Grasswren Grand Slam in Record Time

There’s a well-known saying among birders, particularly among those who live near the coast: seabirders are real birders. Anyone who has spent a day on the blue paddock trying to compare the bill dimensions of prions while dodging the sluicing chunder from birders of more delicate constitution as the floor rolls under your feet and the salt spray mists your binocular lenses will understand that it’s a claim not without some justification.

In Australia though, it’s arguable that there is one other type of extreme birding that may lay claim to also being the domain of “real” birders: grasswrenning. That’s a word now.

I’ve heard it said that any old duffer can notch up a list of a few hundred species in Australia if they simply do some pretty basic birding and visit a handful of different regions. International birding tours sometimes rack up Australian bird lists of 400 or even 500 species in just a few weeks of busy birding and a few internal flights. But a good measure of an Australian bird list, and of the true birding grit of the list-owner, is the number of grasswrens on the list.

The grasswrens in the genus Amytornis are a group of birds which are fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. They’re among those bird species which can look drab or boring in a field guide but which routinely knock your socks off in the field when they are up close. If you’re lucky enough to get a prolonged look at any species of grasswren in the open, their plumage reveals all sorts of subtleties that you won’t have anticipated.

Dusky Grasswren Amytornis purnelli, adult female.

There are anywhere between 10 and 14 species recognised, depending which taxonomy you follow. None of them live in particularly accessible places and most live in decidedly remote and difficult terrain. Most of them favour the shin-ruining spinifex grasses; a group of plants with the distinction of being both figuratively and literally, a complete prick. The ones that don’t live in spinifex, live in clumps of similarly dense and unfriendly vegetation. They range from some of the hottest and driest deserts to the humid and monsoonal tropics. They’re mostly furtive, shy, and able to disappear from view in their chosen habitat leaving a birder feeling completely gormless in the infuriating knowledge that the birds are all around, at close range, but completely hidden from view and unlikely to reveal themselves.

A few species favour rocky slopes with either loose scree underfoot or large boulders that only a rock wallaby, and the grasswrens themselves, can safely negotiate. Some are endangered and disappearing from their already restricted ranges as a result of fire, feral cats, land clearing, or combinations of all three.

Grasswren habitat: harsh, beautiful and remote. Cane grass on dunes of the Simpson Desert is home to the Eyrean Grasswren A. goyderi.

So in summary: they’re small, rare, fast, furtive, superbly cryptic, hard to get to, hard to find, and hard to see if you do find them. And this is their charm. They’re a real birder’s bird.

Well-known South Australian ornithologist and tour leader Peter Waanders recently hatched a plan with two of my Northern Territory off-siders. It was a plan that was nothing if not ambitious and, frankly, had some questioning Peter’s sanity – to see all species of grasswren in a single tour. It’s audacious. If ever a leader was going to be able to pull-off such a feat of birding brilliance, Peter’s name would be near the top of the list. His guiding outfit, Bellbird Tours, is already best-known for running the regular 6- and 9-grasswren tours which plough through the dry interior of the country each year and only rarely miss any of their targets. His dry country tours also have an enviable strike rate with other highly-sought desert delicacies like Grey Falcon and Letter-winged Kite.

To cut a very long story short – they did it.

In an achievement which must be a historic first for Australian birding, Bellbird’s Great Grasswren Air Safari saw all 11 of the currently (widely-accepted) species of grasswren in just 14 days [and I think they may have seen one of the proposed splits as well which would take their total to 12 species by Clements taxonomy]. In fact, the news of their final tick, White-throated Grasswren Amytornis woodwardi, came through the day before the tour ended so they actually saw every grasswren species in 13 days.

For anyone familiar with traveling in outback Australia, you’ll understand what an extraordinary achievement this is. By car, aircraft (both fixed-wing and helicopter), and finally on foot, the intrepid band crossed the entire continent. With crucial assistance from Red Centre expert Mark Carter and Top End bird-finder and River God, Mick Jerram, they nailed the tricky central and northern species.

In under a fortnight, they found and saw an entire endemic genus; a genus of our most infamously challenging birds. I’d be surprised if there is anyone else who has ever completed this coveted full house in less than a month. Well done one and all and congratulations Peter, Mark and Mick – only other tour leaders will ever understand how nerve-wracking a tour like this can be.

A Short Digression

Amid all the back-slapping and the celebratory Darwin stubbies though, there’s another consideration. An important aspect of an initiative like this is that it demonstrates the productive symbiosis that can exist between research and tourism. This is a partnership which is well-established in numerous locations internationally but has yet to be widely-explored in Australia.

Some grasswren species are infrequently recorded and their distributions are imperfectly known. Many of the species which are seen each year are recorded at the same sites; well-known sites where public access is granted and the birds are known to be present. Tours like this don’t just provide an opportunity for birders to get difficult species on their lists. They also provide the means for experts (and all of the leaders on this tour are certainly that), to visit different areas, both during the tour and on reconnaissance visits during preparation. During these visits, birds are sometimes found at new sites. Breeding activity is sometimes noted. Previously occupied sites might be discovered to have been abandoned or habitat destroyed. Non-target species are also noted and atlas surveys are completed. All of this is crucial observational data which is coming from country rarely accessed by researchers from professional research organisations because visiting is prohibitively expensive.

Research and data collection of this nature being funded, directly or indirectly, by tourism is something we really ought to discuss more often and support wholeheartedly.

Well done again to all involved and particular congratulations to Peter, Mark, Mick and the team at Bellbird Tours for pulling off the grip of the year.

CBW

Contained Cats & Crowdfunding Conservation Justice

Kent Wilson shot his neighbours’ cat the other day. With nothing more to go on, that seems like a shitty thing to have done, doesn’t it? Predictably, the tabloid press and online trolls bought themselves an all-day ticket and went to town…

ADELAIDE CAT KILLER ESCAPES CONVICTION was the headline that 9news.com.au went with.

ADELAIDE HILLS MAN AVOIDS ANIMAL CRUELTY CONVICTION said the headline on 5mu.com.au

The Advertiser led with NATURE-LOVER KENT WILSON, WHO SHOT AND KILLED NEIGHBOUR’S CAT, SPARED ANIMAL CRUELTY CONVICTION BY COURT.

Never backwards in cramming as much eye-catching clickbait into a headline as possible, the Daily Mail went with an even more wordy headline: MODEL WHOSE CAT WAS SHOT AND BURIED BY HER NEIGHBOUR SAYS SHE IS NOW TOO SCARED TO WALK NEAR HIS PROPERTY AFTER HE ESCAPES PRISON SENTENCE.

You’ll notice, however, that all of these headlines share a common, and crucial, piece of information: no conviction was recorded against Mr Wilson and that’s important.

An earlier court proceeding had found Mr Wilson guilty of ill-treating an animal to cause death or harm, which he unsuccessfully appealed in the Supreme Court. Despite that failed appeal, at the sentencing, not only did he not get a prison sentence, but Mr Foley, in the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court, refused to record a conviction against him despite the urgings of lawyers for the RSPCA. Bizarrely, for an organisation which ostensibly concerns itself with cruelty to animals in a case that categorically involved no animal cruelty, the RSPCA were hoping that Mr Wilson might receive the maximum sentence for this offence; a $50,000 fine or four years in jail. Instead, Magistrate Foley recorded no conviction and, noting that Mr Wilson had already paid compensation to the cat’s owners, issued a fine of $2000.

In his sentencing remarks Magistrate Foley was very clear as to why he had decided to spare Mr Wilson a conviction for animal cruelty:

“The typical example involves a person who either grossly neglects an animal or whose motive is to simply cause pain and suffering. I accept you genuinely believed [the cat] was a threat to native wildlife on your property, particularly bird life.”

 Mr Wilson had previously been ordered to pay the RSPCA’s costs relating to the appeal.

A neighbour's cat in my back yard. Why do cats get a free pass?

RSPCA: For All Creatures Great & Small?

If all you do is scan such stories in the papers, that’s about as much information as you might have gleaned from the commercial media. As always though, there’s a lot more to it and the more you learn, the more understandable Mr Wilson’s actions become and the more perplexing becomes the RSPCA’s determination to pursue a legal decision against him.

Speaking on the phone with Mr Wilson the other day, his love for animals was obvious. He enthused to me about the 5 acre former apple orchard that he and his family took over 40 years ago and have since been managing for biodiversity. He has counted 60 species of bird on the property and regularly sees Short-beaked Echidna and Western Grey Kangaroos. The property shares a boundary with a 100 acre bushland reserve which is also rich in native wildlife.

Kent says that he routinely sees cats hunting on the block and his usual response is to chase them away, follow them to the boundary of his block and ensure that they have left the property. On the day that Kent shot the neighbour’s cat, he had already shooed away 4 cats – 2 with collars and 2 without. The cat he ended up shooting had already been chased off the property twice the same morning and Kent had been trying to trap it for 2 months without success. It wasn’t wearing a collar.

He’d previously asked his neighbours to keep their cat contained within their own property; a request that was either repeatedly ignored or with which the cat’s owners found it impossible to comply. After repeated attempts to trap the itinerant cat and shoo it off his block only to have it return a short while later, Kent took the, by his own admission, rash decision to shoot it. He’s a licensed and experienced shooter and firearm owner. He discharged a legally registered rifle on private property in full compliance with relevant laws, quickly and humanely killing the cat. He then buried it on his block.

If there is any animal cruelty evident in these actions I must have missed something. Hunters around the country perform similar actions around the country on a variety of animals and usually with a much lower standard demanded of the ethics and humanity of their actions. In this case, a single animal was humanely shot by a legally permitted and experienced practitioner in accordance with ethical guidelines for the humane destruction of pest animals set out by the RSPCA themselves here.

Neither can Kent’s actions since shooting the cat be impugned. When an owner inquired about the cat, Kent made no attempt to hide his actions and openly stated that he had shot the animal and buried it on his property. Without this single act of honesty none of these vindictive legal proceedings, and vindictive is precisely what they are, would have occurred. Pet cats which are allowed to roam freely beyond the confines of the owner’s property often go missing, the victim of snake or dog attack, falling down drains or ditches or getting bowled over by traffic. All of this is acknowledged in the RSPCA's own policies relating to pet cat containment and responsible ownership which can be found here. A less honest man could have chosen the path of least resistance and denied any knowledge of the pet’s whereabouts and that would have been the end of it.

And some media outlets have done their best to ensure that Mr Wilson’s honesty does not go unpunished. This includes making far too much space for neighbours’ baseless attacks on his character including claims that they are afraid of him or too scared to go near his property. This is a very serious innuendo and is utterly unfounded. It amounts to a suggestion that Mr Wilson actually intends physical harm to the cat’s owners should they approach him. This is slanderous, ridiculous and is not supported by the merest acquaintance with the facts of the case or Mr Wilson himself. He’s a long-serving volunteer member of the Country Fire Authority, the local scout group and a dedicated conservationist. He and his family have been well-known members of the local community for 40+ years. Any attempt to paint him as some sort of anti-social, animal-hating, gun-toting weirdo is transparent fabrication of the most laughable (and pernicious) kind. 

An Indoor Cat is a Safe & Healthy Cat

Which brings us to the most perplexing aspect of this story: why has the RSPCA pursued this case against Mr Wilson? The RSPCA is a federal organisation made up of representative societies in each state and territory with a combined annual budget in the vicinity of A$80,000,000. The organisation’s website states its vision is, “to be the leading authority in animal care and protection.” The same page states their mission as “to prevent cruelty to animals by actively promoting their care and protection.” That’s great. Fighting negligence and animal cruelty; promoting responsible pet ownership, care and animal health. I’m right behind all that. Come to mention it, so is Kent Wilson.

This is the most important point to come out of this case for me. The RSPCA is utterly confused; firstly about what constitutes animal cruelty and secondly about the expansiveness of its chosen, decidedly biblical, motto, “For All Creatures Great & Small.”  If this case is an accurate measure of how they prosecute their chosen duty, perhaps a better motto might be, “RSPCA: For Cats, Dogs & Livestock”.

Considering that the RSPCA relies on charitable donations for a large chunk of its bottom line, you might speculate that perhaps there is a lot more to be milked from the public purse through appealing to the emotion we attach to our companion animals than the cursory sympathy shown for the plight of native animals. That would quite neatly explain the apparent limiting of their concerns about animal cruelty, mostly to animals kept by humans rather than animals more broadly. But that’s pure speculation.

The RSPCA has prosecuted a member of the public for humanely killing an introduced predator; an act which spared countless native animals a less humane fate. In their simplistic ethical calculus it seems the RSPCA bestow human companion species with greater weight; which is fine if that’s their choice, but it should be reflected in their publicity material.

The fact that the animal in question was a neighbour’s pet is what Kent Wilson is really paying for – not cruelty. And if we’re to believe any of what the RSPCA claims to stand for, why is it not holding the cat’s owners to account? Their pet was unsupervised and roaming free outside the boundaries of their property. They left it vulnerable to predation by wild animals and free to prey upon threatened native species as well. In this case, irresponsible ownership also brought their pet into the rifle sights of a neighbour who should be as free to have the native wildlife on his property untrammelled by cats as his neighbours are to own them. According to the RSPCA, the onus is on the animal’s owners to restrict them, for their own safety and health, to their own property. Why then, is it not the RSPCA’s duty to enforce this?

This case throws up numerous questions that the RSPCA could be putting to local councils and state and federal politicians rather than harassing individuals with vexatious legal action. There are many questions which are relevant to their stated aims that they seem to be acting counter to:

Why aren’t cat owners legally bound to contain their pets?

In a few places they are – how can these laws be better enforced?

Why are we wasting resources wrongly targeting a private citizen when the Victorian duck shooting season persisted despite all scientific advice that it is inhumane and unsustainable?

Why aren't feral cats, considering the massive threat they pose to native animals, a major issue being investigated and publicised by RSPCA?

Rather than vilifying a man who hastily, perhaps even rashly (but humanely) took action to protect native wildlife, the RSPCA’s considerable public profile and financial clout should be put to the task of helping cat owners across the country to understand one simple truth: an indoor cat, is a safe and healthy cat. At the moment, the propagation of that crucial message is being left to other organisations like the Discovery Circle at UniSA, Land for Wildlife and Arid Recovery.

If the RSPCA really is for all creatures great and small, then our record for mammal extinction alone, and the extent to which stray and feral cats are responsible for that, show them to be derelict in their duty.

Support Kent

Kent Wilson has not shied away from accepting the consequences of his actions in this case. He has been unfairly penalised for the negligence of others. I don’t think he has done anything wrong.

A fund has been set up to ensure that Kent Wilson is not out-of-pocket as a result of these legal proceedings. Your donations and support are gratefully received not only to offset Mr Wilson’s legal expenses, but as a show of support for a citizen who has been erroneously singled-out by an organisation which is hoping to deflect attention from the shortcomings of its own policies by attempting to make an example of him.

DONATE HERE

(Excess money raised will be donated to Arid Recovery in South Australia who do a lot of research around feral cat ecology and threatened species recovery.)

A place for everything and everything in its place. A Leopard Cat Prionailurus bengalensis, in eastern Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Photo used with kind permission Samantha Hopley.

Postscript

I’m regularly accused of hating cats and have already worn a great deal of abuse from this article and my opinions expressed elsewhere. I shudder to think what Kent and his family have had to endure. I’m a well-known animal lover. I love cats too. I can even find them cute in the right circumstances, but I mostly get excited about wild animals. I have stalked Puma in the cloud-forests of Ecuador and the Andean foothills in Chile. I’ve trudged Bornean rainforest at night hoping for a glimpse of Sunda Clouded Leopard and was delighted to come away with an encounter with a Leopard Cat instead. I’ve almost gone cross-eyed and been eaten alive by midges while scouring the Scottish highlands for the increasingly rare Scottish Wildcat. Any accusation that I hate cats is simply false. I recognise, however, that owning such a beautifully evolved predator as a domestic pet carries a very serious responsibility which I don’t think is taken seriously enough in Australia.

I cannot abide any cruelty toward, or mistreatment of, animals. As a professional scientist, I’ve been employed on cat-control programs many times in the past and have euthanased countless animals. This is always done humanely, in keeping with strict ethical guidelines and under regularly updated permits. It’s very important not to conflate these actions with cruelty or hatred. I don’t enjoy killing any animals, but when it has to be done it should be done humanely.

Numerous species of cats are seriously endangered around the world. If you have time and energy to spend defending cats, seek out the charitable organisations listed below which are working to protect and study these vanishing species and they will welcome whatever help you are able to offer. Please don’t waste your time abusing me (or others) for supporting evidence-based responses to our own ecological crises here in Australia or trying to convince me that there is a place in our landscape for feral cats or that your house cat doesn’t do any damage. All the evidence says you are probably wrong.

This is an emotionally-charged subject but it doesn’t have to be. Cat-lovers and conservationists simply need to recognise that we are on the same side. We are all against animal cruelty and support the protection of our native animals as well. The simple message that we all need to get behind is: an indoor cat is a safe and healthy cat.

Learn more about endangered cats...

The Snow Leopard Trust

Cheetah Conservation Fund

Felidae Conservation Fund

Clouded Leopard Project

Amur Leopard & Tiger Alliance

Panthera.org

Save Tigers Now

Sand Cat - Saharan Conservation Fund

The Cape Leopard Trust

Scottish Wildcats

Mountain Lion Foundation

The Orange-bellied Parrot: extinction, taxes and conservation realpolitik

Orange-bellied Parrots at Werribee in 2015. Perhaps as much as 10% of the wild population in a single (crummy) photograph.

“Don’t tell me what you value; show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” – US Vice President Joe Biden.

Heading down the Geelong road the other day it was impossible not to think of the Orange-bellied Parrots. I write the Orange-bellied Parrots, not in the sense of the species as a whole, but in the sense of those specific Orange-bellied Parrots there. This is virtually what it has come to. Driving past the Western Treatment Plant (WTP) at Werribee I could be fairly confident that we were passing within just a few kilometres of some of the only individuals of their species that had been seen on the mainland this year. Maybe two birds; three on a good day*. This from a remaining wild population of 50 birds; or maybe even half that. Estimates vary.

This will not be news to birdwatchers. The precarious dance with oblivion that Neophema chrysogaster has been stepping for the last few decades is well-documented and widely-known in birdwatching and scientific circles. For the last few years the Gang-of-Four at Werribee (two colour-banded pairs) have been the only regular sightings of the species during the annual surveys conducted across their potential wintering range and among very few mainland sightings overall. My information this year is that the gang has dwindled by at least one of its female members who was observed being taken by a goshawk during the summer season at Tasmania.

What occurred to me as we zipped down the Geelong Road was: how many of the tens of thousands of other folks using the same road that day, and every other day, knew about these birds and, if they did, who among them cared?

It might sound a bit wishy-washy but it’s an important question. We can talk and write about conservation and how special our animals are ad infinitum, but it doesn't mean a thing if we aren't getting the rubber on the road; we need to take effective action or it's all so much hot air. This was driven home to me recently by a superb article by Australian ecologist Dale Nimmo et al on The Conversation. That article presented the plain facts about the widespread changes and degradation assailing Australian ecosystems and native animal populations. Frogs, birds and mammals; forests, reefs and savannah are all struggling.

That article introduced me to the stellar quotation from Joe Biden which I’ve pinched for the top of this post, “…show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” The stark truth of that statement is inescapable. So what do we value? Considered in the context of Australian government spending, it illuminates a nation whose values are wildly out-of-touch with reality.

The Gang of Four at a distance in 2015 over the shoulder of Steve Davidson, a long-time leader of OBP winter surveys in Victoria.

The Orange-bellied Parrot is vanishing before our eyes on the doorstep of one of our largest cities. A large portion of our remaining small and medium-sized mammals are on a similar trajectory. There are swathes of Australia’s remote interior that remain poorly-sampled and numerous species that are virtually unknown. The Great Barrier Reef is knackered. Our forests are riddled with dieback. The last of our south-eastern tall, wet forests are still under threat from an antiquated and unprofitable logging industry. Dangerous and barren legacy mines dot The Outback, uninhabitable and toxic. The scars left behind by unsuccessful mineral exploration criss-cross even the remotest regions of the continent's interior. They are rehabilitated in the most perfunctory manner permitted by law and left to testify to our rampant disregard for the natural heritage to which we are all heirs. Most of our frogs aren’t having a good time. The oceans are increasingly full of plastic and empty of fish. The entire continent is awash with feral cats, foxes, camels, horses, donkeys, fish, goats, pigs, deer, rabbits, ants, toads... and then there are the weeds. Changed fire regimes often shadow the spread of weeds laying waste to further remnant habitat and wildlife refugia. We’ve already cleared a fair whack of the native vegetation anywhere that might be good for a farm and there are many out there who don’t seem to grasp the folly of proceeding to clear the rest. Both of Victoria’s faunal emblems (Leadbeater’s Possum and Helmeted Honeyeater) are classified as Critically Endangered. There’s only one classification worse than that. And on top of all this we’re entering an increasingly unstable and erratic climatic future characterised by changes in temperature and rainfall that are already proving too rapid for some species to successfully adapt to.

Faced with all of this, as Dale’s article concludes, it is difficult not to question exactly how urgently we need to spend $50 billion on submarines when expenditure of just a few hundred million dollars could mitigate or eliminate many of the problems listed above. Do we really need to cut $54 billion from public health spending in order to provide tax cuts (coincidentally totalling a very similar figure) to the wealthiest individuals and overseas business owners?

When did Australian democracy jump the shark?

Our leaders wring their hands and furrow their brows with earnest sincerity while explaining, apparently without an ounce of irony, that the savings must come from the smallest funding pools: human services, health, science, education, the environment. The burden of funding cuts must be shouldered by the most vulnerable and least represented in our society. Never mind that just a handful of our wealthiest individuals, chipping in just a fraction of their combined wealth, could fund everything we could ever need and not notice the slightest difference in their standard of living. This while the Australian Taxation Office seems to be legally incapable of ensuring that the businesses and individuals who accrue the most wealth from Australian resources pay proportional taxes on that wealth, while simultaneously falling over themselves to hound lower income earners and hold them to account for their pittance.

It’s not even the stuff of conspiracy theory to suggest that our government is now led by a corporate class which serves any interest but the national interest. This much is observable. At best, we now live in a thinly veiled oligarchy; the cynic in me might suggest outright kleptocracy.

This is only occasionally contested, half-heartedly, by those in Parliament House and nobody with the capacity to think for themselves would believe them. It isn’t happenstance that some individuals at the top of Australian politics rank among the wealthier in Australia, and have friends and associates among the wealthiest. Neither should it be a surprise that they might collude and go out of their way to preserve the status quo.

The same people who helplessly hold up their hands when exposed for exploiting loopholes that allow them to needlessly consolidate their already obscene economic advantage, are the same people who are uniquely placed to close those loopholes and render the system more equitable.

On top of saving billions on unnecessary submarines and corporate giveaways, we might not have to look too far to find funds that could return to government coffers if they simply decided to make it so.

Stop imprisoning innocent people. Tax the church. Legalise marijuana. Tax wealth.

These ideas are simply expressed here but I acknowledge they would not necessarily be simple to put into effect. These are concepts that have been spoken about and debated at length for decades and their time has well and truly come. Are they really that revolutionary? Is it objectionable to demand a government that takes clear action toward building an equitable society that looks after the weak rather than endlessly reinforcing privilege among a tiny few? Is it pie-in-the-sky to expect our leaders to engage honestly and intelligently with experts and harness their learning to develop the best practices to benefit society? Is that unreasonable? Is anyone really so dull that they’re content to entertain the prospect of living in a barren post-mining landscape, drained of its mineral wealth, ravaged by climate change and depauperate of its unique fauna?

Anyone with rudimentary arithmetic skills (or the faintest shred of human decency) can tell you that our current refugee and immigration system is a millstone around the nation’s neck that serves entirely political, rather than practical or humanitarian, ends. Aside from being completely ineffective, it is costly; and cruel. Why are we so intent on displaying this barbarous side of our nature to the world? If we simply stop imprisoning and brutalising the most vulnerable people on Earth, we’ll save a truckload of cash and we can all feel better; win/win.

Next, tax the church. I’m not religious myself but I don’t mind if other people are. We shouldn’t care what people believe – we should care about what they do. Religious institutions rank among some of the wealthiest businesses on the planet, they offer a “service” which is faulty at best and plainly fraudulent at worst and religious observance has been dropping steadily for decades. Their continuing tax-exempt status is a farce which demeans and burdens us all. The first counterclaim to this proposition is usually to point out the variety of charitable and social services that various religious organisations provide which would otherwise need to be picked up by the government. But this is easily dismissed by a simple calculation of the amount of extra tax revenue we’d have to lavish on those services if religious tax exemption were revoked. The religious are always happy to point out the moral and charitable aspects of the organisations they support while sweeping their large catalogue of misdeeds under the carpet. If they’re genuinely keen on helping their fellow humans, they should be stepping forward to welcome taxable status with open arms and ululations of divine joy. They should be happy to do their bit and we should afford them the opportunity to do so.

To these measures you could add: rational defence spending based on realistic strategic assessments rather than hyper-politicised scare campaigns; a rebuilt corporate tax system to stop large businesses heading offshore with billions of dollars owed to Australian tax-payers; social welfare payments that equal a living wage; an end to the negative gearing nonsense; an increased minimum wage and a rebuilt personal income tax system which taxes wealth rather than income.

Implementing even a couple of those measures would have the nation so flush with cash that finding the paltry $10 million per year estimated to be sufficient to prevent the extinction of ALL Australian bird species, would be a matter for petty cash.

Our leaders have all benefitted from our (previously) free education system. They have grown up among the riches of our (seriously imperilled) natural heritage. Many of them have parents who were (welcomed as) refugees and some of them are immigrants themselves. They should be ensuring the same freedoms are available for generations to come, not dismantling each of them systematically.

I don’t even know what any of this has to do with parrots anymore. I guess I’ve had a creeping feeling for a long time that throughout the span of my life the government has been steadily extricating itself from responsibility for the environment. The Earth is just one giant ecosystem and one upon whose function we, and our economy, rely upon for our continued existence. Increasingly, conservation, and the broad base of scientific endeavour that underpins it, is left to not-for-profit NGOs: Birdlife Australia, Landcare, Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Zoos Victoria, Bush Heritage Australia, Greening Australia and countless others. Our national parks have had their funding and staffing progressively slashed to the extent that some reserves are virtually un-managed and many others run on a skeleton crew of rangers who function more as groundskeepers and maintenance crews than natural resource managers or wildlife ecologists.

There’s an election coming and I just hope that the shark which Australian democracy jumped some time ago can be returned to the open sea without fear of culling and we can forget the entire ghastly episode.

Sometimes you jump the shark... sometimes the shark jumps you.

Make your vote count. I can’t, and shouldn’t, tell you who to vote for and neither should anybody else, but I implore you to look hard and make your vote do something surprising and good. Buck the beige status quo. Look for people with less to gain financially from remaining in power. Look for people who don’t offer simple answers to complex problems. Look for people who admit uncertainty. Look for people with character and a background that takes in adversity as well as privilege. Vote for someone who’ll fund science, the arts and maybe even support a Great Forest National Park (protecting at least one of our faunal emblems would be a good start wouldn’t it?) Vote for someone, ANYONE, with a background in science, rather than the endless stream of bankers and lawyers we seem so fond of hoisting to high office. Such people are likely to do a better job of governing than the conga-line of wealthy old men with the laughably obvious commercial interest in public office that we are repeatedly lumped with.

But back to parrots...

A fellow parrot-lover, and a much better thinker and writer than me, Douglas Adams, summed up the travesty of our overuse and destruction of the Earth’s resources when he addressed the University of California, Santa Barbara only a month before his death in 2001. The full talk is highly recommended and can be found here but, in part, Douglas said:

“… there is a kind of terrible irony that at the point that we are best able to understand, and appreciate, and value the richness of life around us, we are destroying it at a higher rate than it has ever been destroyed before. And we are losing species after species after species, day after day, just because we’re burning the stuff down for firewood. And this is a kind of terrible indictment of our understanding.”

Orange-bellied Parrots on their wintering grounds in coastal Melbourne**. It's a very distant picture but I'm just glad to know they're out there.

Extinction, like death, is a crucial and inescapable component of life on Earth. Things will continue to go extinct, and not all extinctions will be caused by human malfeasance. But, if a parrot is going to go extinct on our watch, it should be because an annual trans-Bass Strait migration is an unsustainable evolutionary strategy, not because… jobs.

*In the interests of accuracy: OBP sightings on the mainland are, very sensibly, not publicised. So there may have been some outlying reports that I’m unaware of. We can only hope. This is an illustrative anecdote.

**I'm grateful to Steve Davidson for showing me some Orange-bellied Parrots on a cold and dreary day, about a year ago this month. Hopefully the gang's recruitment starts to improve and gains in size in coming years.

Owl Pellets: what are they and what can they teach us?

Going through some old notebooks the other day, I found an owl pellet. I’d collected* it back in 2012 near the banks of the Finniss River in the Northern Territory during a fauna trapping survey. I decided to pull it apart over the weekend and go through the remains to see what I could identify. This is always an instructive exercise and this was long overdue. After posting a few pictures on social media I was surprised by the amount of interest they generated and how many questions I was fielding about the nature of owl pellets. So it seemed appropriate to put together this short post for those who haven’t encountered an owl pellet before.

Firstly, pellets are not faeces. Pellets are a regurgitated mass of the indigestible parts of a bird’s prey; they cough them up. Many different types of birds produce such pellets but they are probably best known from owls and diurnal birds of prey. Depending on the diet of the bird in question, the bulk of the pellet is usually made up of hair and feathers encasing varying quantities of bones, insect casings, beaks, teeth and claws.

A Grey Falcon Falco hypoleucos, straining to eject a pellet. I collected this pellet too and it was composed almost entirely of Budgerigar bones and feathers.

Despite not being faecal, pellets can contain infectious material so when dissecting them it is prudent to use surgical gloves and to thoroughly clean all instruments afterwards. Having said that, inspecting the contents of pellets is not as unpleasant as you might imagine. In fact it’s not unpleasant at all. Pulling pellets apart to identify the prey species of a bird is like Lego for biologists; I enjoy it immensely. The pellet is soaked in warm water to make it easier to separate and the only odour that might be detected is a bit of a ‘wet dog’ smell from all of the wet animal hair.

Mmmmm... wet dog smell. All that remains of the pellet after soaking in warm water; a lot of hair.

When I’m analysing pellet contents, I use paper kitchen towel as a blotter to dry the pieces as they come out of the water. Then I transfer them to a shallow dish for the painstaking work of separating all the hard pieces from the hair and feathers. For this I use a pair of surgical tweezers and a sharp penknife. Others prefer a pointed implement like a splinter probe or a safety pin.

Larger items like skulls and femurs are obvious and come out fairly easily but the smaller bones can be fiddly to extricate from the matted hair. I know some people who like to use a magnifying glass to see more clearly; I have a 200x USB microscope for dealing with the really small bits. Frog and smaller rodent bones, and teeth if they’re separated from the skull, can be tiny.

The bones are then arrayed on a second piece of paper towel for sorting through later. I lay them out in broad anatomical groups – arms, legs, vertebrae, teeth and miscellaneous. Once there are no more bones or other hard remains left in the pellet, the hair can be sent for further analysis. This requires a powerful magnifying glass or microscope and a fair deal of practice. A skilled observer can usually identify a good portion of individual hairs to species level. I don’t have this God-level skill yet so if I require hair analysis I usually send them away to be identified.

The identification of hard remains is more straightforward but still takes some practice and methodical work. There are a few references for this but probably the best and most widely-used is the trusty old Triggs. Tracks, scats and other traces: a field guide to Australian mammals by Barbara Triggs is a revered classic among Australian ecologists and an indispensable reference. As it says on the tin, it’s handy for identifying tracks and scat but it also has references for skulls and other skeletal remains that are usually sufficient to identify bones to at least genus level and sometimes species. Another handy reference is the Field Companion to the Mammals of Australia by Steve Van Dyck, Ian Gynther and Andrew Baker. This is a larger book which contains detailed keys to identification, but these don’t always include skeletal references. All the same, it can sometimes be useful for narrowing the number of candidates.

These references, combined with the knowledge of the collection locality can usually identify most bones satisfactorily.

This pellet had been collected at the base of a fairly large old stag (dead tree). It was about 8m tall and had a hollow opening upwards at the top. The pellet was large (~45mm in diameter) which narrowed the origin of the pellet to two likely species.

This pellet was found at the base of this burnt out tree. It's difficult to make out from this picture but it has a large hollow opening upwards at the top of the trunk. The beastie may well have been in there for all I know.

The fact that the pellet was found beneath a large hollow gave me further useful information. Rufous Owl Ninox rufa is found through this area but tends to stick to fairly dense areas of monsoonal vine thicket – the collection locality was open woodland. The pellet might have been from any of a few different diurnal raptors found throughout the area but it didn’t seem like an obvious roosting spot for any of those.

Another nocturnal raptor of wooded Top End areas: a Rufous Owl on the upper Daly River.

The Australian Masked Owl Tyto novaehollandiae kimberli, is uncommon to rare and not well-known across most of its range in the Northern Territory. The majority of NT records of Masked Owl seem to have come from the Cobourg Peninsula about 150km to the north-east of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands to the north of Darwin (which would be a different subspecies T. n. melvillensis) or Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (T. n. kimberli again) a long way to the east. When I collected this pellet I was less than 100km almost due south of Darwin. Masked Owl are known to roost in tree hollows during the daytime whereas Rufous Owl roost by day on the branch of a large tree, usually in a well-vegetated area.

Putting all of this together (size, habitat preference, roost selection, distribution) made me tentatively confident at the time, that the pellet was from a Masked Owl. Sadly, the nature of the survey had me accommodated in a motel in a nearby town rather than camped out as would be more usual. This meant there was no opportunity for spotlighting or broadcast surveys which might have yielded a positive identification. Even so, equipped with knowledge of the prey species found within the pellet, I’m still fairly confident that it is from a Masked Owl.

 All the remains that I could identify were rodents including two complete skulls and the lower mandibles from a third animal. The humerus of most rodents has a distinctive crest on the shaft which distinguishes them from other mammals.

Skeletal remains of Pale Field Rat Rattus tunneyi, from within the pellet. The prominent crest on the humerus (labelled with an "H") is distinctive.

The larger skull is likely to have come from a Pale Field Rat Rattus tunneyi. This was the most common species we were getting in our nearby trap lines and matches both the skeletal remains and some of the lighter-coloured hair in the pellet.

What a Pale Field Rat looks like on the outside. Our nearby traps were full of this native species every morning. Not as bitey and more pleasant to handle than Long-haired Rat.

The smaller skull is from one of the native mouse species. The introduced House Mouse Mus musculus, can be ruled out as it has a prominent notch on the inside of the upper incisors; even in a live animal you can quickly check this by running your thumbnail up the inside of the animal's front teeth. The teeth in this skull didn’t have the tell-tale notch. It’s impossible to say with 100% certainty, but the pellet contained some hair with slight rufous/orange colouring so the skull might be from a Western Chestnut Mouse Pseudomys nanus. This was another species that was turning up in our trap survey most mornings so was certainly fairly common in the area.

If the pellet was from a Rufous Owl I’d expect there to be at least some sign of remains from Little Red Flying Fox Pteropus scapulatus, which was common in the area and a well-known prey item for Rufous Owl. Also with this species, I would expect there to be some remains of gliders or possums and probably also some feathers. These were all absent.

Dem bones dem bones dem...

Masked Owl is fairly well-documented as preying primarily on terrestrial animals and all the remains that I could identify were terrestrial mammals. For now at least, I'm pretty sure that there was a Masked Owl knocking about the upper Finniss River back in 2012. Let's hope there are still a few about in 2016.

So there you go, next time you’re at an owl roost and you see some suspiciously non-bird-poo-looking lumps on the ground beneath it, you can have a fair idea of the sorts of things those pellets might contain.

CBW

*This was collected under permit in the course of a commercial fauna survey. It is illegal to collect pellets without the proper wildlife research permits. In fact, it is technically illegal to collect any animal remains, including bones, feathers and road-killed or beach-washed carcasses. This is an area of wildlife legislation that I don’t entirely agree with; feathers, bones and other animal remains can be great teaching aids and kids get a real kick out of collecting them. But it’s not that simple either. Wildlife permits and regulations are probably a topic for another blog post on another day.

Buy Tracks, scats and other traces: a field guide to Australian mammals by Barbara Triggs from Andrew Isles.

Buy Field companion to the Mammals of Australia by Van Dyck, Gynther and Baker from Andrew Isles.

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NBN Failure and the Ghost of Old Heavitree

“We have this day, within two years, completed a line of communications two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia, until a few years ago a terra incognita believed to be a desert” – Sir Charles Hedley (Heavitree) Todd, the first message passed along the completed Overland Telegraph Line, 22nd of August 1872

One of these men is an innovator, talented leader and telecommunications pioneer. Pic - @leftocentre

Anyone who knows anything about Charles Todd, knows that we could have a world-class National Broadband Network (NBN) and soon. Listening to most of our political leaders though, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’ll take the best part of 15 or 20 years to deliver a sub-standard one.

Colonial Australia in the 1860s was an unimaginably isolated place by today’s standards. Before the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL), any message might have taken as long as three months to reach England with a corresponding three month wait for a response – half a year round trip for the merest of personal or business correspondence. In the simple act of connecting the lines at Frews Ponds, south of Daly Waters, and sending the telegraph message repeated above, Todd banished an age in which an inconceivable tyranny of distance held the emerging nation of Australia in check.

In that instant, the communication time with London went from 6 months… to 7 hours.

Absorb that for a few moments. 7 hours compared with 6 months. If you had your affairs in order at the start of the day, you might even get a reply by the close of business the same day!

Of course, there had been years of exploration, planning and construction leading up to that moment. The OTL still ranks beside the Snowy Mountains Scheme as one of the greatest achievements in engineering and infrastructure construction in Australian history. But once the project began it was completed in a dazzlingly short amount of time.

If you’re interested in learning more about the OTL project, and I can recommend it as a cracking yarn and a crucial bit of Australian history, there are plenty of resources available. One of the best is the book by Todd’s great-great-great-granddaughter Alice Thomson, The Singing Line.

The salient points are these: until 1862, a route south to north through the centre of Australia was unknown to the colonists. In that year, after six exploratory expeditions, Scotsman John McDouall Stuart finally succeeded in pioneering the route that the OTL would follow. The final contract for construction of the OTL was signed in 1870 and Todd was put in charge of the project. 30,000 poles and 3200km of line later, relying only on the Great Scot’s notebooks, maps and diaries and despite the vicissitudes of operating in the unknown and extreme environs of The Outback; despite striking work teams (at one point work ceased for a full five months) and still just seven months late, the job was done. Adelaide was connected with Darwin and from there to the rest of the world.

From the time they decided to build it, across the entire continent, through virtually unknown territory, it was finished in a shade over two years.

Two. Years.

From the time colonists first crossed the continent, to the time they'd spanned it with a line of communication, was less than ten years.

Now, 143 years later, our leaders are trying to tell us that it’s going to cost tens of billions of dollars and take 15 years or more to build a national network; with modern techniques and machinery; with a larger and more highly-trained workforce; in a landscape which is utterly well-known and accessible. Workers on the OTL faced death by disease, heat, cold, starvation, snake bite, crocodile attack or spearing. The greatest risk faced by an NBN worker will be a lingering bitterness on the tongue when the local barista burns the milk for their fifth latte of the day; perhaps a deep paper cut while filling out their daily Job Safety & Environment Assessment.

Furthermore, we’re now being sold an antediluvian Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) version of the network constructed, at least in part, of the same materials used by Todd – metal wire – when optic-fiber technology is readily available and preferable.

The numerous delays and budgetary blowouts involving the NBN fiasco are a matter of public record. If it weren’t for the constant changes of leadership and gamification of infrastructure projects, the thing could almost have been built by now.

Doesn’t it all smack of leaders behaving out of narrow self-interest despite a universal acknowledgement of the significance of this project to the national interest?

What would Old Heavitree make of all this? Sir Charles Todd passed away in 1910 at his home in Semaphore, Adelaide. I wish more people knew about him and the many things he achieved. Perhaps a better acquaintance with the extraordinary people from our history might make us less willing to accept the rampant ineptitude and chronic obfuscation that is currently on offer under the misnomer of leadership in our nation’s capital.

CBW