About

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Martin Painter, I am a mad birder, and I get a lot of fun out of birding. Since 2018 I have been living in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Before landing up in Canberra, I lived in Hong Kong for nearly twenty years. It was there that I took up birding, around 2004. 

From the start I was an international birder, travelling widely and racking up a respectable world list. Nearing and just after retirement, between 2013 and 2018, I went a bit crazy and  spent many months on numerous world birding trips. I always had a camera with me, not one of those unwieldy long lenses, but a ‘bridge camera’ with a respectable zoom. I’ll be sharing some of my images with you. 

Various circumstances, most recently the COVID 19 lockdown here in Australia, have brought my global birding adventures to a screeching halt. And when I paused my travels, I began to think and, along the way, to write some of my thoughts down.

When I started out, in 2004, I had to learn to be a birder, and it was an eye-opener. I soon found out it wasn’t just a walk in the park with a pair of bins, relaxing, listening and watching, soaking up nature. It was hard work, very often frustrating and even a bit intimidating. Nearly everyone likes birds: they enjoy the ducks, the pretty little green ones in the trees, the colourful parrots, the majestic eagles. That was me, before. Now, I had to learn how to identify them all with a species name and, if I was to do what all birders do, work out how to find as many species of these ducks, warblers and so on (and so on) as I could. 

Of course, I had help. I was joining a community, but it wasn’t just a community of like-minded hobbyists, it was a discipline of high achievers. I marvelled at the knowledge and skill of the best birders. I listened with amazement to tales of crazy, heroic, long-distance twitches. I came to think birding was a bit like mountaineering, without the mountains. We had our peaks to climb, ambitions to fulfil, and challenges to be surmounted. I even heard tales of dare-devil and danger. I began to see there was excitement and adrenalin rush in birding as well as pure relaxation and contemplative escapism. What a combination!

One of the big attractions of birding to me was that I could combine it with another passion: travel. I have always wanted to go everywhere I possibly could, time and money permitting. Now I had a reason, a purpose, in addition to just experiencing new places and cultures. Off I went, racking up the air-miles. Based in Hong Kong, all sorts of exotic habitats were right on my doorstep, at most a few hours away. 

Birding tourism opens one’s eyes on things that are not usually part of the itinerary of the average tourist. Especially when travelling to poor, developing countries (where most of the good birds are) and searching out the best habitats, it is driven home just how little ‘nature’ is left, how transformed the landscape has been by development and how fast this is happening today in these countries. It was going on before my eyes. The birds were mostly still there, because their populations are amazingly resilient – until suddenly they aren’t, and they are gone. 

The ‘highs’ were as uplifting as the ‘lows’ were soul-destroying. Encountering more or less undisturbed primary forests, mountain slopes, swamps and coastal wetlands was an amazing, revelatory experience. On the other hand, walking through recently-logged primary forest seeing the trashed, sometimes smoking, landscape was deeply depressing. So too was driving for miles and miles through a monotonous landscape of palm oil plantations, between one forest patch and another.

Human history is repeating itself. Rich nation landscapes and habitats have long ago gone through such transformations, by the hands of our ancestors. We led the way, others are following. What differs is the pace and scale of this continuing process of transformation. Again, though, the first world has a hand in it, for example through global corporations bringing with them the techniques of industrial agriculture. 

All of my birding has been in the immediate presence of, and has been a direct witness to, the unprecedented, destructive impact of modern humans on the planet’s ecosystems. Biodiversity loss is now a global crisis, and has become such under the watch of a few generations. I have been a birder having a good time in an age of extinctions. 

The site name for this blog, ‘Anthropocene Birder’ is in one sense a redundancy. Birding didn’t exist before the Anthropocene, that is, before the contemporary era when the (mostly destructive) impact of humans on the planet is at such a scale that it deserves its own label as a new geological epoch.

Indeed, birding as a mass recreational pastime is quintessentially a marker of the Anthropocene. People have always watched and admired the birds that they see around them. They have marvelled, wondered and sometimes attached myths and symbols to what they saw. But modern birding goes in new directions, in ways that reflect the way humans in the Anthropocene more generally relate to world and to nature.

We don’t just watch birds, we track them down and add them to our lists, some of us on a global scale. Birding requires the aid of sophisticated technology and is informed by modern science. It has become a kind of extractive industry, an accumulative process that not only appreciates but also consumes nature. It dissects, records, quantifies and in other ways objectifies the natural world. And it does not always leave it untouched and undiminished. 

At the same time, birding and birders are in many ways a positive force for conservation. So it should be – we need to ‘pay our dues’ to nature. If the Anthropocene is not to be seen from a distant future as the era when humanity destroyed its planet’s life-supporting ecosystems, we all have to do a lot better. The COVID 19 pandemic, also a product of the broader environmental disruptions of recent years, has served to drive this home.

What all this has meant for me and might entail for all birders, is a theme of this blog.

But so, too, is the pure enjoyment of being around birds, with other birders.

I’ll be adding posts periodically, as I have time to write them and as I have new thoughts and memories to write about. Your comments will be very welcome.