Bird watching starter kit

Dear Barry,

I live near Apollo Bay on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. We’ve just come here to enter semi-retirement. The previous owners had cats and dogs and there is a bit of a garden of exotic shrubs and a couple of trees. I like birdlife and would like to attract more birds to the garden. So far we have magpies, I think currawongs, kookaburras, honeyeaters and some smaller birds. I thought the best way would be to provide some food for them. However, when I go to national parks they say don’t feed the wildlife. What’s the best approach? Also can you recommend the best field guide for a beginner and binoculars as now I’m winding down I’d like to know more about what’s around us.

Jenny, Apollo Bay, Victoria.

Hi Jenny,

As a birdwatcher since I was a wee boy I can thoroughly recommend it as a hobby – you get to see wonderful animals and in getting to know them you get to know how the bush works. Because birds fill so many different niches – different ways of getting food and in different habitats – if you know Australian birds well you know how nature in Australia works.

There are a number of truly excellent field guides around now. The best ones to get have drawings or paintings (not photos) in them, cover all the birds of Australia and are a handy size to lug around. I reckon the best one for beginners is Michael Morcombe’s Field Guide to Australian Birds. Drawings are best because they allow the artist to highlight the differences between similar species so you can look for the identifying features easily.

With binoculars you generally, though not always, pay for what you get. But don’t feel you need an expensive pair to start. Any cheap pair of binoculars will allow you to see and identify wildlife easily. The best thing is to work out your price range, then check out a range of binoculars in the shop. I usually politely ignore the shop assistants who rarely know about binoculars because they mostly sell cameras. Actually look through the binoculars out the door and check for the sharpness of the image, the amount of light coming in, and how close you can focus.

You need to focus one eyepiece first before using the general focus (the shop assistant can hopefully help with that if you aren’t sure). Make sure the size is fine for you to easily handle for longish periods.

Once you’ve got your binoculars and bird book you can start seeing new birds. A common misconception is that you need to be an expert and spend lots of time before you can identify things. With the field guides now available anyone can just spend a few minutes a day looking out for new species and easily find out what they are and get a feel for how they behave.

Once clearing started last century the noisy miners moved in.

Now with your garden – please don’t start feeding the birds, no matter how lovely it might be to see them close up. There are two problems with feeding wildlife. Firstly, individual animals can become dependent on the food. If you go away or stop feeding them, they may then be in strife.

The other more important reason is that feeding usually attracts and encourages what I call junkbirds. Junkbirds are lovely, true blue Australian birds that have diets and behaviour which means they can take advantage of urban areas, farmland and other changed habitats. This means they have become very common. Species like magpies, pied currawongs, kookaburras, ravens (aka crows), butcherbirds and noisy miners (not the introduced Indian mynas; noisy miners are a native honeyeater). Many of these birds are aggressive, or predators of smaller native birds. If you encourage them you discourage honeyeaters, thornbills, whistlers, native pigeons and many other native species that aren’t so adaptable.

To give you an example, I’m trying to replant rainforest and attract back the original rainforest birds here in my garden in south-east Queensland. Occasionally a rainforest pigeon, or a thornbill does stop and try to get a feed. But they are immediately bashed up by the resident mob of aggressive noisy miners – a bird that never lived in the original rainforest that used to cover the district. Once clearing started last century the noisy miners moved in, along with currawongs and crows and kookaburras and butcherbirds, all of which raid nests.

So I have lots of native birds, but not the ones that I’d actually like to encourage – the ones that are now rarer and which also help spread the seeds of rainforest trees for regeneration.

This type of problem is now happening all over the well settled parts of Australia.

So to best help the ecology of your area, start a garden of the local indigenous plants, and do anything you can to discourage the bigger and aggressive junkbirds which will try to dominate.

Think of it as creating a more egalitarian society. Someone’s got to start doing it in Australia!

Regards, Barry.

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