Ornithology

Eminent ecological historian Libby Robin has produced a curious book that examines the changing interests and roles played by those Australians who ‘notice birds and feel they need our help’. She aims to examine the rise of the nature conservation movement in Australia, using ‘Australia’s bird-people’ as a sample of Australians with a love of nature.

Within the Australian natural history genre, this book stands out: a quirky mix of autobiography, insights into the behaviour and adaptability of familiar Australian birds, and a fine example of the role of science-based enquiry to help solve human–wildlife problems. Darryl Jones, the author, is one of Australia’s most engaging and high-profile ornithologists. Although the tone of this book is decidedly non-academic, it is packed with information and insights.

When I first heard of an impending Atlas of Australian Birds, my expectations were, it now seems to me, naive, showing certainly no acquaintance with the ‘birds atlas projects [which] have been developed in many other countries’ (actually, the bibliography numbers attached to this direct us to just three such projects: a use of ‘many’ learned, perhaps, from such usages as ‘this wine will improve with cellaring for many years’).

One of the most bizarre as well as unfortunate deaths in literary history occurred when the playwright Aeschylus was struck by a tortoise dropped on him by a bird. Bizarre, that is, if we don’t consider what the bird involved was doing, which was clever as well as practical. From the bird’s perspective, the tortoise was being dropped on a convenient stone rather than the bald head of a Greek tragedian who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s late July and high over the foggy green waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, a solitary Grey Plover beats its way south. Within sight of Sakhalin Island, the former Russian prison colony documented by Anton Chekhov, she veers west, heading for a vast tidal flat in Ul’banskiy Bay, not far from the rural settlement of Tugur Village. It’s hard to imagine a more isolated situation, and yet even here, in this empty theatre of sky and water, there is an audience. Nestled under the plumage on her back is a small satellite transmitter. An aerial extending beyond her tail feathers broadcasts her progress to the world.

With five illustrated field guides, two e-guide apps, and at least three photographic guides available to help people identify birds in Australia, some would question the need for yet another. The first field guide to Australian birds, written and illustrated by renowned bird artist Peter Slater, was published in 1970 and 1974 (two volumes) ...

Australia’s birds stand out from the global avian pack in many ways – ecologically, behaviourally, because some ancient lineages survive here, and because many species are endemic. The ancestors of more than half of the planet’s ten thousand bird species (the songbirds) evolved right here (eastern Gondwana) before spreading across the world. Indeed, Tim Low claims in this important and illuminating book that Australia’s bird fauna is at least as exceptional as our mammal fauna, which has such remarkable elements as the egg-laying monotremes (platypus, echidna) and our marvellous radiation of marsupials (kangaroos, quolls, bandicoots, possums, etc.). Can this be so? As a mammologist, my initial response was that Low’s claim is a bit rich, but, after reading this book, I take his point.

Alec Hugh Chisholm, born in 1890 at Maryborough, is a legendary figure among Australian birders. He was a pioneering member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, later known as Birds Australia, now BirdLife Australia, and worked tirelessly to facilitate and promote ornithological research. He was a prolific author of journal articles, field notes, prefaces, reflective essays, and popular books on birding.

Why would a famous virologist and immunologist (and Nobel laureate) write a book linking birds, human diseases, and ecological degradation? The answer is partly that Peter Doherty obviously has a soft spot for birds and birdwatching. He argues that anyone with an enquiring mind and a natural history ...

Rich in achievement, the artist and naturalist John William Lewin died in Sydney on 27 August 1819; he was forty-nine. With public funds, a stone was erected over his grave in the city’s new cemetery in Devonshire Street. While the inscription referred to Lewin’s official status as the town coroner, its discursive text lamented the loss ‘to this country of an Eminent Artist in his line of Natural History Painting in which he excelled’. Two years previously, in an official dispatch commending several fine drawings to the secretary of colonies in London, Governor Lachlan Macquarie – the last but most significant of a succession of vice-regal admirers and patrons – had praised ‘the Masterly Hand of Mr Lewin’. Schooled in England in a tradition of generic natural history illustration in which specimens were placed at the centre of a page devoid of all context, in Australia Lewin’s work was transformed by precise observations and an innovative approach to the illustration of natural history that was unprecedented. For him, New South Wales – its landscape, flora, and fauna, its Indigenous inhabitants, its own growth to a settled colony – was literally inspiring.