For those who have just come in, I am on a trip to Phillip Island which
lies just south of Norfolk Island...
One bird I missed out on was White-necked Petrel. This was
because my guide refused to show me where they were nesting. Only one tour
operator regularly goes out to Phillip, (Mike Simpson of Land and Sea Tours) and
the condition is that you must be accompanied by a guide. My guide, Karleen
Christian was fantastic- one of the Pitcairners (the descendants of Bounty
Mutineers) who had grown up on the Norfolk. Her love of the place was infectious
and she was very knowledgeable about the wildlife and its natural history and
role in the ecology and culture of the island.
As a guide she was superb. But because she and other guides
had previously shown other twitchers the White-necked Petrels, and those
twitchers had (quite rightly) published their sightings on this and other
forums, some of the local researchers had been quite put out and she was worried
at copping a serve from them, and that they would complain to the National
Parks Service who had the power to revoke the company's tour permit for Phillip
Island.
The issue is centred on the welfare of the birds. The
researchers claim that they were disturbed by the twitchers, though as the birds
were still there some months later I'm not sure that this claim is borne out. I
can understand the concern on letting twitchers loose on breeding birds (as the
recent Hope Island Painted Snipe incident if true demonstrates) but the fact is
that Phillip Island is regularly visited by tourists (most not birdwatchers) and
it seems to have no detrimental effect on any of the other breeding seabirds. In
fact the locals annually harvest Sooty Tern eggs on the island, yet the Sooties
remain to lay another clutch. Possibly White-necked Petrels are more sensitive
to disturbance than other species, I don't know, but in any case, every visitor
is accompanied by a guide, so it is certainly not an instance of letting rabid
twitchers rampant to harass the birds.
Apparently there are only a few pairs of White-neckeds on
Phillip and the researchers have put a piece of perspex to view one pair in the
burrow, so to see the birds only involves approaching this particular burrow. I
do wonder which is the more distressing act for the birds: having an excited
twitcher peering in at the bird through a perspex sheet for a few minutes, or a
researcher dragging the bird out of the burrow to tag it, weigh it, takes blood
samples and make it regurgitate it's last meal to see what it is feeding
on. Though having seen what a twitcher looks like in the raptures of a new
discovery, I think I'd rather have been poked and probed than have to witness
such a spectacle.
I bring this up because naturally I was disappointed, as
this is the only place in Australian territories that the bird breeds, and it is
very rarely seen elsewhere at sea. I would actually prefer not to be
spoon-fed my birds, but as I was only on Norfolk for a reduced time, and
the weather was too foul for any boats to go out offshore (Mike Simpson is the
only skilled and/or crazy enough boatman to go out in rough weather, and even he
wouldn't have gone beyond Phillip Island on this particularly rough day) there
was no other way I could get to see the bird. Every other bird on Phillip Island
I could easily see elsewhere, and I made it clear that this was the bird I
was after. If I had known I was guaranteed not to see it, I wouldn't have forked
out $130 for the trip to Phillip, even though it was well worth it in so many
other ways.
If I was to write that I had merely missed the bird, those of
you who followed me, would be pretty peeved that I had neglected to mention why,
especially if you too had laid out the not inconsiderate sum to see the bird. I
can understand the researchers concerns, and they are quite valid, personally I
would rather not see a bird than be the cause of a disturbance that could
threaten its breeding success, but sometimes I wonder whether people get just a
little too proprietorial over the birds on their patch. After all, I had come
all this way, spent all this money to get a glimpse of the wonders that they
experience every day. Surely that's something worth sharing.
I encountered a similar problem in my quest for the Norfolk
Island Boobook. Late January/February is a good time of year to go to Norfolk
(patches of foggy weather aside) as it is the time most likely for a Long-tailed
Cuckoo to turn up (no, I didn't see one, though one had been reported two weeks
earlier). But the problem is that many of the people in the know are on leave.
This meant that the National Park staff who were on duty weren't aware of
specific information on birds, or were reluctant to pass on what they did know.
Because the researcher working on the Boobooks was away,
the other staff wouldn't pass on any information about them to me. I can
understand them not wanting to divulge nesting locations of this critically
endangered bird, but they wouldn't even suggest a good location to listen for
them. When I came back a second day asking for more information they did very
kindly lend me a spotlight, so I spent the next two nights clambering up the
rainforest tracks in the National Park with not so much as a single call to
tantalise me.
But I hadn't held great expectations of seeing this bird, and
if I had, how to place it taxonomically would have been a problem. (Are the
birds on Norfolk classed as New Zealand Boobooks? Merely a race of Australian
Boobook? or simply an uncountable hybrid?)
The greatest frustration of all for me was my attempt to see
the Norfolk Island Red-crowned Parakeet (Norfolk Island Kakariki). Everybody
who'd been there said that the best place to see these endemics was by the
aviary at the Botanic Gardens. The aviary holds captive breeding birds and the
wild ones apparently come and visit them. Or so the theory goes.
I wasn't too concerned not seeing them on my first day. I had
far too many other new birds to deal with. By the second day I was beginning to
feel uneasy. I was compensated by the fact that the tracks in the botanic
gardens afford great views of most of the other endemics including the island
forms of Scarlet Robin and Golden Whistler. And all the while I had locals
telling me that I was always there at the wrong time. "You want to be there
first thing in the morning." "No, they're more likely mid-morning". "They always
come around late afternoon." Well after three days of being there morning,
mid-morning, early and late afternoon I still hadn't seen them. It took me two
days to even see one of the caged birds.
By the final morning I was desperate. First light, there was a
caged bird calling. No wild birds answered. I raced around to the National Park
and managed to hear some calling in the thick of the forest but it was so
impenetrable there was no way I could get near them. Back to the Bot Gardens and
still nothing. It was now after nine. My boarding time was 10:15. I raced down
to the airport, checked in my bags, went and filled up the hire car with petrol-
300 kilometres in three days on an island 8 km long must be some kind of record.
9:55 and I head back up to the Gardens for one last forlorn
attempt. I am resigned to missing this bird, and unlike the White-necked Petrel
it aint a possibility anywhere else. I get out of the car at two minutes to
ten. There's a bird on the edge of the cage, just teasing me. Then I look again.
This bird is sitting on the outside of the cage! It is a wild
Norfolk Island Red-crowned Parakeet. I get the binoculars on
its beautiful green form and it turns to look directly at me with I swear a
impish grin before it flies off into the forest, waiting to torment the next
poor twitcher. The time is 10:05.
Ten minutes later I am on the plane and leave Norfolk with my
list on 220.
