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Back in Melbourne briefly I tried for the Little
Bittern that Aidan Sudbury had seen at the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens. It had
been many years since I had visited this site and had forgotten how
good the heathland here is. The wetlands weren't quite as good, and no
Little Bittern was forthcoming. While in Melbourne I heard from Paul Peake who
the night before had heard a Masked Owl not far from Lorne. My first
night of this final leg of "The Big Twitch" was spent here. It was not an
auspicious start as I failed to even hear the birds, though I did hear six
Boobook Owls in a very small area, and was serenaded by the werewolf like grunts
of Koalas in love.
The next morning saw me out along the coast at Port
Fairy searching every beach I knew that had held Sanderling in the past. Again
no luck. This was not auguring well. In a now too familiar theme I was unable to
fluke one of the Lawrence Rocks' Cape Gannets in my attempts at
seawatching off Portland. The Government seems to have privatised the lighthouse
near Cape Nelson, and as far as I could work out, access to what was one of the
greatest sea watching spots in Australia is now off limits unless you want to
fork out for a feed of grain fed beef while you listen to a trad jazz band.
Undeterred, I pressed on, nightfall seeing me
at Comet Bore in Ngkarat Conservation Park in South Australia's Mallee.
This area used to be a great spot for Red-lored Whistler and Western Whipbird
but some major fires went through a few years ago destroying most of the
habitat.
Next morning I went for a walk through the mix of
heath and mallee country. There were birds everywhere, mainly Honeyeaters-
Tawny-crowned, Purple-gaped and White-eared, denizens of the heathland. But
there seemed to be a patch that seemed relatively old growth- perhaps it escaped
the fires- and it was in here that I found Shy Heathwren and both a female and
immature Red-lored Whistler. Perhaps they were making a
comeback here; one that may have been thwarted however, as within days of my
visit, fires again swept through the Park. Who knows if the Whistlers can
recover a second time?
From Comet Bore I drove to Pooginook Conservation
Park where I had a "dead cert" site for both the Whistlers and Malleefowl. Lucky
I already had picked up the Red-loreds as I failed to get onto any here, and I
found the Malleefowl mound OK, but it seemed inactive, and no birds could be
found.
Possibly my last option for Malleefowl was
a place called Eromophilla Park which is basically a working wheat
farm with substantial areas of mallee left on it. The amazing woman who
runs it has been throwing grain to the local Malleefowl for about thirty years
and they have become quite used to people. At one point she had seven birds
coming in for a free feed, and up to seventeen were counted in the local
district, but much of the surrounding area has since been cleared for more wheat
paddocks. Now, in the drought, they stand denuded of cover, the precious topsoil
heaped in piles along fencelines whilst the mallee that has been preserved at
Eromophilla Park keeps its soil well bound.
Next morning I went out to the mound, and
there was the local pair of Malleefowl scratching about,
seemingly oblivious to my presence. A very special moment indeed, as I have
hardly ever seen these very, very cool birds, and I had begun to seriously doubt
I would get them.
The last of the Mallee species safely ticked off,
it was time to head further afield with an overnight stop in Adelaide- thanks
again to another of the Harper kids giving up their bed for this smelly
birder- taking a bed from a child; can I sink any lower? While there, Dave
Harper filled me in on waht had transpired after I had parted company with
him on the track to Birdsville back in August and he told me that a day or so
later they had seen over forty thousand Flock
Bronzewings coming into drink at a waterhole out of Birdsville. If only I'd
stayed with them another day!
He had also seen Inland Dotterel at the bottom of
the Birdsville Track near Marree so it was here that I decided to detour
as I was unsure of where else to look for this species. Needless to
say this thousand kilometre detour produced no Inland Dotts, but I finally
caught up with Rufous Field-wren at the Chestnut-breasted
Whiteface site near Lyndhurst.
It wasn't until two days later that I caught up
with Inland Dotterel in the middle of the Nullabor Plain, trying to hide from a
massive lightning storm. The radio later said that lightning had hit South
Australia something like two hundred thousand times, and here was I in the
middle of a vast plain sitting in a metal box, the only object standing more
than half a metre. I sought refuge in the railway town of Cook. Sitting in
the middle of the Trans-Australian Rail-line, Cook is now little more than a
ghost town. I sat out the storm with a bunch of railway workers who were waiting
for their changeover with the West Australian crew. There on that desolate flat
plain, illuminated by flashes of distant lightning, with red dust whipping
around us, blown by a fierce, hot Northerly that seared the soft tissue of
the nasal cavities with every intake of breath, I felt I was on the set of a
Charles Chauvel film, transported back to the early Nineteen Fifites.
It wasn't until after dark, driving back to the
Highway that I finally encountered Inland Dotterel- almost ran
over it on the track. It was a great ending to a dramatic day which had included
some very interesting birds such as Stubble Quail, Crimson and Orange Chats,
Fork-tailed Swift and the Nullabor race of Cinnamon
Quail-thrush.
And now, with November upon us, the total on
625, I was finally crossing into the
West.
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