The little black cormorants were riding the surf. Strange to see them behaving in such a way. Usually they sit low on calm, open waters but on this spring morning they appeared a mirror image of the human surfers catching the waves all around them.
Although at first I thought the cormorants were merely at play like the surfers at Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, I soon realised there was method in their spring madness. As the waves swept towards them, the cormorants suddenly dived under their foaming crests, emerging on the other side, triumphant, with wriggling silver fish in their beaks.
I had travelled to Queensland, binoculars at the ready, in search of exotic tropical bird species at the end of the Tasmanian winter and here I was observing birds I commonly see at home in Tasmania. A bit of spring madness also affecting me, no doubt. Bird-watching, though, represents far more than merely ticking off species on a life-list of birds spotted. The cormorants were drawing me into their world and my birding experience was to be richer for it.
Later in the day I entered their waterworld myself, between the lifeguard flags on a stretch of ocean far safer than that occupied by the surfers and the surfing cormorants. With the warm Pacific Ocean swirling around my body I could see exactly what the cormorants were fishing for. A sand whiting cruised the shallows just beyond the wave break, corrugations of rippled sand a backdrop to the fish’s sleek, streamlined outline.
On an inland lagoon a little later I saw the little cormorants again. This time these second smallest of the family – as sleek as the sand whitings – were joined by bigger and more chunky pied cormorants.
The musical call of the pied currawong – the only one of the three currawong species not found in Tasmania – eventually drew me back to tropical woodland at the end of Hasting Street, the main drag that runs through Noosa Heads.
I didn’t even have to venture into the woods to see birds. Brush turkeys – the males with yellow and orange wattles hanging like necklaces around their necks – patrolled the streets, and above me in the clustered, thick-leaved street trees figbirds bombarded passers-by with half-eaten fruit. Among the trees in the woodland itself, a song symbolic of Australia’s tropical rainforest rang out, that of the whipbird.
I might have been excited by the whipbirds, but the beach and the possible sighting again of the cormorants in the surf called, and I decided to delay going in search of the bird making the remarkable noise which really does sound like someone cracking a whip with great force.
Crossing in the direction of the beach as the sun began to set, I didn’t see cormorants this time, but the sea delivered more of its treasures. A pod of dolphins frolicked just off-shore and beyond them the spout and curved shape of a humpback whale pierced the rippled skin of the ocean, heading south for the summer.