The Northern Territory - The Top End - Part One

This episode is dedicated to Sonja Siddle, who also bore it all.

In the early spring of 2015 Sonja and I visited Ken and Megan Cross and their children in the little mountain town of Mapleton, southeast Queensland. After a delightful four weeks in the Blackall Range, we said goodbye to the Crosses, and flew from Brisbane to Darwin for our first visit to what Australians call the Top End.

The Northern Territory is vast, 1.35 million km squared, with a long human prehistory, 40,000 years of inhabitation by various tribal groups of indigenes. When White Australia attempted to settle the area, three disasterous attempts were made before Port Darwin became established in the 1860s. Today the Territory is populated by 233,000 hardy human residents. Settlements are strung out along the Stuart Highway rather than the coast.  Besides Darwin (136,000 people ), there’s Alice Springs (28,000), Katherine ( 6100), Tennant Creek (3000) and not much else, aside from delightful little settlements like Pine Creek (700). The economy of the Territory is heavily based upon tourism and mining. Some of those tourists are birders, looking for Top End specialties like the Sandstone Shrike-thrush and Hooded Parrot.

Rufous-banded Honeyeater, a common honeyeater around Darwin. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

Though comparatively brief, the Northern Territory has a colourful history, with small Victoria outposts of the Empire dying of neglect , ignorance, and disease, a gold rush, the building of a railway, and migrations of Indian, Malay and Chinese workers into an often hostile white society. In World War II, beginning on 19 Feb. 1942, the Japanese bombed Darwin, Katherine and even Broome in Western Australia several times. Historians are divided upon whether the bombings were a prelude to a planned invasion of Australia or a dramatic demarkation of the limits of Japanese control. As if the capital hadn't suffered enough, on Christmas Eve, 1974 Cyclone Tracey wiped out large sections of Darwin (70% of buildings and 80% of homes were destroyed) and killed 71 people. Thousands of residents were evacuated, some “blown out” never to return to the Territory. However, frequent devastation makes for plenty of opportunities to improve the design of the city and its motorways. Darwin is a nice place to drive once you figure out the basic main routes.

Renting a vehicle in Darwin is not so easy as driving its streets, especially if you're trying to rent a camper van. There usually comes a time in each of our journeys together that I melt into a puddle of frustration and anger, and Sonja has to rescue me from making a complete burke of myself. This trip my low moment began when we entered the van rental place on the oh-so-appropriately named Bombing Road.

After a lengthy question and answer period at the counter, the middle-aged woman clerk knew my credit card number, our birthdates, our passport numbers, the names of our children, our blood types, our Canadian driving license numbers, the dates and places of all previous driving infractions we could recall, the makes and models of all vehicles we had ever driven or been passengers in, the names of our pets, and our health profiles. She put the cap on her pen, waved the 14 inch long form to dry its ink in the humid air and, inclining her head to her right, indicated a single computer standing on a high table in the middle of the cinder-block room.

There on the screen was an blank version of the same form the lady, who I shall call Madge, had just filled out.

"Yous go ahead and just fill that out."

“Wait a minute. We just answered these questions. What are you going to do with that page of answers you just got from us.? “

“Oh, this form? It’s for something else. Now yous have to complete the computer form to reserve your vehicle.”

“But the travel agent in Canada reserved one for us months ago.”

“Well, yous have to fill it out to get your reservation number. Then we have to see if we have a van for yous.”

Madge never specified what she was going to do with our counter form but possibly she wanted it for the Darwin Museum of Silly Things She Made Tourists Waste Their Time With.

Two or three questions into computer form, the program froze. I looked around for help. Madge was heading out the door, leaving behind her co-workers, a young lady and a very quiet boy with his hair in a pigtail. After watching Madge disappear into the back of the office, I managed to attract the attention of the young lady who, it turned out, had just emigrated to Australia two weeks before. 

In a loud voice coloured by a strong Dublin accent, she dragged over Pigtail. Avoiding direct eye contact, reaching for the mouse as if it were a live grenade, Pigtail agitated the mouse tentatively,  whispered inaudible words and darted back behind an office partition. The program remained frozen. I got back into line for the counter.

“The program is still frozen,” I exclaimed several minutes later when I finally got to speak to Dublin again.

“Give him the DVD, “ said Madge as she popped back into the office and then out the door again.

Dublin placed a small plastic clam-like object in my hand. I guessed it was a compact DVD player. A tinny soundtrack played at about volume 2. In the echoing office, I was going to need a lot more volume that that. I stared at the postage stamped sized screen. As far as I could tell a man was demonstrating how to wash a camper van to preserve its finish. Unless I intended to own a van, I didn’t need to know this. I pressed what may have been a button and the DVD switched to the section on how to change the oil, again something I didn’t plan on doing. I pressed the button again. Back to washing the van and a sound track no one could hear. 

By now I could tell by their everted eyes and their eagerness to help other customers who kept coming through the doors that we could be here all day, with Dublin, Madge and Pigtail content to have me cycle fruitlessly between a frozen computer and an inaudible DVD player. That’s when I reached back into my past and marshaled my outrage. Now I spoke in the voice of a teacher who has entered an unruly classroom.

“ RIGHT, I NEED YOUR ATTENTION NOW. PIGTAIL, LOOK AT ME. YOU TOO IRELAND. GO GET YOUR BOSS. I’M GETTING UPSET.”

Turns out that's all I had to do. Madge was summoned. She ordered Dublin to take us outside and show us the Toyoto Hiace we were to live in for the next week. In a matter of minutes we were driving down Bombing Road headed for the highway to Palmerston, an eastern suburb, all forms abandoned. (Many weeks later, back in Canada, I received an email questionnaire asking me how I would evaluate the service at the van rental. I haven't yet gathered the spite and anger to reply. Besides, I'm sure Dublin has moved on, if she was smart, Pigtail has probably since expired from social anxiety and Madge is still there, immovable as a rock in the harbour.)

Lemon-bellied Flycatcher - at the Free Spirit RV Park in Darwin. Photo by Chris Siddle

The afternoon wearing on, we decided to spend the night at the Free Spirit RV Park and Resort, a large well tended establishment where on registering the camper is directed to the swimming pool and given a free drink ticket, not our usual kind of place but it would do. In spite of the groomed lawns, cement curbs, and a tall chain link fence keeping the tropical growth at bay, birds prevailed especially in the evening which because of Darwin’s low latitude lasted about 5 minutes. Red-tailed Cockatoos flew over every evening we were there, along with Little Corellas (a delightful mini-cockatoo),  and Red-collared Lorikeets, that most Australian bird books treated as a full species, instead of “just” a subspecies of the familiar and widespread Rainbow Lorikeet. Who was I to argue with splitist taxonomy?

The most surprising addition to my lifelist was the little Lemon-bellied Flycatcher or Lemon-bellied Flyrobin that was hunting from a utility wire over our camper site. **It’s not one of our flycatchers, of course, nor an Old World Flycatcher, but was initially given its common named because it reminded ornithologists of a northern hemisphere flycatcher. That’s the thing about many Australian and New Guinean birds; when the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh began to settle Australia after the First Fleet of 1788 they had no names for groups of birds they had never imagined existed so spliced together names of familiar birds of Great Britain to best cover the situation. That why there are cuckoo-shrikes, shrike-thrushes, magpie larks, shrike-tits, etc. “Shrike” certainly got a workout, partially because so many Australian songbirds are relatively large and often omnivorous, quaffying skinks as readily as insects. "Flyrobin" is an attempt to create a new category of songbird, a small bird resembling an imagined cross between a European Robin and an Old World Flycatcher. 

The Lemon-bellied Flycatcher belongs to a group called the Australo-Papuan Robins, which include several very colourful robin-like birds, if you’re thinking of the little Eurasian Robin and not the North American Robin. Gets complicated, doesn’t it. To make matters more complicated, Australian ornithologists are a fractious lot, without a single set of agreed-upon common names. Things are much better than they were back in the day when a Radjah Shelduck was also known as a Burdekin Duck. However, even when ALL major Australian field guides agree that a bird is called a Little Shrike-thrush, eBird based on Clements sticks its oar in and lists it as Rufous Shrike-thrush. 

The Lemon-bellied Flycatcher is known for having the smallest nest of any Australian bird, an absurdly tiny concoction of cobwebs, mosses and lichens, a bit like our Western Wood-Pewee’s nest, but even smaller and lower, barely a ring of material on a horizontal branch. Fortunately the female lays only a single egg. Clearly from a reproductive point of view the Lemon-bellied Flycatcher differs much from the New World flycatchers that breed in Canada, which, on the whole build substantial nests and lay “normal” (read Northern Hemisphere)  clutches of 3-5 eggs.

29 April - The next day we tried to find Knuckey Lagoons Conservation Reserve supposedly not far from our rv park. We may have found Lagoon Road but we missed Randall Road and didn’t find the lagoons. This was not the first time we were tempted to hurl our copy of Finding Australian Birds: A Field Guide to Birding Locations by Tim Dolby and Rohan Clarke out the window.

We did find the Darwin Botanical Gardens where Orange-footed Scrubfowl played silly-buggers, running away from us as if we were intent upon killing them. These turkey sized birds are megapodes, “big feet”, using their big feet to scratch together mounds of vegetation on the forest floor and burying their eggs within the rotting leaves and soil, able to somehow determine just the right temperature for incubation, adding to or subtracting from the mound to adjust its internal temperature. An egg hatches, the extremely precocial chicks digs his way out of the mound and sets off to feed and raise himself without any parental supervision. I would love to see a chick emerge but haven’t yet.

The largest and most ubiquitous of the Australian bird families is the group called they honeyeaters (Fraser and Gray 2013) It's also arguably the most colourful and enjoyable group of Australian birds.  There are approximately 76 species on the continent and several more in Papua-New Guinea and on various islands in the Southwest Pacific. "Honeyeater" forms part of many species' common names except for a few called miners, wattlebirds, spinebills, chats, the gibberbird, and a few myzolemas. None actually eat honey. The word may have originated in South Africa where it may have been first applied to honeyguides, which as you know do eat honey (Fraser and Gray). But Australian honeyeaters by and large feed on nectar and some insects drawn to it. Three of the most common and widespread Northern Territory species were evident among the blossoms of the botanic gardens: the Brown Honeyeater with its spritely song (known as the Bush Canary), the White-throated Honeyeater, and new for me, the little Rufous-banded Honeyeater, one of my target species.

We also saw one Pied Imperial Pigeon, a big white pigeon with black secondaries, primaries and most of its tail, a bird that once flocked in the thousands, breeding in large colonies on the islands off Queensland and a much appreciated wild food favoured by early white settlers. 

As the morning heated up we drove to East Point Reserve where a breeze over the Arafura Sea cooled us wonderfully. Canadians are great world travelers as long as the ambient temperature stays between 20 and 24 degrees Cel. After a morning of staring into thick forest vegetation looking for small greenish birds, I was delighted to see that there were highly visible waders (shorebirds) out on the distant edge of the shell encrusted rocks. All I had to do was to cross a Saharan expanse of the world’s brightest sunlight and flesh shriveling heat to get to them. I had my Kowa scope along so that I could study them at a distance without flushing them. Shorebirds have enough trouble with people and their damned pets disturbing them on beaches. These waders were trying to put on weight to fuel their migration to Asia for the Northern Hemisphere spring. They didn’t need yet another interruption to their caloric intake.

The excitement I felt as I drew closer to the assembly of waders might be called the thrill of the hunt, but it’s more a mix of anticipation of discovery with a fear that suddenly the flock obey the urge to migrate and disappear in the distance. Once I set up the tripod and the birds stayed relaxed on the edge of the surf,  I was happy as a child at Christmas, staring at the heaps of presents under the tree. Different sizes, shapes, and gift wraps. And such a toolkit of varied bills and beaks, to mix metaphors: the improbable slender sickle of a tall Eastern Curlew, the recurved levers of ten squat Terek Sandpipers, the short can-openers of two Ruddy Turnstones, and the long probes of two Grey-tailed Tattlers, all of them side by side like a diagram from an ornithology text.

The most challenging members of the flock were the sand plovers. Were both species, Greater and Lesser, present or was I just being greedy? The bulk of the group seemed small, short, and slender, and yet 3 were larger, sturdier, slightly longer billed birds. I went through the flock again and again. Were those larger birds just a product of my wishful thinking? No, there they were again and again. These would be my Greaters, all the rest Lessers.

The tide was coming in, the wader flock shifting from the beach to rocks now offshore. As I retreated, a Brahminy Kite swooped at a tidepool, picked something from just beneath the surface, and flew off, chestnut bodied and white headed against the blue of the sky. Wow.

The bushes and the lawn on the point provided me with shade, the breeze and a good selection of birds throughout lunch and into the afternoon. A Paperbark Flycatcher was new, found around the Melaleulcas (trees). Also present were my new friends the Lemon-bellied Flycatcher and the Rufous-banded Honeyeaters, as well as a small group of White-breasted Woodswallows, a White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike, Rainbow Bee-eaters, and a Horsfield’s Bronze-Cuckoo which had me madly taking fieldnotes as it co-operately posed no more than 4 m from me.

Our rented camper in Kakadu National Park. Photo by Chris Siddle

April 30 involved a brief early morning visit to Holmes Jungle Nature Reserve, as Finding Australian Birds, the birdfinding guide we were test-driving, informed us, “20 km from Darwin’s CBD”. Fortunately this was not our first trip to Australia so we knew that “CBD” means “central business district”, the equivalent of Western Canadians “downtown”. Holmes Jungle is an expansive brushy slope adjacent to a very large garbage dump, which explained that the first memorable sight in the Reserve was a large dead tree full of Whistling and Black kites. Also the dump explained why it was easy to see a Dingo skulking away down the dirt road toward the distant trash.

The bf guide talked up the site as a place to find Brown and King quail, and possibly Red-backed and Red-chested buttonquail. I had had a recent brush with buttonquail habitat in south-east Queensland and I couldn’t afford physically or emotionally to risk possibly repeating the miserable and long-lasting negative consequences of my first buttonquail hunt.  My mate, birder extraordinaire, Ken Cross of Mapleton, had lead me into a thicket Mount Wooroolin (near Kingaroy), one of few sites where the Black-breasted Buttonquail can be found by the sharp-eyed as it slinks away beneath the pestiferous underbrush. We did glimpse the shadowy forms of a pair of buttonquail but couldn’t tell from the distance which species we were seeing. Fair enough. A buttonquail sp. was better than no buttonquail at all. Thank you, Ken. However, 24 hours later I began to itch, a deep-sited crazy itch that could not be satisfied by scratching but was spreading, from behind my knees, and around my ankles upwards towards my thighs and precious bits down under, marking its progress with archipelagos of red welts. Forty-eight hours later I was pawing through the Nambour yellow pages in search of a physician who could prescribe something to stop the itch or assist me in my suicide.

Chiggers, you see, or rather you don’t see because they are invisible to the human eye. Online research was hopeless, as it is regarding chiggers in North America where I had already encountered the wee terrible beasts in 2000 when Chris Charlesworth, Rick Howie, Mike Force, and Gary Davidson and I were exploring coastal Texas. On line everyone is a chigger expert and nobody knows anything. Some advise that chiggers are ticks. No. They are tiny mites. Some claim that the chiggers are living inside your skin. Again, no. The chigger samples your skin, doesn’t like it and leaves, but not before setting up a local irritation of maddening itchiness surrounded by a large red bump. Scratching will make the itch worse. OK, that’s true. It’s almost impossible not to scratch. Again, true. The torture will last three weeks. That depends. Sonja’s itchiness lasted closer to six weeks, poor girl.

Radjah Shelduck near Howard Springs, Darwin. Why is it not swimming? See photo at article's conclusion. Photo by Chris Siddle

Back at Homes Jungle, with my Queensland chiggers still itching me, I was not keen to plunge into the bushes and pick up fresh mites. I don’t think I could have stood more torment so I contented myself by standing in the middle of the dirt road, as far from the thickets as possible and watching birds fly by. When a mite-proof suit is developed, then I’ll go after buttonquail.

A White-bellied Sea-Eagle circled overhead; a nice big bird. You didn’t have to stick your head in a bush and risk cooties crawling down your neck to see it.  A small flock of Pied Herons passed by, very high up. The herons were lifers and I hoped that I would get a closer look at one soon. A movement in a eucalypt turned out to be a Bar-breasted Honeyeater, another lifer, and a very distinctive looking bird. I was to see only two more Bar-breasts in our holiday so it wasn’t like they were common.

In the afternoon we once again retreated to the ocean in search of cooling breezes. This time we visited Lee Point hoping for more shorebirds and were not disappointed. Today's assembly included Whimbrels, a Great Knot, Greater Sand-plovers, Ruddy Turnstones, a Black-bellied Plover, Sanderlings, Grey-tailed Tattlers, Terek Sandpipers, and a Sooty Oystercatcher. Numbers were small as the wader season was approaching its end. Resident species included Masked Lapwings, of course, and the delicate Red-capped Plover. A pair of Red-caps had at least one tiny downy chick on the sun-blasted rocks and sand of the point.

There was also a small flock of several species of terns included Little, Black-naped, a Caspian, Gull-billed, Lesser Crested, Greater Crested and White-winged terns.

In the bushes on shore I found a lifer, the Red-headed Honeyeater or Red-headed Myzomela. Honeyeaters (Meliphagidae) as a group are made up of several genera including Lichenostomus, Meliphaga, Manorina, Anthochaera, etc. Myzomela at first appeared to me to be a rather arbitary use of the generic name until I thought it through. If they are sufficiently distinct, honeyeaters often become known by their group names: miners, wattlebirds, and spinebills for example.  Myzomelas are small, have long slender curved bills, but more importantly several species show clear sexual dimorphism (something like 15 of 31 myzomela species show striking sexual differences in plumage) something that most honeyeaters don't show. 

Only a couple of kilometres from Lee Point was Buffalo Creek where a boat launch was famous among Top End and visiting birders as one of the few places where a person has a sporting chance of spotting the large but elusive Chestnut Rail. When we arrived there was a lengthy queue of fishermen and boaters waiting their turn at the launch so unless the rail wanted a very large audience, there seemed little hope of seeing one.  However, from the mangroves a pair of lifer Green-backed Gerygones dropped to eye-level to investigate my pishing. A Grey Whistler, a Large-billed Gerygone, and an unidentified bronze-cuckoo competed for my attention. Out on the mangrove mud and beach sand Black Kites squatted in the bright sun and noon heat.

1 May -  Before we left Darwin, we visited Howard Springs Nature Park. On the way we passed a mucky wetland on the side of the road and spotted my first Radjah Shelducks, large white ducks with black wings, curiously lemon coloured eyes and horn coloured bills.

Howard Springs was developed during the Second World War as a rest and recreation camp for American soldiers. Prior to WW II, it was Darwin’s major water source, named for a Royal Navy captain who had explored the coast of the Northern Territory in the second half of the 19^th Century. Now a suburb 29 km southeast of Darwin’s CBD is growing up around the Springs.

It’s a quiet picnic place, bathing spot and playground where young mothers bring their toddlers for morning exercise on the jungle gyms. Tourists stroll across the short dam and are content to stare into the pool behind it for freshwater fishes like grunters and for Yellow-faced Turtles. A printed sign cautioned visitors to be quiet around the dam because now at the beginning of the Dry Season, file snakes (ACROCHORDIDAE) were hunting fish. Wow, how great is that! I had seen file snakes in identification guides only and knew them to be shy, curiously baggy looking snakes, harmless to people but great fishers. My field guide, sadly unneeded at this point, stated that on land a file snake moves “with all the elegance of a wet sock.”

 For some reason lost to me, the trail through the monsoon forest next to the dam was closed, but it was a simple matter, since no one was looking, to dodge under the yellow Caution tape and take the track through the woods. I was looking, as all birders that come here do, for the Rainbow Pitta, a real little beauty. Pittas weren’t singing since it was the off-season so the search was tricky and unsuccessful. I did stumble upon my first Arafura Fantail, like most fantails, a confiding and curious bird that took a good look at me as I at him. One encounter with almost any of the Australian fantails (6 species) and you will know how the bird got its group name. There is, or course, the most widespread fantail but it's called, confusingly, Willie Wagtail. Australia has lost many a potential birder just because of this kind of confusion. Imagine a bright young person on his or her first (and last) birdwalk with a local expert. The day is sunny, the temperature not too hot. And what's that bird flitting about on the lawn? "Willie Wagtail," says the expert.

"Oh, I heard of wagtails, but I didn't know that we had any in Australia," chirps the eager youngster.

"We don't except for a couple of vagrants. Willie Wagtail is a fantail."

"Why not call him Willie Fantail then?"

"Because people wouldn't like Willie Fantail."

"What people?"

"The people who have always called him Willie Wagtail, that's who."

And at this point, the young person gives up birding and takes up a life of crime.

Arafura Fantail, one of the Top End specialties- Howard Springs Nature Park. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

  Before crossing into Kakadu National Park we stopped at Fogg Dam near Humpty Doo. This is a water impoundment with a worldwide reputation as a good birding site. No sooner had I parked the van in the shade of some tall trees than I began spotting birds: my new friend, the Lemon-bellied Flycatcher, my lifer Broad-billed Flycatcher, Yellow Orioles, and a Bar-breasted Honey-eater. The dam is about a kilometer long and has extensive marsh on both sides, with spectacular birds, even in the off-season, like Black-necked Storks, a colony of Whiskered Terns, Rainbow Bee-eaters, a flock of Varied Trillers in drab non-breeding plumage, and dozens of Intermediate Egrets, as well as Glossy Ibises. Here I got my close looks and photographs of both adult and immature Pied Herons.

We had the place to ourselves until car full of tourists slowly drove across the dam, stopping next to what in the distance looked like a big tire that had come apart not far from where we had parked the van. The passengers stared at the tire. Returning to the van at this time, Sonja was unaware of the object since the newcomers’ vehicle blocked her view. By the time I had birded my way back towards the van I discerned that our retread was, in fact, a crocodile, stout-bodied, green-black, broad at ears but narrow along the snout. It was inert, strewn with a few drying aquatic weeds and regarding me without interest. ‘Hmm, ‘ I thought, ‘narrow snout. Must be a freshwater croc. Harmless.’ I stood about 1 m from the beast’s snout, then backed up and took photos of it with the only lens I had, a telephoto.

Now when I show the photos, my audience is usually divided, some identifying the croc as a freshie and others as an Estuarine (Saltwater) croc, the man-eating croc of Top End legends.  Either way (you decide which is shown below), I have to laugh. How could I have been so careless as to get so close to what could have been a member of a man-eating species? I had acted like one of those nature-ignorant motorists who upon seeing a bear beside the road in one of our national parks, pulls over and tries to get it to take food from his hand.

My Aussie croc- Fogg Dam. Photo by C. Siddle

In the next installment Sonja and I explore Kakadu National Park. 

Siddle Down Under: A Guest Blog by Ken Cross

A few years ago now a movie came out from Australia starring one Paul Hogan entitled, Crocodile Dundee. It was a story of a ‘character’ from the outback – a crocodile hunting, buffalo whispering, hard drinking, smart mouthed man’s man, who made his way to North America where, in the biggest of big cities, he had to use his wits to survive. It was a more-or-less funny fish-out-of –water story.   

In a similar vein I bring you the parallel story of Chris Siddle in his latest adventure down under.

Chris’s story is similar to that of Crocodile Dundee.

Chris is from Vernon, a small town in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He was an English teacher. And he is a bird watcher who enjoys reading in his spare time.

Would he survive on the other side of the world in the separate creation known as Australia? Would he thrive in the outback?

As it happens, yes.

Before we get into how he thrived, we should determine why Chris would want to leave Canada for Australia in the first place [or in this case the third place]. Crocodile Dundee left Australia for North America because there was a story in it and, ultimately, for love; in Croc’s case – a love for a woman. Chris’s story is eerily similar. Chris fell in love…not with a woman but with Australia. The love began at a very early age, a formative stage we may say, such that it became his destiny. The love began, like many of his loves, with a bird; an Australian bird immortalised in an Australian song. One of his teachers, for reasons which will forever remain unclear, taught him to sing, ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’. Now I can mention the entire lyric as it is agreeably brief;

‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,

Merry merry king of the bush is he,

Laugh Kookaburra laugh,

Gay your life must be.’

The age of the song can be gauged by the use, or by contemporary standards mis-use of the word, ‘gay’ –as at the time of writing the Kookaburra’s life was to be envied.

Now if you are beginning to struggle and feel bad because you do not know what a Kookaburra is, do not panic. After all this would not be a Chris Siddle OK birder blog entry if there was no educational birding content…

The Kookaburra is a distinctly Australian bird. It is a kingfisher – the largest in the world. Its name is an onomatopoeia; being an abbreviation of the bird’s particularly raucous call. It is huge and brown and white with a humongous bill, seemingly specially adapted to its modern past-time stealing steaks and snags from barbies.

Figure 1. A wild but very obliging Laughing Kookaburra allowed me to get close as it watched for prey on the lawn at Kondadilla Falls National Park near Mapleton, Qsld., 31 March 2015. (Ph. - C.Siddle).

Anyway back to Chris’s story. So love was established early and the first full on flourishes were felt many years later when an opportunity for a visit down under presented itself through a BC birding buddy, one Gary Davidson who was living the dream, for the second time; having a year living, working and birding on the island of Tasmania. Chris and his other love, wife and childhood sweetheart, Sonja flew across the Pacific to Tasmania and saw Australian landscapes and the birds within for the very first time, including his very first tickable Kookaburras. 

So the seed was planted and then grew. In 2007 it flourished!

Sonja got a teaching exchange to Australia so the Siddles could live in Springwood in an area known as the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Here Chris learned, unlike Crocodile Dundee, to blend in to the local population. Strolling around muttering, “Tharteen”*, before thoughtfully adding, “mate”, and suppressing the desire to further add an enquirying, “eh?” he became your typical Aussie. Albeit one who is five-three, bespectacled and bedecked with binoculars, and armed, not with a tinnie, but a scope and camera.

Chris’s blending developed like much Chris has achieved through not-insignificant rational thought and research. The latter achieved by avid reading and viewing of decent Aussie texts and films. By end of 2007 Chris had read Australian novelist Tim Winton, novelist and historian [and rugby league tragic**] Tom Keneally, historian Geoffrey Blainey, Sarah Murgatroyd of ‘The Dig Tree’ fame, scientist, mammologist and Australian of the Year - Tim Flannery, historian and socialist in addition to being champion of Indigenous Issues - John Pilger, and novelist Kate Grenville. TV had provided such classics as Spicks and Specks, and Kath and Kim. 

While Sonja was welded to teaching fourth grade at Penrith, Chris was, to coin a phrase, as free as a bird, and visited Cairns, Daintree, the Atherton Tablelands, Newcastle, Lamington, Adelaide, Melbourne in addition to enjoying pelagic trips off Woolongong. By the end of 2007 Chris's bird list grew to 450 and his love grew beyond measure.

This is where I come in. My name is Ken Cross and I’m a birder; resident in Australia. Chris and I had a mutual friend in Gary Davidson who I had birded with in his prior visits to Australia. Chris was primed to visit me in 2007; however the expected birth of my first and final daughter proved to be an obstacle to birding. In a surprise twist, a few years later, Chris hosted my visit and took me birding as I, like Sonja, had scored a teaching exchange to Nakusp, a mere few hours to the east of Chris’s Vernon. When visiting I invited Chris to re-kindle his Aussie love affair and to visit South East Queensland where I reside. This did not take much rhetorical skill. So in 2015 another chapter of Siddle Down Under was written!   

On 27 March, 2015, the Siddles arrived at my Mapleton Manor, or at least the vacated house of my neighbours across the street, to the herald of screeching Yellow- tailed Black Cockatoos. Think birds the size of Scarlet Macaws with lazy wing beats, all black save a yellow daub on their face and large yellow panels in their tails. These birds, in some bizarre sense the ecological equivalent to woodpeckers, fly from tree to tree armed with massive bills used to tear branches apart for the grubs within. Their yellow tails become
agreeably more prominent when they brake from their flight.

Figure 2 - a male Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo in the rain at 1 Daymar Road, Mapleton, 1 April, 2015. Ph - C.Siddle

Most birders know that coming a close second to birding overseas in new and exotic lands is the thrill of showing your local birds, animals and special places to birders from exotic lands and so began our exploration  to the local Gheerulla Falls Track. Being Australia our waterfalls are generally not much to look at; however who needs falls when there are spectacular Spectacled Monarchs –a flycatcher, dark around the eyes and orange on the throat and breast.   Here, too as we listened to Logrunners below on the forest floor and, more tantalisingly, Rose-crowned Fruit-dove above, [both equally unseen] our eyes were attracted to a rather large lizard, a Lace Monitor or to use the name I prefer a Common Goanna. This species can hit nearly three metres long from nose to tail tip so is a lot longer than the iguana whose name was bastardised to initially describe it. It is a beautiful animal; however they often attract my anger as they steal my chook’s eggs. [Chook = chicken]

Figure 3 - The New Holland Honeyeater, Phylidonyris novaehollandiae, was one of the first Australian honeyeaters to be collected and described by science, back in 1790, two years after the First Fleet landed. 

Figure 4. A Goanna on the back lawn, April, 2015. Of the world's 50 species of monitor lizards, a full 25 are lizards of Oz. This one, the Lace Monitor, Varanus varius, is common along the eastern coastal areas of Australia. Ph- CS. 

Closer tracks to home revealed more birds; Pale Yellow and Eastern Yellow Robins, Little (Rufous) and Grey Shrike-thrushes, Olive-backed Orioles, the latter sadly unable to compete with the colours of the North American entry into the Oriole field. And of course there were Honeyeaters. The first ones were heard – Bell Miners. Bell Miners are honeyeaters who are always heard before they are seen as they live in colonies and their constant contact calls ring through the forest. Angry pishing brought them to mob and revealed them as cute little olive green birds with bright orange bills and legs. White –naped Honeyeaters were seen too as were Scarlet Honeyeaters, the latter one of the few Honeyeaters I could put up to win a beauty contest against your warblers!

Weekends allowed, for me at least, more birding and early in April we did a little sprint around some sunshine Coast sites. As we left the hills of Mapleton a Grey Goshawk sped across the road – a poor view of a cracking bird! Wappa Dam revealed many common waterbirds but best among them was the spectacular Great Crested Grebe. On the water’s edge Restless Flycatcher attracted us as did the far less showy Peaceful Dove. Farm flats around the Maroochydore River revealed, Golden-headed Cisticola and Tawny Grassbird – both birds which are subtle in colour and reserved in behaviour. Above them on power-lines perched our smallest falcon – an Australian Hobby. Nearby at a residential estate named Park Lake Estates we wandered about enjoying yet more honeyeaters – Brown, White-cheeked and Little Wattlebird [which is a another Honeyeater]. Little Egrets and Royal Spoonbills worked the edges of the Estate’s lakes. Then, because no doubt I was showing off, I took Chris to some sewage ponds. Here there was some good shit. No, seriously; Black-winged Stilt [I’m not sure what IOC is calling it], the poorly named Hardhead (aka White-eyed Duck), tiny Black-fronted dotterals and the main target as they are elsewhere uncommon Chestnut Teal. Annoyingly as we were watching the ponds through the wire fence surrounding them a calling Mistletoe bird was taunting or rather several Mistletoe birds were taunting. We never saw them well which was a shame as the Mistletoe bird is the only Australian Flowerpecker – a family of birds that has spread throughout Asia but refused to establish in the Americas, and it is bright red and pretty attractive.  

The following day we moved to the south of Blackall Range to stroll through some protected hill forest that overlook the Glasshouse Mountains. These mountains are really igneous volcanic plugs; evidence of long-gone tectonic activity and were the first features named by Europeans in the whole of South east Queensland. Captain James Cook sailing past in 1770 saw the mountains reflecting back the rising sun and named them. Following the geography and history we set off for one of my favourite sites in SE Qld – a little village by the sea, Toorbul. Toorbul does not actually look to the sea but across a passage to Bribie Island, so is shallow watered allowing, at low tide, both mud flats and sand bars. Here good numbers of migratory shorebirds gather to feed and roost, Far Eastern Curlew, Greenshank, Grey- tailed Tattler, Red-necked Stint, Bar-tailed Godwit and Great Knot to name a few. Chris was delighted as waders, non showy little grey birds, are among his passion. To further his swooning a Brahminy Kite – a white-headed raptor sailed lazily past. A few mangrove specialties make Toorbul a must visit – Mangrove Kingfisher, Mangrove Honeyeater and Mangrove Gerygone [a small warbler] – and all were seen well.  In the passage impressive numbers of Black Swan can be seen – circa 400. Finally for Chris the marsupial enthusiast we admired the big mob of Grey
Kangaroos that can always be seen decorating the streets of this village.

Figure 5 - One of the few birds that regularly occur in both Australia and North America is the Bar-tailed Godwit, here on the mangrove mudflats at Toorbul, Qsld. Ph - CS. 

Lifers of different kinds followed as we crossed from the mainland to Bribie Island. Crustaceans, specifically Soldier Crabs, were seen marching over sand flats a sight that had eluded Chris on earlier visits. These blue crabs march forward rather than scuttling sideways hence their name. An Eastern Bearded Dragon, a startling yellow mouthed agamid, was added to Chris’s reptile list, while we checked out yet more waders; Pacific Golden Plover and finally a Striated Heron. Our day ended back at home after dark with a couple more natural history discoveries; specifically an Eastern Horseshoe Bat that had been using my down-stair’s storage areas as a roost site and a wonderful Great Barred Frog calling on the lawn.

Figure 5. Our hosts, the Crosses of Mapleton, Queensland. Back row, left to right: Tom, Ken, and Megan. Front: Milly and Matt. Ph - CS. 

I could go on [and on] and mention more outings that we undertook and mention every critter that we encountered however that would end in death threats to me and would achieve little. Chris himself would like to document an enjoyable few days that we had at Giraween National Park and then to Bunya Mountains. Hopefully my account of Siddle Down Under will provide an opportunity for Chris to publish some of his Aussie images and a minor advertisement for more OK birders to come down under!

Ken Cross | Local Branch Convenor                       

Sunshine Coast Branch

BirdLife Southern Queensland

PO Box 375                                       

Annerley QLD 4103                 

southernqld@birdlife.org.au |birdlife.org.au                   

ABN 75 149 124 774                           

birds are in our nature

Tel: 0754457881

* The first word I felt I could pronounce in a truly Australian way was the number thirteen, running together West Canadian versions of "the" and "dean". Next I learned that "beer", an extremely important word in Australia, is two syllables, "be-yaa". Aside from our weird pronunciations wherein we stress the letter R, Canadian English is fairly colourless compared to Strine. My favourite example of an Australian simile comes from Ken Cross who said one night when we were looking for owls and nocturnal mammals that a Greater Glider should be "as obvious as testicles on a dog". 

** "rugby league tragic" = Some things only Australians understand,  so as a Canadian I have no idea what Ken means. Most people know Keneally as the author of Schindler's List. He's a wonderful writer and deserves a world-wide readership, as does the latest Australian I have discovered, historian and essayist, Don Watson. 

Many thanks to Ken Cross for his article which he and I dedicate to Megan because she's awesome, man!

The Final Months of an Okanagan Winter

There comes a quiet time in the calendar when the sometimes unexpected warm temperatures of February melt the snow cover and the robins that have been in town after berries move upslope into higher neighbourhoods and starlings begin to appear in pairs poking around old buildings and holes in snags getting ready to get the reproductive jump on all the other birds. Junco flocks around feeders may contain fewer birds than they did in January, and male Red-winged Blackbirds position themselves in cattail ditches to sing "O-kla-ee". Human spirits rise, people phone the media to report the "first robin", and birders take heart that spring is on its way.

Then comes March. Ponds and lakes thaw and everyday becomes waterfowl day. From shore you tally Gadwalls, Mallards, American Wigeons, a Eurasian Wigeon or two if you're lucky, Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers, Green-winged Teal, a Common Teal (the Eurasian version of the Green-wing) if you're really lucky, Ring-necked Ducks, Redheads, Canvasbacks, Greater Scaups, Lesser Scaups, Common Goldeneyes, Barrow's Goldeneyes, Bufflleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Common Mergansers, and if you're lucky again a few early Ruddy Ducks and Red-breasted Mergansers. During a better than average early spring a gyrfalcon or a Peregrine will stakeout the ducks for a day or two, adding life-and-death drama to the scene. Gore galore when a gyr knocks a teal out of the air than stands over the ducks and methodically plucks and rips apart the duck, sometimes while the duck is still alive.

After this plethora of early waterfowl, Mother Nature seems a real tight wad with land birds. The passerines and kin of early spring are just a trickle making March a slow month. You long for the first two swallows, Trees and Violet-greens but they are so finicky for the first few months.

Northern Pygmy-Owl "hugs" the trunk of a birch sapling as it watches roosting sparrows in a cedar hedge. Is this a common hunting strategy? Vernon, B.C. January, 2015. Photo by C. Siddle

Here are some suggested activities that may improve your late winter nature experiences.

1. Instead of searching for the first-of-the-season species, be content with the birds that are present. And how does one engender contentment in a mind yearning for novelty? Try looking more closely at birds. Start with one or two species. You might begin with a quest for Northern Shrikes, for instance. How many can you find in a day? What age class does each belong to? Try describing the habitat involved in each sighting. Watch each shrike to see if you can understand its hunting technique. Other questions will occur as you investigate. If shrikes aren't your thing, almost any of the other winter resident raptors will richly reward investigation: Red-tailed Hawks, Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Harriers, Cooper's Hawks, Sharp-shinned Hawks, Northern Goshawks (you should be so lucky!), Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, American Kestrels, and Merlins.

The Bald Eagle is a good choice to study for its hunting techniques. Highly visible and easy to locate, most immature eagles can be individually identified while adults like this one are territorial and can be relied upon to reappear in familiar locations. Burton, B.C. 24 August 2014. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Let me give you an example. I noticed a Red-tailed Hawk perched atop a lamp standard along Silver Star Road near its junction with Foothill Drive in the North BX area of Vernon. As I walked briskly by the hawk (if I had paused, it would have flown) I wondered why that hawk chose to perch where it did. Then it occurred to me that across the road from the Red-tail was a steep south-facing slope, created by the road builders and planted with varieties of grasses and low shrubs by the developers of Foothills subdivision many years ago. Because of its aspect, the slope was snow free, one of the only snow free patches in the neighbourhood. Could that be my answer? Were rodents more accessible on this cutbank for the hawk? That seemed like an obvious answer. But was it too easy? What if I cruised around and checked other south or east facing slopes? Would I find Red-tailed Hawks there as well? Or perhaps the hawk was just perched in the sun out of the wind. Wait. There wasn't any wind, was there? It's remarkably easy to become more aware of one's surroundings even in the first seconds after formulating a hypothesis to my question. Here was something to investigate in my area.

2. During the first half of the Twentieth century birders were quite used to the idea that most species in their neighbourhoods had life histories that lacked substantial details. Today we are still ignorant about many details of a bird's life. If you decide to go beyond identification, work on the basics like how birds, even common species, feed, interact with others, display aggression, avoid predation, communicate, roost, etc. Carrying your studies into the breeding season you can observe and note how species court, form pairs, built nests, lay and incubate eggs, and care for their young,

One of the mysteries in my yard - House Sparrows will bathe when water is available, seemingly regardless of cool winter weather. The very wet female is standing on a lens of ice that took up at least 90% of the bird bath! Not only do House Sparrows bathe in ice cold water, but will do so  near the end of the afternoon before going to roost. Vernon, B.C. 12 Dec. 2014. Photo by C. Siddle

Good basic observational work can be done by the average birder if he/she is objective, unassuming, and keeps careful notes. Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974) became the pin-up girl of this movement after she wrote a two volume life history of the Song Sparrow. Truth be told, Ms. Nice was no ordinary person. She had done graduate work in ornithology prior to becoming a housewife when her husband joined the faculty of the Ohio State medical school. However, the point is that amateurs without degrees in zoology or ornithology have made great contributions to the life histories of North American birds. Check out the 26 volumes of Arthur Cleveland Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds originally published by the Smithsonian and now available as Dover reprints in second hand bookstores. Bent (1866-1968), a successful businessman, was a true amateur. He contributed observations about birds in 1901. Accepting no salary Arthur Bent wrote the life histories of hundreds of species incorporating the observations of thousands of birdwatchers.

Northern Shrike. How exactly does this species go about procuring a meal? Is it a perch and wait predator or does it actively seek out its target? Reifel Refuge, Ladner, B.C. 24 Dec. 2014. Photo by C. Siddle. 

Late winter with its lack of distractions could be a good time to begin your own investigations into a species' life history. Do some background reading (Bent is a good place to start) and never give up because some aspect that you want to investigate is already "known". Birds adapt to local conditions. Your local birds may be acting in a different way that has never been described before.

Don't let fashion dictate. These days the words life histories are hardly spoken anymore. The emphasis in zoology is elsewhere. Many contemporary biologists appear to work with keyboards more than they do with binoculars. However, The need for basic life history is just as important as it always has been. If in the future we hope to save species from local extirpation or extinction we will need to know as much as possible about species' requirements.

3. If you keep feeders in your yard, I encourage you to go beyond the mere list of the species that are present. What are the maximum single sighting counts of each species? What time in the day does each species first visit the feeder? Does that schedule hold true in bad weather as well? Describe some patterns of dominance between species. Draw how you feel when you see a new species. Just kidding about that last suggestion.

4. Establish a walking route and keep a census of the species seen and heard during your walks. See my post about Star Road for an example. Try varying the times of your walks to detect patterns of bird activity. Every fourth census, try walking backwards to see what you're missing. Again, kidding.

5. Instead of getting to know one species well, get to know one place well. It may be a woodlot, a park, a pond... Start with habitat, if you like. Identify the conifers, and when they leaf out, the deciduous plants. Record as best you can the distribution of plant species. Record which birds forage and breed in which parts of the place.

6. When all else fails, take a long weekend trip to a bird rich area like Boundary Bay or Tsawwassan. For the price of gas, a hotel and a few meals out you can experience the spectacle of thousands of waterbirds, birds of prey and wintering passerines in places like Boundary Bay Regional Park, Blackie Spit, White Rock and Reifel Island.

7. As a very last resort, post an observation, idea, or decision on the local email birding group. Being a fractious bunch, male birders will respond with their two bits worth and someone is bound to disagree with you and say so via a  group post and so the battlelines are drawn. Everyone and his uncle will pile on, on one side or the other. The posts pile up electronically, days past as verbal volleys are fired, women, sensible creatures that they are, stand back and shake their heads in disbelief, while the men folk pronounce. And so time passes, winter eases into spring, migrants return and life goes on.

An eBird contributor sounds off about a local eBird reviewer. Virginia Rail. Dawson Creek, B.C. June 2014. Photo by C. Siddle

Note - If you are interested in studying nature beyond identification I recommend that you check out the Biodiversity Centre for Wildlife Studies www.wildlife.org. Mailing address: 3825 Cadboro Bay Road, PO Box 55053 Victoria, B.C. V8N 6L8. BCFWS publishes twice annually a wonderful magazine, Wildlife Afield: A Journal of British Columbia Natural History.

Twitching

To twitch is to purposefully make a special out-of-the-way trip to see an out-of-its-normal-range bird that some other birder has discovered (Talk like a birder! Amaze your friends! Key birder terms are shown in italics). For example, say a Dusky Thrush, an Asian robin-like bird that should be wintering in Japan, is found gobbling mountain ash berries in a suburban yard in Langley. On hearing the news, if your reaction is to grab your car keys and your credit card and kiss goodbye your son or daughter whose birthday party you were supposed to be recording, and tell the  birthday child that you'll get the next birthday since they do came around once a year, whereas this could be your only Dusky Thrush ever, you're a twitcher. Filial obligations and domestic happiness evaporate as fast as the exhaust vapours from your vehicle as you begin your twitch.

When a female-type Great-tailed Grackle appeared at Okanagan Landing in early December, 1993 almost every lister in B.C. twitched it. The bird stuck around until at least March, 1994. Photo by C. Siddle of a similar bird at Laguna, Atascosa, Texas, March 2011. 

A recent example of the cause for a twitch: West Kootenay birders Gary Davidson, Paul Prappus and Carolee Colter simultaneously and unexpectedly saw a White-eyed Vireo in Kootenay Creek Provincial Park a few kilometres west of Nelson, B.C., a species that has never been seen in British Columbia before, an unexpected vagrant from the Atlantic seaboard, among other possible places of origin, on 1 Dec 2014. The news of their amazing find spread like wildfire and people far off (Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria) asked, "Is the White-eyed Vireo a one day wonder or will it stick around near the site of its discovery to be twitchable?"

"How long a drive is it from my home to Nelson?"

"What's the weather forecast for tomorrow?"

"What excuse shall I use to get off work tomorrow? Who can I say died suddenly without the lie being discovered?"

"This job sucks anyway. I'll just go for the bird and deal with the consequences when I return to work. Nurse, take over please. The rest of this heart transplant is pretty much by the book. What do you mean, you're not capable? You'll never know until you try. I'm out of here. "

Okay, perhaps that last sentiment is a tad exaggerated since I don't know anyone who actually chucked his/her job to go on a twitch, but I do know several people who might as well have, since they were useless at work once they had been burdened with the knowledge that a rare bird was possibly waiting for them just a few hundred kilometres away, and there they werein an unhappy birdless place, having to appear to be productive while images of a rarity fluttered through their heads.

The origins of the twitch are lost in the carbon dioxide build up of time but since twitching is a non-lethal form of hunting, the twitch may have begun with two of our ancient ancestors, Thang and Mung, two young Cro-Magnans who competed in every way possible at the prehistoric time.

Mung: (chest thump) Mung see a big bird you've never seed! (pronouns and past participles hadn't been invented yet)

Thang: That's pure bison poop. Thang seed every bird in the valley!

Mung: It's not in this valley. Mung seed it in the next valley over that way (cardinal directions had not yet been invented). It's big and white with eyes the colour of the sun. Also its eyes are like ours.

Thang: Bloodshot?

Mung: No. Looking forward. In front of face. Not on side of head like bison or your sister. (invents I'm watching you gesture. Funny how long-lived some fads are!)

Thang: (mini-chest thump) Mung show Thang this white bird?

Mung: No, Mung have big date (an actual edible date, growing large in prehistoric times)

Thang: (heavy furrowing of heavy brows) Where Thang find white bird with yellow eyes then?

And Mung gave him directions by pointing vaguely off into the distance and mentioning camps and caves of people Thang had never heard of. Somethings never change. Thang, being male, pretended to understand.

Thus the first twitch may have been Thang's quest for a Snowy Owl, a species that has since inspired thousands of twitches. The point is Thang had to drop everything and go out of his way to find this bird; he had to explore a valley previously unknown to him and it took him the whole weekend to reach the valley, find the bird and walk home to his cave. That's a pretty typical time frame for a mid-sized twitch. A really long twitch might involve one or more airlines, like flying from Kelowna, B.C. to Brownsville, Texas, for a White-throated Robin, normally found in Mexico. Such LD twitches are for rich birders or temporarily crazed ones, like guys doing Big Years, a devastating mental illness that hurts everyone it touches. A short twitch might involve a drive from Vernon to Kelowna for a Pacific Golden-Plover at Robert Lake. But what if someone reports a rare bird in your town and you go and see it. Is that a twitch? Not really. There needs to be some appreciable factor of distance involved.

A White-throated Thrush near McAllen, Texas, a bird that Gary Davidson helped me twitch in March, 2011. 

Time is always of the essence in a twitch. The most extreme twitchers drop everything to begin a twitch. When the call that a rare bird has been located somewhere, some twitchers are considerate of social obligations like appearing at their own wedding, or attending the funeral of a close friend or relative, but all twitchers, some secretly, some obviously, chafe beneath just restrictions.

The twitcher knows that the faster he/she responds, the better his/her chances are of seeing the bird. Although some rare birds surprise everyone by sticking around, most don't. Many are the birds that stayed one day and part of the next early morning, only to depart as the balance of twitchers arrived. "You should have been here five minutes ago!"  are among the saddest words ever spoken to a twitcher who just dipped, which is the lingo for missing the bird. In this category I would place my only Ross's Gull which appeared at a small lake in Washington State's Okanagan Valley a few years ago. If I recall correctly, birders had about two and a half days to see this exotic Arctic gull feeding on a disgusting jellified deer carcass on an obscure beach off a secondary road.

Some out-of-range birds delight everyone by staying in a known location for months. Some waterfowl are especially good at extended stays especially if the stray turns up somewhere in late autumn and overwinters. Such a target species allows the birder to make a long, leisurely twitch, which has a nice oxymoronic sound to it. That's how I added a Falcated Duck (near Eugene, Oregon), a Steller's Eider (Port Townsend, Washington) and lately a Tundra Bean Goose (near Tillamook, Oregon) to my life list.

Have I dipped? Oh, yes, spectacularly. For example, way back in 1987 a White-headed Woodpecker was coming to a feeder on Anarchist Mountain. Everyone who tried for it got it. We were living in Fort St. John at the time. At the beginning of spring break I twitched 1200 kms one way and parked in the wrong driveway for 2 days. Of course, I didn't learn that it was the wrong driveway until many weeks later, which made my little heartbreak over the dip just that much more bitter. The only good thing about that particular twitch which ended up occupying most of spring break was that on the way home I stopped at Haynes Point Provincial Park, Osoyoos, and blundered into the Okanagan's first Swamp Sparrow. Oh, and by the way, my string of bad luck with the White-headed Woodpecker in B.C. continues to this day. I've seen White-heads in Washington, Oregon and California but every time one pops up in B.C. I am there to miss it, even the two birds that appeared semi-regularly for almost two weeks along Camp McKinney Road near Oliver.  But every birder has a nemesis bird.

This post is dedicated to Gary Davidson, my good friend from Nakusp, B.C., who has been on many a twitch with me. He has also been responsible for finding a large number of twitchable birds himself including the White-eyed Vireo (with Paul and Carolee), Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Cape May Warbler, Lesser Black-backed Gull, and others.