The Legendary Wollongong

For my last gasp of Australian holiday birding I went on yet another pelagic excursion, the legendary Wollongong fourth Saturday. Shortly after dawn I boarded the Sandra K, a reeking tub that has been taking the world's most notorious birders out looking for pelagic species in the rugged seas off the south coast of Australia every fourth Saturday of the month, for so many years that one wonders if she could possibly still be seaworthy. A diverse group of international hardcore birdos--a Yorkshire PhD student, a french teacher from New Caledonia, a couple of grim midwesterners, myself--joined a motley crew of salty local birdmen who make the trip each month and can identify distant shearwaters whipping past on the wing with only the quickest glance at the flight silouette.

The Wollongong is nothing like birding off Kaikoura, where albatross begin wheeling around the stern of the boat virtually before one has even left the harbor. In this part of south-eastern Australia the continental shelf is a good few hours of rocking and rolling beyond the harbormouth. One of the things the Wollongong pelagics are most renowned for is seasickness, and it was after only a few minutes out that the deck began to lurch back and forth in the alarming swells. I managed to keep breakfast down, but there were some queasy moments.


The Sandra K. at the wharf. Everyone from Phoebe Snetsinger to Sean Dooley has headed out for a gut-churning sea voyage on board this modest vessel.

Puttering through the harbor, a boat full of birdos, all eagerly scanning the waves for the first bird of the day.


"The sun's coming up, like a big bald head."


The former drummer for ZZ Top, now retired to a relaxing life as the resident chum-master on board the Sandra K.


Mmmmmm. Delicious. Nothing like the sight of a tub full of ground raw chicken to help ease that queasy feeling bubbling up from the small intestine. Is that spoonful for me?

Soon a mass of Wedge-tailed shearwaters began to gather, gobbling chicken offal and trailing behind the boat.


The big boys, three Wandering albatross, join the party as we near the continental shelf.

Netting shearwaters for banding; something like capturing butterflies, except bigger, and with feathers.

It's a bit like fishing.


Got one!

Bird banding.


Scraggly shearwater, banded. Tag and release.


Next, a special interactive feature:




Stare at the first image for a few seconds. Now quickly stare at the next one. Now stare back at the first one. And switch again. Now back again. How do you feel? Continue this for seven hours and report back. Your comments on the experience welcome.

The Unwary Cassowary

This whole birding racket, I've often explained, as if in defense of my hobby, leads one to the most spectacular natural places of the globe. It is as if the rare, endangered and spectacular species all over the world possess an unerring eye for our most glorious and unspoiled corners. But it is of course precisely because our own species has done so very much spoiling that such places are remote and inaccessible, and the birds in them so threatened. Until global warming really kicks in with all its turbo-charged, microwaving power, habitat destruction will continue to be the primary cause of extinction for those waning species we are supposed to be sharing the planet with.

When particular birds are really threatened, at risk of being completely extinguished, it is invariably because mankind has done away with all of the suitable habitat in the name of the still apparently admirable goal of "development." Seated in the waiting room of extinction, birds like the Southern cassowary have nearly nothing left of their formerly splendid environment to inhabit, and in such cases birding brings the birder right to the depressing front lines of the ongoing war between mankind and the rest of the natural world.

Which is how I came to be sitting in a cushioned rattan garden chair on the airy veranda of the Licuala Lodge in Mission Beach, Queensland, a "lifestyle-oriented" beachfront community a couple of hours south of Cairns. A comfortable and tastefully appointed B+B with an immaculately manicured garden in the tropical style, the Licuala Lodge lies on a residential cul de sac shaped on the model of any of innumerable luxury Floridian housing developments: a tract of land with a "drive" or a "close" or a "court" paved right through its middle, like the backbone of a fish, and many landscaped driveways off to either side, completing the skeleton. I put my binoculars nearby on the glass-topped coffee table and put my feet up on the porch railing and drank jasmine tea; it's not so bad here at the front, at least for us humans.

The B+B is hosted by an expat british couple, Sue and Mick, who have two semi-permanent residents, Cassie and Charlie, two Southern cassowaries who stride noiselessly out of the adjacent jungle for daily visits. There is a symbiotic interrelationship of species here, as between an anemonefish and its anemone: the regular appearance of the cassowaries ensures the regular appearance of paying, birder guests, and in return the cassowaries profit in the form of banana handouts.

Now, don't go getting all self-righteous on me and trying to denigrate my exciting sighting of wild cassowaries. There is no difference between Cassie and Charlie and the birds that come to your backyard feeder for sesame seeds except that cassowaries are six feet tall and flightless. I know you imagined me trudging through the dim and sodden rainforest dawn, up to my ankles in muck and pulling off the leeches as fast as they could fall out of the trees and down the back of my neck, but that wasn't how it was. When I pulled into the driveway, binoculars around my neck, Mick came out to greet me. (If you remember from the last paragraph, he's one of the people, not one of the cassowaries).

"What are my chances of seeing a cassowary, do you suppose?" I asked, after discussing rooms and rates and so on.
"There might be one about just now," said Mick, "there was one here half an hour ago."
Oh Drat, I thought.

Not to seem anxious, but once I had put my bag in my room and had a first cup of tea, I asked again:
"Mick, is there anywhere I should go for the rest of the afternoon, you know, to sort of increase my chances?"
"Honestly, if you really want to see cassowaries, I would stay right here. You'll see them, I can pretty much assure you. Don't worry."



Cassowaries are enormous, and potentially dangerous. Only Ostriches and Emus are bigger, but cassowaries are tougher. They have a vicious horn-like spur of bone on top of their head and gigantic, muscled thighs, like a duck leg as trained by Arnold Schwarzenegger. They have been known to head-butt and then kick people to death, generally in response to some perceived threat to their young.

Git out mah way, fo' I stomp yo' ass.


In Papua New Guinea there are still stable populations of cassowary, but in Australia, in tropical north Queensland, there may be as few as five hundred left. This is largely because there is nowhere left for them to live; only 3 to 5% of their original habitat remains, and this is fragmented into many small bits, divided from one another by sterile oceans of sugar cane plantation. Although there are still some wonderful tracts of jungle in Queensland, if I were to log into your bank account and remove all but 3% of your funds, I'm sure you would feel that, essentially, you had been wiped out. A bird this size, which can gobble an entire banana the way you might swallow an aspirin, requires a lot of territory in which to forage for fallen fruits.

Cassowary in the driveway. There must be a banana around here somewhere....

Restless, I went for a walk in the garden, staying on the edge adjacent to the jungle, peering into the forest and hoping for a glimpse of a cassowary. Then I heard Mick, calling for me rather urgently. I quickly ran back towards the house, past the swimming pool. Mick was on the second floor porch, pointing down and over the edge of the house. Charlie, I think it was, was patrolling in front of the garage doors, looking this way and that, but mostly up at the porch, expecting a banana to materialize at any moment. He stayed a good fifteen or twenty minutes before sidling off into the forest, but came again an hour later. In the evening Cassie came; she is larger, older and more powerful than Charlie and will not tolerate his presence outside of the breeding season. According to Sue, Cassie will chase Charlie off if she arrives at the house and finds him there; such is the law of the jungle, for there might not be enough bananas to go around. I photographed the birds a volonté.


It took a good twenty minutes of following Charlie around before I managed to get a photograph of him in front of anything that remotely looked like jungle. He was either in front of the garage, or the latticework doors to the downstairs common area of the B+B, or in front of the car. At last as he was slinking back into the forest I got this remotely "wild" shot.


In the morning, at dawn, I knew Cassie was arriving by the crunch of her massive feet on the gravel of the driveway. It sounded just like a person, but walking more calmly and deliberately. In the jungle of course, they manage to move almost silently. When necessary they can run in short bursts at speeds of up to 50km an hour. In their natural state, cassowaries are said to by shy and wary. But cassowaries in Australia are much reduced in personality and behavior, by circumstances. I almost felt like a cheat, seeing my first cassowary this way. After all, birds seen in a zoo do not count for a "life list." How tame are Cassie and Charlie? How legitimate is it to "tick" them? Shouldn't I have shlepped it into the forest, hoping that against the odds I would stumble upon a bird who refused, on principal, to head to suburbia for easy handouts? I tortured myself with these thoughts as I left Mission Beach, driving back towards Cairns along "Cassowary Drive." The access road to the community cuts through a chunk of the pristine jungle that backs up onto the Licuala Lodge. All along its length are warning signs: "Do not feed the cassowaries," or "SLOW DOWN, Cassowary Territory!" An enormous, billboard-sized yellow and black warning sign shows a graphic of a cassowary being hit by a car, and the legend: "Cassowaries have been killed by speeding!" According to Sean Dooley there are an average of four cassowary fatalities a year caused by humans hitting them with cars. In a population of five hundred or so, in a bird with a three to five year breeding cycle, this is significant, but obviously if we allow driving at all, and therefore consider it societally acceptable that a certain number of humans are going to be killed each year in automobile accidents, we aren't going to outlaw cars to prevent cassowary deaths. I tapped the brakes, and slowed just in time to see, there, on the grassy margins of the highway, a third, unnamed cassowary. Was this one wilder, less accustomed to civilization and its ways? I wanted to pull over, but there was nowhere to park, and traffic behind me, so I had to zip on by.


This poor cassowary does not think that Mick and Sue's parked Ford SUV is a banana, instead it is investigating its own reflection in the glossy paint job. If there were only five hundred of you humans left you would carefully and sadly stare into the mirror, too, just in case some surprise chance at friendship had somehow eluded you.

Reading: The Big Twitch by Sean Dooley

Twitching, you need to understand, is not a symptom of some dread disease, or a nervous mannerism. To twitch is to list, to tick, to cross off, as in a species of bird, once seen. Twitchers are those birdwatchers at what we might call the hardcore end of the birding spectrum, those maniacal and fanatical amateur ornithologists driven by a desperate impulse not entirely distinct from collecting passport stamps or records or turquoise enamel cookware. Ever in seek of the new, these are not people who sit about watching their favorite garden birds visit the backyard feeder. No. Twitchers flit around their state, nation, continent or globe in search of novelty, rarity, and most importantly, another X on the checklist. They have "life lists" which catalog the entirety of their successful sightings in the absurd world of competitive birding. I would never participate in anything so crass, not to mention demeaning to the birds themselves. But that's easy for me to say, because my list is longer than yours.

In Australia, at least, my list is most definitely not longer than Sean Dooley's. A lifelong birder and freelance comedy writer caught "between jobs," Dooley, in 2002, squandered his inheritance attempting to break the Australian "big year" record. He sought, in other words, to see in one calendar year more species of birds within the political boundaries of what we call Oz than anyone before him. In fact he hoped to far exceed the long-establish record of 638; he was aiming for a full 700. If you think this is an obscure goal allow me to assure you that in the United States it is not uncommon to encounter birders who keep county lists, not only in their home state, but in the neighboring ones. What's more, they keep cumulative lists for a particular month in a particular county. And monthly state lists. And lower 48-states lists. And lists of their lists. I don't have any of these. What do you think I am? Some kind of bird geek? I do admit to having a "Five-Borough" list and a "Red Hook" list, but purely for my own amusement. And if you had seen Red-throated loon in the industrial wastelands of the Erie basin, swimming just in front of the Sunset Park Home Depot, you would start a Red Hook list too, I know you would. Not to mention I had Wilson's warbler in my back yard on Coffey St. and needed somewhere appropriate to write that down for posterity's sake. But this isn't about me, it's about Dooley.

I don't want to offend anybody, since over the years I've been given as gifts everything from academic works on feather structure in accipiters to sappy reminiscences of lives spent "birding around the old Vermont homestead," but I could care less about books about the habits of birds, how to feed baby birds, what birds some other person saw, what makes birding "fun", why birds can fly and so on. I don't want to stay home and read about other mooks who love birds, I want to go out in the woods and see new ones. Unless it is a field guide, which will help me identify birds in Madagascar, and therefore allow me to add them to my list, I don't care. So a book like The Big Twitch is normally not something you will find me enjoying.

But in fact, I loved it. As far as I can tell from the birders I've met here and there around the globe in my travels so far, Sean Dooley is the only other "birdo" out there besides me who understands why the rest of the world thinks we are insane. And thinks birding is funny but still birds. "To bird" having become in our world a verb. Most hardcore birders you meet out in the field say things like "I was going to fly home to be at my wife's side as she delivered our first child, but I hadn't managed to see Scarlet Macaw in time to get back, so I stuck around the malarial swamps of Guatemala for a few more days. But we're planning on having more children." Should you give the merest hint that you find this suggestive of misplaced priorities, such people invariably go all huffy on you, retreating between the covers of their field guide and refusing to talk about which trail it was exactly that they saw Atherton's scrubwren on that morning. But not Dooley. He thinks it is all hilarious and embarrassing, but inescapable, because he has got the disease. In The Big Twitch, he drives thousands of kilometers through the outback madly ticking off species and eating nothing but stale meat pies, only to arrive, exhausted and road weary, at some god-forsaken internet cafe where he logs on and discovers that some mega-rarity has been sighted thousands of kilometers back across the county, whereupon without stopping for so much as a coffee he rushes to the airport and flies off to fail to see it. Then he laughs about it and starts over. Meanwhile his total is steadily rising, along with the suspense.

I don't want to spoil the ending of this ornithological cliffhanger, but Dooley gets his 700. His 700th bird for the year was a tiny, brightly colored sparrow-like bird known as a Blue-faced parrot finch. Notoriously difficult to pin down, nomadic and wily, parrot finches feed in long grass in clearings in rainforests. One would imagine that they would be doing well, given how much rainforest is being cleared around the world, but parrot-finches are declining. They are very particular and like only tiny clearings in very good, pristine forests. When I was in the Philippines, working on a film about Imelda Marcos, I remember reading about a filipino parrot finch with habits even less-well-known than those of the Blue-faced. It hadn't been reliably seen in years, and even to go to the district where it might conceivably occur meant risking kidnapping at the hands of Maoist separatist guerillas. I didn't try to see it. Dooley saw his Blue-faced on Mt. Lewis in northern Queensland, which has comparatively few guerillas, and as I am in the neighborhood I thought I would stop by and visit the site, being that it is now obviously of immense historical significance. I also hoped to see Tooth-billed and Golden bowerbirds, Mountain thornbill, Gray-headed robin, Bower's shrike-thrush, the aforementioned Atherton's scrubwren, Chowchilla, and Fernwren, these being the crucial species to "get" here, as they all live only in a small area of mountainous coastal rainforest in this enormous state. They are known collectively as the "wet tropical endemics."

The entrance to the Mt. Lewis refuge. If only we had tropical rainforest like this in my Brooklyn!

The bird is known to hang out at one particular clearing in the forest, near the summit of Mt. Lewis, a couple of hours north of Cairns, which was the answer we were looking for in the quiz in the previous blog entry. Dooley claims to have been particularly excited to see the parrot-finch not only because it was to be number 700, but because he had failed to find the unreliable little beast on previous occasions. It was, therefore, a "life bird" as well as a "year bird." With one week left in the year, he wrote:

"Over fifteen years I'd made the pilgrimage to Mount Lewis on five separate occasions. Each one had seen me return with an empty space on the checklist. Others had been seeing them recently at the famous clearing but there had only been one or two and they had been very difficult to get onto.
"I rose before dawn on the morning of Christmas Eve, determined that this time it would be different.... Bleary eyed I drove up the mountain and parked the car at the concrete causeway where a party of Red-browed finches were feeding. The parrot-finches will supposedly forage with the Red-broweds, but not this time.... I tremulously walked the rest of the way to the clearing. Again there were more Red-broweds, again no Blue-faced."

My God, Dooley, put me out of my misery, I can't stand the tension.

"After a couple of minutes I thought I saw something a bit bigger fly down to the base of the grass. I could see one stalk of grass waving about far more wildly than the ones the red-browed finches were perched on. This had to be it. Slowly the bird on the grass stem moved up towards the waving seed-head. Like a fisherman who can tell by the strength of the tug on the line that he's got something good, I knew this was the business. Suddenly the bird popped into view. Plump, bright green body, blue face, red rump: a Blue-faced parrot finch, bird number 700."

Trying to have this experience for myself (this is about me, not about Dooley), I drove after dawn up the slick clay road, through spectacular tropical Australian rainforest, watching the odometer tick off the tenths. The critical clearing is 11.6 kilometers up the mountain from the main road, as any fool who can Google should know. Probably 90% of the birders on the world circuit who have the parrot-finch on their list have seen it in this exact spot. Not me. I saw it well before there, at about the 8 kilometer mark, when an explosion of small birds burst out of a minuscule patch of roadside grasses. Does that make mine better than yours? Directly in front of me, before I had so much as gotten out of the car, a blue-faced parrot finch perched on the branch of a bush overhanging the road. Even through the rental car windscreen I could appreciate the brilliant grassy green body, crimson, pointed, parrot-like tail and the cobalt blue, almost Yves Klein head. The parrot finch is quite a little number. I jammed the car into park, turned it off, and eased the door open gently, while rooting around on the seat next to me for the binoculars, never taking my eyes off the bird. I slipped out and got a bead on it through the bins. Slowly I approached, flushing more birds, which whirred up into the bushes and peered around. Suddenly I was surrounded by parrot-finches, a pestilential plague of them. It made me wish I had brought a squash racquet, to swat my way through. There were four in all.

The legendary Blue-faced parrot finch, Dooley's-number-700, was literally my first bird of the day. When I arrived at the actual, reknowned clearing, I saw two more. At my leisure, relaxing, not rushed. They hung about, as if they enjoyed me watching them. They were virtually nibbling at my shoelaces. (What I'm doing right now, according to Dooley's useful and farcical "glossowary" of ozzie twitching terms, is gripping you off: "Not as grubby as it sounds, but still an unpleasant experience. When one birder teases another after having seen a bird the other one hasn't.") My day started on that high note and just kept getting better. I know, I know, you desperately want to know about the Chowchilla. Yes, I saw it (2684). And Atherton's scrubwren. And all the others. And King parrot. And Bridled honeyeater. Etc. You didn't. I did. You shoulda been there.

Sorry, I got a little carried away there.

One of the best moments of the day was watching two Red-browed finches mating. Out of nowhere a pair flew in and landed just inches apart on a horizontal exposed twig at the edge of the world-famous clearing. In his conical bill, the male was clutching the tip of a blade of grass, which he extended into the air in an arching bouquet. He then hopped a series of vertical hops, waving the seed-head indeed. Each hop brought him closer to the female, who was at the very least receptive enough to have joined him on the branch to begin with. I'm fairly certain she knew what was up. With a final wave of the seeds and a last hop he leapt aboard the passive female. Flustering and ruffling, humping and wriggling, he discarded his blade of grass in mid-coitus, which is to say about two seconds into the proceedings, as if to demonstrate that he no longer needed his prop. I suspect that in the Red-browed finch world, the bit of grass symbolizes the man's willingness to set up house, to nest and to nurture alongside his mate. Somewhere in there I'm sure lurks a life lesson waiting to be learned, I'm just not sure what it is. But I'm going to try out the building materials courtship trick next time I'm in Sunset Park at the Home Depot. Look for me holding a 4X8 piece of sheetrock over my head and hopping up and down.