Day 1- 19/10/10 Lift-off

The brief was clear: drive 1736km to Scotia, in far-southwest NSW, and do it in two days. Unless we saw something genuinely interesting, we wouldn’t be stopping for anything. I was understandably a little disappointed, seeing as I was so precariously close to fulfilling a cardinal goal for the year [achieving 300 native Australian bird species seen; at this time I was on 295] and we would be zooming past heaps of novel things at 110km per hour, but I knew it had to be done.


Seven am saw us peeling out of Brisbane and through Cunningham’s Gap. By 8:30 we were past Warwick, and I was officially in uncharted territory; this was the extent of my previous journeys southwest-ward. Everything till that point was quite routine, but it wasn’t long before we achieved our first notable sighting: Apostlebird (Struthidea cinerea), a familiar bird to anyone who’s ventured sufficiently far west, but a novel one for me. Jeremy quickly picked up a new tick himself: Long-billed Corella (Cacatua tenuirostris). We were streaking towards the NSW border, and soon hit our first petrol stop at Goondiwindi. There wasn’t much in the way of notable wildlife, but there was a lot of water around, the product of all this rain sweeping in from the west. The rain would become a running theme through the course of this trip; the outback was saturated, rivers normally dry or mere trickles were overflowing their banks and everything was a verdant green. This was a good thing for all the obvious reasons, but it also meant that mobile wildlife like birds, normally constrained by the availability of resources, was now spread widely throughout a wider range, implying that they’d be harder to find.

As we headed south past Moree (below) and then Narrabri, we passed through a large patch of dry sclerophyll-dominated forest known generally as the Warrumbungles, broken up into Piliga Nature Reserve, Mt Kaputar NP and Warrumbungles NP. Here we got a good look at Turquoise Parrot (Neophema pulchella), not a new bird for either of us, but not a common species, and a much better sighting than our one previous glimpse earlier in the year at Ballandean. It was a good sign: the wildlife was becoming steadily more unfamiliar, and we would soon be in thoroughly new territory for both of us. It was a little past our next petrol stop at Gilgandra when I noted that this was the point where Torresian Crow would start to phase out and be replaced by two new corvids, Little Crow (Corvus bennetti) and Little Raven (C. mellori). Sure enough, we were soon firmly in Little Crow territory and also had a couple of sightings of Little Raven; Torresians were nowhere to be seen, and we had two new ticks apiece. Jeremy also noted a White-browed Woodswallow (Artamus superciliosus), which would have been new for both of us, but as I missed it, I couldn’t tick it. This was also the one that completed the suite for Jeremy; he had now seen every woodswallow species in Australia.

Nudging out past Nevertire, we hit the Barrier Highway and were soon rewarded with my first wild Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae); we were definitely in dry country now. By now it was late afternoon, and we were on track to reach our main target of reaching Cobar by nightfall. The roads were straight and empty, and nothing could go wrong! Well, at least until Nyngan, anyway, where we proceeded to miss the vital turn to Cobar, and instead went 40km up the road to Bourke. As navigatory infractions go, this wasn’t too serious, and thankfully was to be the only major blunder we would make all trip. The wrong turn also had an unexpected benefit: we scored our first Australian Ringnecks (Barnardius zonarius), and my 300th Australian species was achieved. Within the hour, I had also seen my first wild Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), and thoughts started turning towards a new aim: achieving 350 birds by the end of the year. Little were we to know how close I would come to fulfilling this aim. Also of note: I saw my first wild Red Kangaroos (Macropus rufus).

We reached Cobar right on nightfall, and after a quick dinner at the local RSL, decided to truck on out of town to cover more ground and find somewhere to spend the night. We were hoping for a few herps, but ended up having to settle for no reptiles and a poke around a flooded creek which yielded six species of frogs, including Desert Treefrogs (Litoria rubella) (right) and our first Holy Cross toads (Notaden bennetti), though we weren’t able to see the latter and could only ID them off calls. It was getting late and we were starting to tire, but decent places to pitch up at were nowhere to be found, and so it transpired that my first ever formal camping experience was to be on a truck stop [literally an expansion of tarmac off the main road] on a lonely highway, with road trains whizzing by every couple of hours. Out of sheer exhilaration and exhaustion, I slept soundly.