birds

In search of Australia’s newest mystery bird

Environment / / 6 minutes of reading

For 100 years, the Night Parrot was the undisputed mystery bird of Australian ornithology. Until the discovery and subsequent study of a tiny population in Queensland’s far west in 2013, two specimens found by the side of remote outback roads in 1990 and 2006, also in Queensland, were the only hard evidence of its continued existence.

With the parrot now present and accounted for, there remains one Australian bird that has never been photographed: the Buff-breasted Buttonquail. Like the Night Parrot, it has gone a full century undetected. The last undisputed record was a specimen shot by the legendary naturalist William McLennan near Coen in far north Queensland, in February 1922.

It may even be the first Australian bird condemned to extinction since the Paradise Parrot – yet another Queensland species, which was last seen alive in the 1920s.

Buttonquail are a small family of ground-dwelling, polyandrous species that resemble but are not closely related to “true” quail (part of a much larger group that also includes pheasants and chickens). Distributed from sub-Saharan Africa across Asia and Australia, buttonquail mostly live in grasslands, fly only when disturbed and are not often seen.

Despite its enigmatic status, the Buff-breasted Buttonquail (Turnix olivii) is not a sexy species.… Read more..

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The high-risk life of the Bar-tailed Godwit

Environment / / 5 minutes of reading

From GJ Walter Park, just north of Toondah Harbour on the shores of Moreton Bay, Judith Hoyle gazes across the dappled water towards Cassim Island, a resilient stand of mangroves emerging from the mudflats several hundred metres offshore. Ferries from Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) cruise past, barely causing a ripple.

From a spit of mud on the island’s southern end, a group of 100 or so Bar-tailed Godwits appear undisturbed. But the rising tide is rapidly consuming their roost. As the spit disappears beneath the waves, the godwits reluctantly move to higher ground, deeper into the mangroves. By high tide, they will be forced further inshore, where dogs are allowed off-leash.

Hoyle, a BirdLife Australia board member, watches the godwits with a mixture of awe and concern. The birds are emaciated and exhausted, having only just arrived back in Moreton Bay from their breeding grounds in the Arctic tundra, which stretches from north-eastern Siberia to Alaska. They have barely any energy left, moving only when forced.

“Every time I talk about the migration of shorebirds, I come out in goosebumps,” Hoyle says.

Bar-tailed Godwits are endurance beasts. Last year, a satellite-tracked bird, just five months old, broke the record for a single flight, winging it nonstop over 13,500km from the Yukon Peninsula in Alaska to Tasmania in 11 days.… Read more..

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The savage colonial history of bird names

Environment / / 4 minutes of reading

The Pink Cockatoo has had a few names over the years. The father of Australian ornithology, John Gould, knew it as Leadbeater’s cockatoo, following the scientific name given to it in 1831, Cacatua leadbeateri. This was after Benjamin Leadbeater, the London naturalist and taxidermist.

Sir Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor general of New South Wales from 1828 to 1855, called it the Red-top Cockatoo. He was awestruck by its beauty. “Few birds more enliven the monotonous hues of the Australian forest than this beautiful species whose pink-coloured wings and flowing crest might have embellished the air of a more voluptuous region,” he gushed.

It was for this lavish description that the Pink Cockatoo, now officially classified as endangered, was renamed Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo in 1977, after a survey of members of the Royal Australian Ornithologists Union (now BirdLife Australia) – a vote which the organisation’s public affairs manager, Sean Dooley, describes ruefully as “a bit of a Boaty McBoatface moment”.

It was certainly unfortunate to name such a beautiful bird after a mass killer. In 1836, at the euphemistically named Mount Dispersion, Mitchell encountered the Indigenous Kureinji and Barkindji people on the banks of the Murray River. His account of what happened there, unsparing in its brutality, stands in stark contrast to his rhapsodic description of the cockatoo:

“It was difficult to come at such enemies hovering in our rear with the lynx-eyed vigilance of savages … Attacked simultaneously by both parties, the whole betook themselves to the river, my men pursuing them and shooting as many as they could.… Read more..

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Vote 1 Palm Cockatoo

Environment / / 3 minutes of reading

They have shaggy crests and bright scarlet cheeks. They bow, sway, stamp their feet and spread their wings in a Jesus Christ pose, justifying their status. They whistle and whoop. Males even use their enormous beaks to fashion tree branches into drumsticks, which they use to beat on tree hollows approaching the breeding season.

They are Palm Cockatoos: the largest cockatoo in the world, weighing in up to 1.2kg – lovingly known as “rockatoos” for their punk mohawks, vocal dexterity and percussive talents. And Birds Queensland has officially nominated them as the mascot of the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games, pointing out that previous Australian Olympic mascots have mostly been mammals.

They say it’s time to give a bird a go – but it’s not the only one in the running. The Queensland tourism minister, Stirling Hinchliffe, has already proposed the humble and familiar “bin chicken” (Australian White Ibis). But the ibis’s dumpster-diving habits and distinctive odour doesn’t make it an easy sell to international visitors.

So, why the Palm Cockatoo? Unlike ibis, the cockatoos are unique to Far North Queensland in Australia, living in the remote savannahs of Cape York. (They are more widespread in New Guinea and the Indonesian Aru Islands, so Birds Queensland is encouraging the government to involve our neighbours in celebrations, using the cockatoo as a tool of soft diplomacy.)… Read more..

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Starling murmurations: a fragment of eternity

Environment / / 3 minutes of reading

Søren Solkær was 10 when he witnessed his first starling murmuration, on the west coast of Denmark: more than 100,000 birds, making movies in the sky as they were being corralled by a falcon. It would be nearly 40 years before the photographer, best known for intimate, often playful portraits of artists and musicians, would revisit this scene of his youth, setting aside a week to capture the birds in motion.

That was five years ago, and Solkær hasn’t stopped, making the murmurations the subject of an exhibition and book, Black Sun. “I’ve pretty much done it every winter ever since, and I don’t have any plans of stopping anytime soon,” he says. Before then, and despite his childhood awakening, Solkær had never turned his lens to birds. “I still don’t photograph individual birds, because I don’t find it visually interesting to just depict a bird, it doesn’t interest me artistically.”

In fact, there are eight individual portraits of starlings in Black Sun. Solkær says that was to give colour and context to the bigger picture, “because they really look like small dots of ink in my big photographs. I wanted to show that they’re really beautiful, metallic birds.”… Read more..

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Songs of Disappearance

Environment, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

An album consisting entirely of birdsong has debuted towards the top of Australia’s ARIA chart, beating Mariah Carey, Michael Buble and Abba to get to No. 5 one week after its release.

Songs Of Disappearance, a collaboration between multimedia duo Bowerbird Collective and David Stewart, who has been recording the sounds of Australian birds for over four decades, features the calls and songs of 53 threatened species.

With all proceeds donated to BirdLife Australia, it has sold just over 2,000 units, around 1,500 of them in presale (which is, it must be said, a far cry from the kind of numbers trequired to enter the charts before the streaming era).

The project was the result of a conversation between Bowerbird Collective’s Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, and his supervisor Stephen Garnett, the author of the recently updated Action Plan For Australian Birds, which found that one in six Australian birds are now threatened with extinction.

“He asked whether the Bowerbird Collective could do anything to help promote [the Action Plan], and it was immediately obvious to me what we needed to do,” Albrecht said. “I’m really keen to understand whether environmental art such as this project can have an impact on attitudes and behaviour.”… Read more..

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