30 August 2010

I COULD go to Australia’s so-called Red Centre another 10 times in my life, and never see a drop of rain. So to visit it for four full days and not have a single one of blue sky was in some ways a little sad – it certainly wasn’t always ideal for birding – but in others, an experience to be cherished.

Desert oaks and flowering acacias, reinvigorated by passing rain showers, inject a mix of vibrant colours, textures and scent into the red desert. Photo by Simon Mustoe.

Midnight Oil once said “The western desert lives and breathes in 45 degrees”. For mine, it’s closer to the mark to say it only really ekes out an existence in those kinds of conditions; after the rain has tumbled down, though, it positively seethes with life. I’ve never been much for botany, but I have never seen a wildflower display like it. Nor have I seen the grasses so dense and green, or the Spinifex carrying such heavy seed.

We were, of course, looking for Princess Parrots. It’s hard to think of a single avian event in the past 10 years that has caused such feverish excitement in the local birding fraternity as this one. In case you’ve been living under a rock, large numbers were discovered in late July on Aboriginal land west of Alice Springs, apparently in a frenzy of breeding activity in response to the extraordinarily wet winter the centre of the continent has enjoyed.

I’m as excited as anyone. I’ve long rated the Princess Parrot as Australia’s most beautiful bird: a subjective judgement, sure, but the species’ extremely elegant build combined with pastel colours (rose-pink throat, powder-blue forehead, salmon undertail coverts and yellow-green shoulder) would make it a strong contender anywhere.

In my overripe imagination, it was always how I saw those soft colours interacting with the harshness of the arid interior that had the most appeal. I had even thought of trying to save it as my 700^th Australian bird, but when the opportunity arose to have a crack at the species in an area notionally far more accessible than the area where they last turned up in any numbers – the Canning Stock Route in north-west WA – I couldn’t resist.

A Black-breasted Buzzard nest, just visible through the feathery fronds of a desert oak. Photo by Simon Mustoe.

The illusion of proximity provided by having Princess Parrots turn up a mere half-day’s drive west of Alice is, of course, behind much of the twitching frenzy. The extreme rarity and usual inaccessibility of the Princess Parrot means that many birders ruefully consign it to the small list of birds that, for one reason or another, they will never have the opportunity to see. Suddenly, everyone felt they were in with a shot.

Of course, an illusion was all it was. The birds were effectively on private land, and that was that. Once access had been denied, there was nothing left for anyone to do but search areas of suitable habitat – dune swales in areas of desert oak country with a grassy/Spinifex understorey – as close as possible to where the birds had been seen. As close as 20 kilometres away! A true case of so near, and yet so far.

But our failure to see any parrots doesn’t mean I feel we missed out for trying. The ones that missed out, in my opinion, were the birders who cancelled their flights and plans once they realised the birds weren’t going to be made available to them on a silver platter. You have to be in this game to win it. And while I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to some frustration (quite a lot, actually), surely we ought to be trying to find more Princess Parrots, not just twitch them. At least we gave ourselves the chance.

Of course, we all have busy lives and finite resources. But for making the decision to go ahead, with only a slim chance of finding our quarry, we were rewarded with the sound and sight of displaying Pied Honeyeaters virtually everywhere we stopped; a close encounter with elusive Slaty-backed Thornbills; multiple sightings of Black-breasted Buzzards (including a nesting pair); various songlarks and woodswallows chattering as they soared and sailed around our heads – all part and parcel of a desert in full bloom.

Not to mention the utterly spectacular Kings Canyon and the West MacDonnell Ranges themselves. As cold comfort goes, it wasn’t bad. If nothing else, it sure beats working from home in the middle of winter.

The Parrot Princess

by Simon Mustoe

Princess Alexandra of Denmark

Tasmania’s Mary Donaldson, now Mary Crown Princess of Denmark, isn’t the first Australian to be named as a Danish princess. That honour was bestowed on the Princess Parrot Polytelis alexandrae in the late 19th Century. This exquisite and scarce parrot of the Australian desert was named after Alexandra of Denmark who married Albert Edward and became a Queen of England in 1901.

Princess Parrots by Geoff Jones, Barra Imaging.

Seldom seen, it lives in the driest and most inaccessible sand-dunes of central Australia. Its population so closely follows cycles of wet and dry, that decades of drought have forced it into tiny corners of the remote outback, where almost nothing else lives. This is how it has been for decades.

But this month, an event is unfolding near Alice Springs. Rain has again brought life to the desert. Princess Parrots are gathering en masse, drinking from scattered upside-down plants (Leptosema), laced with refreshing nectar. Hundreds have suddenly appeared to breed, as if from nowhere.

But for these Princess Parrots, there’ll be no fairy-tale ending – there never is. Once rains have passed and the flowers have shriveled in the heat of the summer sun, they’ll move on, diminish in number and vanish into obscurity. It could be another life-time before anyone sees hundreds of bird breeding like this again.