Greetings,
On 31st January 2001, I did a short boat trip from Fortescue Bay to Hippolyte Rock (Tasmania) with a boat-owning friend who regularly goes on fishing trips past the edge of the continental shelf there.
I’d only recently arrived back in Australia after living o.s. for several years, and my head was full of middle eastern birds.
We cruised out to Hippolyte Rock, I think there was a combination of kids and grown-ups on board. I looked up and said “there’s a tropicbird!”. The boat owner, while not a birder, took an interest in things natural history, and had been telling me about all the many albatrosses they saw out at the edge of the shelf.
He had never seen a tropicbird before, didn’t recognise it. I had binoculars, saw the coral-red bill as clearly as anything and the long whitish tail-streamers.
I’m not proud of the fact that in my mind Red-tailed = red bill + red tail Red-billed = red bill + white tail White-tailed = yellowish bill + white tail was not as clearly cemented as it should have been at that moment.
In my flimsy defence, the tropicbird of the region I’d been inhabiting was the Red-billed, and although I’d not seen it in the flesh, it was the image in my field guides.
I seemed to remember that in parts of the country (i.e. Australia), tropicbirds were on the increase – Sugarloaf Rock near Cape Leeuwin, SW WA, I think is a case in point.
I’d never lived in Tasmania, but figured they must have been increasing down that way too. After everybody on board had had a look through my binoculars, the bird landed on a rock shelf 2/3 of the way up the rock – perhaps 100m up. I could still see it sitting on the ledge with its bright bill clearly visible.
We looked some more and went ashore.
After a few more birds at Fortescue Bay, including Strong-billed, Yellow-throated and Black-headed Honeyeater, we went back to Nubeena where my friend’s shack was.
I looked in my Australian field guide, and my heart simultaneously sank and leapt.
As an indication of the level of interest in natural history, there was at least one of Peter Harrison’s seabird guides on a shelf at the shack.
So, I looked at what reference material was around and kicked myself for not being more on top of the situation.
Anyway, there was no phone where we were staying, I didn’t have a mobile, and there probably wasn’t any reception anyway. And who would I have rung?
If it was Red-tailed Tropicbird, it would have been the third record or something for Tasmania. And it couldn’t have been Red-billed, because they don’t occur anywhere near Australia.
Eventually we were back in Hobart and I contacted whoever I could and finally got onto Tim Reid – but several days after the event. Tim was keen to go and look for it, but we didn’t get to do that until 9th February, 2001.
We didn’t see it.
When I was at Sugarloaf Rock, WA, a couple of years later, watching Red-tailed Tropicbirds flying around, I tried to convince myself that red tail-streamers can look white in the right light. At that stage, I more or less convinced myself that they could. But now…
I’ve still got some notes, written after the event, but they don’t include any smoking guns about the amount of barring on the back to support Red-billed vs Red-tailed.
It’s my best “one that got away story”, I think.
Hope the charter flight has better luck!
Cheers
Philip
*-*-*-*-*-*-* Philip Griffin philipgriffin@gmail.com ============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au
http://birding-aus.org ==============================
