The Bridge

This is my (Mike) birders entry from Australia for those interested in our feathered friends. Of course, with a very few exceptions (I think House Sparrows rule the world!), each bird was new to us; not only that, there are whole new genera to become acquainted with. Luckily we had an app of Australian birds which helped (a little). What was amusing was how many names seemed to combine different genera from the old world. Who would have thought there was a Magpie Lark (see photo) or a Cuckoo Dove or a Fairy Wren?

Sydney was a good place to get first acquainted with some of these birds — cities have wide open spaces where it is harder for the birds to hide. Many of them had loud, raucous calls, such as the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo. They nest in colonies and their clamor, quite frankly, frightened us the first time we heard it. Once we got to the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland we were back to the EeBee problem. Unfortunately, unlike our iBird app for US birds, the Australian app did not have actual recordings of the calls associated with each bird. So there were numerous birds which we heard but could not identify.

The one bird we wished to see north of the Daintree River was the Southern Cassowary. The Cassowary, like the Emu and Ostrich, is a large ground bird. It is on the endangered list, but signs along the road assured us of ‘recent’ sightings (how long were the signs up?) and to take care because that portion of the road was known as a potential Cassowary crossing. We had read that the Cassowary often used stream beds as their byways and so we found a bridge. Specifically, the road bridge crossing Cooper Creek. It offered good sight lines both upstream and downstream with plenty of dry stream bed visible because it had been pretty dry recently. So we camped out for an hour a couple of mornings plus also an evening stint. The closest we came to a sighting you can see in this photo. That’s right. Because of all the fruit seeds in it, we identified this as Cassowary poop. So you could say that the closest we got to a Cassowary was its backend!

However, The Bridge was not without its consolations. We saw a pair of Yellow-bellied Sunbirds building their amazing nest which appears to hang in midair (see photo). Also, in the evening, we scanned our binoculars upstream and there, sat upon a dead branch about a metre (yep, get used to it) above the water, was a pair of startling Azure Kingfishers. And speaking of families, at a nearby beach, we saw a family of Red-capped Plovers — mama, papa, and chick — scurrying along the shoreline, just as Sanderlings do on the NC coast. A last surprising sighting at The Bridge was of a Pied Cormorant. Clearly, despite the low water, there were sufficient fish to entice the Cormorant and Kingfishers. We also saw a snake grab a fish from the river. Amazing!

We were reminded of The Bridge we found in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a couple of years ago, where we saw many birds, as well as a pair of huge Iguanas. Of course, The Bridge is a potent metaphor for edges and the spiritual life, and I will not bore you with expounding on the metaphor. Except to say that in this instance in Queensland I was struck about how The Bridge is not only about crossing from one side to the other, but also about opportunity, since there is always the option of staying within the edges of the space spanned by the bridge, to travel upstream or downstream and to exit at another point. We can remake ourselves and be remade at such times when we decide to explore this liminal space.

So what other striking sightings can we name: The Metallic Starlings, who migrate south from Papua New Guinea, to nest and breed. The spectacular Rainbow Lorikeets who are large, raucous, and nest in large colonies. In one of our rainforest walks we did, by chance, look down upon a pair of nesting Wompoo Fruit-Doves. And in Sydney, after a ferry trip to Watsons Bay, we saw the Superb Fairy-Wren. Its blues were irridescent. So for completion here are others identified: Australian White Ibis (all over the parks in Sydney), Crested Pigeon, Silver Gull (they were all around us when we had our take away fish and chips — see this exciting video), Nankeen Kestrel, Magpie-Lark, Australian Magpie, Australian Wood Duck, Regent Bowerbird, Noisy Miner, Restless Flycatcher (very common), Spectacled Monarch, Australian Figbird, Great-billed Heron, Black Butcherbird, Orange-footed Scrub Fowl (unfortunately one tried to cross the road in front of our car and didn’t make it), White-breasted Sea Eagle, Brown Cuckoo-dove, Crested Tern, Beach Stone-curlew, and Welcome Swallow.

From city and rainforest, our next destination is the Great Barrier Reef, where are feathered friends will be replaced by our scaly friends and the diversity of the rainforest plant-life by the numerous varieties of coral. What a remarkable planet.