30 November 2010

I SHOULDA known. It was late October, to start with. Any pelagic freak would be nuts to miss an October trip off Southport, or anywhere off our east coast really. Conditions were perfect: a strong La Nina phenomenon, south-east to north-east winds and the Short-tailed Shearwater migration in full swing. It was in almost identical conditions, in 1996, that a Southport pelagic reported no less than 37 Mottled Petrels, as well as Queensland’s second Soft-plumaged Petrel. You just knew this was going to be good.

Aussie birders get together on board a yacht and head into the Southern Ocean ... just to watch seabirds.

So it was no surprise to hear what I’d dipped on later: Mottled Petrel (only the one this time), South Polar Skua, Black Petrel and three Long-tailed Jaegers, the last a surprisingly rare bird off Queensland. A great day’s birding in anyone’s language.

It’s not as if I didn’t have the chance to go. In fact, I had two chances, after the trip was literally blown out of the water by bad weather the first time around. Did I think to go on the rescheduled voyage on 30 October? Yes, I did. Still I passed.*

This is far from the first time this has happened. There aren’t too many holes in my seabird list in Australia, but there’s a reason why those holes are there. There was the occasion in late June 1999 when I decided to opt out the night before a Wollongong pelagic, for the simple reason that I just couldn’t face the early start and the hour and a half’s drive from Sydney.

So I gratefully slept in, only to start worrying the moment I woke up. That evening, I called the trip leader, Tony Palliser, rather than waiting for him to call me. Somehow, I knew in my bones I’d made a terrible mistake. I was right.

“You’re not going to like it,” I remember Tony telling me, his voice weighted with the terrible gravity of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s supercomputer Deep Thought, just before he pronounces that the answer to life, the universe and everything to be the number 42. “You’re really not going to like it.”

Not only had I missed Kerguelen Petrels and Light-mantled Sooty Albatross, I’d missed a pod of Killer Whales that had decided to surf gleefully in the boat’s wake behind them. As answers go, I would have much preferred 42.

That year, 1999, was a banner year for seabirds in Australia. It was as if a big blob of cold water had broken away from the Antarctic convergence and floated up the Australian east coast, dragging huge numbers of cold-water specialties with it. The week after missing that fateful trip, I added Salvin’s Prion, Blue Petrel, Grey-backed Storm-Petrel and Sooty Albatross to my list – all in one trip! Chatham Island Albatross, Arctic Tern and Southern Fulmar were among the other goodies off the New South Wales coast that year – and let’s not forget the lucky observer who scoped an Antarctic Petrel practically from his balcony off Mistral Point. (The record was accepted by BARC.)

Light-mantled Sooty Albatross is the type of magnificent seabird well sought after by Australian birders.

But to this day, I don’t have Light-mantled Sooty Albatross on my Australian list. OK, I’ve seen hundreds down south (having made two voyages aboard the Aurora Australis, so I know, I should stop bloody complaining), but that’s not the same, innit? There’s been a couple of other near misses – like the time, a couple of months later, I sailed on another Wollongong pelagic, only for Tony to call halfway through the same day to tell me he was literally hand-feeding one off the stern of Sydney’s Halicat.

Westland Petrel is my other pelagic bogey bird. The story of how I first dipped on this corker, in August 1996, is a good one. In the days of cheap petrol and rather more expensive air travel, I drove from Brisbane to Sydney with my non-birding partner, who had unfortunately been grotesquely ill with a stomach virus in the previous week. Of course, I came down with the bug the day before the trip – in fact, I came down with it while getting in a spot of birding at Barren Grounds.

From there, I went to SOSSA founder Lindsay Smith’s house and went straight to bed. Getting on a boat was never going to be an option. I drove all the way home to Brisbane in a foul funk. My partner couldn’t remotely fathom my distress. She became my ex-partner not long afterwards – and I still haven’t seen a Westland Petrel.

I haven’t seen a Leach’s Storm-Petrel, either. That’s because I was in the middle of changing a sweat-soaked shirt downstairs on the Jodi-Anne II at the precise and very brief moment that one decided to put in an appearance on the way to Ashmore Reef in late 2001. (I do remember seeing some Swinhoe’s Storm-Petrels on that voyage, but alas, none that I could independently identify.)

Which brings me, finally, to the extraordinary sighting of large numbers of what were probably Arabian Shearwaters west of Darwin, on this year’s monumentally successful trip to Ashmore. This is on a slightly different tangent, as I never had any intention of joining this particular expedition. But still, there is nothing quite so gripping for me as missing a pelagic first for Australia, and as firsts go, this one’s a hum-dinger – a possible wintering population of a bird hitherto completely unknown in our waters.

Of course, you can’t be on board every boat to sail. But Simon Mustoe and company’s discovery reminded me again of why pelagic birding remains my primary avian obsession: for all the hours of boredom, you just never know what’s behind that next wave. What an awesome find! Who could have predicted it? But then, you can just about always predict something.

I shoulda known…

* Really, it’s a good thing I passed. Spare a thought for Bird-O’s Chris Sanderson, who missed the day in cruel and potentially disastrous fashion after having a small argument with a truck that made an illegal turn into the path of his vehicle before picking up another passenger on the way down the coast from Brisbane. No one was hurt, but needless to say that was the end of Chris’ day. And given we live on the same side of town, I may well have caught a lift with him!