WHO’S A CHEEKY LITTLE BIRD THEN?
Meet Australia’s colourful, clever and muchloved avian gift to the world.
POKE ABOUT IN many a memory, and bingo, there’s often a budgie. In Mark Carter’s case it’s Bluey, an ’80s childhood pet last sighted in a gnarled old pear tree on the banks of the Annick Water in Ayrshire, south-west Scotland. “My mother hated seeing him in a cage so would let him out to fly around the house. But one day she left the window open and off he flew,” Mark recalls. “He hung around for a few days, and after school my dad and I would go sit under the tree trying to tempt him down, but he wasn’t interested. Then one day he was no longer there.”
Fast forward three decades and Mark is now a zoologist specialising in outback ecology, living and working in wild budgerigar heartland. As guide manager at the Alice Springs Desert Park, Mark has experienced many wonders, but rates none so highly as a budgie murmuration. “People talk about things that are quintessentially Australian or really big signifiers of the land, and for me those big budgie events are the peak of life in the outback,” he says. “They always result from a boom season – where there has been plenty of rain and resources, the right pattern of wet and dry to boost the numbers. So when that happens it’s almost like an expression of joy in the landscape.”
To witness Melopsittacus undulatus in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, flashing gold and green as they twist and turn in unison to create billowing patterns in the sky, is on the bucket list of many serious international birders. But so enthusiastically has the budgerigar been embraced overseas as a pet and exhibition bird that many of us, even here on home ground, may have lost sight of the fact it is indeed an Australian native.
On 14 August it will be 180 years to the day since the great 19th-century ornithologist John Gould, his wife, Elizabeth (known as Eliza), joined by two of their children and a servant, walked unsteadily down the gangplank of the barque Kinnear onto the London docks after four months at sea. Their baggage, including many dead bird and animal specimens, would be portered to Broad Street, Soho, later. But a pair of precious little parrots – almost the only living creatures to survive from the menagerie Gould collected in Australia – travelled to their home with them.
Eliza had a sentimental attachment to those particular birds because they had been hand-reared by naturalist Charles Coxen, the younger of two of her brothers who lived in Australia. And they gave her ambitious husband an entry to the drawing rooms of London’s highest society – a parrot pass key that enabled
the gardener’s son to ascend the English class system and rub shoulders with royalty.
The budgerigar was first scientifically described in 1805 by English zoologist Dr George Kearsly Shaw from a single specimen collected near Parramatta, New South Wales, in 1792. But it was Gould who gave the species its full Latin binominal name and dubbed budgerigars warbling grass parakeets.
Introducing them in his opus, The Birds of Australia, accompanied by a plate illustrated by Eliza, a talented artist, Gould enthused “this lovely little bird is pre-eminent for both beauty of plumage and elegance of form, which together with its extreme cheerfulness of disposition and sprightliness of manner, render it an especial favourite”. But even Gould was unprepared for how swiftly the cult of the budgerigar – or gidjirrigaa, as the bird was known by the Kamilaroi people of the NSW Liverpool Plains from where his specimens were taken from their nests – would take hold.
IN 1845 A PAIR was still rare enough to warrant presentation, like living jewels, to Queen Victoria. By the turn of the century gypsy street traders were using the birds to tell fortunes, having trained them to pluck punters’ horoscopes from a box for a penny a pop. Writing in the early 1860s, Gould observed “nearly every ship coming direct from the southern parts of
Australia has added to the numbers of this bird in England; and I have more than once seen two thousand at a time in a small room at a dealer’s in Wapping. The bird has also bred here as readily as the Canary.”
On the budgies’ home turf there was money to be made across the supply chain by anyone who could contrive or carry a cage – bird catcher, wildlife dealer, farmer, innkeeper, sailor, even the lowliest steerage passenger. Being close to both the arid interior and Murray River breeding grounds favoured by the green-and-gold parrots, Adelaide became the gateway for much of the world’s breeding stock.
The trade escalated with the advent of faster steamers. The steamship Souchays, for example, returned to England in 1867 laden with copper, wool, flour and 15,000 pairs of budgies, or, as they were then commonly known, shell parrots. The same year, Lycurgus Underdown, publican of the Hindmarsh Hotel in central Adelaide, amassed a huge stock of birds including more than 35,000 budgies, which he kept in cages behind the pub and advertised to ships’ captains.
But the top cocky of the budgie business was one John Foglia. The son of a Swiss-Italian silk-making family, Foglia established a successful native fauna export business in Adelaide after migrating to South Australia in his 20s. Even though the retail price for landed birds had dropped from £5 a pair in 1855 (equivalent to
$780 today) to 8 shillings ($62 today) by 1881, demand remained high, as Foglia found. On one occasion he sold 16,000 budgerigars to a single dealer, observing “it took three of us three days from 7 o’clock in the morning to 7 o’clock at night to count them”. Between 1885 and 1909 Foglia shipped, by his own estimate, an average of 40,000 birds a year, the overwhelming majority of which were budgies.
The birds that survived the sea voyage packed tight in tiered, wire-fronted cages to be cooed at in cooler climes were in some respect the lucky ones. Parrot pie was still on the colonial menu, and, as late as 1882, the SA Gun Club was recorded as substituting budgies for pigeons when they were “not up to mark” on its shooting ground at the Morphettville Racecourse. But the open season on budgies was about to be brought to an end by one of the world’s fledgling conservation movements.
In many ways demand for budgies was a by-product of a general Victorian-era frenzy for feathers that saw birds simultaneously admired, hunted, plucked and stuffed en masse in the name of fashion. One of the more modest examples of the “murderous millinery” period is an 1890 silk, lace and velvet bonnet topped with three dead budgies and held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection (see above right).
Growing outrage over the feather trade, which saw more than 1.5 million pounds (680 tonnes) of plumage go through London’s Mincing Lane auction houses annually, crystallised as more and more bird species were pushed to the brink.
In 1894 the first Australian branch of the Society for the Protection of Birds was formed in Adelaide and included a good number of influential local matrons who, in accordance with the rules of the organisation, eschewed the wearing of feathers.
IN 1897 THE SOCIETY made an impassioned plea for bird welfare in a deputation to the state government that included in its case “budgerigars taken to England by the masters of ships …the birds were often crushed in a small space, where large numbers of them died on the voyage”.
These early animal rights campaigners’ efforts were rewarded with the introduction of the Birds Protection Act 1900 (SA), which, for the first time, offered the budgie some safety for at least part of the year. The introduction of a closed season in SA, which prohibited the trapping and exporting of budgies between 1 July and 12 January, had a significant impact on the trade.
Incredibly, the wholesale capture of these hardy little birds for decades hardly seemed to have made a dent on their wild population. One of the great strengths of the species is its ability to breed very quickly, with populations exploding into millions in good times and plummeting in the bad.
So it was, in January 1932, when a heatwave gripped Central Australia with temperatures averaging from 46.70C to 520C for 16 successive days. At Paratoo, about three and a half hours north of Adelaide, witnesses reported how budgies escaping the ferocious heat darkened the sky from 5am to 8am as they passed overhead at an estimated rate of 1–10 million every 10 minutes.
Millions more didn’t make it. At Kokatha Station, one of the westernmost homesteads in SA, it was a scene of devastation, with 5 tonnes of parrots, drowned by the weight of waves of desperate new arrivals, removed from a single dam.
Today the budgie remains the quintessential Australian bird in the wild while at the same time retaining its perch as the planet’s most popular pet bird and most competitively exhibited avian species. Adaptable, intelligent and hardy, it had obvious
Demand for budgies was a by-product of a general Victorian-era frenzy for feathers.