When the answer to the simple question of “what are you doing this weekend?” is “looking for a booby”, it can get you into all sorts of trouble in the operating theatres.
Up the M1 in search of a booby
But this is indeed the exact conversation I had with the staff in my hospital late on Friday afternoon. The conversation happened because a bird called the Cocos booby, never before recorded in Australia, had somehow ended up roosting on boats moored at Marks Point on Lake Macquarie, far from its usual home of Cocos Island in Costa Rica. Given my family's keen bird watching pedigree, I just had to see this vagrant and tick it off my life list. So, on Saturday morning, with my teenage son happily and willingly in tow, we set off up the M1 in search of a booby.
Bird watching is good for your health and wellbeing
Birdwatching, or twitching as it is widely known, is an increasingly popular past time that is getting even young people off their screens and out into nature (where, ironically, they record their birding exploits and publish them via the said screens). Once in nature, it is now indisputable that the health benefits start to flow.
We know that our wellbeing benefits from birding. In one study, researchers at Kings College London found that simply seeing or hearing birds provides significant mental health benefits, not just at the time of the encounter but in the hours after. There are many more such studies, all concluding the same thing; bird watching is good for your mental health and wellbeing.
Birding benefits our physical health too. Regular walking lowers your blood pressure and reduces your risk of heart attack and diabetes. It even lowers your risk of dying from any cause. In pursuit of the elusive noisy scrub-bird, my family once walked 20 kilometres in a single day around remote Cheyne's Beach in Western Australia. When this loud-mouthed heath dweller evaded detection, we walked a further 18 km in a vain attempt to spot it the next day. In birding words we dipped on our 'bogey bird' but in the immortal words of Mr Schwarzenegger, “we'll be back”.
If bird watching was a pill, your doctor would be prescribing it two times a day, your birding life list would be part of your medical history, and your cardiologist would simultaneously be an ornithologist.
Dividends far beyond the individual
But the dividends of birding extend far beyond the individual. Bird based tourism generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the Australian economy and is particularly important in remote and regional areas.
We saw this firsthand at Marks Point on our journey to spot the Cocos booby. The local cafe was full of birders planning their expedition and debriefing after sighting the booby and ticking it off their life list. Bird nerds from as far away as Western Australia had made the dash to this little town on Lake Macquarie's peaceful shore and they all needed a morning coffee, lunch and a place to stay. The bird is the magnet, but it's the locals who benefit.
Australia's birds are in trouble
With all this good news, why am I worried about birding? The answer is that Australia's birds are in trouble. Birdlife Australia estimates that 1 in 6 bird species are threatened with extinction. Too many of our unique and iconic birds are edging ever closer to the same fate as their distant cousin, the dodo.
Birdlife Australia estimates that 1 in 6 bird species are threatened with extinction.
Right now, Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt has an opportunity to stop this flight toward extinction as he develops the regulations, known as the Standards, that will accompany the recently reformed nature protection laws. These reformed laws have the potential to significantly increase nature protection in this country, but whether they succeed or fail largely depends upon these Standards.
Recently, the government released a draft standard for protecting threatened species and ecosystems for public comment. It is weak and process driven, meaning that developers can simply tick-a-box to satisfy the law rather than committing to protect nature. What we need is a strong nature standard that forces developers to show that the outcome of their proposal is consistent with the objectives of the laws that are designed to protect nature.
This would help curb one of the main drivers of extinction in Australia; habitat destruction through land-clearing and native forest logging. It would ensure that our forests, bush and skies are filled with our feathered friends, giving future generations the chance to spot a Carnaby's cockatoo, a swift parrot or perhaps even a Cocos booby, and to experience the accompanying scientifically proven joie de vivre.
Looking for a booby.