Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country

By CSIRO PUBLISHING

In Boom and Bust, the authors draw on the natural history of Australia's charismatic birds to explore the relations between fauna, people and environment in a continent where variability is 'normal' and rainfall patterns not always seasonal. They consider changing ideas about deserts and how these have helped us understand birds and their behaviour in this driest of continents.

The book describes the responses of animals and plants to environmental variability and stress. It is also a cultural concept, when it is used to capture the patterns of change wrought by humans in Australia, where landscapes began to become cultural about 55,000 years ago as ecosystems responded to Aboriginal management. In 1788, the British settlement brought, almost simultaneously, both agricultural and industrial revolutions to a land previously managed by fire for hunting. How have birds responded to this second dramatic invasion?

Boom and Bust is also a tool for understanding global change. How can Australians in the 21st century better understand how to continue to live in this land as its conditions are still dynamically unfolding in response to the major anthropogenic changes to the whole Earth system?

This interdisciplinary collection is written in a straightforward and accessible style. Many of the writers are practising field specialists, and have woven their personal field work into the stories they tell about the birds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Mar 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9780643098671

Book preview

BOOM & BUST

BIRD STORIES FOR A DRY COUNTRY

Libby Robin • Robert Heinsohn • Leo Joseph

 [EDITORS]

© in this edition CSIRO 2009

Copyright in the individual contributions is retained by the authors.

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Boom and bust : bird stories for a dry country / editors

Libby Robin, Robert Heinsohn, Leo Joseph.

9780643096066 (hbk.)

Includes index.

Bibliography.

Birds – Behavior – Australia.

Birds – Effect of drought on – Australia.

Nature – Effect of human beings on.

Robin, Libby, 1956–

Heinsohn, Robert.

Joseph, Leo.

598.0994

Published by

CSIRO PUBLISHING

150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139)

Collingwood VIC 3066

Australia

Front cover: Melopsittacus undulatus. From John Gould’s The Birds of Australia. Original copy owned by the National Library of Australia. Call number RARE RBN ef F4773.

Back cover: Masked woodswallows. From John Gould’s The Birds of Australia.

Set in 10.5/16 Adobe ITC New Baskerville and Optima

Edited by Janet Walker

Cover and text design by James Kelly

Typeset by Desktop Concepts Pty Ltd, Melbourne

Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

All illustrations are taken from John Gould’s The Birds of Australia, except for the illustration on page 147 which is reproduced courtesy of Frank Knight. The authors thank Andrew Isles for help sourcing the illustrations.

CSIRO PUBLISHING publishes and distributes scientific, technical and health science books, magazines and journals from Australia to a worldwide audience and conducts these activities autonomously from the research activities of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO.

FOREWORD

It is with great pleasure that I recommend this book to you. It brings together some great writing by historians, ecologists, archaeologists, ornithologists and anthropologists.

Each writer begins with the story of a bird and considers in different ways how it has adapted to its dry environment. People have changed the environment in Australia, dramatically – twice – through two great human invasions, as the environmental historian George Seddon said. The first people arrived some 55 000 years ago and spread throughout the land. Then there was the second invasion, by Europeans, in 1788. This quickly brought agricultural and industrial revolutions to a land that had been previously managed by fire for hunting. The environment changed irreversibly, and birds and other animals, plants and people have all had to adapt to live with these changes. These stories interweave the natural and cultural histories of the birds, and also consider the ways in which people have understood natural history in this place that so often breaks the rules developed by Western science for environments in the northern hemisphere.

Australia has not ranked well in terms of its habitat and biotic losses since Europeans arrived. The situation is grave, but not all stories are about ‘bust’. Some bird species are well adapted to change. These stories of fauna, people and environment show how birds (and people) can adapt to change and variability in rainfall over shorter and longer timescales.

The National Museum of Australia has had a long interest in Australia’s dry lands and deserts. It developed a major exhibition, Extremes, that compared the people and environments of deserts in Australia and other southern deserts in Chile, Argentina and Southern Africa. The book, 23 Degrees South: Archaeology and Environmental History of the Southern Deserts, edited by Mike Smith and Paul Hesse, is another important example of the Museum’s ongoing research in desert archaeology and environmental history. Dr Mike Smith, now a Senior Fellow in the Museum’s Centre for Historical Research, is one of Australia’s leading desert archaeologists, and also a key contributor to this book.

Much of the work of the National Museum of Australia is about telling stories: through the objects in our collections, through our exhibitions and through our research and writing. The Museum has been an enthusiastic supporter of this book from its inception, because of the potential of such stories to helping us understand ourselves as well as our birds and the dry continent we call our home.

At the National Museum of Australia we of course take a particular interest in all things Australian. But perhaps the most important duty of a good national museum is to be conscious of the role of Australia in the world. In a time of global climate change, when the whole planet is grappling with environmental variability and uncertainty, stories of people and environment in Australia can offer parables for a world where global climate change has added great variability and uncertainty to many environments.

Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country will appeal to bird lovers, and also to all who are concerned about how people can adapt to changing environments everywhere.

Craddock Morton

Director

National Museum of Australia

Canberra

August 2008

CONTENTS

Foreword

 Contributors

1       Introduction: boom and bust

Libby Robin and Mike Smith

2       The boom and bust desert world: a bird’s eye view

Libby Robin and Leo Joseph

3       Barcoo bantam: ‘It runs like hell!’

Graham Pizzey

4       Rain and grass: lessons in how to be a zebra finch

Steve Morton

5       Grey teal: survivors in a changing world

David Roshier

6       Australian pelican: flexible responses to uncertainty

Julian Reid

7       Night parrots: fugitives of the inland

Penny Olsen

8       Genyornis: last of the dromornithids

Mike Smith

9       Rainbirds: organising the country

Deborah Bird Rose

10     Woodswallows: a longer term, evolutionary view of boom and bust

Leo Joseph

11     White-winged choughs: the social consequences of boom and bust

Robert Heinsohn

12     Emu: national symbols and ecological limits

Libby Robin

Select bibliography

Index

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Heinsohn is Associate Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University where his work focuses on the evolutionary ecology and conservation biology of birds. He has worked extensively on the behaviour of cooperatively breeding birds in Australia’s southeast woodlands, and on eclectus parrots and palm cockatoos on Cape York Peninsula and in New Guinea.

Leo Joseph is Director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra. With an emphasis on the study of Australian birds in the research environment of a modern museum collection, his work integrates evolutionary history and present-day ecology. The aim of this work is to contribute to understanding of bird evolution. His roots are in natural history, especially in Australia’s arid and semi-arid country.

Steve Morton is an animal ecologist who is especially interested in Australian deserts. Most of his career has been spent with CSIRO, first in Alice Springs and subsequently in Canberra. He is a member of CSIRO’s Executive and presently divides his time between Canberra, Melbourne and Alice Springs when possible.

Penny Olsen is a research scientist based in the School of Botany and Zoology at the Australian National University. Her most recent book, Glimpses of Paradise: The Quest for the Beautiful Parrakeet, was published by the National Library of Australia in 2007 and won a Whitley Award in 2008. She edits Wingspan, the membership magazine of Birds Australia.

Graham Pizzey AM (1930–2001) was one of Australia’s great bird observers, nature writers and conservationists. His series of Field Guides to Australian Birds began in 1965 with a commission from William Collins, the publisher of the Peterson guides to North America and elsewhere. The field guides continued to be revised until his death, the last being undertaken in partnership with CSIRO artist, Frank Knight. Pizzey was famous for a writing style that conveyed with immediacy the jizz (the appearance and demeanour) of every Australian species of bird. His descriptions of the ‘voice’ of the birds are invaluable in the field.

Julian Reid is a biologist with expertise in avian and community ecology and a particular interest in Australian deserts. He divides his time between the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University and CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

Libby Robin is a historian of ideas at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University and the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia. Her most recent book, How a Continent Created a Nation (UNSW Press), won the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Australian History in 2007.

Deborah Bird Rose is Professor, Social Inclusion, at Macquarie University, where her work focuses on entwined social and ecological justice. She has carried out extensive research with Aboriginal people in Australia, and is currently working on a project on ‘love and extinction’. Her most recent solo book is Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004).

David Roshier is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University, Albury. He has broad interests in dispersal and movement ecology of birds, mostly in arid ecosystems. Currently, his research is focused on movement and migration of waterbirds in Australia and New Guinea.

Mike Smith, an archaeologist, is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia. He has worked extensively across the Australian desert attempting to piece together the human and environmental histories of this fascinating region. In 2006 he was awarded the Rhys Jones Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Archaeology.

INTRODUCTION:

BOOM AND BUST

Libby Robin and Mike Smith

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me!

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us,

We see the cattle die -

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady, soaking rain.

Dorothea MacKellar (1904) – ‘My Country’ (verses 2 and 4)¹

Not everyone shares Dorothea MacKellar’s delight in the contrasting beauty and terror of the ‘wide brown land’ of Australia. Droughts and flooding rains each bring their own difficulties, but the animals that have lived in this land over many years have developed impressive adaptations to cope with scarcity and plenty. The challenge for humans and animals alike in a land of environmental variability is uncertainty. When will those ‘grey clouds gather’ again? When will we ‘bless again / The drumming of an army,/ The steady, soaking rain’? The time between rains, ruled by ‘pitiless blue skies’, is a time for holding the nerve, of ecological stretch, and the irregular rains are at the core of a creative ecological pulse. ‘Boom and bust’ are the rhythms of Australia, so different from the regimented seasonality of northern Europe.

It has been difficult for European Australians with the expectation of regular cyclical seasons to find a sense of permanence, to be at home in a place where drought and plenty stalk each other in unpredictable ways. In 1884 George Roberts, mailman on the Birdsville Track, disappeared. His packhorse was recovered but the mailman was not found. As 400 mm of rain had fallen in the district, people assumed that he had been drowned in the floods. But when his desiccated body was found on stony country near Haddon the following year, local people had to revise their opinion: he had died of thirst.²

This book uses a range of individual bird species as a lens for understanding environmental variability in Australia. It is more than a ‘natural history’; we have chosen stories that illustrate how natural systems play out under human-induced change and in some cases how humans have reacted to such events. Boom and bust is often a cyclical process for birds in the Australian environment. People and natural systems can both create booms and busts and human impacts can magnify or diminish natural patterns. People can interact with natural dynamics to constrain or amplify them in some way. Natural systems can also respond in unexpected ways. Sometimes change is irreversible. The story of biotic interactions with humans can only become more complicated as anthropogenic climate change alters rainfall patterns.

Australia has not ranked well in terms of its habitat and biotic losses since Europeans arrived. It has the doubtful honour of leading the world in mammalian extinctions, with some 30% of its endemic mammal species extinct since 1788. It also has the highest number of threatened species on the planet. Conditions on this continent are already more variable and uncertain than in the rest of the world. In Australia, places with limited water – not just the desert country, but also the productive temperate south – are all predicted to receive less rainfall in the future.³

The situation is grave, but history suggests that not all stories will be of ‘bust’. The concept of boom and bust enables us to talk about the outcomes of environmental change for some bird species, and provides a key to exploring the idea of adaptation. If we do not understand the underlying natural rhythms of this continent, we will not be able to manage anthropogenic change.

The evolutionary histories of Australian birds offer some insights into the natural dynamics of the continent. Europeans had to overcome expectations created by northern hemisphere conditions, particularly the idea that regular annual seasons are ‘normal’. In this context, the behaviour of birds adapted to Australian conditions has often been deemed ‘exceptional’ because it challenged established theories developed under European and Northern American conditions. A northern hemisphere perspective has sometimes made it difficult to observe the strategies of animals that live in landscapes ruled by variability and aseasonality.

The difficulty of predicting whether any given year will be a boom or a bust year has become part of national stereotypes. Australia is the ‘El Niño continent’; a landscape ‘where creeks run dry or ten feet high’.⁴ But uncertainty is also increasingly a global phenomenon, and global climate change is already making living with uncertain seasons and extreme weather events more common, even in places where a well-ordered seasonality has been taken for granted in the past. In this book we draw on the natural history of Australia’s birds to explore the relations between fauna, people and environment in a continent where variability is normal and rainfall patterns do not follow regular seasons. It is a book that is aimed at Australian readers, but ideas about coping with boom and bust are also pertinent to other continents and increasingly relevant on the global scale.

Endnotes

---

1     MacKellar D (1904) My Country (poem). Republished with decorations and illustrations by JJ Hilder (1971) Angus & Robertson: Sydney.

2     This story is told in Tolcher HM (1986) Drought or Deluge: Man in the Cooper’s Creek Region. Melbourne University Press: Carlton South, p. 175.

3     Lindenmayer D and Burgman M (2005) Practical Conservation Biology. CSIRO Publishing: Melbourne, pp. 1–6.

4     This phrase appears in scientific as well as popular literature: Friedel MH, Foran BD and Stafford Smith DM (1990) Where the creeks run dry or ten feet high: pastoral management in arid Australia. In Australian Ecosystems: 200 Years of Utilisation, Degradation and Reconstruction. (Eds. DA Saunders, AJM Hopkins and RA How) pp. 185–94. Surrey Beatty and Sons: Chipping Norton, NSW.

THE BOOM AND BUST DESERT WORLD: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

Libby Robin and Leo Joseph

Picture the scene: mid-afternoon in the stony downs country of inland eastern Australia, somewhere near the border between South Australia and Queensland. It is a day so hot that all one can see are shimmering heat mirages rising from the ground. From nowhere, two four-wheel drive vehicles emerge. They stop at a dry creek bed framed by mineritchie, a small tree with bark that is made up of remarkably backward curving rough fibres of a burnt amber, an almost wine-red colour. The vehicles stop in the sparse shade the mineritchies provide and a tired-looking group of academics researching a book on boom and bust steps out of the vehicles.

A few minutes later, after grumbling about the failed air conditioning units in their vehicles, one of them speaks in excited, hushed tones. He is an ornithologist who, despite the self-inflicted trauma of having qualified for an academic career in ornithology, still enjoys finding interesting birds. He draws everybody’s attention to a pair of Bourke’s parrots (Neopsephotus bourkii) sitting quietly in a nearby mineritchie. Thinking that his companions could not fail to be enthralled by the gem of information he is about to impart, he points out to them that Bourke’s parrot is one of the more remarkable Australian parrots and that recently emerging DNA sequence data is showing that its closest living evolutionary relatives, apart from a handful of local species, appear to live well beyond Australia. A behavioural ecologist in the group says that that’s all very interesting but is wondering where the nearest water is, knowing that these birds like to drink in the half-light of dawn and dusk. Just as he is pondering what part of their annual reproductive cycle they may be in, if indeed they have annual cycles out here, the anthropologist in the group, an authority on Indigenous linguistics, recalls that Bourke’s parrot is known to the Pitjantjatjara people further west as ‘Wilyurukuruku’. The historian in the group looks beyond the birds to a dilapidated stock-yard several hundred metres away. Aloud, she muses about when it was in use and what put it out of business. Meanwhile the archaeologist in the group is engrossed in the sharply angled stone flakes at his feet, clearly the result of human craftsmanship, but for what purpose? The palaeontologist in the group has turned to face the other direction, where she has spotted a geological outcrop in the middle distance and is feeling a flutter of hope that it might have just the right sediments she has been looking for to search for bones of that fascinating extinct bird she’s been working on.

And so it goes. Just as different people can see wildly different things in one aspect of an Australian desert, so too the boom and bust phenomenon can awaken different interests in different people. In this book we will explore this generally and in this chapter we will explore it specifically in terms of desert birds.

The history of ideas about Australian semi-arid country and deserts and the birds that live there provides an important background to this book. The bird stories we have chosen illustrate the booms and busts of life in the arid zone, but they have also contributed to the way we think about deserts themselves. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of the relationship between ornithological ideas and our understanding of deserts. The first arid-zone bird ‘discoveries’ by Western science lacked the context of ongoing observation of desert country. As new agricultural and pastoral developments grew in semi-arid country after each of the World Wars, bird observers began to ask questions about how birds live in such country. In the post-war period, professional scientists turned their attention to desert country all over the world, and this brought the Australian desert into international focus. Since the 1970s, new ways of thinking about deserts have further shifted the critical questions of ornithology, and vice versa.

Arid-zone ornithology in the 19th century

Ornithology in Australia had a strong start with the 19th century work of John Gould and his extraordinary collectors, particularly John Gilbert. Gould’s Birds of Australia, published in fascicles between 1840 and 1848, quickly became the definitive work on the subject, and remained so for the rest of the 19th century. It is still regarded as an extremely important reference in the history of ornithology. Gould, Gilbert and other collectors travelled widely, sometimes well beyond the limits of European settlement which in the 1830s and 40s hugged the coastlines closely. Their travels usually began in the major ports: Swan River (Perth and Fremantle), Port Essington and the Cobourg Peninsula in the north, Port Jackson (Sydney) and Hobart Town. Adelaide, Melbourne and Moreton Bay (Brisbane) were also developing as centres and their hinterlands provided birds for the collections. Charles Sturt (1795–1869) named the Darling River in 1828 and ventured well into the interior of the continent in 1844–1846, while John McDouall Stuart (1815–1866) led various expeditions into central Australia the late 1850s, culminating in a transcontinental crossing from Adelaide to the Timor Sea in 1862. Although intrepid explorers such as Stuart commented on the movements of birds when travelling in the interior, their expeditions were not focused on collecting birds for science. Of course, some birds whose populations do breed in central Australian deserts were collected closer to ports and coastal areas generally right from the first years of settlement in the 18th century. Emus, pelicans and other waterbirds such as the grey teal that feature in this book, were well-known in the Gould era. Gould also described species from specimens of individual birds now known to be desert and semi-arid specialists, most notably the night parrot, which Penny Olsen discusses in Chapter 7, the malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata) and the flock bronzewing (Phaps histrionica).¹

New discoveries with new settlements: the early years

of the 20th century

As the semi-arid country fringing the interior was settled more intensively, particularly through soldier settlement schemes in the Western Australian wheat belt and the mallee country of South Australia and Victoria in the 1920s and later, arid-zone ornithology took its next steps. One of the bird mysteries solved during this period concerned the breeding patterns of the banded stilt (Cladorhynchus leucocephalus). By the end of the 19th century, ornithologists had regularly observed that breeding could occur over long periods in the tropics, but birds known from Australia’s temperate zones, including shorebirds like the banded stilt, were generally expected to be regular winter or spring breeders.² Banded stilts look and behave like most other shorebirds, foraging in shallows of salty lakes and periodically dipping and digging their long bills into the sands for invertebrate food. They often co-occur with other shorebirds. For example, they were noted by George Keartland alongside avocets (red-necked avocet Recurvirostra novaehollandiae) and black-winged stilts (Himnatopus himantopus leucocephalus) on the 1896–97 Calvert Expedition to the Kimberley, in north-western Australia, although they were better known by ornithologists in places like Rottnest Island near Perth and the coastal flats of South Australia near Adelaide.³ The