30 November 2011

Scott Baker rang me last night. “I’m watching a Baillon’s Crake under a car in Northland Shopping Centre!” It seems that in our second year of La Niña conditions since the ten-year drought broke, there is no end to the places where wetland birds can turn up.

Throughout southern Australia, normally rare birds are arriving in droves. There have been hundreds of records of Australian Painted Snipe, a bird so uncommon that Victorians traveled specifically to see them a couple of hours from Melbourne in the mid-2000s. This year, flocks of nearly 60 Australian Painted Snipe have been recorded in New South Wales. There have even been sightings in urban Melbourne at Royal Park, at the Trin Warren Tam-boore wetlands (where there have also been regular sightings of Spotless Crake and Baillon’s Crake).

Scott Baker takes a photo of a Baillon's Crake, under a car on the top level of the Northland Shopping Centre car park.

Birdwatchers will be familiar with the seasonal influx of White-necked Herons in spring and early summer. This year, they can be found almost anywhere. I was at the You Yangs recently, in an area of elevated granite landscape and dry forest, far from any water. A White-necked Heron casually landed next to the picnic table, then sloped off into the adjacent bush. Had it just completed a tiring journey from further north?

Little Bittern is another infrequently-seen waterbird that lives in the dense vertical foliage and reeds surrounding swamps. They have been seen at a few localities, including this Little Bittern videoed at Karkarook Wetlands.

Regional fluctuations in waterbird numbers are all part of a natural boom-bust cycle for Australia’s waterbirds. Ecologist Brett Lane of Brett Lane Associates says “while conditions are ideal inland, birds move there to breed. When the inland dries out, they move back into drought refuges, often in coastal areas”. Brett recalls the huge floods of ’74 – ’76, when Lake Eyre filled. For the next ten years, inland wetland conditions were excellent, so much so that Victorian shorebird counts recorded no Red-kneed Dotterels or Red-necked Avocets for the state in 1984. By summer 1985, inland wetlands had started to dry and massive numbers of birds moved back into Victoria.

Significant La Niña events occur on average about every ten years. Until last year, Australia had registered its strongest La Niña events in 1973, 1975, 1988 and 1998. The years following the ’98 event were exceptionally dry. In 2007, Australia’s leading waterbird expert Richard Kingsford was lamenting total and utter loss of waterbirds at key locations such as the Macquarie Marshes near Dubbo (down from 20,000 waterbirds in the 1980s).

This year, the situation has improved but should we be insouciant? After flood events in the 1980s, we made poor decisions about water allocation that we’ve came to regret as we entered a period of unprecedented drought. Already, our opposition leader Tony Abbott is calling for more dams to be built in the wake of recent Queensland floods and our first La Niña for 12 years. Would it not be more sensible to wait and see what the next ten years is likely to bring?

Waterbirds are an integral part of the ecology of our wetlands and their health = our health. Large numbers of Banded Stilts and Red-necked Avocets turning up in western Melbourne are a direct result of Lake Eyre flooding. Now’s the time to take a good look at the state of our wetland networks, recalling that conditions we are experiencing now in Melbourne are temporary but a sign that things can return to good health if we nurture our freshwater environment properly.

One thing is for certain, the return of wetland birds to the state this year is only the start. As we enter another year of high rainfall, inland breeding will become even more prolific. The first sign of a dry year and our coastal wetlands will be inundated with flocks of birds like many of our youngest and newest birders have never seen before.

Baillon’s Crake at Northland Shopping Centre Car Park

'Habitat'

Birds do turn up in some odd places. A Plains Wanderer turned up recently at the Melton Bunnings Loading Centre. A couple of years ago, a Painted Buttonquail was found on Bourke Street. Last night, Scott Baker was at Northland, on the upper level car park, when he found a Baillon’s Crake. Scott says, “the only thing of note that’s ever happened here is a car-jacking and kidnapping last year. I was putting shopping in the car and this thing flew towards me … I thought it was a deformed sparrow! Then it ran across the car park”. 

There’s absolutely no habitat at the location, though it is 300-400m from the Darebin Creek Wetlands. Evidently, the nearest thing it could find to dense vegetation were the wheels of a car.