Libby Robin, Robert Heinsohn and Leo Joseph (eds), Boom & Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, 2009. RRP $39.95. ISBN 978 0 643 09606 6. Online
Anyone who has read Sean Dooley's The Big Twitch understands the image of eccentricity and obsession that can attach to amateur ornithologists. Yet it is dangerous if we ignore the fortunes of avifauna, because they inhabit the Australian landscape like canaries in a coalmine.
The contributors to Boom & Bust, including botanists, zoologists, philosophers, environmentalists, sociologists, hydrologists and archaeologists, provide a timely scientific reminder that the fate of birds is inextricably tied to our own.
Libby Robin and Mike Smith point out that Australia leads the world in mammalian extinction and in threatened species. They argue that 'people can interact with natural dynamics to constrain or amplify them' especially through their impacts on species and habitats.
Taking an active interest in the activities of birds is, then, a responsibility of every Australian, made more urgent by climate change.
Robin and Leo Joseph provide a gentle but vital methodological introduction, describing the arrival of the research party — 'our rag-tag group of academics' — in a dry creek bed in Central Australia. Particularly informative is the interaction between the disciplines involved, whose practitioners are united by their respect for the birds of this dry land and the adaptations they make to climatic variability.
A chapter by the late Graham Pizzey describes the popular perceptions of an 'irruption' of the black-tailed native hen in populated areas of the south-east after rains in the early 1970s. Steve Morton on the zebra finch, David Roshier on the grey teal and Julian Reid on the pelican explain the importance of breeding periodicity, migration, group behaviour and adaptation to 'anthropogenic-driven environmental change' in the survival of these relatively common birds.
Penny Olsen reflects on the elusive night parrot, of which there have been few recent sightings. In 1990 and in 2006 it 'turned itself in' as road kill. Protected by the desert, the night parrot 'has gone bust, but has not yet turned to dust'.
Unfortunately, as Smith reports, the genyornis is extinct. This large flightless bird seems to have succumbed perhaps 50,000 years ago to the combined effects of habitat fragmentation through climate change and the introduction of predation by humans.
Deborah Bird Rose explores the complexities of Indigenous concepts of country and kinship. Rose is interested in 'pattern, connectivity, patchiness and flux'