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CALLING ALL BIRD LOVERS. It's a bird/bad language extravaganza with Andrew Turbill
391 Plays8 days ago
If you prefer nature to people, birdsong to screeching tyres and secretly want to crash the economy via mass workplace dropout due to a bird language contagion, you will go absolutely crackers for this convo.
Andrew Turbill aka. THE BIRD GUY is here to share his epic and somewhat perilous birding quests for 2025, from stalking Logrunners to sidestepping fascists and recording a full blown predator attack in the sky.
F****** fabulous listening for anyone under the spell of birds.
Andrew’s 2025 to-do list
- find out where our local superb lyrebirds (well, at least 1 lyrebird anyway) nest and get an audio recording of the young bird begging or alarm calls
- get a decent photo of a logrunner
- build an elevated sit spot platform in the forest
- spend more time in the forest socialising with songbirds and less time doom-scrolling about the callous and cruel manifestations of psychopaths, narcissists and fascists
- record audio of a full-sequence aerial predator attack
- keep my bird baths full 365 days of the year
- devise a way to dissuade catbirds and fairy-wrens from mercilessly pummeling my windows at dawn throughout spring and summer
- find someone desperate enough to make some walking-around money to enter 30 years of my naturalist seasonal field observations into a data base or excel spreadsheet so i make some effing sense of them
- take on a bird language apprentice
- visit my mum more often
LINKY POOS 🧙♀️
You were once a Bird Language Samurai, and can be again ~ Andrew Turbill
Voices of birds page on Andrew’s website
Upcoming Bird Language events + retreats
****support Reskillience on Patreon****
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Reskillians Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey,
00:00:06
Speaker
hey this is Katie and you're tuned in to Reskillians, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. I am gratefully recording in Jarrah Country, central Victoria,
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm actually recording with Jaira Country right now, sitting outside under a big shady rabbinia tree with all of the birds peeping and jeeping and singing around me.
Nature Knowledge & Consumerism
00:00:38
Speaker
I recently heard Robin Wall Kimmerer say something pretty incredible and tragic, that the average American child can recognise 1,000 brand logos but less than 10.
00:00:52
Speaker
10 plants and animals in their environment. Besides the tragedy of that, Robin believes that this ecological impoverishment is one of the reasons we're so susceptible to consumerism. Our ancestors existed in webs of connection and kinship.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yet many of us now live in lonely human-only landscapes, both literally because we're living through the sixth mass extinction, but also because we just don't recognise our modern human family anymore. We don't know them. They're strangers to us. And Robin says that a simple antidote to this scarcity and the shopping sprees that it triggers is to enrich our vocabularies again. Learn the names and ways and niches of the creatures around us.
00:01:42
Speaker
I definitely feel this.
Personal Enrichment through Bird Calls
00:01:46
Speaker
Ever since getting a bit curious about birds, I've grown disgustingly rich. My knowledge bank is brimming with feathery friends and their calls. I count them off and stack them up like pennies as I walk along our driveway. There's the golden whistler with his clear celebratory song, and the rufous whistler with melodies so sweet their borderline smug.
00:02:11
Speaker
There are the sonorous hoots of the common bronze wing and the soft piping of the spotted partelote, like a cherub playing the flute. The striated partelote has a different voice, deeper, more liquidy, and I'm guaranteed to find them down by the river in the fat-bellied red gums.
00:02:31
Speaker
I've now learned where the brown tree creepers like to creep, chattering as they bounce vertically up the sides of the grey box. I've clocked the brown falcons hunting emo, gliding in the wake of the neighbours tractor. And I have it on good authority from the wallabies that the war between chuffs and carolongs and magpies is as old as the hills.
00:02:54
Speaker
All I need to do when I feel that consumer urge is walk outside with my eyes and ears open and let the stories pour in. You don't have to be obsessed with birds. Any nerdy nature pursuit can be added to your portfolio to start earning interest today. The rocks, the trees, the clouds, the creeks, the bush foods, the bugs.
00:03:18
Speaker
The cockatoos right now, there's no end to the golden threads you can follow. And the hit of dopamine from a new pair of pants is nothing compared to cracking a nature mystery such as the strange new squawk that I started hearing a few weeks ago that I couldn't for the life of me figure out until I took a walk and spotted the sacred kingfisher doing its squawking thing on a branch above my head.
00:03:47
Speaker
So this happened last week, and I was so goddamn excited, like I'd won the lottery. I'm not going to attempt to mimic the sacred kingfisher, even though today's guest is kind of like Shazam for birdsong, and could probably identify it from my mangled impersonation.
Introducing Andrew Turbill, Bird Language Expert
00:04:04
Speaker
I will soon be passing the mic to Andrew Turbill for the birdiest, nerdiest episode of Resculience ever.
00:04:11
Speaker
Andrew is a dude who's just as serious about birds and nature as he is about having a laugh. Known as the bird guy, he's a bird language samurai, environmental ninja and naturalist who spent decades working for the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service and also running bird language and deep nature connection retreats. Mostly on the east coast but us Southerners occasionally get a little bit of Andrew too and I'm going to link his upcoming workshops in the show notes.
00:04:39
Speaker
disclaimer. As well as bird language, this convo features bad language so your fledglings may not appreciate the f-bombs. Speaking of fledglings, this episode goes out to my nerdiest bird friends, Mick and Soph, who are patrons of the podcast and also expecting their own little chick to hatch soon.
00:04:57
Speaker
So, bad people, nature people, bush people, earth people, here is the delightful Andrew Turbull and my iPhone recording of the sacred Kingfisher who arrived a few weeks ago just in time for summer. Thanks for listening friends, enjoy.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah I know you spend a lot of time with songbirds and all birds and you may prefer their company to humans so yeah i mean is there a songbird that you feel a deep connection with well as you say it's song i love do you like songbirds um i i don't not love non songbirds i should like to be clear like you know songbirds are those They're the birds that typically you find out in the forest that make really complex, lovely calls. That's their territorial song calls in particular. I mean, some of their other calls, which we'll get into later, like their alarm calls aren't necessarily lovely. But songbirds are those calls you'll hear in the morning in a dawn chorus, yeah just after dawn in a forest. It's all that beautiful explosion of lyricry.
00:06:08
Speaker
Other birds that aren't songbirds, like I've been doing a lot of work just the last couple of months with shorebirds with oyster catchers and waderbirds, I've just never taken much interest in them. it's It's not personal. I now know that they're really cute and I like them a lot, but I didn't for like for the last 40 years. So they're not songbirds. And they just don't have the quite the range of vocals that songbirds do.
00:06:31
Speaker
um and it's just look it's just a fire i think it's just like a absurd petty bias i've had towards songbirds um in terms of the uh one role of the ones i love it's it's a bit hard to say but i i really love eastern whipbirds do you get eastern whipbirds where you are okay oh look this is going to expose my ignorance i don't think so not to my knowledge they're the ones who make that layer to you Yeah, yeah, yeah. Super loud whip. And it's two birds, right? Yeah. Yeah. You'll get the choo, and then at the end you'll get the female, because that's the male, and the female will, if she's around and in the right mood, will give that sort of like a choo, a cheer, or variations on that. They've got a few variations. It's a like a little tight outfit between the two of them.
00:07:21
Speaker
I know when I learned that recently, it totally blew my mind. Yeah. And that's just a way of showing that they're a tight couple. I guess it's advertised into the other territorial owners of Whitbirds, you know, across the Creek or up the hill, like we're still here. We're still tight. Don't try and make a move on our country.
00:07:41
Speaker
Oh, because I always wondered, this is my you know first of many questions for you, Andrew, I always wondered because I learnt the whole it's a duet thing. And then I was wondering, does one start and it's a hopeful start, kind of like a game of volleyball where someone's got to be there to keep the ball up and what happens if there isn't a partner to complete that song? In order to get like a lot of Australian songbirds were made for life,
00:08:05
Speaker
um And yeah whether they live for two years or 30 years, they might keep that one mate out of their life. But you've got to start somewhere. And so initially, a young male needs to establish a territory. You really aren't going to get a partner unless you can establish territory.
00:08:22
Speaker
So and the part young the young male needs to be able to advertise for a mate and also establish territory using like the acoustic signaling that you've got a territory. So you do get you do get males doing their whipping and without yeah with ah the full-on lack of a female at the end. And sometimes I've seen males and females, I know they're a partner, but the female doesn't always call back. Maybe she's got a mouthful of grasshopper or something at the time, I don't know, but or maybe just in a bad mood.
00:08:51
Speaker
But they don't always call back. But they do pair bond. And other birds, like you know you might have the little peewee, the black and white, small birds that get out of the grassy sort of country, rural environment. They're called magpie larks or peewees. You'll see those birds up on the power lines. And they give a call between the male and female, the pair bond. But they also give a little bit of a dance at the same time. And they sort of like to chip in. and like they're like two sort of like watching the Beastie Boys sing or something like they sort of come in with different lyrics and it all works together with the dance and that's been shown if their dance and their lyrics are tight then the tighter it is the less trouble we have with having to fend off sort of neighbouring rivals. Wow those little average run-of-the-mill magpie larks are even rendered interesting when you observe them and understand them
00:09:45
Speaker
to this degree. And thank you for the Beastie Boy references. That is always appreciated and as a first on the podcast. um So Andrew, I really want to understand, I want to kind of circle back to something that we really, really briefly touched on, which is, you know, the work you do and the preferences you have for being in a moist forested gully surrounded by wildlife, as opposed to hot headed
Bird Language & Human Survival
00:10:08
Speaker
humans. But the fact that you're compelled to share your knowledge about ecology and bird language and nature connection says something to me about a deeper motivation and you know sense that you see in this work and reason that it should be kind of rippling out to people especially at this time that we find ourselves in. So I wonder if you can just speak to why you do the things you do maybe despite your aversion to human beings. Yeah look I think my I think ultimately if I wasn't compelled to be involved in
00:10:41
Speaker
humanity through trying to inspire and motivate people to fall in love with nature. I would just be a complete hermit. That would be fine. As long as I can get hold of you know good quality coffee and a few other small addictions.
00:10:58
Speaker
but um i I think I um i feel like ah my last work is that I'm compelled to to kind of introduce people to the joys of spending time in wild nature and for protection. We're at a real like pretty nasty sort of junction you know in in the history of the planet in modern times where, you know, we're experiencing widespread ecological collapse. I mean, ecosystems are unspooling. And I don't think people understand how how that affects will affect us. We are part of those ecosystems, even though we get our food from supermarkets, where ultimately our whole health and wellbeing is attached to our nature and with our lives, the quality of our lives, our human health and wellbeing,
00:11:49
Speaker
is intricately and inevitably and unavoidably tied to the health and well-being of natural ecosystems. And birds are probably one of the most visible, certainly one of the most easily heard signals of health, ecosystem health. They kind of tell you about ecosystem health. Even if you don't open your eyes, you just pull up in a car park somewhere, wind the window down, start listening. I can listen for the first five minutes and I'll start to get an idea of the quality of the ecosystem outside.
00:12:27
Speaker
based upon who's there and who's calling, and the abundance, the complexity of what certain species are there. So you go into the suburbs, you don't hear live where it's called, you don't hear long-runners calling.
00:12:39
Speaker
You don't hear these more sensitive rainforest and wet forest birds that need lots of understory and need undisturbed lives because they're real intricate introverts. And you'll get the more boasting, of the but more garrulous sort of extroverts like your noisy miners, your lorikeets and some of your other parrots and and those sort of guys and opportunists. So birds really tell us about forest health and they tell us about the health of the environment. I think that's why I need our brains, Katie, so that our brains, there's good evidence for this when people are in environments where there is rich diversity and abundance of bird calls.
00:13:21
Speaker
this the brain lights up with a sense of well-being. This is a good place to be. This place will have good stuff for us as a hunter-gatherer, because that's how our brains were formed just through 300,000 years of hunter-gathering. So the birds tell us this is a good healthy place. And when you don't hear birds calling at all, or you hear just a few birds calling, I think it introduces a sense of survival stress.
00:13:46
Speaker
So bringing people to a love of birds and getting them to listen more deeply and being aware has a double-edged sword to it. One, the benefit of it is that that nature connection staff through birds as a portal into nature connection, we know for certain that that is so good for us in terms of human health and wellbeing benefits. We we know for certain that's just now well and truly evidence-based.
00:14:14
Speaker
But the more you're aware of your environment through birds, also I think you're more aware of the absence, the things that have changed, the degradation, and that could bring a bit of and can also bring a little bit of a sense of grief. So that needs that needs also needs to be, people need to be aware of that, and we might try and do a little bit of grief management around that, you can get grief management stuff too. There's a lot in that answer, and I'm thinking of your article, I think it was something around You're a bird language samurai and you just don't know it. And as you say, that ancestral requirement for understanding that conversation that's happening all around us, not only to indicate the wellbeing of the local ecology, but also to help us avoid predators. Can you illuminate that connection between birds and their alarm calls and how we would have and can use that to understand what's happening in the world around us and maybe who's on the hunt?
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good, I'm glad you brought that up, because like that that idea just came to me one day about how we're bird language samurai, because during bird language retreats and then even the online, the online Zoom, bird language introduction of bird language sessions, I've kind of been amazed, like unexpectedly amazed at how quickly people pick up bird language and start making like deep insights within just a couple of days of of practicing it. I'm like,
00:15:40
Speaker
This is not like learning Arabic or something like, you know, you just seem to be, the poll seems to be greased already. You just straight into it and people get good at it. And I started thinking about that as like, why is it this thing, this particular skill set, we seem to be so well adapted for already. And it's because if you think about, just say, bird alarm,
00:16:04
Speaker
So that's when a bird is has a predator approaching. It is making a call, it's an alarm call, if let's say it's a ground alarm, a big lizard, like around my way we've got goannas, a lace monitor.
00:16:17
Speaker
It's just like cruising around, small birds on the ground, they've got nests, they're like freaking out. They're not worried about necessarily themselves being eaten because so much of the Australian ground predators are reptiles who don't like leap off the ground six foot like the most of the low, the feline and mammal predators of northern parts of the world.
00:16:38
Speaker
But they mob it, they call it, they give it a mobbing call, which is a very progress, ongoing sort of call that attracts in other birds. And they're like, hey, let's just all work together and see if we can piss this guy off altogether. Get him out of here. Just an annoyance.
00:16:54
Speaker
and And it's a bit like if you're hanging around a preschool and the entire preschool of little kids start coming out and just like calling you names, you aren't going to want to hang around that preschool for long. Maybe you should have been hanging around the preschool at all. So every single one of our ancestors, your ancestors, my ancestors, everyone outside the my room here,
00:17:19
Speaker
They don't know it, but everyone in their ancestors was a samurai bird language expert, because if they weren't, they wouldn't have they wouldn't be here. Their genetic line would have been extinguished in the mouth of a giant megalania seven-metre goanna, or in a tiger, or in some other ferocious bloody predator.
00:17:41
Speaker
thousands of years ago because it was only let's ah let's look at Australian context where we did have megalania which is this so five to seven meter long goanna that's like twice as big as a Komodo dragon they cruise around Australia 30-40,000 years ago There's 150 kilogram marsupial lions, like basically like a quoll the size of a bear. Those creatures were hunting Aboriginal people and in this country. Now, Aboriginal people, to get away from a creature like that, I would not be surprised by them. You'd probably need like a 50 to 100 meter head star, right? In order to either get up a tree, grab some spears, grab some fire, jump in the creek, whatever you've got to do to get the heck out of there and to offend yourself.
00:18:25
Speaker
It was only birds that gave you the alarm calls that birds gave. It was only through those bird alarm calls that gave you that 50 to 100 metre head start, that heads up at that distance. If you waited until the cricket stopped calling and the frog stopped calling, it was probably too late. You just didn't have a chance. So throughout our hunter-gatherer histories of that long, deep time ah reliance on bird language to stay ah ahead of these lethal ground predators, particularly that's I think that's still wired into the brain. like I think we've still got the muscle for that in there, even though now we've become fat lazy dogs. you know like We just get our food brought out in a bowl, and we don't have to worry about it. I mean, the only predators I worry about now are bloody people. And unfortunately, birdling, which is a warm-year psychopath and narcissist. Speeding SUVs with a bunch of kids coming home from school in the back is like the modern day equivalent of a megalania.
00:19:19
Speaker
oh Well, there's ah this the charming little bit over to to a charming real estate agent. You think they're a really lovely guy with actually like a psychopath can destroy your life. There's no bird language that can give you a warning there. Well, maybe we need to train the bird to identify narcissists and mob them.
00:19:36
Speaker
Hey, see like I can get behind that. At the local level now, we still have a bunch of predators. They don't threaten my life necessarily. Goannas and quolls and cats and, you know, pythons and red leaf like snakes. They're not super threatening to us, but they're very cool. to If you learn the bird language, that' they're still doing the same thing. They're still calling like they did for thousands of millions of years. um If you tune into that, you get to see a whole bunch of really cool predators that you would never normally get to see.
00:20:03
Speaker
predator tracking across the landscape through bird language is super fun. Totally and it's such a wicked party trick as well. I think um John Young who's someone I'm a total fangirl of talks about being out on hikes and knowing when people are coming along the track for minutes and minutes and minutes in advance because they've bird ploughed the hell out of that trail and the birds come rushing through and then he's expecting them, you know, five minutes later. So I feel like one really great on-ramp or like a ah dissemination device is just flexing your cool bird language skills at a party or gathering and like when the cat's going to come sauntering in.
00:20:41
Speaker
That stuff happens even when you haven't been doing it for as long as John Young or I have. You can do that with only a few months training. Honestly, you can do it after one single, like people come to retreat, they do four days of retreat. I reckon you can start doing it. I've seen people, because we have a little signal, little phone signal messaging app group for the bird nerds who have come along to the retreats and stuff. There's about 200 people on it.
00:21:06
Speaker
And they post videos. They just come onto a tree. Next thing you know, they're posting a video and they're going in the video. They're going, Oh, I can hear the noisy miners are telling me there's a snake and they're wandering out through the backyard. They're looking around for an after about 30 seconds. Like, Oh, there it is. And there's a bloody huge tiger snake just lying in the, in the grass. Um, and that's the party trick, right? It's like, so knowing something is there at a distance, but it's invisible to you until you arrive. But you've been, you're inside, maybe on the computer, any cooking dinner, maybe doing whatever.
00:21:37
Speaker
And the birds told you, and you go outside and people go, how the fuck did you know that was there? It's like secret knowledge. And what, just briefly, Andrew, what does that involve that, as you say, like a quite a rapid remembrance or re-acquisition of that predator tracking skill? Like what would someone do to know how to how to pick a snake in their long grass after a month?
Recognizing Bird Alarm Calls
00:21:59
Speaker
It's really just about learning the quality of the sound quality of ground alarm.
00:22:06
Speaker
So when I do a Zoom workshop, for instance, I've got people currently on my Zoom workshop, my Birdland Zoom workshop, all the way from Gulf of Carpentaria, South Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. aye like I can't just give them an example of a bird in my backyard and say, learn this call, learn this alarm, and therefore you'll go find goannas and snakes. Because you're like that that bird doesn't occur across all those different landscapes and that latitude and across countries. But you can look at the quality of the alarm call. and It's varied they very, like there are really so core similarities in the quality of the alarm call that ground birds will make when they're threatened by a ground predator.
00:22:46
Speaker
And so once you learn that, that's really important part of it. The other part is to, you've got to be able to, and you would have heard this from John Young stuff, is being able to establish a sense of baseline. So baseline is essentially what is sort of what does your little bit of nature look like and sound like when it's relaxed?
00:23:06
Speaker
Like, what does that look like? That baseline? When when nothing, nothing bad, nothing exciting's happening, when it's just like, relax state, what does that look and sound like? And you won't know that if you're just walking through that landscape, because you are the source of disturbance. Like, you just create.
00:23:23
Speaker
stress because you're just putting your pumping out predator vibes as you walk through. You're crunching the grass, you're crunching the the leaves, you're big, you're a predator, we're nasty. And so i I really get people to practice the sit spot. So the sit spot's like the core routine that people practice, which is where you basically find a really a spot you can get to pretty easily.
00:23:49
Speaker
You don't want to have a sit spot up on top of ah like a 1,000-metre mountain. It's like, oh, the best s spot. But it takes you to only get there once every five years. You want to make sure that someone you can get to really quickly it has a few different habitat types there. And when you get there, they sit. And the idea is to let that just all the disturbance that you made, getting there let it all go quiet.
00:24:10
Speaker
So you kind of imagine like a pool, you know, a pond and the ripples that you made moving in after 10 or 15 minutes, they will go real quiet. And now the pond is quiet. And so when it go and I suddenly steps into the air, you know, within a hundred meters or a python starts slithering through, you know, 50 meters away or whatever it might be, a cat, person, dog, whatever. Then you're going to get these ripples on the pond.
00:24:37
Speaker
And you'll be like a little, you, because you're all quiet and you've gone quiet for 10 minutes, you're kind of like a water spider now on the outside of the pond. You're feeling the ripples, right? You're detecting them and you go, I'm now like part of nature in this sort of sense of like detecting the ripples of disturbance. And you, and you'll hear, you'll hear the alarm and it breaks, it breaks with the baseline because it's so different and it's the vibe of it is so obviously not relaxed.
00:25:04
Speaker
and it's a ground alarm and it's a mobbing ground alarm, it'll be persistent and then people can like watch and they'll listen to getting closer. It might be hundreds of meters away at the beginning, just barely audible, but after a while, like a goanna or whatever it is just wanders past. And it's just so cool to kind of like just tune into it, track it moving and then see the predator walk past. You predicted it and then there it is, you get to see the confirmation, the prediction. Such an excellent.
00:25:33
Speaker
description of why to do a sit spot and I know that most of the listeners have heard of sit spots and how foundational they are to deep nature connection and like a non-negotiable just fucking do it but you know what I so rarely do it because it's one of those it's like intellectual hijacking of these you know embodied practices where you think, oh I know that so I don't actually have to do it, I know it in my head so I don't need to take my body out onto the land and sit there. But I i absolutely appreciate this, quite a magical description, um picture that you've just painted for us of the pond and the still waters and being able to then tune in to the real true baseline of a place and then notice someone else's ripples as they come through. so Thank you for that thing. I i think if you see it as like doctor's orders, go do this in spot. Like if you had a bad back and the doctor's like, you're gonna lie down for a week or you got to do this, you got to go Pilates or whatever it is or else your street back's gonna be fucked for the rest of your life. You tend to kind of go do it. Most of us go and do what the doctor said, well at least for the first yeah three or four times. But
00:27:07
Speaker
If you take that approach to assist spotting as a mental health and wellbeing form of medication or form of practice, because you're actually I think you're actually putting years on your life when you when you take up a practice like this. It's not just about listening to birds like that's cool, tracking predators is cool, but we know that that going out and sitting in nature and having that ah that connective engagement, that immersive connective engagement, this the evidence is really clear. That stuff will prolong your life and will bring you all these surreal and measurable benefits to your mental health, your physical health, and just your general quality of life. So it's not just fun or whatever. It's not frivolous. It's it's kind of core to your well-being. Yeah, thank you for that addition. That is speaking really profoundly to me. It's not a nice to have. It's a non-negotiable. Thank you, Dr.
Integrating Bird Knowledge in Daily Life
00:28:02
Speaker
Turbell. So I want to leave ample space for your list of 10 things, which is
00:28:07
Speaker
literally the maddest and most marvellous thing I've read in a long long time but I just have one more question before we get to that which is about your everyday rhythms because as much as I am so curious about people's expertise what I'm almost more curious about is how they pattern that expertise or that deep wisdom and understanding how they pattern it into their everyday because I mean, this might sound really judgmental, but I feel like if you're an expert in something and you're not, at least to some degree living and breathing that or embodying that day to day, like what does that actually mean? Are you actually behind it? Is it truly genuinely authentically close to your heart? So Andrew, I want to understand how all of this, this body of knowledge comes home to to roost for want of a better avian pun.
00:28:53
Speaker
um in your own nest? Yeah, well I'm like pretty lucky that I live in a property surrounded by rainforests and I'm rebuilding lowland, so topical rainforest and beyond that's about yeah connected to about a million hectares of national park. So I can go seriously AWOL into that forest.
00:29:13
Speaker
from just the back of the house. In fact, sometimes it's like it can be a little bit too much, too well connected to nature. Like we've just had the last six weeks of having a green catbird, pair of green catbirds, just absolutely like launching like a Ted offensive, as I think I've explained to you before, into my windows of the bedroom at dawn and then doing their like,
00:29:40
Speaker
you know at the same time, and it's like, oh man, just a ah ah tad more suburban, maybe in that way. But no, I couldn't tolerate suburbia, but just outside the house, I can already move into that sort of immersive environment. So it depends on how much work, because I work with National Parks, and I and i i do a whole bunch of other work where I've got to actually leave home, unfortunately. But when I get time to myself, which is, I've tried to structure my life, so I have a fair bit of time to myself,
00:30:10
Speaker
I'll just do these unstructured wanderings where I'll grab sometimes my camera, sometimes my my audio recording gear, sometimes binoculars and sometimes all three and sort of walk down the driveway a bit and then at some point just sort of follow a sound that I'm not sure what's going on there and I'll follow that sound in the bush and normally not emerge for like three hours.
00:30:37
Speaker
And true to your initial point, that's my professional development. Like, I don't want to be going back to a retreat next year at Wang Gate Lodge and just tell the same story that I told last year. You know, um'm I'm in the business of collecting new stories, new observations, new new curiosities, new new questions. ah And so you've got to do, as John Young calls, the dirt time. There's just no getting around that. You don't get to ride in your laurels, sit on your laurels. What do you do? You rest on them.
00:31:09
Speaker
ah me
00:31:12
Speaker
You can't really ride your laurels, I'm pretty sure, but you can rest on them. So you don't get to rest on your laurel. I think you've got to constantly keep building. This is one of those cool things about bird language for me, is that you never get to the end. It's not like you go, right.
00:31:31
Speaker
I've reached the zenith, I now understand. It just doesn't work like that. Everything you observe, it kind of opens up a new question. And I think that's why bird language for me is really a pathway towards becoming a naturalist, right?
00:31:49
Speaker
big difference between that form of engaging with birds towards naturalism, which is asking questions, which leads to questions, which leads to more questions, compared to, say, twitching, which is the twitcher birds, birdos, who can be fantastic at identifying birds, quite often amazing at identifying birds, but often it's not then followed up by a question. So they'll see a bird and they'll tick it off on their list and they're like, yeah, that's I've got that bird now, but they're like,
00:32:16
Speaker
The question is like, what is it up to? it Where is it nesting? What season does it nest in? How long does it incubate for? What does it have to do? yeah how's it What's the breeding pattern? What's that call mean? Why is it making that call right now? Where does it sleep tonight? All that stuff, they're not so much interested in that. Not all of them, of course, aren't quite generalizing, but there's a big I think it's a big difference between those different paths.
00:32:40
Speaker
I'm into creating naturalists. I want people to ask questions and get lost in the inquiry base. So that's kind of what I still practice. I still just go off path as much as I can. We'll spend an hour sitting in one spot, maybe an hour staying in another spot, and then wander back to the job I was doing before I was called away by an unexpected errand in the forest.
00:33:06
Speaker
and just going, that's okay. that's sort yeah It's okay to spend three hours if you've got the time. you know It's okay to spend three hours just in the bush. And whatever job I was doing, I can get back to. But if you don't follow it up in the moment, yeah, 10 years ago, you advanced, you haven't learned anything.
00:33:25
Speaker
like then I think then you become a Freud. Yeah, well you've been verified as not a phony. Definitely worth listening to and what I think is is excellent about that last illustration of your your life there on the land and bring in the functional land share situation that you find yourself in. Are you saying that the commune or the cult into which you have been co-opted somehow actually works as a harmonious organism?
00:33:52
Speaker
Uh, it's a community, it's a little community. It's just six, six families that have got 100 acres and it does work. I think it works because there's only six families. I think if you had like, you know, 15, you can do what people have always done and form factions and hate each other forever. Uh, but when you've only got six shares, you kind of, it's not big enough to form caucuses and factions. So you tend just to get over your little petty bullshit and get along with each other. And you don't need each other's laps. We see each other for working bees. We see each other up and down the driveway. We help out. You know, when everyone needs help, we give a hand. But it's not, it's not culty in that sort of way that we're always, you know, catching up for nightly rituals and, um, um, it's a We go out and drink our adrenochrome.
00:34:39
Speaker
sorry But if i if i so get if I see something really cool, like last year I found a glossy black opportunity nest up on the ridge. They took us some photos and and just posted them you know to the community. And everyone's keen. They don't want to go up, you know take us up and show us because everyone's proud of the nature of the area.
00:34:58
Speaker
We've cleared a lot of Lantana around the rainforest and people would be proud of that work. Bringing the rainforest back in after it was so degraded by farming during the mid-1900s. Cool. Yeah, that's a great point about the sweet spot. Number of people on the land not forming those factions.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah awesome to hear the good news. So what I that was a weird kind of truncated comment question opener but um where I was going with that is that I love that your list you interpreted my strangely expensive brief as you know your intentions what you're taking into 2025 things that you're curious about questions you're asking and I fucking love that because I guess This whole listicle concept, what it's designed to do or what I was hoping it was going to do was really get to the heart of what my guests care about and what they're up to and their core practices.
00:35:54
Speaker
as a human person and kind of the provocations that they might put back out there to the listener. But something about your offering of your own intentions, like what you're hoping to do, the edges that you're pushing, that was just, because because I've read the list as ah as a spoiler and I laughed and I laughed. It was just so wonderful and so irreverent and so, so damn geeky. I think what lit me up was that you're getting to what I really, really hoped for this series and these lists, which is,
00:36:22
Speaker
what do you care about and what do you what do you know and what goes on in your head and so I feel like you're going to be sharing some of those things with us in a way that is going to spark at least my imagination I can say that for sure so Andrew do you have anything to add to you know like to preface this list before we dive in?
00:36:42
Speaker
uh well i could preface it by saying i prefer the word bird nerd the term bird nerd rather than geek no i'm just joking but i do i do think that i do think that nerds and nerdiness is the new cool And we should be encouraging it. Yeah, when I was at school, when I was at primary school, and me and my one other mate, Roger, who were into birds, you couldn't like, you couldn't rely on knowing the difference between a spotted partylote and a striated partylote to get a girlfriend in Year 3.
00:37:16
Speaker
Amazing as that sounds right to your listeners, like that that wasn't like a total chick pulling sort of this skill set. No, it was actually a way to to get into real trouble because it was you get teased for it. like So my initial heroes when I was at ah you know in those early years of my life were people like Harry Butler and David Attenborough.
00:37:37
Speaker
And they were effectively growing and mentoring little nerds, little nature nerds, but there was no sort of social infrastructure or social license for nerdiness, nature nerdiness, until I think fairly recently, I went back to that same school that I was teased out when I was in young primary school. I went back there a few years ago for a presentation and I asked, I told the story of me and Roger and I said,
00:38:03
Speaker
how many of you guys are into birds now and like half the school put their hand up and it was like wow like that's ah such a transition right and that's effectively bird notiness because ecology should be a mandated subject in school every year like what's the point in knowing bloody differentiation, integration, maths, but having not a clue about the benefits of ecosystem services. It's madness. It's complete madness. So I think let's let's bring nerdiness back into the light. Well, but maybe it was never in the light, but let's let's let's put it in the light as being a cool thing to be. That's the only preference. This list, I was off top of my head. Some of those things may take me longer than a year, but I'm so i'm sort of
00:38:51
Speaker
I'm sick of putting up news resolutions for things like I'm going to drink less coffee or stupid stuff that you're never going to do because I will always drink coffee, lots of it. But these things are like, if they're not achievable, the ones that aren't achievable, at the very least, I'm out in the bush for a long time. Like I'm out there doing other stuff. Like I'll get a whole range of other benefits anyway. Well, let's, let's hear it. Fire away. Well,
00:39:18
Speaker
So the first one is I really want to find out where our local lyebirds, that's superb lyebirds, we've got all around the house, up into the forest behind us, where they're bloody nesting. Because I've found an old nest, I've been there for 30 years on my property, right, and I've never found their nest. They nest in the winter, or through the autumn, so they start nesting in about May through June. The female, he does all the work, the male's just a He's just a dancing, singing john Johnny Farland sort of character. Or a lead guitarist or something in a rock band. Has no interest in in the the welfare of the children, it seems, beyond just the procreation. So the female does all the nesting. So i' I've come close to tracking the nest before, but it takes a long time. A little quick little side story on that, like, in terms of finding nests. So when my kids were young, and it was this whole thing of like, get off your screen, you know, like parents everywhere, you've had too much screen time, get outside, as we were kind of just slowly losing ground to Facebook and TikTok. And I put a list on the fridge one morning that they woke to, and it was a list of bird nests with with cash prizes for each one.
00:40:38
Speaker
Things like Yellow Robin nests were like pretty dime a dozen in that place. Like I probably have found seven or eight of them this season so far within a couple hundred meters of the house. They were 50 bucks. But when you got up to the Lyrebird, that was a $500 cash prize. what So that was, the I had had my kids out, they sometimes went out for half a day to pack lunch and they never got a Lyrebird. They're hard to find with the nests of Lyrebird.
00:41:05
Speaker
But they' are real they're a real treasure. I mean, to find one would be next year, if I could find one next autumn. It would be such a thrill and and a privilege. And then to get a recording of the Yonge Library. There'll only be one, one Yonge Library in the next. I can get a little bit close and get a recording of the Begging Call.
00:41:29
Speaker
that would be super special. So that one may not happen next year because I i reckon I probably got to put at least a hundred hours, maybe 200 hours in for that to get that nest unless I fluke it. So there's a fairly big investment there, but you know, that's, that's on my list. And if I spend 200 hours and I don't find a live bird, well, I bloody hell, that's 200 hours out in the bush.
00:41:57
Speaker
Is there is there a payment like from the local council or something to you a parent or bribery if you find such a thing? My payment is that's 200 hours in the bush has 200 hours and not spending doing some stupid bureaucracy or engaging with an IT problem or doom scrolling on my phone. Like that's my payment.
00:42:16
Speaker
what you sorry Your second point Andrew also sounds deceptively simple but I'm guessing there's a bigger story behind it. Oh yeah because law runners okay so live birds look like they're one of the oldest songbirds on the planet basically all the songbirds of Europe, North America, China, wherever you go in the world They all owe their existence to some ancestor that diverged from lyrebirds maybe 40 million years ago or something. So we've had lyrebirds, it looks like, in the Australian rainforest and nowhere else in the world, for maybe 40 million years, but between 25 and 40 million years. They're bloody old, right? They're Gondwana and Orange in the company. Evolved in Australia and and Antarctica. They're really old.
00:43:06
Speaker
Log runners are a little bird that, when you see them moving around the forest, they kind of look like mice almost, like slightly large sized mice. And they're massive introverts. They're real, they keep to themselves. They don't like company. And they're close relatives of live birds. So they are very, very old as well. And they diverged from live birds right back where we don't know how far, but 20 million years or something back. So they also have been scrounging around in rainforests on the floors of rainforest for a fucking long time. Now, because they're in rainforest,
Nature Photography & Birdwatching Techniques
00:43:40
Speaker
on the ground of rain yeah on the on the on the ground floor,
00:43:44
Speaker
it's always so bloody dark, it's hard to get a photo of anything in those environments, but they also don't let you get too close to them, generally. You've gotta put a lot of time in, and when they're feeding, they really get, like, they super get absorbed by their feed, they're scratching, they've kind of got these spines on the end of their tail, they've got a longish tail, they have spines coming out of the end of their tail,
00:44:05
Speaker
and they lean back on the spines like tent pegs holding them into the ground while they use their legs and scratch madly with their legs throwing material out of the way so they can expose the ground and then they eat the little creatures that they expose. When they're in that mode, when they go in full berserker like that, that's where you can get close to them. But you've got to put the hours in. And I have yet to get a photo of one and it's embarrassing.
00:44:31
Speaker
Oh, so embarrassing. I actually can't believe that. um How long is your longest camera lens? That's a personal question. I just want to know how long you have to have your lens be to get something of that.
00:44:46
Speaker
of that version Well, the thing is, it's not about the long it's not about how long the lens is, how will you use it in this situation, that is true. The lens I use is only 300mm. A lot of the bird photographers I know are using 600mm lenses or even longer, which you can pay for a good one, 20 grand or something.
00:45:06
Speaker
but that in some ways it's like I would love to have one day me wrong but it is kind of cheating in a sense like I like to get up close and personal with my birds so I even though I got a short 300mm lens not a real big lens when I spend a lot of extra time getting inside their personal space. So when I take, if I take a photo of a robin, I'll be, you know, I'll be sort of somewhere inside of four or five meters. If I can get even two or three meters away, especially if it's nesting. So I try and use those stealthy kind of slow moving have given them a lot of time to get used to me. Um,
00:45:46
Speaker
If I have to, I'll just stay in the one spot doing a photographer the sixth spot for like two hours until the bird goes into that one little what mossy log that I've got ready to go because that's the log I want to take a photo of the bird on and sure enough, you know, after you do that enough times.
00:46:03
Speaker
ah but the bird you want will land there, you've just got to be able to be in the right spot and do it long enough. i I kind of like doing that rather than seeing a bird at 30 metres away, not even being in its personal space and then just snapping it because you've got a bloody huge lens. And that won't really help you with log runners anyway because they're in complicated, cluttered environments and it's dark, you need to be up close, you need to be in their zone.
00:46:27
Speaker
you mean you can't just use a body you know a Kodak you know sort of insert camera but you need something with a little bit of lens but mainly it's about being close enough and patient. Yeah I hear you I was just thinking of um I refuse to use binoculars for the longest time um because they make me feel a little bit seasick. But I also was really happy to be honing, sharpening my ear holes and listening more to the calls. And then I started feeling like, oh, maybe I should be using binoculars because I don't have to disturb the birds as much. But now you've kind of presented with this alternate another vision of being more stealthy and more patient so that I could you know have my binoculars and eat them too or whatever the right proverb is.
00:47:09
Speaker
Yeah, chocolate binoculars. um look Getting good binoculars, I was lucky, I had a pair of ship binoculars for a long time, for 20 years or something in my birding life, but I was once doing a ah tour, a a four-day tour with this a company that bring out international you know bird lovers.
00:47:30
Speaker
And I had this elderly Swiss woman on the tour and at the end of that I kept asking to borrow her binoculars because she got this like three thousand dollar pair of Swarovski binoculars and she kept complaining how heavy they were for her and I kept saying they're really good in my hands they they they feel really nice in my hands just jokingly but anyway after the tour finished and she went back to Switzerland wherever she came from about a month later this enormous box arrives in the post and inside the box from Switzerland and inside the box with her binoculars among other things. So I felt like I had cataracts removed from my eyes
00:48:10
Speaker
when I looked through these binoculars, like the world was hyper real. It was better than it normally is. And so I'm a firm believer in getting the most expensive binoculars that you can afford, even if it means not eating for a couple of weeks, because it will transform your life.
00:48:26
Speaker
You just want to be out there. If you get shitty binoculars, you know, really parochial view of the world, you're not going to want to get out there because the binoculars are just making you sick, like you said. Or they're dull. But when you get better binoculars, and you don't even spend like 400 to 800 bucks and you get binoculars that honestly you feel like you got some sort of additional sense is being added to your sensory input. It's like vision plus. So I'd still say binoculars are cool to take with you.
00:48:55
Speaker
The listing will, as you say, like cleaning out your ear holes, like learning how to actively listen properly, and people go, I know how to listen. What's this going about? No, you don't. Your brain is filtering out information that it thinks is unimportant all the time in order to save energy and only present you with the minimum amount of data about reality. And a lot of that stuff that goes to your spam box is currently interesting stuff.
00:49:20
Speaker
that needs to do with birds and you need to learn how to re-write rules in there that says don't send that to spam, put that into my inbox, I want to know about that stuff. So once you start learning that you realise how much more full the audio world is around birds, but you need to have a combination listing and also be able to see so you can go, what's that bird up to? So I can then say that call, I can see that call is associated with courtship or with begging or with fighting or with whatever. So a combo deal. Amazing. Thank you for the relatable email analogy.
00:49:58
Speaker
Very good. um So your next point is, it sounds super fun, but also kind of perilous at the same time. What did you have for number three? Look, when I go into my six spots, I often just sit at the base of a tree. That's that's cool. I like a little bit of a view down through the forest. I'm going to be able to see things up close, but I don't want to be just like just completely confronted by a bunch of foliage clutter. That was all very well in the beginning, but now that the rainforest that I've been working on, taking a little Lantana and stuff out of it, it's starting to regrow back. It's pretty getting pretty dense.
00:50:31
Speaker
I'm thinking about building like about a three or four meter high pole structure in the forest and putting like a little one meter by one meter perch on top of it and I can see on top of that a little ladder down the I'm thinking that it'll do two things maybe it'll get me high enough that I won't get attacked by the forest midges as much which is like the six potters bloody nemesis the summer months but by getting a bit higher you get to see a different perspective on the forest because you're in the sort of mid-story and I've I have climbed trees before and done sit spots in trees and you do get this like really weird perspective that you're not used to because you're looking down on the ground and birds on the ground will often just not look up at you and just forage right underneath you and that would be really cool but
00:51:19
Speaker
Seeing a tree gives me a really sore arse, so not to mention it's a little bit dangerous, but if I can get like a nice big sort of platform, little thing to sit on, comfy pillow, percolator of coffee or whatever, chocolate, I could have extended sous-spot and maybe been reaching three at the same time. That's my that's my goal there.
00:51:39
Speaker
ah plush lux. Yeah. Okay. I loved your next one. It speaks to my cynical cynical heart. Yeah. i've already We've already been through this a little bit, but we do live in a pretty nasty time politically, I think at the global level and and ecologically, climate crisis, ecological collapse, all that sort of nasty stuff. And I'm an ecologist by training so I'm just, I'm super aware aware of all that, even at a local level, just constantly just like developments going in and just beating up the coastal ecology. So you're kind of aware of all that pain, that pain in nature and and just just the situation in places like Palestine. It's just like makes me just so rageful and kind of like disgusted with humanity.
00:52:28
Speaker
And so it's just ultimately not good for me, kind of like impotent rage in a way. And I want to be i'm a bear witness, I don't want to like ignore the plight of people suffering a genocide. For instance, so I want to be able to be active in some useful way, like doing stuff in the community actively. But I think I need to offset that with just spending more time with the birds more time in nature because that's the restorative thing that kind of like gives me the peace the peacefulness i guess some equanimity restores not doesn't restore my faith in humanity at all i think that's why i'm truly shocked but it it gives me so it fills up some i know other word nourishment because that word is sort of it's used but you can't stand but it is nourishing
00:53:20
Speaker
in a sense that if I've done that in the morning, if I've gone out and spent an hour or two singing the bush in the morning and connecting with my woodbirds and all the rest of the city, I'm much more capable of dealing with the world after that without getting empty. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I mean, we may not all be out there building four metre tall birding platforms in the forest after this interview, but I think we can all get into spending more time out in the bush on the land as an antidote to doom scrolling, so I very much appreciate that point. And nourishing yourself, I'll also check the nourishment box on the
00:53:58
Speaker
podcasting platform warnings so that people know that if they're allergic to the word nourishment tree, they should not tune in. I was going to just quickly add to that part that ignorance would be bliss. Like if I could, if I could get a conscience level, get away with it, not tune in at all. I think I'd be happier in general, you know, letting the world slide into oblivion outside and just sticking in the forest.
00:54:23
Speaker
for me i can't do that. It just feels too selfish. So I need some way to cope and that's my coping. That's the way I cope. It's my, I've got to do that. And if you live in the suburbs or you live in places where you don't have a million hectares of forest to go to, which is like pretty likely, then just sitting in the garden, but just seeing the garden and not thinking about pulling out bindis or pulling out weeds or harvesting carrots. I mean, just sitting, it's the practice of sitting without need to do.
00:54:52
Speaker
like you do that anywhere in veranda or somewhere else but don't try and do something else at the same time you've got to give yourself over to the not doing part yeah gosh these conflicting messages like Sedentary is so bad and now you're saying we got to just sit there and do nothing? Yeah, small periods of sedentary amongst the flurry of activity. All right, Roger. Okey-doke. Yeah, number five, if you please. As you know, like from looking at the website, um I try and record
00:55:28
Speaker
um examples of all the different voices that different voices that birds will use and to communicate with each other and about their environment, about their about the natural world around them.
00:55:43
Speaker
and um I've kind of developed a schema for that. There's about yeah eight or nine different types of voices. I can use courtship, voice, aggression, bickering, begging, territorial voices, and this sort of mimicry, a few other things. When it comes to alarm, if you've got a ground alarm, it's very, like I was saying earlier, ground alarm's persistent, hangs around for a long time,
00:56:10
Speaker
and spatially kind of tied to one spot, normally a sleeping python or something, or it moves pretty slowly, like a lumbering going on. But aerial alarm like a peregrine falcon coming in to snap up a lorikeet in the forest above you. That takes place in a blink of an eye. And by the time you've untangled all your bloody cables and plugged your headphones in and got your little, got my audio thing going and got the mic going and lifted it up, that peregrine's like five kilometres away.
00:56:44
Speaker
So it is bloody difficult to get an audio recording of the flea alarm that birds will make when they're under attack from an incoming aerial predator like a bird. Not like blood sucking fleas FLWE. That's right.
00:57:03
Speaker
I i haven't also haven't for the record got and got a audio attack an audio recording of a bird being attacked by a flea. That's also something that might be the following year I might look for that.
00:57:16
Speaker
but this is this is birds that are being they're under imminent lethal attack you know lethal threat by a falcon gospel call it sparwa or something and normally that stuff happened I see it all it i don't see it all the time but I see it happen in a year, probably 12-20 times.
00:57:37
Speaker
but I never got any bloody thing with me to do the recording because my actual recording gear is a bit cumbersome and I leave it behind unless it's all set up and ready to go. So I'm trying to work out, can I get something, can can I get a little recording system for my phone, or a little plug-in thing for my phone, I've been looking at those. Something that's just more readily available and I can have it on and when I think I'm in a kind of like a zone for that sort of stuff that might happen, just have it running. And if you go and look on the internet and you go,
00:58:06
Speaker
example of audio recording of birds under attack by a falcon. The internet is so thin. If you know look up, there's a whole range of subjects from porn through to bloody rock stars or whatever, where it's just like there's an endless amount of that crap. But you go and look up this nature-based stuff. It's quite like everyday things happen in nature.
00:58:29
Speaker
the audio recording of birds making a fleeing alarm when under attack by a predator, aerial predator. Bloody silch! Or very close to it. Oh, I was just gonna say, I've noticed that too and so I'm really excited for the deluge of bird call porn. Maybe not deluge, but one. If I get one, one call, like one full sequence.
00:58:53
Speaker
of the bird coming in, you know the parrot coming in, a whole bunch of honey just freaking the little heads off. And then as it as it moves through, then they all go into that sort of recovery call where they're like, I'm alive, oh my God, I'm alive, are you okay? ah I've only, I have got one or two of those calls recorded and it was just because I was recording something else at the time and the attack happened left the field. So it's not awesome recording, but it's basically king parrots reacting to a goshawk.
00:59:21
Speaker
and they just come belting out of the forest next to me, and they've got this clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, bowerbird down the gully who doesn't even see the guy or but he makes a community announcement to all the other female to his female companion companion and you'll go
00:59:42
Speaker
And that's him, letting them know, hey girls, Goshawk in the area, keep your heads down. That's part of his life. You know, him sort of trying to say, when you mate with me, even though I don't help you with the babies, I do help you keep ahead of Goshawks. Um, and that I did get, I've got that sequence. I have got that sequence once. Um, so that's about all. yeah Yeah. Hey, while we're on this, are those recordings on your website?
01:00:08
Speaker
I think so. i've got yeah like I've got the Voices of Birds pages on the website and I've got examples of every single voice type. I've got it i've got my ah my examples and photographs and i just and some and some dialogue to talk about what it's about.
01:00:24
Speaker
Okay, sweet, it'll be. That's all, that's all, that's all free. That's all free. There's no paywall. We'll just go look at your timely one. Yeah. Oh, it's a brilliant repository, Andrea. And your writing is just, it's so captivating and so charismatic and a real good time. So I highly recommend everyone go and plumb the depths of your website because it's, it's, it's rollicking. Thanks Katie. I love writing. That's mine. Yeah. Yeah, I can tell. So the next one, your next point is extremely apt as we come into the warmer months, and it's to do with supporting our feathery friends. Yep, that's it. If you want to do one thing, if you can do one thing to help out your local birds, no matter where you are, in the middle of sub-birds, out in the middle of 1-1 rainforest where I am, it's to get a good bird bath and just keep it full.
01:01:16
Speaker
Keep it full. You don't have to scrub it out every day or anything like that. I mean, just keep you it full, everything and then give me a good clean out, but just basically keep it full. Because if you get like a, you know, a couple of bough birds turn up and then just these burly of boof heads, by the time they've had a good bath, they empty out two liters of water and you've got to fill it back up again. But it's not filled up at the top.
01:01:36
Speaker
little buddy little um you know thornbill or a little finch come along and like they can't reach the water and it's like you got to rush out put more water in there and honestly you go out on a hot day and i get the hose and i can i'm filling up my bird bath the birds can hear the sound of the water going in the bird bath from 100 meters away and they start lining up like kids at a bloody municipal pool. So they really value that water. The birds need to clean themselves apart from drinking. They need to clean their feathers off and so they will have a bird bath. They will use a bird bath three or four times a day and the bird bath is somewhere where you can see it from your kitchen window or from your office study. It's close to a tap. It's got a little bit of foliage around it. They don't like bird baths out in the middle You put them in the middle, no way in the middle, but with no foliage around it, you'll only get the bullies turned up. But if you can put it near a bit of foliage, a bit of shrubbery, you'll get the little cuties coming in as well. And it is such a kind and humane thing to do for birds. And so picking it for all year round so they know that you're reliable. Because if you're not reliable, they just stop turning up. Yeah, we're in my friend's cottage, who's an avid.
01:02:46
Speaker
lover of all creatures great and small and she's got so many bird baths here and they're situated brilliantly with lots of different sized shrubbery and the long and the short is we can sit anywhere in our garden and see this litany of beautiful bejeweled birds from you know the spotted pardalotes up to the waddlebirds all having bath time and they're just completely delightful to watch and we're astonished at how familiar they become with us and as you said how rapidly they take you up on that offer of fresh water like they are waiting in the wings and will descend as soon as you refresh the bath.
01:03:22
Speaker
And how's their personality, you really see their personality shining out in the bird bath? Like, whose whose personality is bolshe? Whose personality is shy? And it can be unexpected. Like I saw, it there's a whip bird. We've got whip birds coming to the bird bath all the time. and The whipbirds, well, they all have their different ways of wanting to get the water, like a little fantail or an eastern spine mill, which just delicately flits across the surface really quickly and then just back on the side, then flips it back in and back on the side. But a whipbird just like gets in the birdbath, upwards neck, and just sits there and just like wallows.
01:03:58
Speaker
And then you get like a bowerbird comes to the, ah you know, a satin bowerbird, big wolf head gets to the outside and looks in at the whip bird and is basically like, you know, okay, fuck off. I'm here now. You know, I'm twice as big. and It's my turn. And the whip bird to my astonishment and my extreme delight.
01:04:15
Speaker
just sort of wades across to the edge of the bird bath and just like pecks this bough bird straight in the face and knocks the bough bird back off the bird and then just goes back into the bird bath and just keeps like wallowing and and was like wow I didn't realise you guys which is so bullshit. Bitch slapped. Bitch slapped and this bough bird was just like what the fuck just happened then? So I love watching the personality shine in the bird bath. You can't help but feel joyful watching birds in the birdbath and you feel good you just bloody feel good after it just 10 minutes watching birds you just it tickles something deep inside it is it's a two-way win-win situation you know you really need to get this birdbath yeah it really triggers my cute aggression they're just so cute oh yeah that's right and they just cuddle them
01:05:12
Speaker
Well, Adri, look, I'm highly aware of your time because I know you need to get out there and start photographing log runners. So we have a few more points to run through. So I'd love to hear what you've got next as an intention.
Challenges with Birds and Reflections
01:05:24
Speaker
uh... well we've already talked about the uh... the catbird coming my window mornings and that has not they're not the only bird who's interested in pummeling windows uh... they do it because they see like a handsome rivals uh... look at back at them and it it it rages them of course because that's the in the middle of their territory in the breeding season they're like they cannot tolerate another pair of extremely handsome catbirds it out. But they're they not only extremely handsome, but they're also extremely pugnacious and and resilient. They just never seem to leave. They're always there when you turn up and need to be pummeled again and again every morning.
01:06:06
Speaker
And in the end, the only way I've dealt with them is to put like any chicken wire over my ah my windows, like you're some shop in Kilgandra. It's just like, it feels like a jail in that way. I'm like, you've got to be in a better way. I don't know. I've got to try and work in a better way. Because the fairy wrens are the same thing to my car mirror. And it builds up like this sort of Naru-sized guano pile on on the edge of your window. of the dash of the ah the window sill, and some young fella texted, he got in contact with me recently, sorry, email, and he's like, Andrew, can you help me? I have a golden whistler that is destroying my car.
01:06:46
Speaker
And I was just like, like, old Whistler's only about the size of a lady think of a banana. Like, how's it throwing your car? And he's like, it just attacks it. And she shits all over it and attacks it and attacks it. He said, it's destroying the paint. And it's spending so long moving up and down the one spot next to my mirror. Its feet are staying there.
01:07:08
Speaker
actually tear the paint off like weather away the so the paint on his car and it was like oh this is if i could solve this problem i reckon i could patent it holy shit golden whistler attack yeah he needs some like cat red prim mesh i did see um these super fancy and really expensive windows that they were pitching for high rises to stop the you know crazy massacre every single day of birds flying into those windows and they were just like subtly flecked with little I don't know they had some thing that yeah stopped the light reflecting but I'm guessing that it might not cut it for these the pseudo competitors in the mirror I don't know
01:07:51
Speaker
It might do. I know that once you mean, because it's ah it's it's a way of, you don't notice it looking out as a person looking out in the world, you don't notice it, but looking in, it looks like it's a solid object and not just like ah another paint and yeah another sort of like area of sky to fly through. I don't know whether it would be good enough to stop a reflection. um I'm going to try just putting some like maybe hanging some, I don't know, some stuff that just moves around in the light, in the wind, you know, like thin stream of material silver strip sort of material like that I've tried doing a bit of that it has to be something that doesn't also offend me because I mean I mean they're working in the office looking out through these windows which currently makes me feel like I'm you know in some bunker I'm gonna work on that next year oh
01:08:36
Speaker
get back into that next spring. My my next one is I'd really like to find somebody who like say they're desperate enough or dedicated enough or some other way maybe impaired that don't know how much work they're about to do to intro all of my data because I've been taking seasonal records of birds and animals and when they arrive and when they breed and you know when they change up calls for 30 years and so I've got hundreds and hundreds of records quite complex in records because like I've been recording everything from butterflies to paddy melons to when the pythons come out when they change their hunting styles and when the termites, wing termites come out and when the migrants come back from New Guinea the little flycatchers come back and all that sort of stuff
01:09:29
Speaker
And I ah need to get into a database of some sort so I can start i can start interrogating it and getting the patterns out. Because there's like super useful stories to be told out of that data. Indeed. But when it's just a giant pile of journals and diaries and loose paper, it's quite not that great. But it looks like it'd be a really tedious job. So that's why I need to find someone who doesn't.
01:09:55
Speaker
I can sort of trick into doing it, if pay them, anyone out there who's like just got some sort of impairment where they just love putting information into the spreadsheets. Okay, yeah, I will buy reskillingitscareers.com and monetize this this listing service that we could possibly post on the podcast as well. And also, Nody recording stationary question, Andrew, what's your preferred notepad and then for field recordings?
01:10:24
Speaker
Oh, look, these days I just go by like a bloody ah annual student diary from like, you know, Officeworks or something. In the past I've used these naturalist field diaries that I just basically get a page and that has on there the date and has a little section for weather, a little section for but plants, a little section for insects, a little section for birds and other animals. And I fill out information on each one of those and I probably try and do that twice a week.
01:10:51
Speaker
And that was just all loose leaf collected. So I've got folds of that stuff. But then I started just writing down stuff, you know, like a diary. And the best diary I found for it was just a student diary. It has the least amount of crap in it. And it's it's I can just write down things. And then that way the date's already there. So that's that student diary. But I have seen the most, like one of my bird language students at the Wengat Bird Language Retreat were at in October.
01:11:16
Speaker
she showed me her diary her field diary and she does absolutely like gorgeous like watercolor painting like little drawings and stuff that go with key feature of the record so if there was like i don't know blue triangle butterflies are just emerged she'll she'll do an incredible beautiful photo of an illustration of blue triangle butterfly and then right about the butterfly but also other things that happen at the same time because you want to be able to correlate things like when the blue butterfly merges what else is happening maybe the tallowoods just started going to flower maybe the maybe the carpet pythons have all just disappeared recently because they've all gone off they grab it and they can see on eggs who knows what they're up to maybe at the same time as the robins have started doing a particular call
01:12:02
Speaker
Over a few years of writing down records, you don't really know initially which of those observations are going to be important. You just write down all the observations you can think of, and over time you start to see the ones that are actually correlatable, and you wither it down, you know, until you've got these things, so you go, these are the ones I'm going to track.
01:12:19
Speaker
Now, I'm going to be really paying my attention paying attention to when the rose robin calls every year in July because I know the rose robin, when it first starts calling in July, I know that means that the nesting season has arrived for the sunbirds and I can start looking for nests. So, it takes it took me 20 years to work that out. Initially, I just wrote down a whole bunch of things. A whole bunch of things that started calling. But then after a while, I was like, oh hang on.
01:12:43
Speaker
Buddy Rose Robin is the signal. It's the signal. It heralds the beginning of the sunburn nesting season. And that sort of that sort of pattern emerges from the data.
01:12:54
Speaker
once you have enough of it. the most The more regular you do it, the better. Initially, just just record everything and do it regularly. if But try and get plants, try and get insects, try and get birds, because we'll all have some sort of bias inherently towards one type of animal or one type of, you know, whether it's trees or whatever, botanist or you just do plants and have nothing about insects, nothing about birds, nothing about animals, nothing about marsupials. Forces you to go, shit, I haven't actually paid attention to anything that's going on with plants for the last two weeks.
01:13:23
Speaker
And I'll go out and have a look around and realize, oh, it turns out the flooded gums are flaring. I just didn't even think about that. But of course that explains why the Scarlet Honey is a bag. So you're trying to you know you're trying to broaden that. Again, it's a naturalist inquiry approach. Why is that happening? So your second last point is quite a big and juicy one.
Mentoring Young Bird Enthusiasts
01:13:44
Speaker
um I really believe strongly in mentoring. I think like I did a science degree back when the world was young.
01:13:52
Speaker
And I, you know, it's great, got a little basis. But compared to the learning that happened when I started work and was actually teamed up with ecologists doing fieldwork, like really good ecologists, like the degree was just nothing compared to the to the mentoring.
01:14:11
Speaker
So, I've been lucky to have some really key mentors in my time. Even John Young, I spent some time with him in a couple of workshops, and he didn't probably know he was mentoring me, but I was getting mentored. Not around birds, but mentored around how to present bird language material to the audience, like storytelling and stuff like that. like That was the stuff I took from him. And so I've had some really good mentors, and I'd like i'd like to have an opportunity to mentor a young bird line print And i've I've got quite a few people through
01:14:43
Speaker
The years of doing bird language they're on the signal group who we keep contact every week several times a week And it's like a low-level mentoring But I think I'm kind of getting ready for a proper, you know to have a one or several proper appearances So that I can have someone even could get to the point where they can run retreats, you know done the And I can just I could just pull back with my genotronics on the veranda Let the minions run the show. Make star appearances.
01:15:15
Speaker
ah Lucky minion who's a mentor. Well, I hope that that transpires. Wonderful. a Mentoring. it's It's a hard thing, I think, to get it right. But I think it's so valuable as a lifelong kind of, you know, tool in people's lives, like you can set them on a certain direction and give them guidance. And I've i've been lucky to have had that and I want to give that back.
01:15:45
Speaker
It must feel pretty amazing to feel and know yourself, to be ripe in that way and to have the capacity then to start beaming that out to people around you and feel confident in that. Not that you can get it right and it's never going to be perfect, but just your own sense of, you know, like overflowing with enough stuff to have someone else be able to kind of sip at that cop too.
01:16:07
Speaker
I think that's a good metaphor for it. But i'm I'm just really, I think that I know that I'm at that place because I've had good mentors. So I've kind of like learned from people who mentored me and like and I reflect back on it and I go, my God, they changed my life. Like they completely and utterly deflected me from a course of action that I was on and put me onto a whole new course like in that through that mentoring.
01:16:33
Speaker
And so I've seen how they do it and how important it was. And I think you're recognizing yourself when it's kind of like, i okay, I'm ready. I've done a little bit of it before, but it not really been formalized. I think at some point in the next year or two, I want to try and formalize that arrangement with somebody and and really make it like this is a purposeful outcome. i'm I'm purposefully doing this for ah yeah an outcome. And I think you recognize that in yourself only because you've had someone else do it for you.
01:17:02
Speaker
Okay we find ourselves at your final intention for 2025. Oh yeah well the intention there is just to hang out my mum a bit more but it could be my dad too, it could be my whole family you know my mum and dad live pretty close they're still not too old we do see each other a reasonable amount but you know you kind of it's just easy to have just see days weeks go by and you don't show up. It's a bit of a selfish reason there too. My mum's really good at gardening and I really need some help with gardening. So she's a good hoard of cold trips and she comes over and gives me landscaping advice. So try and get a bit of work out of the old girl too, coming out to help. So yeah, I think just spending time with family where you can is something important. and that
01:17:51
Speaker
kind of goes against the grain of my hermit style reclusiveness. Like both my partner Rose and I kind of resent having guests most of the time at the house. We just do both just kind of reclusive introverts. So we don't go out of the way to invite family. We've got a couple of people come and stay. But even then it's like, you know, even in two days, time you're fucked off now. Getting out, getting away from my normal reclusiveness and making sure I get out too.
01:18:21
Speaker
to visit the text of an hour more, I think. Something I'll make sure I don't lose sight of next year. Thanks for including that and giving it the penultimate position in your list. I thought that was really sweet. And thank you too for... It wasn't an afterthought. It was. It could be seen that way. Not at all.
01:18:43
Speaker
Oh, well, Andrew, thank you so much for bringing your smarts and your stories to the Riskillosphere. Like, I've just had so much fun. um Is there anything that you would like to point our attention to as we wrap up this conversation? Something something cool that you're offering out into the world or something you've written or anything, really? Well, but the easiest thing is like the website. the If you just put in Andrew the Bird Guy,
01:19:09
Speaker
dot com. You should be able to find me or Andrew andrew the Bird Guy Bird Language into your browser. You should be able to find me. That website has everything in there that I you know, all the stuff that I spent, that was really my COVID work. When I, when I was doing the COVID lockdown period, which I loved actually, because I wasn't in a North townhouse. I was, you know, in Mansa Forest and had a reasonable excuse to be reclusive. So I did a website then, and I just put down heaps of stuff that I could, that I wanted to communicate to people. So there's a lot in there. There's lots of pages on bird language.
01:19:46
Speaker
white chick in the bird language, how does his spot, all the different voices of birds. and But there's also about 30 different articles I've written on naturalism related to stuff that we've been chatting about today. you know like Crazy shit like the bird bird, the bower birds.
01:20:02
Speaker
in the birdbath with the bird. It's just one of the stories I've written I used to write for a a local magazine. So that's they come about, put them in there as well. So there's good stories there. And I love stories. I love writing stories. But there's also some pages there about events. So stuff coming up in 2025. There's a whole bunch of face-to-face bird language retreats. Coming up, there's one in Melbourne, and in just outside of Melbourne, at Gilwell Park. That's coming up in is in late February. There's one on the Central Coast at a place called Arimba. It's a beautiful property there. There's one at Wangat Lodge. So the Arimba one is in is in March. The one at Wangat Lodge is in October.
01:20:44
Speaker
and I'm trying to organize a couple of other ones as well. Plus there's online Zoom based workshops that happen throughout the year that you can do through your computer but I set homework for you and then I punish you when you don't do the homework. So all those offerings are on the website and there's lots of detail showing you what we do and what's on offer and how much they cost and how to book. And you can join, if you're interested in getting, I do seasonal newsletters as well. I'm just about to release one as soon as I can get my wife to help me edit it. And they're like seasonal naturalist newsletters, go out about six times a year. And you can sign up on the website under the contacts, contact me page. And then I just send you out the stuff. It's with a whole bunch of audio, sometimes with lots of pictures and stories.
01:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, cool. I will link all of these tasty tasty morsels in the show notes for everyone. and Good on you, thank you. Yeah, I wish you all the best with your nerdy endeavors. I'd actually love to hear how you go, especially with some of those um really quite tricky aspirations that you got going on there, but good luck. Well, maybe we'll get like another, you know, but outbreak of a yeah epidemic disease and I'll have the opportunity to.
Speculation on Bird Flu Epidemic
01:21:56
Speaker
But fuck, it might be bird flu. I'll tell you what, what it could be bird flu. That hasn't hit hit the country as the time of the recording, but it has started. There are at least a couple of examples of it jumping into people and getting them pretty bad respiratory system issues. But it is really, like I say to the students when they come and join on the yeah bird language stuff, I go, look, this stuff, I've got to give you a warning call because this this can lead, this is a curse as you get you deeper into this. It can lead to unemployment.
01:22:24
Speaker
because you don't have time to go to work. It's too exciting to be in the forest. You don't want to miss out. In a mature society, there'll be a form on the, there'll be there'd be like ah a space on the unemployment form, like, you know, why are you unemployed? Why are you claiming unemployment benefits? You just be the one that ticket this this bird language student.
01:22:45
Speaker
And it would grind the economy to a ah halt, which is going to be ecologically marvellous. Zero growth economy through bird language. that I should have put that down on my list, number 11. Brilliant, you can have it. that's that's We'll set that free.
Gratitude & Next Episode Announcement
01:23:00
Speaker
Thanks Andrew. Thanks Katie.
01:23:05
Speaker
megalania sized thanks to Andrew Turbill for dreaming up such a creative and fun set of 10 things and go ahead and check out the show notes if you want to stalk Andrew some more. Now I'm going to try and make up for lost time and release the next episode on natural beekeeping with Adrienne Yodas.
01:23:24
Speaker
oh my god so good, on cue next Monday which means you only have to wait a few days for that and truly it is another deep meaningful and magical chat. I interviewed Adrienne in person which always makes for a more connective exchange and if you listen to that and get excited about natural beekeeping let's chat because I'll be setting up my own hive in the next year or so.
01:23:46
Speaker
Alright friends, it's a pleasure to spend this time with you as always and I hope you've got restful, social or blissfully solo holiday plans on the horizon. See you Monday.