TAKING FLIGHT

The beauty of birds

On the wing

It can happen slowly. For many it comes with age, yet some will start out as youngsters and never lose the love of it. The passion, often the obsession, with birds. It’s happened to me later in life. On walks with our dog I always look up. Working from home in Sydney, a specific and beautiful call will mark the transition into autumn. The return of the yellow tailed black cockatoos (below).

Birds open up a whole new world to us. An acute sense of awareness about our environment. Wherever we are in the world, among the Manhattan skyline spotting a glimpse of a peregrine falcon, or in the Galapagos Islands, where you can almost trip over blue footed boobies, swallow tailed gulls or American oystercatchers (below). The colours, the exquisite feather arrangements, the behaviours, the design, the aerial capabilities. They’re all a joy to behold.

I could think of nothing better for a parent to infuse their kids with a love of birds. They become a key to an appreciation of the natural world. In Australia, there are many common species like our magpies (below) that have adapted remarkably well to suburban life. Watching them hunt for worms and insects is easy and fun in your local park or if you’re lucky enough, even your backyard. They are highly intelligent birds with a very sophisticated language and are even able to recognise individual human family members if they’re (the maggies) regulars to your patch.

Then there are bucket list birds that people will travel across the world to see. Birds like the extraordinary shoebill. Rob took this great photograph of a shoebill in Uganda. That stern gaze and regal presence, all 5ft or 1.5 metres tall, with a fiercesome beak that can devour even baby Nile crocodiles in one gulp. It’s estimated their numbers are down to between 5 and 8,000 in the wild, with a vulnerable listing by the IUCN.

There are flightless birds too let’s not forget. Sam and Lee’s trip to Antarctica recently had them snapping their necks at the antics of the penguin species, such comical and loveable characters in their little dinner suits and awkward carriage on land. This is a gentoo penguin below, the fastest swimmer of the 17 species of penguins.

And what about the migrant species. The heroic deeds of birds like the Arctic terns or the bar-tailed godwits, that fly tens of thousands of kilometres between hemispheres every year. Even Adelie penguins in Antarctica migrate some 13,000 km a year between feeding and breeding grounds. Then there are birds like the stunning southern carmine bee-eaters (below) that move between southern and central or equatorial Africa, spending a few months in the summer down south before heading north again as the temperature drops and the atmosphere becomes less humid. A game drive can be thrilling if all you do is watch these aerialists bomb the insects kicked up by your vehicle. Trying to capture the best photograph at super high shutter speeds is a brilliant game in itself.

We mentioned the Galapagos. The swallow-tailed gull below was so unconcerned by Brad’s proximity, that he was able to get an amazing shot of the Epic clients in the beautiful bird’s eyeball! Now that’s a bird’s eye view … of the humans.

Then there are extraordinary looking birds like the knob-billed duck below. It’s only the male that has the large extension of its beak sitting front and centre as it were like a small satellite dish. This was the first one I’d ever seen in beautiful Tarangire National Park in Tanzania, during a pause in some huge rains. The colours of these beauties are also very striking.

In Australia, we’re blessed with a huge variety of parrots, 56 species in all, which embrace everything from the common large sulphur-crested cockatoos, through to endangered swift parrots and tiny, exquisite little birds like the varied lorikeets that live in the north of the country. When spring rolls around and the native flowers come into life, your camera’s viewfinder can barely cope with the explosion of colours, like the omnipresent rainbow lorikeet feeding on the red callistemon here.

Driving in outback Queensland, headed for Darwin a couple of years ago, I saw a grove of trees a few hundred metres from the road and pulled over. The air was moving all around the trees, again, in a blaze of colour. It was my first encounter with a massive wild flock of budgerigars, another Aussie native species. There were literally thousands of them filling the air, the trademark green and yellow markings catching the sun as they wheeled and turned. It was a truly magnificent sight.

So birds will pop up here, there and everywhere, even in the snow like the beautiful snow partridge in the Himalayas below, a member of the pheasant family. Just like the story of the canary in the coal-mine, where sweet little birds were sent into mines to test the air for chemicals, birds are a frontline indicator for the health of our eco-systems and ultimately the planet. Air quality, food sources, habitat in the form of trees or shrub vegetation for small birds. The quality of the water in our oceans and fish stocks, have a profound effect on seabird populations.

There is nothing like watching a large bird of prey or a vulture soar across a mountain valley or an African savanna. How good is Brad’s shot below in the Himalayas of the Griffon vulture. It almost deserves its own soundtrack. It represents a kind of freedom, to rise and cast yourself to to the wind. I think we’ve taken birds for granted, I know I have until only relatively recently. Now I find myself frustrated if someone doesn’t share my enthusiasm for pointing out a superb fairy wren’s call, or maybe they’re not quite captivated as I feel they should be when a kestrel zooms past silently carried by a big southerly wind. Get started with your kids on a list of birds near you, start ticking them off and watch their interest grow.

And we haven’t even started on owls ! Another stunning pic from Brad below, of a Verreaux’s Eagle-owl, Africa’s largest species of owl. Once known as the giant eagle-owl, they have a deep bass call, that makes me smile as I lay in my tent in the still of a winter’s night in a camp in the Okavango. It might just be my favourite sound in Africa. They are the most stunning birds, looking every bit the cliche of the wise old owl if you happen to spot one during the day.

From the cliffs near our home in Sydney, I can watch these majestic Australasian gannets (above) soaring above the Pacific swell, occasionally plunging into the big blue below chasing fish or squid. It’s a thrill to be eye height to them when they come close in to shore.

If just one person buys a book or a bird app or a pair of binoculars out of this, then job done. Birds enrich any safari or adventure enormously. They enrich our lives. You wait, you will be twitching before you know it … and watching your partner’s eyes glaze over as you say … wait, what was that call?? 😁

#travel stories

Photography:Brad Horn, Rob Barbour, Sam Wallace, Simon Reeve