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Sighting the Australian land mass as I approached
from Lord Howe, I was struck with the daunting thought that I would soon be
crossing it's vast expanses, and then back again, all before the end
of the year. But before I did that I still had a few old friends to
catch up with.
So it was straight to the Capertee Valley once
more, driving through the bushfires that ringed the Blue Mountains and Lithgow.
And this is only October- we are in for a hell of a Summer. Even
though it had only been a month since I'd been here, the country had dried
out even more. Any trees that had been threatening to flower now appeared
suitably chastened and joined the wilting throng. Not a good omen for finding
Regent Honeyeaters.
Similarly, no grasses seemed to have seeded
either, so I was at a loss as to where to even begin looking for Plum-headed
Finches. After a day's birding the entire valley, things were looking quite
grim, for although I had seen many good birds (Singing Bushlark, Turquoise
Parrot, Grey-crowned Babbler, Striped Honeyeater, a White-throated Nightjar
heard at night at Glen Davis) I still hadn't seen my target species. Then late
in the afternoon as I drove along a small group of birds flew up in an adjacent
paddock. All day I had been stopping for instances such as this and all day they
had turned out to be Pipits or Zebra Finch, or even Diamond Firetail, but not
what I was after. I almost didn't stop, but resignedly I drove back, and sure
enough four Plum-headed Finch popped their heads up, took one
look at me and flew off, never to be seen again. Bird number 618.
The sun was sitting very low by now, and I was
resigned to spending yet another fruitless day in the dry valley. I did one more
round of the likely spots. No luck at Glen Alice but I did see what must be a
White-browed/Masked Woodswallow hybrid. It looked exactly like a Masked
Woodswallow except that it had a broad white eyebrow, or to put it another way,
was exactly like a sepia toned White-browed Woodswallow, with all the colour
drained out of it.
As sunset approached I found myself back at the
River where Carol Proberts had reported a couple of pairs of Regents had
established territories. This area had been the focus of my attention but had
failed to produce, and did likewise again. I was going to leave, but as there
was still a few minutes light left, I thought I may as well hang around.
And then it happened. I noticed a largish
honeyeater type thing fly to the top of a River Oak. Without expecting anything
I put my bins up to it and behold, there glowing in the last rays of the day was
a single Regent Honeyeater. With their pasty, warty face they
always seem so drab in books, but here in the golden glow of the evening, you
realise what an absolutely beautiful bird this thing is.
I raced back to get my tape player to try and call
it in closer for a good video shot, but it failed to respond. And as I stood
there on the bridge listening to the analog reproduction of the call ring out
through the valley, I suddenly was overwhelmed with the gut wrenchingly sad
feeling that I was listening to a ghost call.
If I was to do another Big Twitch again in
thirty years time ( I think it will take me that long to recover) my guess is
that Regent Honeyeater is the most likely bird I couldn't see again because
there won't be any left in the wild. I hope I am proved
wrong, as there is a recovery program well underway for this species.
I just wonder whether the damage done to their box-ironbark habitat has been too
great and no amount of tree planting and declarations of remnant reserves such
as has just happened in Victoria (hooray- finally!) will be able to reverse the
alarming population crash of the past few decades.
And so I left the Capertee Valley both exultant and
despairing, but at least I had the Regent Honeyeater, bird number 619. Next stop
was out on the edge of the Riverina where Dion Hobcroft had reported Black, Pied
and Painted Honeyeaters. The mistletoe that had attracted this congregation
of rare honeyeaters was on the wane and there were no Pieds hanging around
and just a few Painteds. But I was after Black, which had eluded
me in the Outback. After a long time scanning each drooping
cluster of flowers, a female Black Honeyeater flew into
view. Looks like all its mates had gone, no doubt heading towards the
coast in the desperate search for something to feed on in a year where
nothing is flowering. But I only needed one bird for my purposes, and now I
only needed one more species for this part of the world- the elusive Spotted
Quail-thrush.
I drove to Chiltern where Barry Trail had recently seen Quail-thrush. Barry had,
like so many others, worked tirelessly to get the Box-Ironbark National
Parks legislation through a recalcitrant Victorian Parliament, and had
celebrated the recent victory by hiking for two nights through the newly
protected Mt. Pilot forest block where he cautioned, he had only come
across one Quail-thrush.
Undeterred I went up into the forest and on his
advice, looked for areas with a tussocky understory. And at the first likely
spot I stopped at, had a pair of Spotted Quail-thrush doing
their thing amongst the tussocks. How could I have struggled with this bird
previously? How could Barry have missed them?
Perhaps the luck was beginning to run my way, and
with bird number 621 under the belt, it was time to look to the West with the
record beckoning.
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