Edward
Umimmak
I’ve recently returned from a holiday to Queensland, Australia, a simply superb area for birding and general holidaymaking. It was essentially a non-birding trip as I was travelling with three non-birders (wife and in-laws). However, I managed to get up at an ungodly hour every day for three weeks so I could go birding on my own for three hours before breakfast, and I also had three full days in the field to pursue my interests. The fact that I saw 249 species on a non-birding holiday speaks volumes for the magnificent birding to be had in QLD. The first two weeks were spent in the western suburbs of Brisbane. The final week was spent in the tropical NE of Queensland in the superb resort of Port Douglas. I had allowed myself one full day’s birding (5 November) in the rainforest and to make the most of the limited time I had I hired the services of local bird guide Del Richards, a very good move. Del’s expert local knowledge and good sense of humour made it a great day.
I had arranged to meet Del half-way to save us both a bit of time and leaving Port Douglas at dawn I saw the first birds of the day, the ubiquitous (and introduced pest) Common Myna as well as common natives such as Figbird, White-breasted Woodswallow, Helmeted Friarbird, the odd Black Butcherbird, and kicking at the leaves by the side of the road Orange-footed Scrubfowl, which surely has the smallest head in relation to body size of any bird. Once at the rendezvous with Del (who had brought a welcome extra pair of eyes in the form of local birder Graham Goodall) we headed inland towards Julatten, seeing my first Black Kite of the trip on the way. We stopped to change cars at Del’s house and whilst he was getting ready he asked if I’d seen a Buff-banded Rail. I had had brief views of one near Brisbane (courtesy of BF member Tom Tarrant!) but was keen to see another one. Del nonchalantly tossed a piece of bread near to the edge of the grass and told me to watch the bread and keep still, and went on loading the car. About ten seconds later two Buff-banded Rails came out the grass and started attacking the bread. A good start!
Once in Del’s car we continued inland, admiring my first lifer of the day, Emerald Dove, by the roadside. The great advantage of birding with a local, especially in forested areas, is their knowledge of bird calls. A quick stop later and Del had found me another new bird Spectacled Monarch and in the same tree its close relative Black-faced Monarch. Great! Just before the tiny settlement of Julatten we turned off onto the rough road to Mt Lewis, famed throughout the Australian birding world as one of the best highland rainforest sites in the country. A couple of miles up the road we made a stop to listen for any good birds, in the space of a minute we had four honeyeater species above our heads, Graceful, Bridled, Dusky and Macleay’s Honeyeaters, all new birds for me. Considering the wealth of species in Australia there are refreshingly few LBJ’s, and it’s maybe the Acanthizidae, the Australo-Papuan Warblers which have you peering in the field guide the most. Higher up we saw two new LBJ’s from this family, both local endemics, Atherton Scrubwren and Mountain Thornbill. We had already seen the superabundant Grey Shrike-thrush and Little Shrike-thrush lower down and when I told Del that I had another Little further up the road he told me to look again. Of course, stupid me, a Bower’s Shrike-thrush, another bird only found in this area of Queensland.
It had been an excellent morning so far but then I heard a noise which got my heart racing. From somewhere in the canopy came a long drawn out cat-like yowl YEEEE-OOOOOOOO-WWWWWW, a sound I recognised immediately although I had yet to see this bird. It belonged to the Spotted Catbird, a member of the bowerbird family. In the Brisbane area the exact same sound had been a common background noise in subtropical rainforests, where a very close relative the Green Catbird (thought by some to be conspecific although all field guides treat them separately) yowls from the treetops. After a bit of listening and peering this beautiful green forest denizen was seen superbly well feeding on fruit. There are two families of bird which I find particularly fascinating, the fairy-wrens and the bowerbirds, and it was members of the latter that I had told Del were very high on my wish list for the day. The real fun was about to begin. We parked the car and set off down a narrow trail through the rainforest. After about five minutes walk we began to detect an immensely powerful and varied song just off the path. Del asked me to wait and stealthily walked about ten metres into the undergrowth. After a couple of minutes of craning his neck and listening to the constant torrent of song, he beckoned me in. I crept forwards and once at his shoulder he pointed at a spot a few metres away and about two metres above the ground. There was a male Tooth-billed Bowerbird, turning its head this way and that as it sang, the serrations on both mandibles which give its name clearly visible. I felt elated, even more so when Del pointed out the bowerbird’s stage bower of upturned green leaves designed to attract a mate. What a privilege, an absolute top ten birding moment for me. Del left me to enjoy it on my own for a while and continued up the path.
Five minutes later I caught up with him on the trail, he was obviously waiting for a reason. Another sound reached my ears, a deafening CHOW-CHOW-CHILLA. In fact, although bowerbirds were very high on my list of “must sees,” there was another bird which was absolutely number 1, and the song told me that here it was. First one dark brown bird scuttled across the path, then another, a third and then a fourth, and one by one they returned, a couple pausing on the edge of the path allowing great views. These were Chowchillas, a member of Orthonychidae, which consists of just two species (three depending on taxonomy) in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The other species, Logrunner, I had seen near Brisbane and is my all time favourite bird. The Chowchilla, a NE Queensland endemic, is close behind in second spot. Some trip reports scarcely make a mention of this drab brown and white dweller of the forest floor. To me it was love at first sight. It has such charisma, feeding in an identical way to the Logrunner, although the birds otherwise are superficially rather dissimilar. It props itself up on its tail and scrapes the ground, flinging its legs out at a 90° angle, first one then the other, searching for invertebrates in the leaf litter. Thrilled by this sighting we left the birds half-buried in the leaves and continued. See here for more info on this family http://montereybay.com/creagrus/logrunners.html
Whilst I was attending a call of nature Del told me to turn round very slowly and as I did I got a skulking Fernwren in my binoculars for a couple of seconds, which followed Bluethroat in the Netherlands on to the list of "lifers seen whilst relieving myself." At this point we once more left the track, squeezing through a narrow gap in the vegetation. After about twenty metres an incredible sight awaited, a tangle of twigs forming two towers about a metre and half high joined at the base, quite obviously an artificial structure. Its designer was somewhere close by, calling unseen from the canopy, a Golden Bowerbird, the smallest Australian bowerbird but also the one which builds the largest bower. Del told me that the superb golden male had disappeared in the last couple of months and had been replaced by a duller young male. Del wandered off following its call whilst I got distracted by an amazingly confiding White-throated Treecreeper, and a feeding Chowchilla. Soon Del gestured me over as he had located the bowerbird following its croaking call to a tree about 30 metres from the bower. We were then able to watch it calling from a low branch for the next few minutes. I’ll be back one day to find a golden male!
By now it was approaching lunch time and we headed back down the mountain towards Julatten thoroughly satisfied with the morning’s birds. We had finished with the rainforest for the time being and after Del had stopped at a favoured site and called up two Yellow-breasted Boatbills and noting a few Forest Kingfishers on overhead wires, we turned north into the drier country around Mt Carbine. The superb thing about birding in this corner of Australia is the range of habitats in such a small area. Just a few kilometres from the 1,000 metre high wet rainforest of Mt Lewis begins the dry savannah, the edge of the outback if you like, with thousands of termite mounds, painfully thin cattle crowded around the waterholes and open paperbark forests. In many ways this is exactly what foreign visitors imagine inland Australia to be like before they arrive, and wow is it hot! Del pulled over into an area of paperbark trees. It was tinder dry and 35°C and I wasn’t too hopeful of anything new here. Del’s finely tuned ears soon picked up a new bird, Banded Honeyeater and another Yellow Honeyeater, a third, Northern Fantail, followed by Fairy Gerygone, Striated Pardalote (a very “common” bird which had eluded all my best efforts round Brisbane) and finally an extremely confiding Gould’s Bronze-Cuckoo. Even Del was surprised how productive this stop had been.
We then approached the small community of Mt. Carbine and turned off the track to a site where Del normally has Australian Bustards. We had scarcely driven a couple of hundred metres when Graham calmly said from the back seat “here’s one.” I looked into the mid-distance but couldn’t see anything except the nodding grass, tree stumps and the inevitable sunbaked termite mounds. “Just here,” Graham said, and there was a female Australian Bustard 10 metres from the car, I had been looking far too far away, as Little and Great Bustards I had seen in Spain were shy and would never have allowed such a close approach. There were several in the area, including a superb displaying male with a huge sac of feather hanging pendulously beneath his breast.
By now I’d seen a host of new species but I joked with Del that now we needed to find a new family for me as there should have been species representing two new families in the area which I was really keen on seeing. No problem, said Del, and we went on to another rough track and soon saw a party of Grey-crowned Babblers, one of the Pomatostomidae, a family of five species restricted to Australia and PNG. This party was so energetic and noisy, probing every crevice in a dead tree, ensuring that any invertebrate taking refuge there would eventually end up inside one of the babblers. I was really taken by these birds and declared yet again that this was definitely one of my top ten birds of all time. Another lifer, Squatter Pigeon, was sitting amongst them, but unlike the Grey-crowned Babblers, which seemed indifferent to our presence, they were dead still and watched us the entire time. See here for more on Australo-Papuan Babblers
http://montereybay.com/creagrus/pseudo-babblers.html
It was really sweltering by the time we reached the Mt Carbine caravan park and Del made a bee-line to another natural wonder, an avenue of twigs, decorated with bones, berries and twigs. Its builder was sitting in the tree right above it, its bill opened as if panting in the heat. It was a Great Bowerbird, its exquisite pink nape contrasting with the subtle grey-brown scalloping of the rest of its body. It was the seventh bowerbird species of the trip, after the three in the rainforest earlier in the day and Green Catbird, Regent and Satin Bowerbirds near Brisbane, and my great affection for this family was getting stronger by the moment.
One of the residents of the caravan park said he’d just seen the other main target bird in the area a few minutes earlier, and we set off but when we got there there was neither sight nor sound of it. We drove around a bit (it was too hot to get out and walk much by now) but drew a blank. Then just as we were leaving the caravan park Del slammed on the brakes and said “there he is” and sitting low in a tree were two Apostlebirds, one of the scruffiest looking birds I’ve seen and considerably bigger than I had imagined. Another new family, an Australian endemic and a real lively character apparently, but these two seemed paralysed by the mid-afternoon heat and stayed put allowing, however, close views.
Eventually it was time to return to the coast and we headed back through the savannah, stopping to admire a Blue-winged Kookaburra on a telephone wire, and a couple of Red-winged Parrots in Mt Molloy. Near Julatten I mentioned to Del that some British birders had told me about a certain bird here, one that I’d only seen very briefly in flight in Brisbane and one that I really wanted to see again. As we were driving close to the site I saw a HUGE long-tailed, massive billed grey bird flying with leisurely wing-beats from one set of trees to another. There it was, the world’s largest parasitic bird, the Channel-billed Cuckoo, and eventually we located six of these superb noisy creatures, almost hornbill like in appearance and known colloquially as Rain Bird (like that other large migratory cuckoo, Australian Koel) as it appears just before the onset of the wet season. I declared, not for the first time, that this was one of my all time top ten birds. I really must go over that list as I’m sure there are a lot more than ten birds on it!
I’d had a superb day with Del and Graham, recording 112 species and 30 lifers in a simply magnificent area for birding. There is plenty reason to return to see the birds I missed, Victoria’s Riflebird (heard several times but just remained hidden), Southern Cassowary, Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher (I was a few days too early for that gem), and return I will. Australia and its birds exert a very powerful hold on me.
E
I had arranged to meet Del half-way to save us both a bit of time and leaving Port Douglas at dawn I saw the first birds of the day, the ubiquitous (and introduced pest) Common Myna as well as common natives such as Figbird, White-breasted Woodswallow, Helmeted Friarbird, the odd Black Butcherbird, and kicking at the leaves by the side of the road Orange-footed Scrubfowl, which surely has the smallest head in relation to body size of any bird. Once at the rendezvous with Del (who had brought a welcome extra pair of eyes in the form of local birder Graham Goodall) we headed inland towards Julatten, seeing my first Black Kite of the trip on the way. We stopped to change cars at Del’s house and whilst he was getting ready he asked if I’d seen a Buff-banded Rail. I had had brief views of one near Brisbane (courtesy of BF member Tom Tarrant!) but was keen to see another one. Del nonchalantly tossed a piece of bread near to the edge of the grass and told me to watch the bread and keep still, and went on loading the car. About ten seconds later two Buff-banded Rails came out the grass and started attacking the bread. A good start!
Once in Del’s car we continued inland, admiring my first lifer of the day, Emerald Dove, by the roadside. The great advantage of birding with a local, especially in forested areas, is their knowledge of bird calls. A quick stop later and Del had found me another new bird Spectacled Monarch and in the same tree its close relative Black-faced Monarch. Great! Just before the tiny settlement of Julatten we turned off onto the rough road to Mt Lewis, famed throughout the Australian birding world as one of the best highland rainforest sites in the country. A couple of miles up the road we made a stop to listen for any good birds, in the space of a minute we had four honeyeater species above our heads, Graceful, Bridled, Dusky and Macleay’s Honeyeaters, all new birds for me. Considering the wealth of species in Australia there are refreshingly few LBJ’s, and it’s maybe the Acanthizidae, the Australo-Papuan Warblers which have you peering in the field guide the most. Higher up we saw two new LBJ’s from this family, both local endemics, Atherton Scrubwren and Mountain Thornbill. We had already seen the superabundant Grey Shrike-thrush and Little Shrike-thrush lower down and when I told Del that I had another Little further up the road he told me to look again. Of course, stupid me, a Bower’s Shrike-thrush, another bird only found in this area of Queensland.
It had been an excellent morning so far but then I heard a noise which got my heart racing. From somewhere in the canopy came a long drawn out cat-like yowl YEEEE-OOOOOOOO-WWWWWW, a sound I recognised immediately although I had yet to see this bird. It belonged to the Spotted Catbird, a member of the bowerbird family. In the Brisbane area the exact same sound had been a common background noise in subtropical rainforests, where a very close relative the Green Catbird (thought by some to be conspecific although all field guides treat them separately) yowls from the treetops. After a bit of listening and peering this beautiful green forest denizen was seen superbly well feeding on fruit. There are two families of bird which I find particularly fascinating, the fairy-wrens and the bowerbirds, and it was members of the latter that I had told Del were very high on my wish list for the day. The real fun was about to begin. We parked the car and set off down a narrow trail through the rainforest. After about five minutes walk we began to detect an immensely powerful and varied song just off the path. Del asked me to wait and stealthily walked about ten metres into the undergrowth. After a couple of minutes of craning his neck and listening to the constant torrent of song, he beckoned me in. I crept forwards and once at his shoulder he pointed at a spot a few metres away and about two metres above the ground. There was a male Tooth-billed Bowerbird, turning its head this way and that as it sang, the serrations on both mandibles which give its name clearly visible. I felt elated, even more so when Del pointed out the bowerbird’s stage bower of upturned green leaves designed to attract a mate. What a privilege, an absolute top ten birding moment for me. Del left me to enjoy it on my own for a while and continued up the path.
Five minutes later I caught up with him on the trail, he was obviously waiting for a reason. Another sound reached my ears, a deafening CHOW-CHOW-CHILLA. In fact, although bowerbirds were very high on my list of “must sees,” there was another bird which was absolutely number 1, and the song told me that here it was. First one dark brown bird scuttled across the path, then another, a third and then a fourth, and one by one they returned, a couple pausing on the edge of the path allowing great views. These were Chowchillas, a member of Orthonychidae, which consists of just two species (three depending on taxonomy) in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The other species, Logrunner, I had seen near Brisbane and is my all time favourite bird. The Chowchilla, a NE Queensland endemic, is close behind in second spot. Some trip reports scarcely make a mention of this drab brown and white dweller of the forest floor. To me it was love at first sight. It has such charisma, feeding in an identical way to the Logrunner, although the birds otherwise are superficially rather dissimilar. It props itself up on its tail and scrapes the ground, flinging its legs out at a 90° angle, first one then the other, searching for invertebrates in the leaf litter. Thrilled by this sighting we left the birds half-buried in the leaves and continued. See here for more info on this family http://montereybay.com/creagrus/logrunners.html
Whilst I was attending a call of nature Del told me to turn round very slowly and as I did I got a skulking Fernwren in my binoculars for a couple of seconds, which followed Bluethroat in the Netherlands on to the list of "lifers seen whilst relieving myself." At this point we once more left the track, squeezing through a narrow gap in the vegetation. After about twenty metres an incredible sight awaited, a tangle of twigs forming two towers about a metre and half high joined at the base, quite obviously an artificial structure. Its designer was somewhere close by, calling unseen from the canopy, a Golden Bowerbird, the smallest Australian bowerbird but also the one which builds the largest bower. Del told me that the superb golden male had disappeared in the last couple of months and had been replaced by a duller young male. Del wandered off following its call whilst I got distracted by an amazingly confiding White-throated Treecreeper, and a feeding Chowchilla. Soon Del gestured me over as he had located the bowerbird following its croaking call to a tree about 30 metres from the bower. We were then able to watch it calling from a low branch for the next few minutes. I’ll be back one day to find a golden male!
By now it was approaching lunch time and we headed back down the mountain towards Julatten thoroughly satisfied with the morning’s birds. We had finished with the rainforest for the time being and after Del had stopped at a favoured site and called up two Yellow-breasted Boatbills and noting a few Forest Kingfishers on overhead wires, we turned north into the drier country around Mt Carbine. The superb thing about birding in this corner of Australia is the range of habitats in such a small area. Just a few kilometres from the 1,000 metre high wet rainforest of Mt Lewis begins the dry savannah, the edge of the outback if you like, with thousands of termite mounds, painfully thin cattle crowded around the waterholes and open paperbark forests. In many ways this is exactly what foreign visitors imagine inland Australia to be like before they arrive, and wow is it hot! Del pulled over into an area of paperbark trees. It was tinder dry and 35°C and I wasn’t too hopeful of anything new here. Del’s finely tuned ears soon picked up a new bird, Banded Honeyeater and another Yellow Honeyeater, a third, Northern Fantail, followed by Fairy Gerygone, Striated Pardalote (a very “common” bird which had eluded all my best efforts round Brisbane) and finally an extremely confiding Gould’s Bronze-Cuckoo. Even Del was surprised how productive this stop had been.
We then approached the small community of Mt. Carbine and turned off the track to a site where Del normally has Australian Bustards. We had scarcely driven a couple of hundred metres when Graham calmly said from the back seat “here’s one.” I looked into the mid-distance but couldn’t see anything except the nodding grass, tree stumps and the inevitable sunbaked termite mounds. “Just here,” Graham said, and there was a female Australian Bustard 10 metres from the car, I had been looking far too far away, as Little and Great Bustards I had seen in Spain were shy and would never have allowed such a close approach. There were several in the area, including a superb displaying male with a huge sac of feather hanging pendulously beneath his breast.
By now I’d seen a host of new species but I joked with Del that now we needed to find a new family for me as there should have been species representing two new families in the area which I was really keen on seeing. No problem, said Del, and we went on to another rough track and soon saw a party of Grey-crowned Babblers, one of the Pomatostomidae, a family of five species restricted to Australia and PNG. This party was so energetic and noisy, probing every crevice in a dead tree, ensuring that any invertebrate taking refuge there would eventually end up inside one of the babblers. I was really taken by these birds and declared yet again that this was definitely one of my top ten birds of all time. Another lifer, Squatter Pigeon, was sitting amongst them, but unlike the Grey-crowned Babblers, which seemed indifferent to our presence, they were dead still and watched us the entire time. See here for more on Australo-Papuan Babblers
http://montereybay.com/creagrus/pseudo-babblers.html
It was really sweltering by the time we reached the Mt Carbine caravan park and Del made a bee-line to another natural wonder, an avenue of twigs, decorated with bones, berries and twigs. Its builder was sitting in the tree right above it, its bill opened as if panting in the heat. It was a Great Bowerbird, its exquisite pink nape contrasting with the subtle grey-brown scalloping of the rest of its body. It was the seventh bowerbird species of the trip, after the three in the rainforest earlier in the day and Green Catbird, Regent and Satin Bowerbirds near Brisbane, and my great affection for this family was getting stronger by the moment.
One of the residents of the caravan park said he’d just seen the other main target bird in the area a few minutes earlier, and we set off but when we got there there was neither sight nor sound of it. We drove around a bit (it was too hot to get out and walk much by now) but drew a blank. Then just as we were leaving the caravan park Del slammed on the brakes and said “there he is” and sitting low in a tree were two Apostlebirds, one of the scruffiest looking birds I’ve seen and considerably bigger than I had imagined. Another new family, an Australian endemic and a real lively character apparently, but these two seemed paralysed by the mid-afternoon heat and stayed put allowing, however, close views.
Eventually it was time to return to the coast and we headed back through the savannah, stopping to admire a Blue-winged Kookaburra on a telephone wire, and a couple of Red-winged Parrots in Mt Molloy. Near Julatten I mentioned to Del that some British birders had told me about a certain bird here, one that I’d only seen very briefly in flight in Brisbane and one that I really wanted to see again. As we were driving close to the site I saw a HUGE long-tailed, massive billed grey bird flying with leisurely wing-beats from one set of trees to another. There it was, the world’s largest parasitic bird, the Channel-billed Cuckoo, and eventually we located six of these superb noisy creatures, almost hornbill like in appearance and known colloquially as Rain Bird (like that other large migratory cuckoo, Australian Koel) as it appears just before the onset of the wet season. I declared, not for the first time, that this was one of my all time top ten birds. I really must go over that list as I’m sure there are a lot more than ten birds on it!
I’d had a superb day with Del and Graham, recording 112 species and 30 lifers in a simply magnificent area for birding. There is plenty reason to return to see the birds I missed, Victoria’s Riflebird (heard several times but just remained hidden), Southern Cassowary, Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher (I was a few days too early for that gem), and return I will. Australia and its birds exert a very powerful hold on me.
E
