COCOS BOOBY

Since my publisher visited in February, I've been too busy writing to do much birding. I did take time out to twitch the Indian Pond Heron on Christmas Island in March (and managed to pick up the Arctic Warbler at the same time), but, other than that, I've done very little birding since February. Certainly the furthest thing from my mind this week was a possible twitch. May twitches are unusual. I've only ever done two: the Northern Shoveler at Werribee in 2004 and the Forest Wagtail in Alice Springs in 2013. Most twitches occur in our summer. Then, out of the blue, on Tuesday morning, Richard Baxter rang me to say there was a Cocos Booby at Lake Macquarie. I'd never heard of a Cocos Booby. (Let's be honest, I'd never heard of a Nazca Booby until 2024.) I don't like to display too much ignorance in front of the great man, so I asked tentatively: 'Does Avilist recognize it?' When he assured me that Avilist embraced the Cocos Booby wholeheartedly, and I could count it on my Australian list, I was up for the twitch. Richard intended to fly to Sydney then pick up a hire car and drive to Newcastle. When he found he couldn't get a direct flight to Sydney from Perth, we agreed he'd fly to Melbourne and we'd get the same flight to Sydney. Miracle of miracles, I managed to get on the correct flight, and, not only that, I booked the seat next to Richard: 15B. The flight departed at 6 o'clock. I had a lunch with former work colleagues on Tuesday, so I could still attend that, but I'd have to cancel my covid booster that afternoon and my hairdresser's appointment the next morning. Both those phone calls took longer than it took me to pack. I arranged a car to take me to the airport and I was ready to go. I'm afraid I wasn't very good company at lunch. All I could think of was the Cocos Booby. Richard told me that the species had been split recently from Brown Booby. Out bird was a female, and was identified from a Brown Booby by the bill colour and the underwing pattern. Having dipped on my Nazca Booby after travelling all the way to Ashmore Reef to see it, I was especially anxious not to dip on his Cocos cousin. Now, apart from the two Gannets, there are six boobies on the Australian list: Abbott's, Red-footed, Brown, Nazca, Masked and now, Cocos. Here's a photo of a Brown Booby I took on Ashmore Reef in 2016. You can tell it's a male by his blue bill.

I reckoned that the Cocos Booby would look very like a Brown Booby. I made my way to the right gate in the Virgin terminal (a sufficient challenge for me for one day) and waited for Richard. And waited. When my plane was about to board, I texted Richard and asked where he was. His plane was late. Should I board my plane, or wait for Richard? I approached the desk and overheard a phone conversation, which seemed to indicate that passengers from some other plane which had been delayed, had been removed from this flight to Sydney and transferred to another flight. I asked whether my friend was included in this group. The woman told me quite curtly that privacy provisions meant that she couldn't possibly divulge that information. What plane had people been transferred to? Again, that information was far too confidential to tell me. So I got on the plane and flew to Sydney alone. Richard and I met at the hire car desk in Sydney airport. We picked up a nice Kia and set off for Lake Macquarie. Getting out of Sydney airport at that hour in the rain was a bit of a challenge. I thought the road signs left a lot to be desired, and while we had GPS on the phone, we lacked the right cords to display this information on the screen on the dashboard. Notwithstanding these difficulties, we made it to Lake Macquarie, arriving before 11 p.m. We stayed at the Belmont Hotel, and very nice it was too. (And, I thought, very well priced at $135 per room.) The next morning, we set off at 7 to look for our booby. Unfortunately, Lake Macquarie was blanketed in a heavy fog. No doubt the bird was roosting on a yacht on the lake, laughing at the small crowd of disappointed birders who couldn't see anything but fog. Richard and I decided to go and have breakfast and return when the fog had lifted. That was a good plan, except, after we'd enjoyed a slow and delicious breakfast, the fog still hadn't lifted. We returned to Lake Macquarie to wait. The bird is sitting somewhere in the middle of this fog.

We waited. We knew the bird was present. It was just a matter of time before nature allowed us to see it. There weren't a lot of distractions. As far as the birdlife went, I might as well have been in Melbourne. I saw Noisy Miners, Silver Gulls, Magpies, Magpie-larks, Crested Pigeons, Australian White Ibis and Spotted Doves. The fog did finally lift sufficiently for us all to get a tickable view of the bird. Very kindly, it then flew from one boat to another, giving us a glimpse of its underwing pattern. I came home so delighted with my new lifer, that I've almost forgotten the stress of waiting - first waiting for Richard to turn up, then, waiting for the fog to lift. Almost.