Your Deserts Need You

***Remote Birding Expedition on sale now - details at this link***

Desert birding - this is the year

Lately I’ve been back in the desert. Sometime soon, you should head to the desert too. Whether you’ve never been before, or you’re a veteran Outback traveller, this year, as a birder, you ought to get out there.

My recent trip was the first of what will hopefully be a series of trips to collect data for a research degree I’m undertaking. This first one involved myself and my colleague in most desert escapades, Mark Carter, leaving Coolangatta and heading west with no itinerary other than reaching Alice Springs in ten days or so. The only mission was to fill in a few blanks on the desert map that neither of us had visited and to try and see what few lifers might be lurking there for us. Chief among these were a few species of grasswren.

There was a dual purpose for finding the grasswrens: neither of us had seen most of them and my research involves obtaining good quality audio recordings of Dusky Grasswrens across central Australia so any recording encounters with congeneric species would be useful practice.

The most obvious thing we noticed as we barrelled west of the divide and into the arid zone of the NSW/QLD border districts, was how much lying water was on the country. From the very first afternoon we drove through large thunderstorms. At Cunnamulla, roads to the north and west were all closed forcing us to head south and miss some of the best Grey Grasswren country out toward Innamincka. But we still made it to a flowing section of Cooper Creek where Mark was able to give his kayak its blooding on a proper desert river.

This is where Burke & Wills went wrong: they should have brought a kayak.

Heading south brought us into the range of the intriguing NSW race obscurior of Thick-billed Grasswren so all was not lost yet. This is not intended to be a comprehensive trip report so to cut a long and all-too-familiar story short: we dipped. Consecutive days over 40 degrees, a dearth of recent observations and inexperience recognising the bird’s habitat certainly contributed to our dip. These factors and the ever-present threat of being rained-in kept us moving southward after a fairly full day of gibber bashing.

The afternoon weather was regularly foreboding...

From Port Augusta the punishing temperatures eased but the rains continued. We had success with the Western Grasswren near Whyalla and found the birds in good voice and reasonably approachable for photographs and recordings despite quite a gusty day. The Thick-billed Grasswrens showed themselves ever-so-briefly further up the track near Coober Pedy and then we kept pushing north to Alice Springs and Dusky Grasswren country with a few days up my sleeve to make some more recordings.

The one constant of this trip was our (or at least my) inane commentary on the amount of water we were seeing. Most of the numerous bridges across the Stuart Highway between Coober Pedy and Alice Springs had water flowing under them and those that didn’t, recently had. The Palmer River was flowing strongly, the Finke crossing at Henbury was swollen as it had been for some weeks, and every clay pan and gravel pit was brimful. Every gibber plain from Tibooburra to Idracowra looks more like a golf green than the bleak Martian vista they usually resemble. Mobs of Emu were encountered the whole way through and, as evidenced by a juvenile bird even showing up on the beach at Shoalhaven Heads, Inland Dotterels have clearly bred very well across their range. These captivating little shorebirds were everywhere.

Emus on the 16th fairway near Tibooburra.

In all my years knocking about The Outback I’ve never seen it like this. Even the wet years of 2010-2011 didn’t manage to spread the pulse of life as far across the landscape as the last 6 months of wet weather in Central Australia have done.

Many of the roads across The Outback have only recently started to re-open after lengthy closures and many will need a fair amount of repair work done. The country will need to dry a bit and birds will continue to breed up but, by May, birding should be hotting up just as the weather is cooling down.

Ormiston Gorge at the moment: ringing with the chatter of breeding Budgerigars in every tree with the songs of Dusky Grasswrens cascading over the cliffs and hillsides.

Mark and I are heading off on another desert expedition in May. This time we're covering the Great Victoria Desert and parts west in search of a few birds that will be new to many birders’ lists: recent western splits like Naretha Bluebonnet and Copperback Quail-thrush are both high on the target list and we’ll be on constant look-out for other specialties in this region like Scarlet-chested Parrot, Sandhill Grasswren, flocks of wild Budgerigar, and Princess Parrot. Boom years like this don't come around too often and if nobody is out there to witness the spectacle of it all a great opportunity will have been missed. We aim to get out there during the peak of activity as birds are coming off multiple consecutive breeding cycles and the weather is at its most agreeable. We'll be seeking the above-mentioned bird species, but we'll also be looking to document and photograph all manner of fascinating and uncommonly encountered desert wildlife and flora before the inevitable drying, the burning, and the long wait for the next period of such frenzied productivity.

Sunset over Willochra Plain - hard to beat.

This 10 day expedition leaves Alice Springs on the 24th of May (all the details can be found over on Mark’s website here) and it'd be great to have you along. We only have a few seats left so don’t muck around – get in touch! We look forward to seeing you out there.

CBW

Birds of New Guinea: Distribution, Taxonomy, and Systematics

By Bruce M. Beehler and Thane K. Pratt

This hefty book is the companion to the second edition field guide for the same region which I reviewed here earlier. It’s a massive work of data collection and scholarship and grew out of the effort to update the field guide. The amount of new research that had been undertaken since the publication of the first edition was such that all the new information couldn’t possibly be shoe-horned into the single volume. As a result, Birds of New Guinea: Distribution, Taxonomy, and Systematics (DTS) comes in at 668 hardbound pages versus the 528 pages in the paperback field guide which is also printed at a slightly smaller format.

At around $140 it's at the lower end of the price range for large reference volumes on similar subject matter. If that price makes you flinch you should consider carefully the scale (both literally and figuratively) of the book that money is purchasing. Birds of New Guinea DTS will probably have slightly reduced appeal to the general bird watcher than the field guide, given that it lacks the colour plates. But to the serious scholar of Australo-Papuan birds, or even the diligent student of northern Australian species this book is a gold mine. Birds of New Guinea DTS is effectively a checklist; as the authors acknowledge, a heavily modified, re-ordered and updated reworking of Ernst Mayr’s original 1941 List of New Guinea Birds.

Any birders who have read Tim Low’s magnificent Where Song Began, will be well aware of one of the sweeping themes of that book: though the landmasses of Australia and New Guinea appear separate the reality is that they are both part of the same continent and even a casual glance at their faunal assemblages bears this out. Both islands possess echidnas, birds-of-paradise, bowerbirds, dasyurids, wallabies and tree kangaroos. Birds of New Guinea DTS is a reference that fleshes out this reality to a granular degree. A mind-boggling amount of field time has produced the data in this book, backed up by similar levels of industriousness in the laboratory and during the editing process. The taxonomy follows the same sequence set out in the field guide with just a few minor tweaks where new information has come to light.

Birds of New Guinea DTS (bottom) with its dust jacket off.

The real advances in knowledge that have allowed for this expanded edition are greatly improved understanding of the distribution and systematics of New Guinea’s birds. Importantly, this permits a treatment of almost the entire avifauna of the island down to subspecies level—something most Australian field guides do incompletely or not at all.

There is a wonderful introduction which provides a lot of information about the geography and history of the island and includes a detailed discussion of the systematics presented in the book and the references which have informed their approach.

Birds of New Guinea DTS is certainly an important milestone of ornithology in this region and will be an invaluable reference for birders and ornithologists working in New Guinea and across northern Australia.

CBW

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