The mystery of the elusive bird

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

In January, we had the great pleasure to join Ian Wilson, a wonderful friend and one of Australia’s leading bird photographers, on a road trip from Melbourne to Kangaroo Island off the coast of Adelaide in South Australia. All the great bird pictures here were taken by Ian and are shown here with his permission.

Australian darter with prey
The bird spears the fish then tosses it into the air to orient it for swallowing

 I recall visiting Kangaroo Island when I was at university in Adelaide in the sixties when there was an oceanography project based there. I remember that it was thickly forested with the types of eucalyptus trees that koala bears like and that it was a stronghold for the charming animals. I haven’t been back since then and things have changed. Kangaroo Island has reinvented itself as a tourist destination with honey from Ligurian bees (the only remaining pure-bred strain), wineries (not very good), oysters (good) and restaurants (variable). However, it still has dramatic coastline and hosts a variety of seabirds who pack tidal sand islands as the sea rises and falls.

View from our house - the white on the sandspit is all seabirds - mainly cormorants

Kangaroo Island is not small. It’s Australia’s third largest island – nearly 100 miles long - and it’s about ten miles off the mainland coast. The island separated from the mainland some ten thousand years ago at the end of a glacial period when the sea level rose. The Kartan people lived there before, but deserted the area as the sea cut it off.

As the tide rises, the birds move closer to the shore.
And when that floods, they take themselves further down the coast

Australian pied cormorant in flight

Portrait of Matthew Flinders

In 1802, British explorer Matthew Flinders “discovered” the island and named it “Kungaroo” Island after the local species of Western grey kangaroos. He was closely followed by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, who was the first European to circumnavigate the island. As a result, many French names dot the island’s coast. Britain and France were at war at the time, but the explorers were very civil to each other, sharing fresh water points and the like. Hard to imagine something like that these days.

Back to our trip. We started with a couple of nights at Nelson in Victoria. It’s a pleasant, fishing town on the mouth of the Glenelg River. More important from our point of view is that it’s the home of a rare and interesting bird, the Rufous bristlebird. The particular subspecies in southern Victoria is rated as “near threatened”. The name comes from the bristles at the base of the bill, and can be seen in Ian’s remarkable pictures. This male was having a disagreement with an intruder who was after his female. Lots of noise and display but no injured parties. Also hard to imagine something like that in the human sphere.

Rufous bristlebird telling off an encroaching male

Better not underestimate me...

Next stop was McClaren Vale home to some of South Australia’s best food and wine. We stayed in a cottage overlooking the town.

Sunset from the cottage

Next we took the ferry to Kangaroo Island.

Leaving the dock on the car ferry

Satellite image showing fire damage

Sadly, there were no koalas in evidence, and we learned later that some 80% of the population had been destroyed in the terrible fires that devastated 96% of Flinders Chase National Park on the western side of the island in 2019/2020. Fires are natural phenomena in the hot dry summer months in many parts of Australia. The issue is that some animals – such as the koala bears - are simply not adept at escaping from fires, and their habitat is reducing every day. They can’t easily recover. On the other hand, small remaining protected areas may become overpopulated. Perhaps excess individuals from other areas may be introduced to Kangaroo Island in the future to try to rebuild the local population.

Avian victims of the fires included the endangered local subspecies of the Glossy black cockatoo and the White-bellied whipbird. The latter was our “target bird”, not least because it had graduated from being a subspecies to the status of full species recently. Seeing it was hard; photographing it even more so. The much more common Eastern whipbird has a remarkable call ending in a whiplash that gives the group its name. The White-bellied has a completely different call and that’s how we found it. It was a bit of a detective story. First, go “door to door” asking people and Facebook groups where might be sensible to look. Eventually, this paid off with a tip from a National Park tour guide who suggested a spot near Vivonne Bay in the south of the island. Next, one visits the scene and tries to trace the culprit. We patrolled the road and heard the bird call in the thick bush not too far away. Wandering down a side path rewarded us with more calling and suddenly the bird flitted past. Then it was gone. The bird had flown.

The next morning we had an early start – not too early for fear of hitting nocturnal wallabies on the road – and staked out the same site. The morning went by with only a few distant calls. We came to the point where it was getting hot and we were tired. Cappuccino at the nearby café sounded like an option. And then one of the birds called closeby.

Finally, the bird was cooperative, even to the extent that Ian got a decent picture. Of course, he’s not satisfied with it and is already planning another campaign involving three weeks on Kangaroo Island to get the sort of pictures he’d really like. But it was an exciting day.

 

White-bellied whipbird

It was a memorable trip in so many ways, and we hope to see Ian again in the not too distant future. In the meanwhile, he shares his magnificent pictures.

Pacific gull