Stercorarius parasiticus
Port Phillip
Bay is huge. With an area of nearly 2000 square kilometres and a
circumference of around 260 kilometres, it’s large enough to accommodate two
sizeable cities on its shore: Melbourne, with a
population of four million people, and Geelong,
home to nearly one-hundred and eighty thousand.
Yet the size of the Bay is
deceptive: despite its breadth it’s never deeper than twenty-four metres; much
of it averages only eight metres deep. The Yarra and Werribee
Rivers flow into Port
Phillip Bay; they flow, too, through
the Bay, and the meandering submarine passages of the rivers create shipping
channels for vessels coming in and out of the Bay. Around the ancient river
beds the Bay is shallow, and that shallowness makes it unusually susceptible to
drying out: research suggests that the Bay has dried out and refilled several
times in the last ten thousand years.
The most recent of drying these
events, which took place perhaps as recently as one-thousand years ago, may
have been due to a sandbar blocking the Bay’s sea entrance. That entrance, between Point Nepean on the
eastern Mornington Peninsula and Point Lonsdale on the western Bellarine Peninsula, is only 3.2 kilometres wide;
this passage of water is so treacherous that it’s known simply as the Rip.
The same sands that once rose up
to block the Rip and seal off the Bay emerge from the waterline about eight
kilometres east of Queenscliff to form the Mud Islands. The islands are poorly named, not just
because they’re made of sand and not mud, but because – in the manner of
Australian landmarks – the name makes them sound desultory, despairing, tossed
off and temporary. The Mud Islands are
ephemeral, they shift and slide in shape and geography as the tides and the
winds adjust the sand, but in essence they are permanent: a circle of three
islands, with a circumference of five and a half kilometres, enclosing a
central lagoon. Temperate Victoria’s own tropical
atoll.
The Mud Islands
are invisible until you’re almost alongside them. They rise only a metre above the waterline;
the sea around them is so shallow, sometimes only a foot deep, that no vessel
greater than a small-drafted speedboat can come near them. Landing on the islands means dropping anchor
offshore and wading in. Once on the
islands you’re at the mercy of the Bay and its infamously fickle weather: there
is no shelter out there, all the vegetation is hardy stunted coastal shrubbery that
in most places barely reaches your knees.
The only canopy is the sky.
But the Mud Islands
are extraordinary, because what’s out there are birds. Thousands of them, in ever-changing
congregations: Terns (Sternidae)
crowding the beaches with nests at the turn of each year; Black Swans (Cygnus
atratus) in their hundreds feeding in the seagrass beds off the islands’
northern perimeter, the towers of Melbourne just visible behind them; Swamp
Harriers (Circus approximans) quartering the air above the islands;
Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) and White Ibises (Threskiornis moluccus)
thronging the edges of the lagoon; and in the lagoon itself, in enormous
numbers every summer, small birds at the edges and their larger, longer-legged
cousins in the deeps, the Charadriiformes
– the migratory waders.
More than any other group of
birds, the names of waders evoke just how deeply ingrained is our fascination
with birds: Knots; Godwits; Greenshanks; Stints; Snipes; Sandpipers;
Sanderlings; Curlews. They’re ancient names: they speak of ancient people in
the bleak landscapes of seabound northern Europe
anticipating the annual bounty of these great travellers, which fly in their
millions from the southern to the northern hemisphere and back again every year. The Aboriginal people who lived around Port
Phillip Bay must have had names for them, too – and it’s pleasing to imagine
these birds, which live dual lives at each end of the planet, moulting from
their breeding finery in the northern summer to their drab off-season plumage
for their southern hemisphere retreat, passing also from one language into
another as they fly. The Knot gets its
English name from Canute, or Cnut, the tenth-century king of northern Europe, who is said to have commanded the tide to stop
rising. The Knot, like all its kin,
feeds at the edge of the sea; it parts the tide with its beak as it forages for
tiny invertebrates in the mud.
This information was imparted to
me by the guide who led me and twenty or so other people on a tour of the Mud Islands
in the middle of February. Sturdy and
jovial, she’d been to the islands many times before and displayed an
astonishing facility for bird identification that left me embarrassed. With my cheap pocket-sized binoculars I was
by far the least equipped of the whole tour group; whenever our guide set up her
telescope, carried on her shoulder all the way around the islands, I was the
first to line up for a view. Truth be
told I couldn’t tell one species of wader from another except by size, but I
didn’t mind: I was happy just to be told what I was looking at, and to know
that after twenty years of yearning for these birds I was finally gazing upon
them.
We lunched among them. Turning inland towards the lagoon we sat upon
something like a meadow, what passed for a meadow on that remote sea-shaped
landmass, and we unwrapped our sandwiches or rolls or whatever we’d brought
along. Tiny Red-necked Stints (Calidris
ruficollis), all red long since vanished from them, pattered along the
lagoon’s shore. Bar-tailed Godwits (Limosa
lapponica), huge beside the other birds, probed the deeper water
one-hundred metres out. Right beside our
picnic spot Curlew Sandpipers (Calidris ferruginea), long-necked and
elegant, dabbled in tiny ponds set amid the heath. The activity of the birds was endless: no
basking in the midday sun for them, no sleeping through the heat. No more than a month after we visited their
islands they’d open their wings again and turn north-east, following the coast
and then the open sea all the way back to vast summer swamps of the Arctic,
there to breed and raise a new generation of migrants. It’s an enormous flight and it requires
enormous amounts of food to fuel it.
Even when we finished lunch and
crossed the lagoon, wading past the waders, they broke at the last possible
instant: they watched us warily as birds do but they allowed us to approach
more closely than most birds would.
Perhaps every second counts when you’re feeding to fly the length of the
world. In the distance a great cloud of
White Ibises lifted into the sky, and beyond them, high above, approaching the
island on broad wings spread over the bay, we saw a young White-bellied Sea
Eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster), speckled and brown in its juvenile
plumage. The sands around the lagoon
were scattered with the remains of long-dead ibises, bones and feathers and
briny stink.
We completed our circuit of the
island quickly; we arrived back at our starting point half an hour before the
boat was due to return. The company that
organises the tours runs them once a month throughout summer; the previous
month, our guide told us, the beach upon which we landed had been filled with
thousands of Crested Terns (Thalasseus
bergii), each pair with a near full-grown chick. The beach was empty now, with no sign that
such a hatchery had so recently existed.
Walking across the sand was quick and easy.
Travelling back across the Bay to
Queenscliff was easy, too, when the boat came.
We sat and did nothing and in twenty minutes we were back. Yet that ease was deceptive: when the boat
came we watched from the beach as the men piloting it ran out two anchors to
secure it in the undulating water; then we had to wade out to it one by one and
clamber up the ladder and into our seats; don our lifejackets, ensuring they
were properly fastened; try not to move too much as the small boat rocked from
side to side. Once the anchors were up
we turned around sharply and raced back towards Queenscliff, our ears full of
the roar of the engine and our faces splashed by the salt-water chopping and
sluicing up over the sides of the boat. Travelling the nine kilometres between
the Mud Islands and Queenscliff might have been
conveniently managed but it was nonetheless a cumbersome affair, an awkward and
unnatural movement across an alien environment.
Our small boat smacked the water, jolting us with every wave, tracing a
hectic and jerking line across the Bay.
When, midway through our journey, a dark gull-like bird briefly flew
parallel to us and just out of reach, its ease of movement, wings beating at
the air like oars, brought into relief the absurdity of our quest to be among
the birds.
We idolise birds for their
flight; it sends us into raptures. Even
as we recognise how unlike us they are, we envy them. I visited the Mud Islands
because I’m earth-bound. Having become
accustomed to travelling overseas every few years I now find myself, after a
period of financial uncertainty and employed in a low-paying job, unable to
afford to fly anywhere. I live month to
month, paycheque to paycheque. Migratory
birds accumulate fat before their great flights; humans save up money in order
to fly, but I cannot do so at this moment in my life. So instead this year I’m staying closer to
home, to see the places I’ve previously ignored for their proximity. I’ve been living in Victoria for ten years now; I’m finally
getting around to visiting it.
From the boat, approaching
Queenscliff, our guide immediately and uncannily identified the dark bird at
our shoulder, just as she had been doing all day. It was an Arctic Jaeger, she announced – a
small species of Skua, a piratical group of birds who make their living by forcing
other seabirds to relinquish their food.
“Arctic Jaeger” is an old name for the bird: nowadays it’s more properly
called the Arctic Skua or the Parasitic Jaeger.
But bird people hold sentimentally to the old names: I still call
Fairy-wrens (Maluridae) “Blue-wrens”,
and our guide named the bird that briefly joined us as an Arctic Jaeger, so an
Arctic Jaeger it was.
It had bred in the northern
summer, six months before we saw it. As
the early chill of the Arctic autumn had begun to grow, the Jaeger had opened
its sharp wings and turned south. It had
crossed the equator some time in September, flying down Australia’s east coast, taking
shelter in bays, always looking for other birds returning from a feed. It had chased and harassed numerous other
birds – gulls, terns – until they’d dropped or disgorged the food they were
carrying. It had seen many boats, and on
one warm fine day it had, briefly, flown alongside one, paying it no particular
heed, at the edge of a great bay, from where it could see through a narrow gap
in the land the wild sea beyond.
Like so many of the birds I’d
seen that day, the Jaeger would soon be going north again, flying the many
thousands of kilometres back to the Arctic.
The journey is not without danger and nor is it without cost; yet
millions of birds the world over do it every year, and have been doing so for
uncountable generations. Measured
against that scale of life the impression made by one dark bird on one happily
wind-blown human is nothing at all; yet it’s the only metric I have by which to
measure the experience. When I saw the
Jaeger – and more so, when I heard our guide name its species – a thin, bright
line was traced for me half way across the world, from the high Arctic to
southern Australia. I’ve been to the Arctic
twice, once ten years ago by myself on money borrowed off a credit card, and
once four years ago with my father on a trip he paid for and for which I always
intended to reimburse him but have never been able to. The Arctic is vast and to describe it as a
single place is absurd – the Arctic I know, inland, among hills and valleys and
fresh water, is radically different from the Arctic known to the Jaeger and its
migratory fellows – yet there is a connection, for in our naming we have made
it so. The Arctic is the Arctic, and increasingly I feel its pull on me, as if I
need to return to it every few years.
In all likelihood I won’t get to
go back there for many years yet. I’ll
have to hold tight to my memories of its silence, its crisp air, its
wildlife. But it’s a comfort to know
that it comes on feathers to visit the part of the world I live in, every year;
it’s good to know that I can travel only a few hours from home, and by proxy
find myself transported to the planet’s highest latitudes. The birds are strong enough to fly that great
distance, there and back, every year – to carry me with them is not so great an
ask.
Image sourced and adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/
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