Bird flies to wrong continent
By Mark
Whittaker
September 15, 2004
A SOLITARY starling has set the
birdwatching world aflutter after arriving in the Kimberley 12 days
ago.
No ordinary backyard pest, this starling with a rose-coloured beak
has never before been seen in Australia.
Normally it spreads across the
central Asian steppe in great wheeling flocks, heading south at this time of
year to winter in India.
How this lonely bird came to be in Australia has sparked a flurry of
speculation about whether it overflew India and kept flying for 6000km, perhaps
hitching a ride on a ship, or whether it just escaped from an aviary - even
though the bird isn't kept in Australia.
One person who doesn't care how it got here is Joy Tansey, warden of
the Broome Bird Observatory. She was the first person to see it, and in the
birdwatching world, where ticking off new species is the name of the game, this
was one very big tick.
She was taking a mother and daughter on a birdwatching tour of Roebuck
Plains Station, outside Broome.
Out on a grassy plain dotted with fat termite mounds, they saw the
strange, predominantly black and white bird with a rosy beak.
"I was pretty
amazed," says Tansey, 50, whose personal tally of birds seen in Australia is now
556 species. "The adrenaline rush was huge. We grabbed the scopes and camera and
started to take pictures. I was shouting: 'Find paper. Write this down.' But it
was an obliging little fellow. It sat around for 35 minutes."
She started alerting others via phone and the internet, so by
lunchtime, at La Trobe University in Melbourne, ornithologist Rohan Clarke was
being alerted to the find by Mike Carter.
In the competitive but friendly world of twitchers - birdwatchers who
list sightings of different species - Mike Carter sits atop the tree with more
than 770 species in Australia, and here he was alerting Clarke, perched on 749
and closing, to the news.
By 11.30pm that night Clarke was touching down in Broome. Next morning,
filled with anticipation, he drove out to the fence line where the starling had
been seen. But it wasn't there, so Clarke spent the weekend scanning the plains
with Broome's hard-core birdwatching community of about seven, becoming
increasingly despondent that the bird had flown.
He flew back to Melbourne without the tick. The bird hasn't been seen
since, despite the best efforts of the locals, who would kick off a mini tourism
boom from all the likeminded souls if they could just get it to sit still for a
couple of days.
The
Australian
