Review: Understanding Bird Behaviour by Stephen Moss

“The Golden Eagle, which has universally been considered as a bird of most extraordinary powers of flight, is in my estimation little more than a sluggard, though its wings are long and ample.”

John James Audubon

The only times I've seen a Golden Eagle I've always gawped at its mastery of aviation. Clearly Audubon thought otherwise. But everybody looks for different things in the pursuit of birds. This is why there are so many different names for it: birding, twitching, ornithology, bird-watching. They are all subtly different, but there is a lot of overlap and most of us are practitioners of all of these at different times. This is why only a true birdo understands that you can be out for a day of birding and stop for a while to do some bird-watching; a statement that seems the height of nonsense to a muggle.

If birding can be loosely defined as noting all of the birds in a general area for the purpose of listing or census, bird-watching is a more immersive activity. Monitoring a sheltered pool of water and observing the birds interacting while bathing and drinking might be bird-watching. So might setting up in a patch of scrub to observe the behaviour of a mixed flock feeding in a bloodwood in heavy blossom. Bird-watching is what elevates a Willie Wagtail from merely another common bird on your day list, to a larger-than-life character, full of personality, staunch in defence of resources or territory, endlessly adaptive and innovative in its choice of nesting locations, tireless in its hawking of insects from its perch on a fence post and hilarious in its interrogation of its reflection in a car mirror.

Willie Wagtail Rhipidura leucophrys, a true bird-watcher's bird.

When everything on your patch has been ticked and listed, surely understanding what birds are doing when you’re watching them is the name of the game. More than this, interpreting the behaviour of the birds we seek also helps us find the birds more easily and ultimately become better birders overall.

With the acquisitive activity of bird photography gaining ground on the more inquisitive pursuit of bird watching, it’s crucial that people seeking wildlife, for any purpose, recognise the difference between restful, natural bird behaviour and a bird that is agitated, threatened or stressed by the observer’s encroachment. 

We've all seen a bit too much of this I think. Surely the point of having a long lens is that you don't have to stalk so close to birds in such an exposed situation? When the tired little birds that have just flown halfway around the world are looking up from their frenetic (and critically urgent) feeding and fluttering nervously just 10 metres from the glass on your 500mm lens, it's probably time to stop looking at the birds and have a good hard look at yourself. 

If birding is primarily about allocating a bird its correct identity, bird-watching is about observing and understanding birds’ behaviour.

Understanding Bird Behaviour then, is very much a book for the bird watcher in all of us. Well-known British naturalist and author, Stephen Moss, has produced a valuable, timely and exciting book here. For anyone interested in taking their birding beyond mere identification and listing, this book will provide the perfect jumping off point.

It is laid out superbly with god-tier photographs throughout. The main body of text is split into two parts, with part one taking the reader through the basic range of bird behaviours broken into six chapters: movement, feeding, breeding, migration & navigation, distribution & range and life & death. Part two addresses the birds by family and sets out the behaviours they share and those that make some species stand out from their close relations.

It’s an educative read, but it is not quite the comprehensive treatment of the behaviour of all groups of birds that you might surmise from the title; a better one might have been Understanding British Bird Behaviour. The book limits its treatment, for the most part, to species occurring in the British Isles. Despite this, the text provides ample coverage of all the more common examples of bird behaviour that most of us can expect to come across.

Understanding Bird Behaviour makes no claims of being an exhaustive reference but as an introductory text on the subject it covers a lot of ground. The information is clearly presented and perfectly accessible for beginners while still holding plenty to recommend it to experienced birders as well. The limited geographic treatment results in missing many fascinating examples of bird behaviour (nothing on flightless birds, nectarivores, bowerbirds, megapodes, hornbills, birds-of-paradise) but the interested reader will track down full accounts of these groups in other books easily enough.

Moss points out a recent decline in the activity of twitching (ticking rarities) and raises the possibility of an imminent “renaissance” in bird-watching. I’m sure many of us would welcome such a movement but I’m not sure I’d noticed the decline in ‘twitchiness’ – certainly not from this antipodean viewpoint.

But regardless of where you reside on the twitching spectrum we can surely all agree with Moss that, whether you’re in Galway or The Galapagos, alongside the Thames or on the shores of the Yarra, it is the behaviour of birds that encapsulates their fascination for all of us. To that end, this book should become a foundation text for all new birders and will be a welcome refresher for those of us who need to slow down and take more notice.

CBW

Buy it from Andrew Isles

Flying Dinosaurs: how fearsome reptiles became birds by John Pickrell

NB: There is an analogue of Godwin’s Law that operates in vertebrate palaeontology. It is enacted whenever someone begins to speak or write about feathered dinosaurs. It states that that person will eventually use a form of the phrase ‘ruffled feathers’. In writing a review of a book that deals, primarily, with our not-entirely-recent knowledge of feathered dinosaurs, it seems particularly pertinent to get this out of the way in case I ruffle some feathers myself. Ruffled feathers. There.

*****

When Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow decided to go to his Twitter account to say something about the pending fourth instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise, he may not have appreciated how many feathers he would ruffle. More likely though, it was a crudely-veiled marketing ploy and ruffling feathers was precisely his aim.

In a tweet that will live in infamy, on the 21st of March 2013, @colintrevorrow stated simply, “No feathers. #JP4”.  I needn’t go into the myriad reasons this decision was a load of old bollocks, as zoologist, writer and Tetrapod Zoology blog/podcast/conference impresario, Darren Naish covered the “No feathers” tweet nonsense more adeptly in his article for CNN Online, than I could here. But it’s a fitting reminder that the things you see in the media and even in some books, don’t necessarily have anything to do with scientific consensus. Anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and the living appearance of dinosaurs are just some of the topics that most scientists have reached an agreement on some time ago, but which are apparently still fair game to be drawn before the court of the masses and debated by the uninformed for the consumption of the unaware (to the chagrin of whoever’s left).

Jurassic World's dinosaurs lack authenticity - and feathers - John Pickrell in the SMH

But, unlike climate change and evolution (which I’d go as far as saying are common knowledge), you could be forgiven for not being bang up-to-date with your reading of vertebrate palaeontology over the last 45 years. Unless you foster a particular interest in birds or dinosaurs or both (not unusual), the advances in our understanding of the fossil record and origins of these groups of animals may have slipped past unnoticed. And if you missed this, then the 'Dinosaur Renaissance', in our understanding of how they appeared in life, may have passed you by also. It certainly passed me by. My childhood obsession with dinosaurs in the 1980s was fed by books full of (even then) erroneous depictions of dinosaurs as lumbering, ‘shrink-wrapped’, pachydermic beasts whose extinction, perhaps even without the benefit of hindsight, seemed inevitable.

Artistic Depictions of Dinosaurs Have Undergone Two Revolutions - Darren Naish on his Tetrapod Zoology blog at Scientific American

How handy then, to have a single source, John Pickrell’s Flying Dinosaurs, which offers us the ultimate catch up on modern perceptions of dinosaurs. Released in June 2014, this book takes the reader through the many discoveries of fossilised feathered-things to date. From the first find of Archaeopteryx lithographica in 1861 to the numerous feathered fossils that have been uncovered in China since 1996, we get the story behind each discovery and illumination of their significance to the bigger story… and what a story.

The big news, and the story that Flying Dinosaurs really seeks to tell, is that… [SPOILER ALERT] … dinosaurs never truly went extinct at all and are still among the most commonly encountered animals living among us.

Yes, there was a mass-extinction around 66 million years ago, associated with the massive impact at Chicxulub on the Yucatán Peninsula (and I was warmed to see that Australia's impact crater at Tnorala [Gosse Bluff] near Alice Springs even gets a mention on p. 169). But among the animals that survived the cataclysmic Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary were the theropod dinosaurs that are the direct ancestors of modern birds; ergo, birds are dinosaurs.

Tnorala - the 142.5 million years old comet impact crater west of Alice Springs, Northern Territory

In fact, this is not particularly new knowledge. The close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was postulated by Thomas Huxley shortly after the first Archaeopteryx discovery in 1861, and it has been the generally accepted consensus that birds descended from some kind of dinosaur since the 1970s. The exact nature of the evolution of flight in birds is still being tossed back and forth between a few schools of thought, but the science of the theropod dinosaur ancestry of modern birds is as settled as it can be.

UK-based zoologist and author Darren Naish does a good line in t-shirt designs spreading the word. All the coolest birders buy them online at the Tet Zoo Red Bubble store - image by Darren Naish

Pickrell writes engagingly about sometimes technical scientific subjects. This won’t surprise anyone who has read his work as editor of Australian Geographic or in numerous other journals and magazines before that. It’s one thing to write well about a topic you understand yourself, but it’s another talent altogether to bring the layperson to a level of understanding that might allow them to enjoy the elegance of hard-won scientific knowledge. Flying Dinosaurs navigates the specialised terminology and mind-bending complexity of phylogenetic systematics (cladistics), without lapsing into unintelligible jargon or languishing too long on esoteric concepts. This is an achievement in itself. In the popular science genre there is a fine line trod between patronising the reader and skimping on crucial facts. While I wouldn’t class myself as a layperson in this field necessarily, I found my own knowledge being constantly revised, updated and deepened.

Flying Dinosaurs does for avian evolution what Carl Sagan’s Cosmos did for cosmology. It takes a large and complex subject and streamlines decades of technical work by specialists in a variety of disciplines into a well-crafted story, more easily comprehended by the rest of us. It loses none of the authority of a peer-reviewed paper as every claim and proposition is referenced. In many ways this is the finished product of science; the field work has been reported on, the technical work completed, the laboratory tests and models confirmed, the knowledge verified and the key conclusions are finally rendered plain for the rest of us to appreciate. Surely there can be no higher aim for science writing, popular or otherwise, than to bring all of us to a higher level of understanding of the nature of our universe and the world we live in.

Flying Dinosaurs certainly delivers on this aim. This is science communication at its best, and deserves to be widely enjoyed.

Flying Dinosaurs is published by Newsouth Publishing

You can follow the author on Twitter @john_pickrell

Buy it from Andrew Isles

Related Links

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/20/a-velociraptor-without-feathers-isnt-a-velociraptor/

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/11/opinions/naish-jurassic-world-missed-opportunity/

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/aristic-depictions-of-dinosaurs-have-undergone-two-revolutions/

http://m.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10876135

Birds of the Darwin Region by Niven McCrie and Richard Noske

While it seems another El Niño is looming, the flow of good Australian natural history books is far from drying up. This is perhaps most true for books about our birds. In recent years we’ve welcomed Dolby and Clarke’s Finding Australian Birds, Fraser and Gray’s Australian Bird Names and the re-release of Alec Chisholm’s classic Mateship with Birds to name just a few. All of these are exciting examples of passionate advocates for Australia’s birds, putting their heads together and sharing accumulated knowledge with an eager audience.

This recent release from CSIRO Publishing, is no exception; it’s astonishing. It’s the sort of book that makes you excited about being a naturalist. For the many who are already familiar with the authors’ other work, this will come as no surprise. McCrie is perhaps best known as the author, with James Watson (no relation), of that other beloved Top End treatise, Finding Birds in Darwin, Kakadu & the Top End. A founder of the prime online reference for Top End birders, the NT Birds newsgroup, he has also been a well-loved tour leader for visitors to the Top End over many years. Richard Noske’s prolific scholarship of birds in northern Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific is well established. He was senior lecturer in biology at CDU for some 26 years, authored, with Graham Brennan, another work of great interest to northern birders, 2002‘s Birds of Groote Eylandt, and is the current chief editor of the journal of Indonesian ornithology, Kukila.

Laurie Ross' eye-catching Rainbow Pitta adorns the cover. One of the easier to see of this typically elusive family, and still relatively easily found around Darwin.

Happily, it’s a fairly common practice in Australia for local experts to work up a guide to the birds of their town, region, or patch. Such experts are, typically, deeply knowledgeable long-term residents, enthusiastic about recording for posterity all of the vagrant records, seasonal movements, and breeding ecology of the birds of their locality. You don’t have to look far to find self-published guides to this town or that shire. Sometimes these are simply brief pamphlets produced under the photo-copying budget of the town council, but range to more elaborate spiral-bound affairs produced with funding from local field naturalists’ clubs or Landcare groups. McCrie & Noske’s Birds of the Darwin Region, seems likely to become the yardstick by which such guides are measured.

The executive summary for this collaboration? If you’re a birder, ecologist, or you’re at all interested in the natural history of Australia’s north, you’ll want this book.

Birds of the Darwin Region is clearly a labour of love from two long-term residents of the region. Indeed, a book of this kind is only made possible by authors with the intimate knowledge of an area that comes from living in it year round. There are some noteworthy absences from the species list, which serve to remind you of the limited geographic scope of the book. No Variegated Fairy-wren (the treated area doesn’t extend as far as the sandstone country); no Chestnut-backed Button-quail; no Masked Owl; no Dusky Moorhen. Maybe some of these occur in the vicinity of Darwin but clearly none have been confirmed within the treatment area.

The species accounts are accompanied by seasonality charts, and distribution maps. The region is divided into a grid of 64 cells with explanatory notes at the front of the book detailing the number of surveys providing data for each cell.  

The research the authors have done in confirming or discounting records is, no doubt, all but exhaustive. There is an ‘unconfirmed species’ section toward the back for those few birds lacking sufficient substantiation for their occurrence to be admitted without question. Otherwise, the records in the list can be considered ‘gold standard’; thoroughly referenced… and what references. For keen NT listers the references pages of this book alone will be a crucial reference.

McCrie & Noske have done an extraordinary service to Australian ornithology, in compiling, organising, and vetting the observations and publications of the many naturalists who have studied Darwin’s birds in the past. To this end, there’s also a ‘history of ornithology’ section in the front of Birds of the Darwin Region, giving deserved acknowledgement to those who went boldly (recklessly?) before onto the mangals and mudflats, before the days of that great ruiner of lenses, Bushman’s Plus™ tropical strength insect repellent.

The species accounts are wonderfully in-depth without being academically soporific; authoritative while managing to be almost conversational in style. Each account is highly readable. Birds of the Darwin Region is clearly focused on the birds of this one defined area, but as many of these species occur across northern Australia, and even farther afield in some cases, it will have relevance far beyond the bounds of Darwin as well.

Without even going past the waterfowl there are numerous examples of what makes this such a valuable and readable reference. The species account for one of the Top End’s iconic species, Magpie Goose, runs over four pages. It not only contains the expected information about its life cycle and habits around Darwin, but some interesting insights into how local policy and community attitudes can affect a species. Recreational hunters, indigenous hunters and mango growers all influence the movements and site use of this species which, in turn, can influence the health of areas used by the birds.

NT waterfowl hunting season: Anger over 34 geese carcasses dumped near rural property

Still among the waterfowl, what about that most infuriating of ducks – Garganey? This ‘Artful Dodger’ of ducks has certainly eluded my Australian list as skilfully as the Dickensian urchin. I first lived full-time in the NT from 2006. In the 26 years preceding 2006, Garganey was recorded in 20 of them, including a staggering 125 birds at Leanyer in 1991. From 2006 to 2014 (the cut-off for entries in this book) it was seen by… no-one. Well, not quite. No-one except for my arch-rival in NT listing, Mick Jerram, who spotted 3 of the birds on the Katherine River in 2008. The perfect grip.    

Birds of the Darwin Region with some other familiar volumes for size comparison. There is a lot in this book. 

Birds of the Darwin Region boasts many truly enlightening factoids; things I’d never read anywhere else before. Take this sterling opening sentence to a species account for example: “Although among the smallest of the world’s swans, the Black Swan’s neck is proportionately longer than in any other, giving it a uniquely elegant silhouette.” My favourite though, is at the other end of the book, in the species account for Canary White-eye: “It has the ability to prise open small flowers… by inserting its somewhat wedge-shaped bill into the floral tube, then gaping, behaviour known as zirkelning.” In the landmark textbook of our pursuit, Ornithology (3rd edition), the author Frank B. Gill lists only four entries in the index under the letter Z: Z sex chromosomes; zeitgebers; zugunruhe; and zygodactyl. Zirkelning? Nowhere to be found. For this alone McCrie and Noske have my admiration.

Finally, Birds of the Darwin Region draws on records from a number of databases; the NT Fauna Atlas, Eremaea Birds (and latterly Eremaea eBird) and the Darwin Bird Atlas project among others. I suspect it’s highly likely that anyone reading this will have contributed observations to one or many such databases, and you can be justifiably proud in pointing to this book as the fruit which is ultimately borne by such citizen science projects.

Darwin is deservedly renowned as one of the top birding destinations in Australia, which places it high in the running worldwide. With Birds of the Darwin Region, Niven McCrie and Richard Noske have cemented their place in any future history of Top End ornithology to be written, and provided an indispensable reference for visitors and researchers for many years to come.

CBW

Buy it from Andrew Isles.

Review: Birds & Animals of Australia's Top End - Darwin, Kakadu, Katherine and Kununurra by Nick Leseberg & Iain Campbell

Here at the Box Hill Laboratory of Ornithology we love books and we love getting mail. This being the case, there is no more welcome kind of mail than fresh-from-the-press bird books. So it was a wonderful augment to a slightly overcast Wednesday to find this new book in the mail box.

Straight off the bat, it’s worth noting the technical redundancy in the title. This guide covers birds AND animals of the Top End. This has attracted comment elsewhere along predictable lines so I should deal with this before moving on – yes, birds ARE animals. Thanks professor. Seriously though, this is a redundancy that many of us have difficulty avoiding. Just do a search for tour operators offering birding AND wildlife tours and you’ll get an idea of the magnitude of the problem.

To describe yourself as a birder, birdwatcher, or ornithologist, at each level glosses over a good portion of your other interests and skills. Many birders also keep lists of mammals, reptiles, butterflies and moths. It would be a rare birdwatcher that didn’t derive as much pleasure from an encounter with a possum or goanna as the birds that share the same habitat. Any qualified ornithologist will almost certainly have passed through training in general zoology before specialising, so has skills and interests beyond the world of feathered things. So we often feel compelled to explicitly state that our interests and skills extend to furred, scaled and even spineless things also. As I’m known to say perhaps too often, birds are a ‘gateway drug’.

So yes, the title is somewhat redundant, but it points to something you’ll enjoy; there’s a good deal more than birds within.  

Just one of the glorious frog plates.

Nick and Iain (who together produced the recent Birds of Australia: A Photographic Guide with Sam Woods covered here) have gathered around them a ‘who’s who’ (or should it be ‘whom’s whom?’ – I can never work it out) of esteemed wildlife photographers to deliver this new guide. Up front, it is acknowledged that this is a guide targeted specifically at beginners. The experienced birder will find a fragmented and incomplete account of the region’s birdlife here, but the authors state as much in many parts of the book. The novice will find plenty within its pages to keep them busy and set the hook for further explorations, but if you’re looking for a comprehensive treatment of Top End fauna, other more complete books are readily available and, if you’re that way inclined, you probably already know what they are.

With that out of the way though, there is still plenty within this guide to recommend it to more experienced birders. The introductory section gives a good grounding in the geology, climate and habitats of the Top End. There is also a brief guide to some of the more popular wildlife-watching sites.

The layout of the images is up there with the best I’ve seen and, for a few tricky confusion pairs, it provides some neat comparisons. (If you’ve never sat on the beach at Lee Point, beset by sandflies, sweat lashing off you, trying to convincingly separate Greater and Lesser Sand Plover, then you have yet to truly earn your Top End birding stripes. In December it can feel like even your fingernails are sweating.) For novices, the plates for herons and egrets will be handy too, as will the section covering terns in breeding and non-breeding plumage, at rest and in flight. The notorious LBJs of the tropical mangroves (Green-backed, Mangrove and Large-billed Gerygone) would be intimidating to the new-comer but they are beautifully compared on the one page allowing quick assessment of the salient field marks. Again, though obviously handy for the beginner, there will be experienced birders breathing a sigh of relief quietly to themselves. These species don’t always appear together so neatly to offer clean comparisons when you’re ankle-deep in black mud out the back of Palmerston sewage works! This is a great reference.

One of the finch pages: flawless images with simple, beautiful presentation.

The layout of the images has been done with great care and the result is effective and very easy on the eye. Multiple species from similar habitats are blended into the one scene to allow easy comparison. There is only one drawback with this approach – when the same care isn’t applied to the scale of images. There are a couple of obvious examples, neither drastic, where this might cause some difficulty for a novice birder. In one example I think the size of the Australasian Grebe is too close to the Green Pygmy-Goose it is depicted beside. This is not a great problem as they are distinctly different-looking birds. A greater challenge for an inexperienced observer is that Great-billed Heron, a monster among wetland species, is depicted beside the dainty White-faced Heron with their sizes being far too similar on the page to suggest the significant difference in bulk that will greet the observer in the field. Putting the massive size difference to one side, these two species look similar enough that a first time observer might easily be confused. But this is the only potentially negative aspect of this approach that is otherwise user-friendly, accurate and beautiful.

Mostly the scale of the images is spot on as in this page of Top End doves.

So what of the other animals sections? The book reflects the fact that when we go in search of wildlife, it is mostly birds that we see. Birds fill the first three quarters of the book, with other fauna treated at the back. All of the pictures are of a similar high quality to the bird section. The difficulty of finding mammals is reflected in the slim coverage but this is fair enough. Again, this book is targeted at the novice and probably at the international visitor, so identifying the many different macropods is a priority over mice, rats and dunnarts. Even the ardent and trained observer will be lucky to see these animals at all, let alone well. But there is much more than just kangaroos and wallabies for the fur-lovers. I’m particularly glad that there are a few microbats treated, as I always see these charismatic little creatures as the unsung heroes among mammals. They make up almost a quarter of our mammal list but are often relegated to the too hard basket by recreational wildlife seekers; this needn’t be the case. Acoustic detection gear is now quite affordable and user-friendly for the amateur enthusiast and the Top End offers many locations for observing bats leaving and returning from roosts; a situation where they are quite identifiable to species level with a bit of practice.

Herpers too will be satisfied with the tremendous imagery of frogs. There are more than enough confusion species among Top End frogs to trip up even a practised observer. I was emphatically reminded of this fact during a recent stint on the Arnhem Land Plateau. But having the likely candidates laid on a single plate in gloriously sharp colour is a great help. Sadly, the snakes and lizards of the Top End have fared pretty badly since the arrival of the Cane Toad, with many species noticeably more difficult to find now than they were even 5-10 years ago. The obvious snake species are covered, a few of the agamids, skinks and happily, a good variety of the geckos; once again, with some excellent comparison plates presented.

There is only one major typographical error that got past the editors and I suspect the authors will have been mortified as soon as the book was in print and they found it. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a sharpened HB pencil. On page 225, both accounts for the two turtle species presented are headed “Northern Long-necked Turtle Chelodina rugosa”, despite the images and the body of the text depicting different animals. A quick check of the Australian Reptile Online Database (AROD) website, which is actually the source for one of the photos here, quickly clears up any confusion: the bottom species is Northern Long-necked Turtle Chelodina rugosa. The top species is Northern Yellow-faced Turtle Emydura tanybaraga. No problem.

The only other puzzling references I found are as likely to result from my ignorance as actual errors. I’ve never heard of Intermediate Egret referred to as “Plumed Egret Ardea plumifera”. I understood plumifera to be a subspecies of Intermediate Egret Ardea intermedia. Similarly, I’ve never heard of Pacific Emerald Dove being referred to as “Brown-capped Emerald Dove”. But this could just be the authors singing from a taxonomic songbook that I’m unfamiliar with. While we’re being pedantic, sharp-eyed birdos will spot on page 113 that the scientific binomial of Little Shrikethrush is incorrectly given as Colluricincla harmonica, which is actually Grey Shrikethrush – just a typo.

All in all, this is another high quality production from these authors. As with Birds of Australia: A Photographic Guide, the images are a testament to the dedication of the talented photographers who have contributed their work.

This will be a tremendous introduction to wildlife-watching in the Top End for first time visitors – authoritative, clear, attractive and small enough to go in a camera bag or day-pack. Although this is openly targeted at novice wildlife seekers, I’d suggest that there will still be many experienced naturalists and locals out there who will find this a useful reference.

The essentials:

Soft cover, 272 pages

Published by Princeton University Press

Price varies between sellers from around $18 up to $50

Happy reading.

CBW

Support a local and buy it from Andrew Isles.

The birds and other wildlife of the Top End won’t watch themselves; it’s time to start planning your trip.

The NT is blessed with numerous experts who can assist with the planning and execution of your ultimate Top End birding trip. Get in touch:

Mick Jerram in Katherine at Gecko Canoeing and Trekking

Mike Jarvis in Darwin at Experience The Wild

Luke Paterson in Darwin at NT Bird Specialist