‘A pop of colour in pretty grim times’: my (brief) life as a twitcher

I’m halfway through some question or other when Ruby cuts in: “Ah, there’s a male!”

I don’t know if this is common among birdwatchers, but she and I are constantly interrupting one another — and ourselves — as we trek through Royal Park in Parkville, Melbourne. Mid-sentence someone will jabber “Oh!” and point to a trio of welcome swallows speeding overhead, or they’ll fall silent halfway through a thought, their breath visibly rising and then dissolving into sharp dawn air, and there on a branch reaching over the path is a spotted dove.

The process of birding is a constant slip from moments of total presence and enveloping silence, to sudden shocks of distraction, and back again.

At this point, I’m still coming to terms with my borrowed binoculars, to the jump in speed everything takes on when your eyes are several feet in front of your body. Every tiny movement of the hand makes the scene a swishing blur, with great mocking crescents of black encroaching from the sides of my vision.

The first three times Ruby tried to point birds out to me, I’d looked in entirely the wrong place, flitting about from one empty branch to another until she’d cheerily announce: “Oh, it’s fucked off now.” This time my hands are steadier, as is my rotation of the focus wheel between my eyes. Slowly the confusion of brown and green reeds snaps to pristine hard-edged clarity, and there in the dead centre is a male superb fairy-wren, a streak of black across his eyes like Replicant war paint, his cheeks and the top of his head an iridescent blue, luminous and clean as the sky.

He dances through the reeds, seemingly weightless. His flitting movements are too quick for the human eye, so he looks as though he’s been captured by stop motion every time he comes to rest. A blink, and he’s turned. Another, and he’s retreated a few rows. Then a few more, and then he seems to evaporate, and the reeds sway in the bright cold.

Ruby is Ruby Gill, a musician and more or less lifelong birder, and she and I are spending the early hours of Monday morning participating in the Aussie Bird Count, a survey organised by peak bird conservation group Birdlife Australia, and carried out by anyone who’d like to get involved.

It started in 2014, Birdlife Australia spokesman Sean Dooley tells me later, with the organisation trying to tap into the collective knowledge of what it knew was a large but shy cohort of “bird nerds”. It got 15,000 people in the first year. After two years of lockdown that’s rocketed past 100,000.  

“During lockdowns, particularly in Melbourne, birds became like emissaries from the outside world, bringing some joy and a pop of colour in otherwise pretty grim times,” Dooley says. 

From October 17-24, birders across the country use an app developed by Birdlife Australia to type in the characteristics of the birds they see, giving the organisation insights into changes in the numbers and distribution of Australia’s birds.

“We’re careful with the data, because we recognise it’s accrued by people who sometimes don’t have a great deal of experience,” Dooley says. “But it’s filling knowledge gaps and confirming other research that’s going on. We’re kicking ourselves that we didn’t start this 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. Even with the eight years of data we had, we’re seeing some clear patterns.”

Gill, when she’s not doing this, is channelling those powers of observation into gentle, acutely felt songs. As much as she can, she organises tours so they go places that don’t interrupt her ability to birdwatch: “It’s such a big part of my life, above and beyond career and music.”

In recent years, as various centres for connection and community have come apart in Melbourne, Australia and around the world, she says mornings like this are a reminder that you are part of something bigger than yourself. You have no choice but to be.

“It’s a place where I’m just another arm of the planet. There’s no power and no ego involved, just paying attention,” she says, before quoting the late poet Mary Oliver: ‘To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.'” 

Birding thus becomes a way of plucking from the air a “third place”, somewhere outside the home where a person is under no obligation to produce or consume, where the vagaries of life and variety of possibility are a little more apparent. 

“It’s also a map of how an ecosystem is evolving, a log that helps us to understand how the planet is changing, often because of our impact,” Gill says. “And the people who have the power to halt that need data.”

Birds are a great barometer of the health of an environment, Dooley says. And like so many Australian animals in recent years, what they’re telling us is alarming.

“[They] are really facing the extinction crisis,” he says. “At least one in six Australian bird varieties has at least one subspecies that’s threatened. That’s just ridiculously bad.” 

The loss of habitat from sprawling suburbs is part of the problem (incidentally, if you think swooping birds are a hassle, know that’s probably our fault: they’re the only ones robust enough to survive the relentless spread of built-up areas, and they bullied more mild-mannered birds out). In other cases, it’s the apparent indifference from both sides of government: consider the heartbreaking near-decade fight to stop the slow starvation of the Carnaby’s black cockatoo north of Perth. And in yet other cases, the reasons are perplexing and scary, as with the huge global drop in the number of sparrows, a bird that previously dealt with city life just fine. 

Unsurprisingly, in urban areas, birds often thrive most at points of conspicuous human absence. Gill tells me that the best birding in Melbourne is at the Werribee sewage treatment plant, and that in her home country of South Africa she would trudge through the near unbearable stench of a local paper mill for the same reason. Crumbling infrastructure offers great spots for nests, and plenty of weeds for seed-eating birds.

If you want some really good birding, Dooley says, go to Chernobyl, or the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. 

Beyond the citizen science of a project like the Aussie Bird Count — which I suspect for her and many other twitchers is incidental — Gill says the process of birdwatching is “a chance to feel less lonely in the world, to be more present and come into nature and our place in it through something beautiful and entrancing. There are few other parts of the planet that are that alive, and so woven into our day-to-day lives, they have their own personalities and language”.

On our walk, Gill and I see 17 varieties of bird — a solid but unspectacular morning’s work as far as I can gather. Royal Park is home to 155 varieties, a whole parallel society with its own languages, customs, communities, rituals, turf wars; the same knotting of temperaments and motivations and histories as any cluster of humanity. And in places you can see the mirrored tops of buildings and hear the receding roar of heaving traffic headed to the CBD.

Are you inspired to take part in the Aussie Bird Count? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.