Living and Birding Gratitude: Great Grasswren Expedition: Part One

It was about a year ago when the IOC first gave the Rusty Grasswren full species status and renamed it the Opalton Grasswren. It had been a subspecies of the Striated Grasswren, and it was only to be found in the (well duh) Opalton area of western Queensland. I thought I’d be able to get up there in a couple of months as soon as that virus thing settled down. Little did I know how long that would take. There were a few trips planned that ended up cancelled. This autumn, I was finally able to make a solid plan for a trip up there with my buddy James. We were to leave the end of April and were going to be joined on the expedition by our friends, Alan Stringer and David Adam. It seemed like this time I was really going to go.

Once again James and I were Team Troopi. Alan and David in Alan’s Subaru Outback became Team Subi (pronounced ‘soo-bee’). I like that. We left on Wednesday 28 April and travelled north to our first over-night at Merriwagga, NSW. It was a very nice, old caravan park. I will return sometime. Next, we were planning to stay at a park just south of the Queensland border. We arrived there and none of us could receive any functional mobile signal, even though the WikiCamps app listed the park as having Telstra. We decided to move along to one of my favourite parks in Oz, the Warrego Riverside Tourist Park in Cunnamulla, QLD. I really do love that park.

Alan and David even picked up a lifer or two there. It is a great park for birders. Thanks to James, I even got a Lifer frog, the Red Tree Frog. Now I keep little lists of reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, but my main focus remains on birds. Speaking of birds, on the entire expedition Alan added 19 Lifers and David picked up seven. The birding around that caravan park really is excellent. David said he would like to come back and stay there for a few days. Everything about that park is first rate.

The next morning, we rolled along to Tambo, QLD and took rooms at a nice little motel with beautiful bottle trees around it. I wanted an easy, comfortable night’s sleep. We would be leaving very early and (we thought) going ‘straight’ over to the Opalton Bush Camp. We were soon to discover that Robert Shore had been correct in his warning that navigation devices are incorrect between Longreach and the bush camp. We wandered around for hours trying to find a route that went through.

However, at one point far down yet another track that did not lead to the seemingly mythical Opalton Road, we pulled into a nice little spot to discuss our options. Just in moments, David noticed a couple of Opalton Grasswrens! Yes! We were all quickly out of our vehicles and taking photos of the main target bird of the trip, and my only Lifer target of the expedition. We had accidentally found them where no one else had seen them before (that we know of anyway). I am not sure exactly where we were, but as best I know, the coordinates were: -23.4952161,142.8355741. Somewhere out there we also saw a group of babblers that turned out to be Hall’s Babblers! Those were a hoped-for target for James and the others as well.

We may have been on private land. There was a gate involved but it was not signed. We merely closed it, since it was closed when we had gotten to it. That is the rule out there. If it is closed, reclose it. If it is open, leave it open.

We rejoiced in the grasswrens, but we continued to try and find some route up to the bush camp. We never did. We decided to drive back to Longreach. We arrived there just before dark and stayed at a truly woebegone caravan park run by a literally loony anti-vaxxer lady. I did not have to talk with her. I just paid her and moved quickly along. David and Alan were not as lucky, and they got an earful about pig DNA, mutations and insane conspiracy talk. Later I said that at my age, almost any mutation would probably be an improvement.

The next morning, we drove north to Winton and came down to the Opalton Bush Camp (or Bush Park, it gets referred to as both). The road is unsealed and occasionally rough, but at least it exists. We arrived at the camp in the early arvo. We found a nice spot to set up next to a little one-room, green building that James and I called the “vampire house.” We had joked about there being vampires in Queensland. I mean, not really, but it was funny at the time. There are no vampires in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia or New South Wales. The jury is still out on the NT though. They are quite possibly up there as well as in Queensland.

We headed just across the track to bird an area recommended to us by several people who had been there recently. It was along the trail into Glenn’s house. He is basically the local of that area and a nice guy (and definitely not a vampire). James and I continued out to his place and had a short visit with him. When we returned, we discovered that David and Alan had found numerous Rufous-capped Emu-wrens. We marvelled and took photos. We had not yet seen the Opalton Grasswrens in their official area though.

We decided to try a spot five or so kilometres down the track to the west. We still did not find the grasswrens, but we did see a Spinifexbird. Yet another target for the guys. As the day faded, we headed back to our camp.

After one of the best night’s sleep that I had on the expedition, we went back across the track from camp again and quickly we were seeing those beautiful grasswrens. Several years ago, for various reasons, I stopped taking tonnes of bird photos. I used to occasionally shoot over a thousand in a day maybe eight or ten years ago. I took quite a few photos of the Opalton Grasswren and the Rufous-crowned EW, but certainly not a thousand. I am still not ‘about’ the photo, but I like them. It is a very personal and important choice for me, about me and how I enjoy birding. These are recording shots and memory shots. They are to supplement my words, not replace them. There are bird photographers. I know some brilliant ones. At this point, I am not a bird photographer. I am a birder and a writer that also likes to get a photo of a bird when he can.