BIRDWATCHING

The other day a student asked me why I liked birds so much. It's an interesting question; I have no ready answer really; I suppose birds represent a glimmer of a greater existence and that captivates me.

For over twenty years, I've actively gone looking for birds. One of my life's missions is to see as many of Australia's 800+ species as possible. Thus far, I've 'ticked' 515 of them. Birdwatching is a challenging activity that demands all your senses to be in overdrive. You have to be utterly in the moment (as if one is on a Zen quest), with your eyes and ears super-sensitive, if you are to really see the avian world around you. My passion for birding in Australia has taken me everywhere from Dove Lake at the base of Cradle Mountain in Tasmania to where The Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts converge in Western Australia...

I've visited mangroves, saltpans, montane rainforests of the wet tropics, sewage farms, botanical gardens, gibber plains, savannah, channel country, spinifex-fringed creekbeds, wet sclerophyll woodland, heath, beaches, lagoons, sand dunes, ponds, swamps, saltmarshes, high altitude forest, Antarctic Beech forest and the continental shelf off NSW in the name of finding new species...

I've had green-backed gerygones two feet away in Darwin Botanic Gardens, squatter pigeons following me around at Mt. Molloy State School (Queensland), a superb lyrebird flick leaf litter down on me in northern Sydney... I've seen a rare hepatic form of an Oriental cuckoo, an origma asleep in a sandstone gully overhang, powerful owls devouring their rosella prey, a peregrine falcon pursuing a feral pigeon over ocean, hobbies chasing starlings near Southern Highland springs, 100+ flock bronzewings take to morning outback air, a white-tailed tropicbird floating up from the horizon several kilometres off Magic Point, Maroubra, like some alien crucifix and a vagrant house crow, from south-east Asian or India, pull garbage from a bin at Dee Why... priceless moments...

Basically, birds bring every day to life.

LJ, June 5 2008.