The year just ended was the first since I took up birding in 2005 (or thereabouts) during which I made no international birding trips (mind you, most of those years were spent in Hong Kong, so that puts ‘international trips’ into a bit of perspective). Australia has been practically cut off from the rest of the world during most of the year due to pandemic-induced travel restrictions, so I have been confined to these shores and, for most of the year, to my home town of Canberra.
Indeed, in 2020 I had fewer actual encounters with new birds than I had armchair ticks, thanks to to the busy-ness of the taxonomists. In total, I had six lifers: Little Buttonquail, Inland Dotterel, Australian Painted Snipe, Plains-wanderer, Latham’s Snipe and Ground Cuckooshrike. Quality, if not quantity! For me, it was a big year for birds of Australia’s plains and swamps. But not a ‘Big Year’ in birding terms – that, for me, came in 2016, when I travelled the world and saw 1,978 new birds.
I sense a few contemptuous snorts heading my way: ‘Aw…poor you!’ – indeed, I just sent myself one. The fact is, I have enjoyed a very good year’s birding. Or, maybe I should say, ‘birdwatching’ – or, as some say these days ‘slow birding’. This term has come to be attached to something of a movement, in which some birders are treating birding as akin to a mindfulness experience, a way to feel good through dialling down, being quiet, contemplative, appreciative of nature and so on. Clearly, that’s not done by busting a gut to see nearly 2000 new species in a year. But it corresponds somewhat to a lot of what I did in 2020.
But slow birding for me is just what most people used to think of as birdwatching. I watch birds – I ‘birdwatch’ – at my garden feeder, but rewarding though this is, it is not birding. On my fifteen overseas trips out of Hong Kong in 2016, I was birding. My Inland Dotterel was also seen on a rare 2020 birding trip. This was an organised tour, led by Phil Maher out of Deniliquin in the west of New South Wales, primarily to see the Plains-wanderer – a very special bird indeed. The Inland Dotterel and several of the other good things on that list above were a side-benefit.
But on most of my outings with binoculars in 2020 in Australia, I was birdwatching. There are some things that I do when birdwatching that I don’t do when birding – for example, I sit still for half an hour and watch a pair of Brown Gerygones building a nest; later, I stand and watch for twenty minutes as a pair of fledgling Pied Currawongs flop though the branches in a gum tree, begging and being fed.
And there are some things that I do when birding that I don’t do when birdwatching. The main aim is to ID a new, rare or at least a noteworthy bird. Often, I use playback; and during a day’s birding, I may get in and out of my vehicle again and again as I travel from hotspot to hotspot. If I am pretty certain something special and rare is there, I will sit and wait in the hope it turns up, but normally I don’t have the time – there are more new birds down the road to add to the day list.
When I bird, I always make a list and often count the individuals as well as the species, putting the results on eBird. When I go birdwatching I don’t feel the urge to bother. In the hide at the wetlands, a notable difference is that while the birdwatchers say, ‘Wow! what a lot of Coots,’ and then just sit and watch them diving, the birders are meticulously sifting them out from the Moorhens and counting them: ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred….
I must confess, it’s the birder in me that mostly gets me going, especially at dawn. One day in December 2020, I jumped in my car and headed for Jerrabomberra wetlands to look for an Australian Painted Snipe, a bird I had never before seen. I knew it was there as it had been reported on eBird. I found it, and the encounter was a 2020 birding highlight. The species is endangered and rare, with (it is estimated) some hundreds only left in the wild, scattered across nearly the whole of Australia (albeit concentrated in the east of the Continent).
My own personal experience of this bird was typical of most: sitting in a hide and getting a glimpse through a powerful magnifying lens of a blurry image across the water against the reeds, along the edge of which it was feeding. The lens in question was on a camera, and the image was a digital one, not a clean, unmediated one, so the view I was getting was very much second-best. One thing was clear, and that was the distinctive pattern of the markings in the plumage, including the mottling on the wings that showed it was a male. Good enough for a tick, but not really ideal. The strain of looking and the limited rewards meant that I didn’t go on watching for more than a few seconds. And I have deleted the blurry images from my digital photo library, so poor were they.
Canberra birders (and no doubt, twitchers from further afield) were still flocking to the wetlands weeks after the first sighting. Indeed, there was renewed excitement, as it had become clear that not only was there a male, but also a female. Are they breeding? Even if not, the prospect that this location may become a regular stopping-off point, and that it might help sustain the dwindling population of this species, is a matter of great excitement.
There were other birders in the hide, and we chatted about the reasons this was a special moment. There were also a few photographers, who just wanted to take images of whatever they saw – the Snipe was not, for them, a prize subject. There were some showy Pink-eared Ducks close by, and some clattering Australian Reed Warblers occasionally sat out in the open.
For the birders, the main topics of conversation were how often this species of Snipe visited these wetlands, how many years it was since the last one was seen, and whether they might breed. There were clearly some happy ACT year-listers among those coming to see the bird, but the concern for its well-being and future prospects was the main sentiment. Indeed, it was an ornithological interest that in part drove the conversation – not for nothing is the local club called the ‘Canberra Ornithologists Group’ (COG). Most birders ‘follow the science’ closely and many, through networks like COG, engage in citizen science through their birding. One of those present made sure I was already a paid-up member.
Going to see the Snipe was an archetypical birder’s day out. We were targeting a species following reports of its sighting and turning up to look for ourselves. The fact that we weren’t getting close-ups or prolonged looks at the bird going about its daily business in plain view was regrettable, but no more. As a birder, for me the main point was the excitement of seeing a rarity appear in front of me, identifying the species and adding it to my list.
The excitement, however, was not only a form of self-gratification. There was a less self-regarding dimension to it, born of our concern for and appreciation of endangered birds like the Snipe, for what they express and represent about the state of wildlife in Australia, during an age of extinctions. Birders are, after all, bird lovers.
This was only one of several outings I have made in my neighbourhood to look for birds in the past month. Another encounter on another excursion, this time to a woodland area on the edge of the city, was of a very different kind but equally memorable. I was looking for a several-times-reported Painted Honeyeater (another local rarity, so it was the birder in me that got me there), but without success. I was heading back to the car a bit disgruntled, because the birding generally had been slow (i.e. not many birds – that’s how most birders use the phrase ‘slow birding’).
Suddenly, I was in the midst of activity: a White-winged Triller called, a Varied Sittella darted from one gum tree to another, Thornbills called high in the branches and a pair of Dusky Woodswallows swooped overhead. A Rufous Whistler called from nearby and a White-throated Gerygone was singing somewhere. The Triller, a male, flew into view and landed on a branch above me.
As I manoeuvred to see him, he remained motionless for some minutes. My binoculars also picked out a nest just below him in a crook of a branch and, mostly obscured, a sitting, brown-streaked bird – a female Triller. Agitated, she hopped off the nest and hid close by in the leaves, also watching. The male flew into a nearby dead tree and immediately, I could see the reason for the agitation – not just me, but also an Australian Magpie lurking at the top of the tree, directly overlooking the nest.
Now, the Woodswallows were bombing the Magpie, and the general commotion was creating further alarm. Finally, the Magpie tired of the harassment and flew off, and with it the Woodswallows, who had been using the tree as a perch from which to sally out when I first arrived at the scene. The female Triller repaired to the nest and the male flew off about his business.
I tried for an angle to get a good photo, but on this occasion, the ‘perfect image’ did not present itself. Never mind, I generally think that if I see a close-up, crystal-clear shot of a bird like a Triller on its nest, from the right angle, it probably means the photographer was either getting too close or had made use of some artifice or other (and had a ton of patience). I’m not that kind of photographer.
All this unfolded over about twenty minutes as I stood at the foot of the dead tree. It was enthralling, a real-life drama of the kind that likely marks every day for a pair of nesting birds. I was part of the scene and no doubt one reason for the general alarm, but none of this was about me.
Birding always places the birder at the centre of the action, for it is the art and science of identification by the expert that marks the activity for what it is. For this, one can be at a distance and totally detached from the real-life scene, as with my Painted Snipe. That, to me, was mostly just a blurry image, but good enough for the ID.
But the ‘gotcha’ moment of the ID of a special bird – the application of the art and science of species identification to an encounter with a rarity – was not the point of the experience of birds that I was having with my Trillers, which was more commonplace but also more intimate. I was a watching bystander in the midst of a short passage of the daily life of some common woodland birds. At the time, part of watching was also to capture some of the scene in my camera, however futile this endeavour turned out to be but, like the photographers in the Snipe hide, that didn’t mean I was just birding. I was also birdwatching.
Of course, being a birder as well as a birdwatcher, after I got home I consulted the birding data bases and my bird books to make sure I was right about the ID of the Trillers and their nest, and I followed up with some more digging into their breeding behaviour, and the like. A scientific curiosity about the daily life of birds is what amateur naturalists have always expressed as part of their love for the subject of their observations, and replicating this is part of the attraction of both birding and birdwatching.
Perhaps this is the thing to take away: while we can see how some parts of birding are in some ways the antithesis of the kind of experience I was having when watching my nesting birds, what brings the two together, rather than putting them somehow in opposition, is an underlying love for birds and our deep curiosity about them. The sentiments of joy and hope expressed upon seeing an endangered Australian Painted Snipe, safe and secure in this fragment of its shrinking natural habitat, must also be shared by all. And likewise, my response to seeing a pair of Trillers trying to raise their young in some typical Australian woodland surely chimes with something larger: a sense that, despite everything, things can still be right with the world, even in 2020.
