To use the extensive lexicon of the fanatical birdwatchers, the twitchers, I “dipped out” on one of the rarest birds to be seen in Tasmania in recent years. To make matters worse, the rarity from Eurasia, the grey wagtail turned up at my local birdwatching spot, the Waterworks Reserve.
I was told later that it was a “crippler”, another twitcher term for a bird of stunning beauty which hangs around to be observed and photographed.
I’m far from a “dude” in these matters (a dude is an amateur birder who gets in the way of the expert twitchers) but I certainly appeared so among some of the birders who had travelled from the mainland to spot the wagtail. They were still hanging around a few days after the initial sighting in the hope of getting better pictures.
I was particularly annoyed at missing the bird because I had actually been in the reserve on the morning of its first sighting. As I led a bird walk, I saw in the distance a party of birders at the edge of the southern-most reservoir. I could see them swinging cameras and binoculars and thought they were merely looking for the Tasmanian endemic species that can be seen in the reserve, all of the 12 except for the forty-spotted pardalote.
If I had known the birders’ target I would have deserted my party, and left them to their own devices.
Over succeeding days there were more than a few birders prepared to commit the cardinal sin of twitchers: to “grip” or boast about seeing a rare bird that another birder has missed out on. And to show me pictures of the actual bird, one showing it sitting in bright sunlight on top of the sandstone culvert that directs the Sandy Bay Rivulet around the twin reservoirs.
The grey wagtail, I gather, certainly was a crippler. I know the bird well from my native Britain and I would have loved to acquaint myself again with its beauty. It has a plumage which mixes a slate-grey back with a bright yellow underside. As its common name suggests, it also has a long tail which it wags, a little like the willy wagtail of the Australian mainland although the similarly-sized birds are unrelated.
The rare sightings so treasured by twitchers for their life-lists of birds spotted usually comprise migratory birds which lost their way. As demonstrated by the grey wagtail, they can turn up at opposite ends of the earth. The grey wagtails of Europe migrate to Africa and those of the Asian regions of Russia, to south-east Asia. It is likely the bird at the Waterworks was born in Siberia, and it is believed to be only the second spotted in Tasmania.
I might have missed the wagtail but it could have been worse. As I hunted for the bird days later I was joined by a birder who had arrived from Melbourne – and paid full fare to make a late booking.