Birds in Their Habitats Read online

  For Lou, who shared with me so many of the encounters in these pages,

  and so much more. Thank you.

  © Ian Fraser 2018

  All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO Publishing for all permission requests.

  The moral rights of the author(s) have been asserted.

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  Contents

  Prelude

  Introduction

  1 Deserts

  Warrigal Waterhole, north-west Queensland: an oasis

  Desert seed eaters

  Budgerigars

  South-west Queensland: locust swarms

  Woodswallows and nomadism

  Flock Bronzewings and Fairy Martins

  The Sahel: arid woodland

  The Quail-plover: of birding and twitching

  Waza National Park and its panting birds

  Waza: guineafowl and sandgrouse

  The Atacama: the driest desert

  Flamingos

  Other memories of deserts

  References

  2 Rainforests

  Western Cameroon: lowland tropical rainforest

  When birding is tough: Picathartes

  When birding is tough: Mt Kupé Bushshrike

  Julatten, north Queensland: a magnet for birders

  Mount Kinabalu, Sabah

  Bamenda Highlands, Cameroon: vanishing birds

  Mindo Valley, Ecuador: a jewel in the crown

  Paz de las Aves: positive ecotourism news

  Aguas Verdes, northern Peru: more positive ecotourism news

  Acjanaco Pass Road, southern Peru: cloud forest

  Andean Cock-of-the-Rock: leks

  Top End, Australia: monsoon forests

  Pittas: old passerines

  Kibale Forest, Uganda: more pittas

  Paluma, north Queensland: fragmented rainforest

  Riflebirds and speciation

  Cairns, north Queensland: hovering sunbird

  Other memories of rainforests

  References

  3 Oceans and islands

  The Galápagos: oceanic islands

  ‘Darwin’s finches’

  Darwin’s beach

  Tasmania: a continental island

  Island endemism

  Tasmanian Scrubtit: an older endemic

  The ‘turbo chook’: a cautionary tale

  Lord Howe Island: a volcanic speck

  Island extinctions

  The Lord Howe Island Woodhen: almost not there and back again

  Island breeding colonies: from Fernandina to Cape Town to Victoria to Chile

  Chile’s Chonos Archipelago: prolific seabirds

  Wind soaring

  Other memories of oceans and islands

  References

  4 Mountains

  Torres del Paine NP: Andean Condors

  Featherless heads

  The awesome alula: making flight possible

  Can birds smell?

  K-selected breeders: ‘have one kid, make sure it survives’

  Colca Canyon: high-altitude birding

  Soaring: ultimate flight

  The Drakensbergs, Lesotho: snow in Africa

  Bearded Vulture: digesting bones

  Torres del Paine again: New World vultures

  Unexpected origins

  Flying high: how do they do it?

  Other memories of mountains

  References

  Colour plates

  5 Wetlands and rivers

  Gum Swamp, New South Wales

  r-selected breeders: ‘have lots of kids, hope a couple survive’

  Grey Teal and breeding triggers

  Musk Ducks: a story of a duck’s luck

  Showing off in the water

  Cocha Salvador, Peruvian Amazonia

  Single-species Families

  Birds eating their greens

  Muscovy Ducks, and birds in service

  Jerrabomberra Wetlands, Canberra

  Preening

  Other memories of wetlands and rivers

  References

  6 Suburbia

  Canberra: crafty cockies

  Learning to live in town

  Canberra again: the Great Koel debate

  Birds in a warming world

  Melbourne Cricket Ground: a groggy gull

  When birds collide

  Canberra yet again: hybrid parrots

  Becoming a species: it doesn’t happen overnight!

  Still in Canberra: pardalotes

  Birds in burrows

  Dinosaurs in my garden

  Other memories of suburbia

  References

  7 Woodlands and grasslands

  Great Western Woodlands, Western Australia: Emu family

  Ratites, and the mysterious case of the flying elephant birds

  Feathers: a bird’s best friends

  A bird’s leg: a wonder of redesign

  Extinction

  High Veld, Wakkerstroom, South Africa: Widowbirds

  Tall tails and true

  Barkly Tableland, Northern Territory: grassy expanses

  Wind hovering

  Other memories of woodlands and grasslands

  References

  Bird species index

  General index

  Prelude

  The First Time. That’s the name of surely one of the most beautiful love songs ever written in English, Ewan McColl’s evocative ballad to Peggy Seeger, charting gently and intimately the key stages of a developing relationship. I guess most of us could do that, albeit perhaps more privately and probably less lyrically. But what about our ‘other relationship’? Nothing sordid implied there – I’m talking of the love affair that we all share … with birds. What else can you call the passion that leads us to follow a single bird, not necessa
rily a ‘new’ one, for an hour or so to absorb all of its subtle nuances, or just muse in a hide for ages, watching life potter along? Or indeed plan your holidays (or at least attempt to, loved ones permitting) around birds you’re hoping to see? Can you trace the tentative beginnings of awareness, through to the full flowering of publicly proclaimed commitment? Was it an epiphany for you, or a gradual and inevitable development? Just pause for a moment there and try to remember.

  It seems, when I rescanned their books, that for well-known birders Sean Dooley (The Big Twitch), Simon Barnes (How to be a Bad Birdwatcher; to the Greater Glory of Life) and Bill Oddie (Little Black Bird Book), birds were always part of their lives. For Simon, and perhaps Bill, it was apparently with family encouragement; for Sean it seems to have been despite his father.

  For me, I always knew I wanted to do things that involved animals. (I told an infant school teacher that I wanted to be a zookeeper when I grew up; she suggested that a zoo director might be a more appropriate goal. I’ve no idea still if she was right, but I did become a keeper for a year, though never a director.) My first memories involve following tolerant Sleepy Lizards – which I’ve learnt to refer to as Shinglebacks since I moved east – through the paddocks north of Adelaide, while Peter the bull terrier kept an eye open for less benign reptiles. He was somewhat neuronally challenged but utterly faithful, and very good at his other job of protecting dad’s ducks from stray cats. (My younger sisters were restricted to following caterpillars round the verandah, but, because they too were curious children, it didn’t always end well for the caterpillars.)

  Being a small boy, what I was really interested in was big African mammals, but by the time I was 12 I was keeping day lists of birds seen on a family holiday. I have the booklet now, all written out in Best, a page per day. It reflects a more relaxed approach to nomenclature – Blossom Parrot, Mountain Duck and Peewee, for instance (though I still use the last two). The only guide, apart from dad, was Cayley’s somewhat rudimentary What Bird is That?, which might help explain why I recorded Black-breasted Buzzard along the Coorong. The rest of it looks pretty convincing and comprehensive though. Being a thorough boy, I also noted ‘Rabbit’ and ‘Fox (dead)’.

  But my epiphany had come shortly before that when we spent a week in a shack at Milang on Lake Alexandrina at the mouth of the Murray River. There was a White-headed Stilt breeding colony just down the road and I was entranced by them, visiting daily to see their impossibly spindly red legs trailing as they whirled crossly into the air, yapping like puppies. To this day, one of my very favourite activities is pottering around wetlands.

  It’s strange to those of us immersed in the awareness of birds (because after all, it’s so much more than just ‘watching’, isn’t it?) that others are – or even could be – unaware of and unmoved by birds. I’m a fan of Simon Barnes’ How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, in which he says ‘I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching.’ It’s not an obscure philosophical credo, but a simple statement of fact that we all know intuitively. Wherever we are (outside at least), there are birds. So whether we’re walking to the shops, or hanging out the clothes, or having brunch with friends, or at the footy or cricket or an outdoor concert, we’re immediately aware if a raptor or swift whips over, or if a Grey Currawong or Gang-gang Cockatoo calls. It’s not something we just go and do sometimes – it’s an integral part of our entire existence. Just like being in love really.

  So, how was it for you, the first time?

  Introduction

  One of the wonderful things about birding is all the amazing places it takes us to and I’ve been pretty lucky in this, especially over the last decade or so. I spend a lot of time wondering while wandering, not only about the birds but about other animals, about plants and, of course, about the places themselves. This book is something of a synthesis of some of those wonderings, in the context of an attempt to share some of the remarkable landscapes and habitats I’ve found myself in, as well as their inhabitants. I love it when I think I’ve found some sort of understanding of what I’ve seen – usually through someone else’s insights – but I also love it when I realise that I really can’t seem to grasp just what I’m looking at. We are by nature a pretty arrogant mob, and a bit of forced humility does us no harm at all.

  The key thing is to acknowledge where we’re ignorant – I think the concept of compound ignorance is a significant one. I’ve seen it described as ‘a state in which one not only does not realise his ignorance but considers himself to be knowledgeable’, but a friend of mine put it more pithily; ‘he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know’. I might suggest that this is the cause of many of our global problems, but it’s probably not my place to do so. However, I’m convinced that it’s good to be reminded, for various reasons, how trivial we are in the greater scheme of things, how much there is still to learn about this very wonderful world.

  Admitting what we don’t know, while simultaneously struggling to make sense of it, is a very important start and perhaps a part of being human – it’s certainly a most significant part of birding.

  The book is thus also an attempt to share my own understandings, such as they are (mostly, as I say, by reading and trying to assimilate what those wiser and more qualified have to say on the topic), as well as my lack of them. If any part of it sparks a responsive train of thought in you then I’ve done something worthwhile. If any of the birds and places here bring back memories for you, then that makes me happy. And if by any chance there’s anything new in here for you, and you’re encouraged by it to go and meander down an unexplored thought track, or go and experience a new place or habitat or bird, then so much the better! Maybe I’ll see you out there one day.

  Much of what follows reflects my Southern Hemisphere origins and inclinations. I actually think of myself as a Gondwanan, and those lands attract me most. I did spend time some decades ago in Europe, and briefly stopped off in North America on the way home, but since then my wanderings have been almost all south of the equator. If this isn’t your part of the world, I really hope you won’t be deterred: the principles are universal, many of the fascinating studies I talk about are from the Northern Hemisphere, and anyway isn’t it good sometimes to explore somewhere new?

  Taxonomy

  I have opted to use the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) taxonomy and common names throughout, simply because one needs to be consistent, they are widely adopted, and they provide quarterly online updates, with justifications. I’m using Version 7.2 (as retrieved from http://www.worldbirdnames.org/classification/family-index/ on 18 May 2017).

  Acknowledgements

  In reality, many people over many years have contributed to the experiences and thoughts herein, not least of them Chris Carter who has sent me to South America many times for work. To a few, however, I owe a more immediate debt, during the actual writing process. If you detect any errors, then they survive despite the best efforts of these people!

  • Dr Janet Gardner of the Australian National University read most of the text and tutored me expertly and patiently in the complexities of how birds deal with surviving in a warming world.

  • Julian Robinson provided invaluable assistance and advice in preparing my fairly ordinary photos into a state approaching suitability for publishing.

  • Associate Professor Naomi Langmore of the Australian National University cast her eye over the material on koels, and told me something that absolutely delighted me!

  • Professor Dave Rowell of the Australian National University gave me some excellent tips on the mysteries associated with magpie hybrid zones, thus rescuing me from years of frustration.

  • Louise Maher, my partner, read it all as I produced it, casting a very usefully beady eye indeed over the grammar and general presentation. Even more importantly, she was always there for me.

  • As I’ve come to expect, the people from CSIRO Publishing have been encouraging, supportive and helpful from the start. Among them I am especially gratefu
l to John Manger, Briana Melideo, Lauren Webb and Tracey Kudis. Peter Storer, scientific editor, combined tact and ruthlessness to make this a better book; it was a pleasure and an education to work with him.

  1

  Deserts

  Warrigal Waterhole, north-west Queensland: an oasis

  Just east of Mount Isa in arid north-west Queensland, a faded sign by the highway indicates a track to Warrigal Waterhole. It is erosion-rutted and at the time we weren’t in a four wheel drive, so we left our vehicle to walk the 2.5 km through an ancient bony red landscape of folded hills and plains thickly strewn with gibbers, rounded wind-polished rocks eroded from the hard crust on the hills above. They had been swept from the track to some extent by vehicles, but still posed a rolling threat to the ankles of walkers distracted by a Hooded Robin swooping between bushes. In the distance, the ever-frustrating Crested Bellbird, a key element of the soundtrack of inland Australia, proclaimed eternally ‘dee-dee-dee-DEE-dee’, constantly turning so that the mellow notes rose and fell, defying us to pinpoint him.

  The plains between the hills were punctuated with big red termite mounds and scattered shrubby eucalypts above blonde tussocks of Mitchell Grass and huge spiky hummocks of Porcupine Grass. The termites live by harvesting the grass; it has been said that they are the antelope of Australia and the lizards are the lions and hyaenas (see Photo 1). Arid Australia has a greater diversity of lizards than anywhere else on Earth.

  It doesn’t sound much like a desert as most people probably interpret it – drifting dunes of burning sand with the only vegetation being date palms around a rare oasis and animals represented by the odd camel train and scuttling scorpion. However, a desert can be any dry place, be it hot or cold; the Antarctic plateau is the world’s biggest desert (followed by the Arctic, the Sahara, the Arabian and Gobi Deserts – so, three of the Big Five among deserts are cold). As a rule of thumb, a desert is defined as any place receiving less than 250 mm of rain a year; more than that, but less than 500 mm, and it’s a semi-desert (e.g. USGS 2016). I find the terms arid and semi-arid to be less loaded, but in the end these things are just human conceits. By these criteria, the Mount Isa area, with 460 mm of rain a year, is near the moister end of semi-desert, but a simple statement of annual rainfall isn’t the whole story: 85% of The Isa’s rainfall comes in the Southern Hemisphere summer months of November to March, when the average daytime temperature is 36°C, so most of the rainfall evaporates before becoming available.