A year in Oz
A ‘big year’ in Australia provides a memorable look at the country’s unique avian life.
WHO among us hasn’t wanted to take a year out and bird an entire continent or country without interruption – particularly now most of us have been under virtual house arrest for much of the last year?
Well, American R Bruce Richardson and his wife did just that when they retired, before settling fully into their new adopted home of Australia. This readable and mostly light-hearted tome describes their journey from beginning to end.
If you’ve sampled that continent’s geography and its skew-whiff wildlife, you’ll know that whatever happened, they were in for a birding treat, and as a couple they get to see the vast majority of Australia’s amazing birds while racking up plenty of ‘character-building’ experiences and mishaps along the way – and somehow come out of it with their relationship intact.
While Sean Dooley’s The Big Twitch is the bible for such an endeavour, Richardson manages to see most of the tricky species, though not without hitch. The couple hit most of their targets hindered by weather, vehicle decrepitude, health problems, anxiety and hypochondria, and the almost deliberate reluctance of certain ‘bogey birds’ to get seen, but come out of the end of it stronger and wiser (though only the author seems keen to repeat the experience any time soon). There are many memorable incidences along the outback and coastal roads and, if you’ve visited any of the key Oz birding areas, pangs of nostalgia will rise in your chest as you compare your own experiences with the sometimes harsh realities of Richardson’s.
Many written birding odysseys can suffer from what one might call ‘list syndrome’ – the temptation to write down almost every species seen – but the author mostly avoids this by being an engaging character and interspersing his account with (occasionally over-long) detailed observations and descriptions of the locations, people and – yes – caravan and campsites they stay in. In fact, this book could almost be used as a guide of where and where not to stay when on the road visiting Australia’s best birding sites.
The Richardson’s year was truly memorable, and you will get a strong and savoury taste of it in these pages. Perhaps more importantly, it may well serve as inspiration for similar rugged and fulfilling journeys in the postpandemic world to come.