Part 1: beginnings
When I was very young, perhaps 8 years old my dad brought me my very own binoculars. I don’t remember the specs but although they were terrible quality, they rarely left my reach. I also acquired an old tape recorder and used to sneak down into the lantana to record the crazy courtship antics of our local Satin Bowerbird.
I remember lying in that dank, scratchy lantana thicket for well over an hour sometimes, waiting for the finicky dandy to seduce a female to dance and sing to, or at the very least come and inspect his bach-pad (aka bower). Satin bowerbirds are, to the core of their beings, suspicious and devious creatures. Criminality is never far from their thoughts. This is especially true for the coloured males who undertake regular smash-grab raids on rival bowers. Thus, to gain the trust of such naturally wily birds necessitates lengthy periods of motionless waiting.
Incidentally, many decades of observing the antics of young children as an adult leads me to believe that the uncanny patience I learned during those lengthy stays under the lantana constituted rather an astonishing feat.
Thinking now about why I even cared enough about birds to put up with the ever-present leeches, ticks and mozzies, it was almost certainly something to do with how much I frikkin’ loved David Attenborough’s first Life on Earth series. Sir David has a lot to answer for.
But even before that I had some bird-nerd comradery in the form of my best mate at school. Rog was the only other kid on the planet who I knew for sure was into birds as much as I was. There might have been others, but they were wisely keeping a lid on it, during school hours at least.
Rog’s family lived next to a huge swamp…which we called “the swamp”. It was a veritable bird-lovers heaven. It was also extremely mucky and gross. Years later I would find out exactly just how gross as the swamp had actually been used to process antimony and gold, leaving it so contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals that it qualified as the most polluted wetland in NSW before it was cleaned up just a few years ago. So that explains a few things (about me) I guess.
Part 2: Why knowing stuff about birds wasn’t useful for getting a girlfriend in the 1980’s.
The next formative surge forward in my bird-nerd journey was when I started going along with dad on bird banding outings. Bird banding is basically the coolest thing ever if you’re a weird kid into birds, because you actually get to hold the little darlings in your trembling hands. I would help the wonderful (and long gone) ornithologist Bill Lane put up his long, super-fine mesh nets along fire trails and walking tracks to snare birds for him to measure, band and release.
We’d set up the tall wooden poles, unfurl the net, tension up the support ropes and head back to bush headquarters (aka. Bill’s chair and fold out card table, upon which were carefully positioned his thermos, biscuit box, small cotton draw-string bags for placing the captured birds in, a box of tiny metal bands, tiny scales, callipers and a neatly annotated record book).
Now for the fun bit. Every ten minutes or so I’d sprint around the tracks checking on the nets. Well, maybe not sprint. I’ve never really been a sprinter – it makes me want to heave after about 20 metres – but I’m an impressive canterer (which is apparently not even a real word? Well it is NOW).
The aim was to check the nets often. It kept me occupied so the adults could enjoy their salacious gossip (or whatever) back at Bush HQ but also because we didn’t want birds hanging in the fine mesh too long or they’d get themselves so impossibly tangled up we’d have to cut the netting. Sometimes Currawong or Kookaburra would do the surgery for us.
Can you imagine the breathy excitement of a young boy who effing loves birds when he comes legging it around the corner of the trail to spy at a glance a captured Noisy Pitta or Regent Bowerbird, or maybe a party of fairy-wrens. Wild-eyed feathery bundles just hanging there, suspended in the spidery web of netting, their motion arrested mid-flight. It was heady stuff and heated my already smouldering passion for birds to thermonuclear temperatures. It was an experience so infused with unfettered joy and clarity of purpose that it literally rewired my brain, then and there.
And despite the fact that being able to readily tell apart the calls of Spotted and Striated Pardalotes was not a useful or even remotely socially acceptable way to attract a girlfriend in high school, I nonetheless kept on paying attention to them (birds AND girlfriends).
Incidentally, it’s not that knowing stuff about birds (and nature more generally) isn’t a sure-fire way to attract a mate. It is. Just not in western society, not yet at least. But in any hunter gatherer society it most certainly would have been. For thousands and thousands of years bird language nerds were cool.
Part 3: Thrill of the hunt
As a kid I was obsessed with identifying as many birds as I could lay eyes on. In those days it was mostly about using my eyes (via crappy binoculars) as opposed to later when I trained up my ears. The prospect of a embarking on a family camping trip to a new bioregion brought on a flutter of nerdy excitement.
Leafing through my trusty copy of Graeme Pizzey’s ‘Birds of Australia’ (actually was my dads’, but he didn’t seem to need it as much as I did, so….) I would make myself a “most wanted” list of novel species I might see. Much coveted birds (my “unicorn list”) who sat atop the MOST WANTED list included such delights as Diamond Firetail, Pink Cockatoo, White-backed Swallows, Crimson Chat, Chiming Wedgebills, Ground Parrot… To see one of these, to actually clap eyes on these legendary buggers in the wilds and then scrawl a feverish note in the bird book, well it was bloody exciting is what it was. Pure nerdy excitement.
Once the actual trip got under way, I permitted myself a start for the official bird list once we moved beyond our local government area, unless a Peregrine Falcon shot across the sky just as we were pulling onto the highway, but seriously, that’s fair enough, right? I mean, who doesn’t want a freakin’ Peregrine at the top of their bird list? Jesus, give me a break.
Much to my little brothers’ chagrin, I insisted on claiming the middle seat in the back of the car on long journeys as it afforded me the greatest sweep of observation through the front window of any birds looming ahead on the road. Sometimes, when we finally got to the gravel road of our national park destination, I’d transfer to sitting on the window sill and make Dad drive slow. When I spotted something, I’d bang on the car roof for him to pull up so I could focus my binoculars. Um, yeah, it took FOREVER to get anywhere.
Part 4: My first bird language hero
Years later I started a job with National Parks, joining a team of leading ecologists and fauna specialists to conduct surveys (trapping and fauna searches) across a bunch of State Forest reserves (soon to become National Parks) on the NSW North Coast. These teams were basically the equivalent of ecological SAS assault units. Every person on my team was an indisputable boffin. THE expert on microbat, THE expert on elapid snakes, THE expert on frogs and on it goes. I was assigned to help THE expert on birds, David Stewart.
It was embarrassing really. I was to David as a Robin is to Batman, or a Remora fish is to a Humpback Whale or the Nationals to the Liberal Party. But hey, what I lacked in actual knowledge I certainly made up for in raw enthusiasm. It wasn’t that I couldn’t reliably identify birds, I could, but I lacked one major superpower that David had in spades – call recognition. Allow me a short anecdote – picture this if you will:
Dawn in White Box woodland country. Rising hues of pink and shy crimson spill across exposed sandstone outcrops. David and I are standing by a white government Landcruiser, notebooks in hand, binoculars in hand. At least, mine were, and I used them to good effect through a series of rapid-fire views top confirm bird species. But Dave’s binoculars rarely moved. Yet his list, which I had initially sought to outpace with, soon metastasized into a veritable compendium of local birds. I couldn’t understand it. Was he a bird-psychic? Or was this a list of all the POSSIBLE birds he was HOPING to see?
Neither. Dave was listening. He knew bird language. In fact, he would go on to create the largest collection of recorded bird sounds in Australia. But, in that moment, I quickly came to realise 2 things which would change my life forever:
- I thought I was close to the summit of knowledge for my local birds, but as oft happens (especially when you’re 20 years old), I was cruelly (self) deceived and it was but a crest…a nice place to sit and enjoy the view momentarily. In actual fact, the track of knowledge rose again steeply and surely has no final summit, and
- I wanted to be as rad at knowing bird language as David was. He was my first bird language hero
But the good news is that you don’t have to be as rad as David to get a kick out of bird language. In fact, to begin with, you can learn how to do some awesome stuff like track predator movements across your backyard without even knowing the names of the birds making the alarm calls.