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.