A magpie-lark strutting about the walkways and car park of the marina at Prince of Wales Bay has created a stir in the twitcher-sphere.
The sighting in Derwent Park of the species, which is usually seen on the mainland, was first reported by the twitcher’s bible, the Eremaea birdline website, in January and again in person to me when Pieter van der Woude, who runs wildlife cruises to Bathurst Harbour and Port Davey, saw the bird late last month at his mooring at the marina.
A twitcher is a birder who goes to great lengths to record the sighting of birds, especially out of their home range, and although I don’t consider myself such a fanatic I couldn’t resist the temptation to drive out to Prince of Wales Bay for some twitching myself.
The magpie-lark is a favourite bird of mine and I always look for them when I go to Melbourne, where they are common in the open spaces of the city centre. And I listen for their tinny call when politicians are being interviewed outside Parliament in Canberra because magpie-larks can often be heard in the background, along with the screeching of rainbow lorikeets flying overhead.
The magpie-lark resembles the magpie, as its name suggests, but it is smaller and more dainty. The pied plumage is also more complex, layered in stripes, especially about the face.
I searched for the bird for a couple of hours but, needless to say, I drew a blank. On rare twitching forays I never get to see the birds being sought out. I have a twitcher’s curse.
It was the same late last year when a grey wagtail was spotted on my home patch, the Waterworks Reserve. Everyone seemed to spot the bird – even birders who had flown in from Victoria, to see a Eurasian bird rarely spotted in Australia, not just in Tasmania as in the magpie-lark’s case.
I might have missed out on the magpie-lark but there was solace in the fact that I would have been watching a bird that in all probability would be destined to have a lonely future.
In the days when I considered myself a twitcher – spotting the rarest bird ever seen in Britain, a golden-winged warbler from the United States – I always felt sorry for the birds that had somehow got their migratory wires crossed, heading off in the wrong direction for their great migratory journeys.
The magpie-lark is not known to be a long-distance migrant and I wonder about the circumstances of it crossing Bass Strait. Was it swept up in high winds near the coast, and just continued flying until it hit Tasmanian shores? Did it misread the stars, the position of the sun relative to the horizon, or the earth’s magnetic field, all aids to plot flights by migrating birds?
Such birds usually become stranded in foreign parts without any hope of getting home, and finding a mate.
The grey wagtail at the Waterworks Reserve though escaped this fate. It is believed to have been eaten by a feral cat.