birding-aus

The Big Twitch- Catching Up

To: "birding-aus" <>
Subject: The Big Twitch- Catching Up
From: "Sean Dooley" <>
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 10:59:00 +0800
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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