. The brits exclude the Channel Is from the UK list for the same reason.
I would include Norfolk and Lord Howe, though I think the kiwis might argue the toss for the former.
I published a Checklist of Australian Birds back in 2008 which dealt which all this, and I now have an on-line version which I up-date every few months. This Checklist excludes the island Territories from the main list but details what is only recorded there. I have now gone to IOC order, and adopt a less conservative approach to species than C & B- I wrote the first list in part because the national checklist was at that time 10 years out of date, and we are already coming up on 2+ years for the last one, a long time in these days of taxonomic flux.
Before anyone starts flaming me, what you do with your list in the privacy of your room is entirely up to you, the “Official” version includes everything so listers like that and that’s fine, but personally I[‘d like to see a more logical zoogeographic based approach, and my Checklist is a start
There are different ways of looking at this of course, but I am going to argue that you are wrong to think that it is somehow more noble, sensible, pure, logical or obedient to European birding principles to exclude Australia’s external territories when compiling a list of “Australian birds”. If you are following the taxonomy of Christidis and Bowles 2008, which most Australian birders seem to do, then it might make sense to use that list as a checklist, and to try to tick everything on that list, and for that you would have to include the territories. But most birders look at it from the other perspective: they consider a boundary and try to see everything they can within that boundary, whether it’s on the list or not. In other words, they are not averse to adding to the list. In fact, for some, they almost have to add to the list to tick anything new! So what boundary makes sense? Some talk of biographical regions, continental Australia etc. Others, like me, keep State lists, suburb lists, year lists etc. It doesn’t really matter, but I would contest that the best kind of boundaries are the sharpest ones. I could, if I wanted, keep a list of birds that I see in the desert, and a list of birds that I see in the rainforest, but what am I to do with birds I see in the transitional regions? Similarly, I could list all the birds from a region that makes sense in an evolutionary or biological sense, e.g., birds seen on this side of the Wallace line…after all, there are cockatoos and mammals similar to Australian ones all through New Guinea and Indonesia. But how could I draw the line sharply enough not to run the risk of having sightings I could not definitely place? OK, and what about and Australian continental list? Surely I would have to include Tasmania; after all it’s a State of Australia. But if I keep Tasmania then surely I would have to keep Lord Howe Island. So to keep consistent I would have to keep all of the close Islands so in comes Boigu and Saibai. So then I would have to define the closeness of islands and there are always going to be islands near the border. The 200 mile limit seems quite arbitrary so why should it be used to define the ‘Australian-ness’ of birds? Really, you could agonise about all these questions and send up with your own personal criteria and a list that might make sense to you but which couldn’t be usefully compared with anyone else’s list because you are the only one adopting that set of criteria. To me it makes perfect sense to use political boundaries to define your list, and that is just what Christidis and Bowles have done. Although nothing is perfect, there is going to be a lot less angst about what you should be including. And anyway, who the hell cares what they do in Europe?
The simple solution is to establish different lists according to your whim. People keep all sorts of regional lists – a national list is simply one sort of regional list.
I agree that it is pointless taking European conventions as a guide. Many European countries are the size of an outback shire, so they are at best the equivalent of a state list. If I lived in that part of the world, I would probably put together an EU list …
The bottom line, is that if you are establishing a biogeographical list, New Guinea is just as Australian as Tasmania.
As for guidebooks, create a combined Aus-NZ tome – most of the species in NZ are to be found in an Aus guide, so you wouldn’t have to add to many pages to an Aus guide …
Instead of pulling your hair out trying to come up with a pure Australian list [your world list is the only one that really matters] why don’t you set yourself the challenge of defining the most interesting lists. You might keep a list of all species seen at sea, a list of taxa seen in all plumages [e.g. juvenile, immature, adult breeding/non-breeding, male/female and the various morphs], a list of genuine vagrants, a list of species seen while not birding, and a list of bogey birds. Perhaps you could also keep a list of the twitchers you’ve been able to identify in the field [presumably without the use of call playback and other unethical devices].
Sorry for my tardiness after a mad month. Everyone has made some interesting (and highly divergent) points of view on this (though I’ll take Laurie’s last comment purely in jest … Mind you, anything’s possible I suppose!) I am closer to Phil Gregory’s line of reasoning than Steve’s, although Steve’s is perfectly legitimate and, as he points out, certainly the simplest. The point made by David Richardson about the Sahul Shelf is interesting, as Ashmore and Cartier Island lie on the edge of this, but do Lord Howe and Norfolk? Surely not… Cheers