149 Chasing Rarity
About this episode
Rarity can make a bird feel precious, but it can also change how we see everything else. Author and science journalist Justine Hausheer shares her thinking about common birds, endangered species and her book The Vanishing Wild.
Birds featured: Australasian Bittern, Golden-shouldered Parrot, Rainbow Lorikeet, Regent Honeyeater
Episode illustration: Regent Honeyeater
Justine Hausheer is an award-winning science writer and author. Her first book, The Vanishing Wild, explores the fight to save Australia's threatened wildlife. As a science writer for The Nature Conservancy, She’s followed logging elephants through Myanmar, surveyed for sea cucumbers in Manus, and waded into outback waterholes. Justine holds a master’s degree from New York University and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
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Kirsty Costa [00:00:00]
The guest for this episode is on Gubbi Gubbi Country in south-east Queensland. This Country spans the Sunshine Coast, Moreton Bay and the Gympie regions. And I'm currently on holiday on the Country of the Gunaikurnai people of East Gippsland. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to any First Nations person from around the world listening to this podcast.Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa, and here together we notice birds.
When someone visits Australia for the first time, they often see our birds with completely fresh eyes. Birds that many of us walk past every day suddenly become extraordinary again. Writer, science journalist and birder Justine Hausheer is here to help us experience this feeling. Justine lived in the United States before moving to Australia.
Justine Hausheer [00:01:05]
I think I've been interested in wildlife from as early as I can remember. I grew up in Florida in the United States, and our house backed onto a lake, and so we had things like armadillos, raccoons, snapping turtles, and dozens of bird species in the backyard. And so noticing them and observing them, that's just been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.It wasn't until my early 20s when I became what I would call a birder, or started considering myself a birder. At the time, I was living in New York City doing my master's degree in science journalism, and I was just miserable because I did not have easy access to nature, especially as a poor grad student. It's hard and expensive and time consuming to get out of the city.
So I signed up for a weekly guided bird walk in Central Park run by the Natural History Museum. And so every Thursday I got up before dawn, I got on the subway with my binoculars, and I took it north to the park.
The walk started during fall migration. So in the US we had these really distinct seasonal migratory pulses, one in spring, one in autumn, where you've got tremendous numbers of birds moving across the continent, some travelling distances from South America to the Canadian Arctic. And along the way they're stopping at key sites to rest and refuel.
And believe it or not, Central Park is one of those places. Right in the middle of the biggest cities in the world, this concrete jungle, is a fabulous birding hotspot. And I just fell in love immediately. Everything about birding appealed to me. Spending time outdoors, the fact that it's kind of like a scavenger hunt to see what you could find, and then a bit of a puzzle to figure out what you're looking at. And keeping lists. I am one of those people that does love a good list. So everything about it appealed to me, and I'd never looked back.
Kirsty Costa [00:02:52]
I was lucky enough to visit Central Park just before COVID, and I still remember being amazed by how much wildlife was packed into the middle of New York City.Justine Hausheer [00:03:02]
New York has such a robust birdwatching community, and I think because there are so many people in such a small space, you'll see things on Instagram where a Northern Saw-whet Owl, or I think the one I saw a couple of weeks ago was an American Woodcock, shows up. And it's just doing its thing in the foliage, and there are about 500 people staring at it because it's New York and you have so many birders.So yeah, it was a really interesting place to learn how to become a birder, and not what you would typically expect, especially as someone who grew up and spent a lot more of their life in more wild places. I do think it's a bit funny that I really became a birder in that really urban environment, because I was craving something and I just wasn't getting it, and I didn't know what it was.
Kirsty Costa [00:03:46]
And then Justine visited Australia, which is a very different birding experience to New York.Justine Hausheer [00:03:51]
My first visit to Australia was about a decade ago. It was before I moved here, and I came over for work a couple of times.The first time I was here, I arrived in Brisbane and I was with another colleague who's also a birder. Of course, we were wildly jetlagged and awake at two in the morning. So we got in a car and we drove down from the city down to Lamington National Park, to O'Reilly's. We got there at about dawn, and I have such a vivid memory of hobbling around the parking lot with only one shoe on because the trees were just dripping with birds. Parking lots - always the best birding.
It took us probably 45 minutes just to get our shoes on and our bags sorted to go for a hike, because the birds were so good. So some of the very first birds I saw in Australia were Regent Bowerbirds, Albert's Lyrebirds, Australian King-Parrots. It was so lucky.
The next day we were back in Brisbane and in between work meetings I went and walked around the City Botanic Gardens, right by the CBD. And I was just as gobsmacked by Blue-faced Honeyeaters, Brush-turkeys, Masked Lapwings, and it's Brisbane, so the ever-present ibis. And I just couldn't get over the fact that you had a rainbow-coloured parrot flying around the downtown of a major city. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
Kirsty Costa [00:05:02]
I love hearing international visitors talk about Australian birds because they remind us not to take them for granted. Rainbow Lorikeets, ibis, Blue-faced Honeyeaters - these are the birds that many Australians see almost every day. But to someone arriving from overseas, they can feel completely surreal. It's funny, isn't it? The birds that are most available to us can sometimes become the birds that we stop seeing properly.Justine Hausheer [00:05:28]
I think we're all guilty of ignoring or undervaluing the familiar. People are hardwired to like novelty. Something new lights up our little brain's reward centres with pleasure, and that affects how we interact with nature.So even if you're not a mad keen twitcher that's obsessed over your life list, birders like new species. And I don't think that's limited to birders. When I have friends and family visiting from the US, they lose their minds when they see a kangaroo. But I also can't tell you the number of times that Australians have come up to me to talk about how, when they went to America, the highlight of their trip was seeing a squirrel. And that's like saying the highlight of your trip was seeing a pigeon. It's like, what are you talking about?
So I think every place has species that people just dismiss as having no value or no interest, often because they're common and they're around all the time, like a Rainbow Lorikeet or an ibis.
Kirsty Costa [00:06:27]
One of the ways that I maintain my interest in common and local birds, the ones that are really familiar to me, is watching their behaviour through the seasons. There are hundreds of Rainbow Lorikeets living in my suburb, and they continue to fascinate me. When the gum trees blossom, they have a parrot party and drink nectar together. During the winter, they retreat more to tree hollows, and when the Musk Lorikeets arrive in summer, they show their territorial displays.But still, I must confess that there's nothing more thrilling than seeing a bird for the first time. When I was last in Japan, the excitement of seeing and hearing a Green Woodpecker stayed with me. If you feel that way, Justine says that you're not alone.
Justine Hausheer [00:07:07]
I think that experience of going to a new place, a new country, a new city, that removes the biases that you have. Every single thing is new. So something that would be common there is just as interesting as a Regent Honeyeater or something that's really, really rare or interesting for various reasons.But one of the things I really love about more common birds is that they give you that opportunity to observe behaviour more. There's lots of them, so you can see them more often. For Rainbow Lorikeets in suburban and urban environments, they're often very habituated to humans. So it's easy to sit and watch these more common birds, or some birders in the US call them trash birds, and you can observe them in different seasons. How their behaviour might change during breeding or as food resources change.
And when it comes specifically to Rainbow Lorikeets, at our previous house we had a tree right up against the house where we were renting. And so we put out some water and it was so much fun to just sit there and watch the Rainbow Lorikeets drink, but also interact with one another. Breeding season, you had the males get all like rolling and try to have sexy times with their girlfriends, or bicker with one another.
And I really love that about common birds. You get to observe the behaviour and see them more and more often, and it gives you more chances to understand more about that species. Whereas all of these things are hard to do with a rare bird because you often just get this quick glimpse and then that's it, they're gone.
Kirsty Costa [00:08:39]
Another way to make familiar birds exciting again is to set yourself a local challenge. A few years ago, I did a local big year where I spent a year trying to see as many birds as possible close to home in between workdays. It wasn't about travelling far or chasing the rarest thing. It was more of an excuse to get out into my local wetlands and reserves and see my local birds with new eyes.Justine has been thinking about doing one too.
Justine Hausheer [00:09:05]
Yeah, I have a lot of aspirations to do a local big year. It just hasn't - I want to wait until I can commit properly to it.A lot of the birders up here where I live on the Sunshine Coast, there's a local Facebook group and they do what's called the game. So every year they're all doing local years. But the rules are that you have to get a photo of the bird and you post it to the Facebook group. So not only who can see the highest number of species, I think it's within the LGA, I'm not quite sure, but also you have to get a photo as well. So they like the sort of competitive element of it with one another.
So yeah, I have great aspirations of doing a local big year and I know several people who have done them. One of the things I spoke with a friend of mine, Jeremy, out in Perth, and he said that one of the things he liked about a local big year - he chose a 200 kilometre radius from his house - was that it introduced this idea of local rarities.
So a bird that might be really common somewhere else, and you'd never get in the car to go drive to see that thing, but if it was rare for that 200 kilometre radius, it's sort of another way to gamify or appreciate things that are uncommon in a particular area, even if they might be common somewhere else. And it is a bit special that the bird shows up.
So yes, it's very much on my to-do list. Maybe next year.
Kirsty Costa [00:10:25]
Justine and I have just worked out that the Jeremy that she's talking about is actually Jeremy Reimer. You can hear him chat about shorebirds and Western Australian birds in episodes 51 and 81.The idea of rarity has ended up taking Justine somewhere much deeper. She has spent the past few years researching endangered animals in Australia for her book, The Vanishing Wild. And one bird that has really shifted her thinking is the Regent Honeyeater.
Justine Hausheer [00:10:53]
I'd seen a Regent Honeyeater. This was again very shortly after I moved to Brisbane, and I signed up for the local rare bird alerts and all of that, and there was a pair of Regent Honeyeaters that had showed up on the south side near a suburban shopping centre complex that I guess had some blooming silky oaks.And so I'd never heard of a Regent Honeyeater at the time, but they looked cool and everyone seemed very excited. So Saturday morning I went down and I was with a couple of other birders milling around outside of, I think, like a Woolies. And yeah, I managed to see my first Regent Honeyeater.
So it was really exciting because they're an absolutely gorgeous bird. But it wasn't until later that I fully understood how special that had been. As you and your listeners might know, Regent Honeyeaters are critically endangered. There's something like 250, give or take, left in the wild. So they're very rare. The population is falling so fast that young birds are struggling to learn the right songs. And the predictions are if we stay on the same trajectory, the species could be gone within two decades.
So all of this I learned later.
To get back to your question of what makes people interested in birds, I think people are hardwired to like novelty. But a lot of wildlife watchers also gravitate towards rarity. That might be a bird that's difficult to see by virtue of its behaviour or where it lives, something like a Princess Parrot or a Letter-winged Kite, which looks just like a Black-shouldered Kite, but it's rare and it's hard to find. But it can also be species like Regent Honeyeater that are rare because they're threatened or endangered.
In terms of why birders like rare species, I think that might vary from person to person. For some, certainly it's the challenge. Others, it's a status symbol. It's the equivalent of their big BMW car or whatever, to have a big life list or to have seen a particularly rare bird.
And I spent a lot of time over the past couple of years thinking about that idea of rarity because I was writing my book, The Vanishing Wild, which explores threatened species conservation here in Australia. Every chapter looks at a different species, the place they live, the threats they face, and what conservationists are doing to protect them.
But a common threat across all of these species, and I kept seeing time and again in my research and my conversations, is that we often fail to pay attention to a species until it becomes rare. Either we don't value it, we don't learn much about it, we don't monitor how it's doing until we notice that things start to go downhill.
And that's a big problem within conservation, birds or otherwise. It's so hard to get funding to study or protect a species until it's in trouble, when the reality is we should be doing the opposite. We of course help threatened species, but we should also be putting a lot of money into investing in keeping populations of birds or other wildlife healthy, rather than waiting until it slides downhill. Then we're already behind the ball and we're scrambling.
Kirsty Costa [00:14:03]
Even though I call myself a birdwatcher, I'm really interested in whole ecosystems, not just birds. You're probably the same. So I think you'll like Justine's book. The Vanishing Wild has some great chapters about birds, and other extraordinary strange species are included too.Justine Hausheer [00:14:19]
It's mostly birds and mammals, which sort of reflects larger taxonomic and scientific biases.The bird species, I think, that'll be most of interest to Weekend Birder listeners would be the Australasian Bittern. So that chapter looks at the Bitterns in Rice Project, and how farmers in the Riverina are trying to help bitterns nest in their rice fields because so much of the natural wetland habitat in the Murray-Darling Basin has been lost. And here we have this rare opportunity where a wildlife species is able to make use of a working landscape. So let's keep that going.
Speaking of rarities, another chapter deals with one of the most mythical and rare birds in Australia, the Night Parrot, and how conservationists have used bioacoustics to study it and to find new populations, particularly with Indigenous rangers out in Western Australia.
And the last chapter that's on birds looks at the Golden-shouldered Parrot up in Cape York. This is another species where, like the Australasian Bittern, it's declined quite a lot since colonisation. And now one of the most important remnant populations is on a working cattle station. So the pastoralists have partnered with conservationists to try to protect the species on that property, on Artemis Station, while still continuing to run cattle.
Again, it's another instance of how can we help our wildlife live alongside people and within working landscapes? Because we need to do that. We can't turn everything into a national park.
Kirsty Costa [00:15:47]
If you'd like to find out about the Rice and Bitterns project, head back to episode 29 with Matt Herring. And shout out to Josh and James at Lyfer, a new Australian birdwatching lifestyle apparel business. In episode 126, you can hear about their fundraiser for the Golden-shouldered Parrot.As part of writing The Vanishing Wild, Justine travelled around Australia to speak with different people involved in wildlife conservation, and I'm curious about what she learnt from them in the course of writing the book.
Justine Hausheer [00:16:19]
I travelled across the country. I spoke with dozens, if not nearly 100, scientists, land managers, naturalists, Traditional Owners, and there are a few common threads from those conversations about what the future looks like for Australia's wildlife.I think that undertaking extreme interventions to save species is going to become more and more common. We're going to have to jump in after emergencies, after natural disasters. Things like evacuating species before bushfires, or the work Zoos Victoria did to develop those Bogong Bikkies that were then essential to helping the Mountain Pygmy-possum after yet another disaster, after the bushfires in Black Summer.
Vaccinating entire species. It's something we haven't absolutely cracked yet, but they're working on it for koalas and devils. That's an extreme intervention. We might need to continue down that route. Moving species from place to place as climate change alters their habitat. All of these things that are quite extreme now, they're going to be more necessary for a greater number of species.
I think we're also going to have to make hard choices about what we save and what we're not able to. Interventions that work really well right now, like fenced havens to keep small mammals safe from feral predators or captive breeding, those are essential and they're working very well. But we can't do that for every species. It's too time intensive, too labour intensive, and as the list of threatened species grows, we're going to have to make decisions about what gets our investment, for lack of a better word.
Climate change is increasingly more and more of a problem. It's not just one thing on a laundry list of threats. It is a threat in and of itself for many species, but it's also amplifying existing threats, and it's undermining a lot of the things that we have been relying on as conservationists to help species.
And then I think we also have to recognise that recovery, this idea of not just keeping a species on life support or keeping it from going extinct, but really bringing it back, that might be out of reach for a lot of species. Either there's simply too little habitat left, or threats like disease or feral predators are going to act as a ceiling for those species to be able to recover. And a lot of things are going to end up dependent on us for their long-term survival.
Justine Hausheer [00:18:32]
All of that's depressing. But I think the good news is, more often than not, not for every species, not for every instance, but more often than not, our understanding of the threats and the potential solutions for any given species is more than enough to do something. What we need to do is put more money towards funding conservation, and we need better policies to protect nature.That was the thing that surprised me most. A lot of the time, it's not a knowledge issue. We know enough. We don't need to learn more. We know enough to really get stuck in and to do the conservation actions that are going to matter most, and that can benefit numerous species at the same time.
Kirsty Costa [00:19:10]
It can be hard listening to this type of conversation and thinking about the future of the living world, but there is a lot of optimism there. Optimism is not blind belief that everything is going to be okay. It's the understanding that we have the knowledge, skills and tools we need to create a better world. It's just about activating them in the most effective way.Justine isn't offering easy optimism here, but she says that she keeps coming back to what can be done and to the people that are already doing it.
Justine Hausheer [00:19:39]
Anyone who loves wildlife or works in conservation, it can get really overwhelming because it's not often a good news story. But writing this book has also given me a bit of hope that wildlife and wild places will not vanish entirely.Many species have shown remarkable resilience and tenacity to everything we've thrown at them since colonisation. You've got all these new technologies like bioacoustics and eDNA detection dogs, a lot of which I explore in my book. These are giving us ways to collect data at vast scales, and that's data we need to monitor species and make decisions about how to save them.
And I think above all else, our wildlife has champions. You have hundreds of scientists and ecologists working day and night to protect species. You've got private landowners pitching in. Traditional Owners are doing what they have always done, which is care for Country. And you have people who care about wildlife, even if it's not their job. You have birders, you have mammal watchers, and every little bit of support counts.
Kirsty Costa [00:20:36]
Before Justine heads off, I want to come back to where we started, the idea of chasing rarity. Birdwatchers often feel pulled between two ideas at once, the excitement of seeing something rare and the desire to protect it.This is something I think about a lot. I understand the thrill of seeing a rare bird, especially when it appears somewhere unexpected. But I also wonder about what happens when hundreds of people descend in one place to see one bird, even if that individual bird seems okay. What does that mean for the habitat and for all the other birds and animals using that space?
So I'm curious about whether Justine thinks birdwatchers should shift away from chasing rarity, or whether there's a way to hold both things at once.
Justine Hausheer [00:21:18]
For me, when I'm looking for rare birds, it's about the opportunity to observe and appreciate these incredible animals while I still can. The reality is that you and I and everyone listening, we will experience extinctions in our lifetime. There are species alive today that will vanish in the next few decades, despite all of our conservation efforts.Australia's extinction rate has held steady at four species per decade since colonisation. I have dedicated my life to conservation and trying to make sure that doesn't happen and that we don't lose any more species, but I'm also realistic.
To your question, I don't think birders should give up chasing rarities entirely. There are ethics that you should follow when rare birds are around. But I also really encourage everyone who loves birds and wildlife in general to also appreciate the species that are still abundant.
Things like, for me in south-east Queensland, Pale-headed Rosellas and Crested Pigeons and Blue-faced Honeyeaters. All of these are in my backyard and I get so much out of seeing them every day.
Because the reality is that if we wait until a species is rare to appreciate it, then we're going to see more and more species become threatened. That ties directly into the problem we have within conservation, where we don't fund or have policy protections for things until they become rare. And I think birders can take lessons from that. Chase the rarity ethically, but don't take the more common species for granted.
We're living in the middle of a climate crisis, and species that are common today might not be common in the future. So we can't take anything for granted, I think.
Kirsty Costa [00:22:48]
That feels like a good place to land. Chase rarity ethically, but don't take common birds for granted, because the birds that we think of as ordinary now are still extraordinary, and the birds that are common today may not be common forever.You've heard me wrestle with the ethics of chasing rarity as a birdwatcher, like when the Swift Parrots landed in northern Victoria, or a vagrant seabird appeared in the Western Treatment Plant in Melbourne. I've decided that wrestling with ethics is exactly what I need to keep doing, so I can continue to evaluate my personal impact on the living world. And I encourage you, Weekend Birder friend, to do the same.
Many thanks to Justine for helping us think about rarity in different ways. Her book is called The Vanishing Wild. Go buy it from your local bookstore or library. In the show notes, you'll also find links to Justine's website and social media accounts if you'd like to connect with her online.
It's been great to hear from so many of you about the final show of season four. You've been submitting some really great questions via voice message or text for the upcoming Ask Us Anything episode. Your last chance is via weekendbirder.com, and you'll need to get in quick.
The next episode is our 150th. How did you and I get here so fast? A fan favourite is returning to the show to talk about birdsong. It's going to be ace.
Speak to you again soon.
