Birding in the big smoke

There was a time when going to the big smoke meant visiting a city. Now it means going to south-east Asia during the dry season. Indonesia has really reset the bar when it comes to smoke generation. This year more than 100,000 fires have been illegally set to clear the vegetation to make way for plantations. Many of those fires have been lit on peat soils, and don’t go out until the wet season arrives. My wife and I flew to Singapore in mid-October. We crossed the Australian coast for the last time around Darwin. The atmosphere was clear to around about Suliwesi and then the smoke started. You could look down and see the smoke from individual fires coming together to form a continuous miasma that covered the earth for over 1000 kilometres. At times it rose up to the cruising level of the plane (11,000 metres). It was a depressing sight. While not all days were bad, the smoke was a constant companion while we were in Singapore, Malaysia and the adjacent seas. On one day in the Java Sea, the smoke was so thick that you could barely see 100 metres (the ship was sounding its foghorn during the day) and I stayed inside to spare my lungs. I don’t know how migratory birds that navigate using the sun or stars cope, as there was no way of seeing the sky. One morning we found an Oriental Scops Owl roosting in between the steps on the upper deck – it had come aboard the ship some time during the night between Langkawi and Penang. It may have been lost. Overall, I see the situation in Indonesia as a case of ecocide (perhaps future generations will see that as the crime of the century). Huge amounts of biodiversity has been destroyed and land degraded. Tens of millions of people have been smoke affected, and the fires have put over a gigatonne of carbon into the atmosphere. I think the people of Darwin are lucky that the prevailing winds don’t bring the smoke to them. What I’m not sure about, is the extent to which the smoke is affecting the migration of birds in the area. Are we getting more birds turning up at the vagrant traps (e.g. Christmas & Cocos-Keeling Islands and Ashmore Reef) because of the smoke? Are there many shorebirds travelling through the East Asia Flyway that come through SE Asia during September-October? Anyhow, on the bird front, the consistent city species were sparrows, mynahs, swifts/swallows and crows. I didn’t see one gull, (House Crows sound like gulls) had one glimpse of a tern at Lombok and only saw 2 (Lesser Whistling) ducks while in SE Asia. Of the course, the first bird I saw on arrival at Fremantle was a Silver gull … In summary, I wouldn’t travel to the smoke affected parts of SE Asia during the burning season. It may or may not affect the behaviour of the birds, but it does affect visibility and the quality of distant photographs. It is also unhealthy to breathe and depressing to be out in. Hopefully change will take place in Indonesia and the situation will not be so bad in future years. Regards, Laurie.