EIGHTY MILE BEACH IS A VAST MAGICAL PLACE
The dim glow of dawn greeted me as I left my tent, splashed water on my face from a ground water tap and hurriedly ate cornflakes. By 5.45 am I was sliding onto the back seat of a Toyota Landcruiser with my companions; three young birders from China, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. We drove out from the homestead at Anna Plains Cattle Station and headed west down a red pindan track towards remote Eighty Mile Beach in northern Western Australia.
A cull of wild dogs on the station has helped ensure a successful breeding season for the local Australian Bustards. I can see adults with nearly full-size young roaming the grassy plains as we head for the beach. A Spotted Harrier is perched on a fence post waiting for the early morning heat to provide an uplift so it can start hunting. Eighty Mile Beach is eleven kilometres from the inland station. Our convoy of vehicles pulls up facing south on the firm crushed shell beach. Soon, Karrajarri Wildlife Rangers from the Bigyadanga Settlement join us. We are on Karrajarri and Nyangumarta Country and they are the traditional owners.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the vastness of sky, land and sea in this magical place. At low tide the mudflats extend several kilometres. The nearest public access is over 140 kilometres to the south. This is not a place that ordinary visitors can easily come to. We travel in convoy along the beach for another 40 kilometres to where good flocks of endangered Red Knot can often be found and set two cannon nets in last night’s high tide rack. Our mission for the next 12 days is to study migratory shorebirds by collecting measurements and placing identification bands and flags on their legs. This is the 34th year of the expedition and the information collected is an internationally recognized prime source for what we know about these extraordinary long-distance flyers. This year we will also place some satellite transmitters on Eastern Curlew, Little Curlew, Whimbrel and Oriental Pratincole.
By mid-morning it is 38 degrees and I am in a bird hide that is tucked into the sand dunes. I monitor shorebirds as they form large flocks to the north and the south of the nets. Oriental Pratincole, Little Curlew and Oriental Plover have arrived on the beach from the grass plains to escape the heat and cool down in the sea breeze. I look south and estimate 150,000 Oriental Pratincole stretching over several kilometres. We decide this will be the target species for the day. Very few Red Knots can be found on the beach this year, a sign perhaps of their near critically endangered status. A little after mid-day 200 Oriental Pratincole and several other species are in front of the nets and we decide to make the catch.
The extreme summer conditions on Eighty Mile Beach requires special steps to be taken to look after bird welfare. A shade tent is erected and cool darkened holding cages are set up and angled to take full advantage of the cooling westerly sea breeze. Bio-metric measures are then taken and the strongest birds selected for satellite transmitter attachment. Today we are using 2-gram Microwave Telemetry devices attached using safe leg harnesses. Each device has a micro-solar panel less than half the size of a child’s thumb nail. The 5 birds selected all fly off successfully with their transmitters attached.
As the sun begins to set to the west over the Indian Ocean, we return to base camp on Anna Plains Station. The catching team clean the gear and prepare equipment for the following day. The data entry team place the information gathered into the electronic database to add to what is now more than 30 years of scientific information. We in the Satellite Transmitter team sit under a tree near to a Telstra telecommunications booster and call up the Argus Satellite System. We log onto the five Oriental Pratincole signals. Four are signalling but one is not. Is it a transmitter failure or did the harness fail and the transmitter fall off or did perhaps the White Belled Sea Eagle, who’s territory is some kilometres up the beach, choose to hunt shorebirds earlier in the day? We can only speculate. We never hear from the fifth Oriental Pratincole over the coming weeks.
Postscript:
This is the first ever opportunity to learn about the local movements and migration routes of the Oriental Pratincole. After a few days the heaviest bird left Anna Plains via Sulawesi for rice fields north of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The journey took 5 days. Two remained on Anna Plains feeding on the bloom of grasshoppers following earlier rains, while one flew overnight towards Broome and then on over the northern parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. By late March all had left Australia and by different migration roots had arrived in various parts of South East Asia. These Oriental Pratincoles used only one stop to reach their breeding grounds. There is much more to learn from the signals they will send back over the coming months to help us secure their long-term survival.
The expedition is an initiative of the Australasian Wader Study Group in partnership with the Asian Australasian Flyway network. Participants are drawn from Australia and internationally.
Photos: R Bush. Map from AWSG.
A cull of wild dogs on the station has helped ensure a successful breeding season for the local Australian Bustards. I can see adults with nearly full-size young roaming the grassy plains as we head for the beach. A Spotted Harrier is perched on a fence post waiting for the early morning heat to provide an uplift so it can start hunting. Eighty Mile Beach is eleven kilometres from the inland station. Our convoy of vehicles pulls up facing south on the firm crushed shell beach. Soon, Karrajarri Wildlife Rangers from the Bigyadanga Settlement join us. We are on Karrajarri and Nyangumarta Country and they are the traditional owners.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the vastness of sky, land and sea in this magical place. At low tide the mudflats extend several kilometres. The nearest public access is over 140 kilometres to the south. This is not a place that ordinary visitors can easily come to. We travel in convoy along the beach for another 40 kilometres to where good flocks of endangered Red Knot can often be found and set two cannon nets in last night’s high tide rack. Our mission for the next 12 days is to study migratory shorebirds by collecting measurements and placing identification bands and flags on their legs. This is the 34th year of the expedition and the information collected is an internationally recognized prime source for what we know about these extraordinary long-distance flyers. This year we will also place some satellite transmitters on Eastern Curlew, Little Curlew, Whimbrel and Oriental Pratincole.
By mid-morning it is 38 degrees and I am in a bird hide that is tucked into the sand dunes. I monitor shorebirds as they form large flocks to the north and the south of the nets. Oriental Pratincole, Little Curlew and Oriental Plover have arrived on the beach from the grass plains to escape the heat and cool down in the sea breeze. I look south and estimate 150,000 Oriental Pratincole stretching over several kilometres. We decide this will be the target species for the day. Very few Red Knots can be found on the beach this year, a sign perhaps of their near critically endangered status. A little after mid-day 200 Oriental Pratincole and several other species are in front of the nets and we decide to make the catch.
The extreme summer conditions on Eighty Mile Beach requires special steps to be taken to look after bird welfare. A shade tent is erected and cool darkened holding cages are set up and angled to take full advantage of the cooling westerly sea breeze. Bio-metric measures are then taken and the strongest birds selected for satellite transmitter attachment. Today we are using 2-gram Microwave Telemetry devices attached using safe leg harnesses. Each device has a micro-solar panel less than half the size of a child’s thumb nail. The 5 birds selected all fly off successfully with their transmitters attached.
As the sun begins to set to the west over the Indian Ocean, we return to base camp on Anna Plains Station. The catching team clean the gear and prepare equipment for the following day. The data entry team place the information gathered into the electronic database to add to what is now more than 30 years of scientific information. We in the Satellite Transmitter team sit under a tree near to a Telstra telecommunications booster and call up the Argus Satellite System. We log onto the five Oriental Pratincole signals. Four are signalling but one is not. Is it a transmitter failure or did the harness fail and the transmitter fall off or did perhaps the White Belled Sea Eagle, who’s territory is some kilometres up the beach, choose to hunt shorebirds earlier in the day? We can only speculate. We never hear from the fifth Oriental Pratincole over the coming weeks.
Postscript:
This is the first ever opportunity to learn about the local movements and migration routes of the Oriental Pratincole. After a few days the heaviest bird left Anna Plains via Sulawesi for rice fields north of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The journey took 5 days. Two remained on Anna Plains feeding on the bloom of grasshoppers following earlier rains, while one flew overnight towards Broome and then on over the northern parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. By late March all had left Australia and by different migration roots had arrived in various parts of South East Asia. These Oriental Pratincoles used only one stop to reach their breeding grounds. There is much more to learn from the signals they will send back over the coming months to help us secure their long-term survival.
The expedition is an initiative of the Australasian Wader Study Group in partnership with the Asian Australasian Flyway network. Participants are drawn from Australia and internationally.
Photos: R Bush. Map from AWSG.
LORD HOWE COULDN'T HAVE GIVEN A DAM
Lord Howe island is a small topical island about 500 Klms off the east coast of Australia. With only 300 residents and a limit of 400 visitors it is a paradise for holiday-makers wanting a simple life. We visited in January 2015. Flights leave Sydney daily and from other places in the summer high season. Book early to avoid disappointment.
Lord Howe never visited the Island named after him, nor as far as we know, did he take the slightest interest in the place. As the First Sea Lord of the British Navy he was far too busy maintaining the status quo. Back in 1788 early industrial change was causing all sorts of terrifying ideas. The old Sea Lord was dealing with the outrageous suggestion that iron boats could replace His Majesty’s magnificent fleet of English Oak Warships.
“Never!” he and his fellow Sea Lords declared and to make the point they set out to demonstrate once and for all the foolishness of such a preposterous idea. Standing in full dress uniform before the muddy infected waters of the River Thames they witnessed a metal bar and a wooden plank being thrown into the waters. “See” they pointed at the mucky depths, “The iron sinks and the wood floats.” “ Let this be the end of the matter.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world Lt Henry Lidgbird Ball not so much discovered the small island landmass in the Tasman Sea as stubbled upon it on his way to set up a penal outpost on Norfolk Island. As the Commander of the HMS Supply he knew how to curry favour back home. Having named the Island after his boss, Lord Howe, he went on to name the highest peak after Capt’ Gower, Lord Howe’s unofficial deputy, most likely successor and an astute politician to boot. Unfortunately for Lidgbird, Gower died only a few years afterwards from a stroke while having an early morning shave at his English country estate. Lidgbird diplomatically named the lesser of the two great peaks on the island after himself thus establishing his credentials in the pecking order of things. To those below him in rank went smaller knobs and bobs. Blackburn, the Master of the Supply, got a small island in the sheltered southern coral bay where today day trippers use canoes to paddle out into the sheltered lagoon waters. In case he had missed anyone he named the entire collection of islets to the north-west ‘Admiralty Isles’. Whether any of this naming did Lidgbird’s career any good at all seems lost to history.
“Never!” he and his fellow Sea Lords declared and to make the point they set out to demonstrate once and for all the foolishness of such a preposterous idea. Standing in full dress uniform before the muddy infected waters of the River Thames they witnessed a metal bar and a wooden plank being thrown into the waters. “See” they pointed at the mucky depths, “The iron sinks and the wood floats.” “ Let this be the end of the matter.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world Lt Henry Lidgbird Ball not so much discovered the small island landmass in the Tasman Sea as stubbled upon it on his way to set up a penal outpost on Norfolk Island. As the Commander of the HMS Supply he knew how to curry favour back home. Having named the Island after his boss, Lord Howe, he went on to name the highest peak after Capt’ Gower, Lord Howe’s unofficial deputy, most likely successor and an astute politician to boot. Unfortunately for Lidgbird, Gower died only a few years afterwards from a stroke while having an early morning shave at his English country estate. Lidgbird diplomatically named the lesser of the two great peaks on the island after himself thus establishing his credentials in the pecking order of things. To those below him in rank went smaller knobs and bobs. Blackburn, the Master of the Supply, got a small island in the sheltered southern coral bay where today day trippers use canoes to paddle out into the sheltered lagoon waters. In case he had missed anyone he named the entire collection of islets to the north-west ‘Admiralty Isles’. Whether any of this naming did Lidgbird’s career any good at all seems lost to history.
Lord Howe Island remained uninhabited for more than 40 years. Whaling ships and warships occasionally called by during this time to collect fresh meat in the form of turtles and birds. These were easy to catch being tame the result of having had no experience of humans. Within a few decades a large seabird, probably a Booby, that nested along the beaches had been eaten to extinction; then followed the White Gallinule, a flightless ground bird; then the White Throated Pigeon and later, after settlement, the Red-fronted Parakeet. This noisy Parakeet had taken a liking to crops planted in the new forest clearings and so was shot to extinction by settlers.
If you are from Europe and holidaying in the island today you will awake to the very familiar bird call. The European Blackbird was introduced in the 1950s and now lives across the whole island. Singing from morning until dusk, they feed on worms pulled from the garden lawns of the three hundred or so island inhabitants. Listen carefully and the melodic call of the Blackbird will be interspersed with the distinctive ‘whit-whit-whiet-WHIT’ of the endemic Golden Whistler.
If you are from Europe and holidaying in the island today you will awake to the very familiar bird call. The European Blackbird was introduced in the 1950s and now lives across the whole island. Singing from morning until dusk, they feed on worms pulled from the garden lawns of the three hundred or so island inhabitants. Listen carefully and the melodic call of the Blackbird will be interspersed with the distinctive ‘whit-whit-whiet-WHIT’ of the endemic Golden Whistler.
January is the time to be on the island to see all the nesting seabirds bar two – the Providence Petrel and the Kermadec Petrel. Walk up to the top of Mababar hill and look down over the 400-foot cliffs where the Red-Tailed Tropicbirds nest. Walk on to Mt Eliza and be among the thousands of Sooty Terms with their fledging chicks. Continue your walk down off this 147 metre peak to North Bay and there, in the Norfolk Pines, the Black Noddy will be nesting. On the lower branches of the trees by the southern Lagoon sit White Terns with their single chicks. The parents fly back and forth with squid caught in the bay to feed their downy offspring. At nightfall, in the woods by Neds Beach, many thousands of Shearwaters return from the sea to feed their young who call out from their secure ground burrows. And, on those Admiralty Islets nest the biggest of the seabirds here, the Masked Booby.
It’s a feast of nesting seabirds largely unnoticed by the holidaymakers who splash in the waters of Ned’s Beach or hire snorkelling gear to observe the fish in the coral lagoons. The fittest holidaymakers may make their way to the top of Mt Gower which was, until quite recently the last refuge of the endemic Lord Howe Hen, a flightless bird decimated by the introduction of feral pigs and goats. These feral animals have now been removed from the Island and the Island Hen population has grown to about 250 pairs who live in territories across the whole island again. Lord Howe Island Hen the Common Noddy and the Sooty Tern |
BELLINGEN IS FOR THE BIRDS
Black Faced Monarch
Can I persuade you to turn off the highway south of Coffs Harbour, drive 11km on Waterfall Way to Bellingen, turn left over the river by Lavenders Bridge, up the short hill and into the showground; there to camp for a night and a day?
Will it be the cost – just $7 per head? Or the constant supply of hot showers, the well cut field or the shade of Camphorlaurel trees in the heat of summer?
Well maybe, maybe not….
But could I persuade you to come for the birds?
At dawn, by the showground canteen shed, the old and now grey crowned resident Australian Magpie drops to the ground from his night roost. Upright and still with the sharpest dark red eyes he patrols his domain moving methodically around the oval. By the Camphorlaurel grove he observes, from a perch on the oval fence, the younger female partner he took this year. He notes with apparent approval that their one young, born in late October, is now independently feeding although still close to its mother.
'Old Maggie'
Above them, moving through the foliage three Blue-faced Honeyeaters pick caterpillars off the branches. Two parents and just one young, the other fledglings had been too slow to avoid the kookaburra’s carnivorous desire for fledglings just out of the nest.
The old gray crowned Maggie moves on to the eastern boundary.
Here, one overly-anxious male Pied Butcherbird calls out to his female mate seeking assurance she is still in his territorial domain. She ignores him; he seems beside himself. She is far to busy bill-feeding their single demanding offspring who screeches at her, never satisfied with the amount of food delivered to its open bill. It does not occur to the self-absorbed male parent that he might help out.
Then, just before 8am, out from the southern forest come four slow-moving black shapes screeching their way to a 100 year old Scots Pine. The Yellow Tailed black Cockatoos indulge themselves with the seeds of pinecones.
When the heat sets in the old grey crowned Maggie heads for the shade of remnant rainforest at the northern edge of the showground.
Now is the time find a camp chair, place it under one of the shade trees scattered across the grass field, face the remnant rainforest wall, sit back with your favored brew and watch the show. First up, the Brush Wattlebird’s sharp crack call focuses your eye on the lower branches. You spot the bar tail, a give-away identification marker. But then another barred tail and an ascending, accelerating horse whistle. It’s a New Guinea migrant, the Pallid Cuckoo. Perhaps she laid her egg this year in on of those Honeyeater nests, a favored surrogate parental choice.
The old gray crowned Maggie moves on to the eastern boundary.
Here, one overly-anxious male Pied Butcherbird calls out to his female mate seeking assurance she is still in his territorial domain. She ignores him; he seems beside himself. She is far to busy bill-feeding their single demanding offspring who screeches at her, never satisfied with the amount of food delivered to its open bill. It does not occur to the self-absorbed male parent that he might help out.
Then, just before 8am, out from the southern forest come four slow-moving black shapes screeching their way to a 100 year old Scots Pine. The Yellow Tailed black Cockatoos indulge themselves with the seeds of pinecones.
When the heat sets in the old grey crowned Maggie heads for the shade of remnant rainforest at the northern edge of the showground.
Now is the time find a camp chair, place it under one of the shade trees scattered across the grass field, face the remnant rainforest wall, sit back with your favored brew and watch the show. First up, the Brush Wattlebird’s sharp crack call focuses your eye on the lower branches. You spot the bar tail, a give-away identification marker. But then another barred tail and an ascending, accelerating horse whistle. It’s a New Guinea migrant, the Pallid Cuckoo. Perhaps she laid her egg this year in on of those Honeyeater nests, a favored surrogate parental choice.
Olive Backed Oriole
Most of the forest birds have finished nesting for the year by January and are now accompanying their young as they move through the forest canopy. There’s a delicate rusty coloured Rufus Fantail, an Eastern Spinebill, its distinctive V shape chest marking still to develop and a Black Faced Monarch with a soft red belly, grey-blue wing and a jet back face. As the heat rises further, an Olive-Back Oriel comes to rest under shady leaves, its wings partially opened and its bill wide to cool itself down.
Pallid Cuckoo
The heat begins to pass in the late afternoon. Suddenly, out of the dense inner forest there’s a long eerie ‘meow’ high in the trees. Then another one off to the east. Then another a little closer and then two excited short ‘meows’ together. A pair of endangered Green Catbirds meet up to spend the night together.
Green Catbird
As the sun descends over the town, leaving a pink hue across the thin lines of cloud, out of the west come more then a thousand Cattle Edgets heading home from their feeding fields. Many are in V formation, some have rusty breeding plumage, flying low and eastward over the showground to their nesting sites on branches hanging low over the Bellinger River.
Time to leave your armchair twitch and head for an ale or two at the Federal Hotel on Hyde Street just across the river.
To camp at the Bellingen Showground year round contact Ray on 0431 264 836
For information on local bird watching groups go to www.birdlife.org.au
The Story originally appeared in the Blog 'Bellingen and Beyond ' in February 2013 http://bellingenandbeyond.wordpress.com
Time to leave your armchair twitch and head for an ale or two at the Federal Hotel on Hyde Street just across the river.
To camp at the Bellingen Showground year round contact Ray on 0431 264 836
For information on local bird watching groups go to www.birdlife.org.au
The Story originally appeared in the Blog 'Bellingen and Beyond ' in February 2013 http://bellingenandbeyond.wordpress.com
The Firing of Cannons on 80 Mile Beach
In February, 2013, I had an opportunity to join the N-W Australian Wader Expedition. The expedition was made up of people from Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Germany. We caught and released more than 3000 Waders and a few Terns, placing identification flags on their legs and some 50 geo-locators where attached to Great Knots. The purpose is to learn more about the need for conservation along the migration flyway between Australia and the Arctic circle. The photos are mine and also from the group, including David Li and April Reside, which help to 'tell the story' in a more complete way.