Rooster crouched in the tyre tread of his Pajero, discreetly smoking a roll-your-own. Mid-fifties, clad in pocket-rich khaki, he affected a kind of ruggedness. The flare in his blue eyes hadn’t gone out. It must have had something to do with the international birders he hauled up Iron Range in Cape York, to twitch and photograph its spectacular birdlife.
I’d put substantial trust in Rooster to guide me to the lair of the golden bowerbird. The encounter began with me rising at five am to drive to the Julatten fire station. There I exchanged my hire car for Rooster’s off-road vehicle, a mandatory requirement to scale the forty-kilometre unsealed spine of the Daintree’s Mount Lewis. When it came to species that raised the pulses of bird-watchers like me, the golden bowerbird held the trifecta: it was difficult to locate; it was smart; and it was fetchingly beautiful.
The golden bowerbird is a wet tropics’ endemic, its range restricted to elevations above seven hundred metres. It possesses design and engineering skills that ornithologists are continuing to unravel, constructing a maypole bower for courting purposes from forest twigs, lichen and flowers. And finally, the golden bowerbird’s form and plumage are exquisite, its head and wing feathers refracting sunlight to produce the iridescent golden sheen that inspires its common name.
We arrived at Rooster’s secret location following several hours’ heavy four-wheel driving. The paucity of landmarks astounded me. There was no picnic table, no composting toilet or lidded rubbish bin. There was no green and silver government funded sign detailing the golden bowerbird’s natural history. I strapped on my binoculars and water bottle and stepped down off the high-set vehicle. No discernable pathway led into the forest. By the looks of it, I was expected to follow Rooster into the dense scrub. He stood near a cedar, holding back a string of wait-a-while for me to pass through. Ducking under, he let the plant go; it flung back into place, closing the gap where we had entered. Walking a few paces behind Rooster, I darted and weaved around stinging trees and thorny, snaking vines. I smelled mushroom, humus and rot, but in my ignorance of Daintree plant ecology, couldn’t get my bearings. Instead, I became acutely aware of my lack of knowledge. Later, Rooster let me in on a secret: he’d tied white ribbon around certain trees, to mark the trail to the golden bowerbird’s platform.
Sweating, I slapped at sand flies, considered the leeches in my sandshoes. Just when I thought I might double over with hunger pangs, Rooster stopped. A finger to his lips, he pointed in the brush behind his shoulder.
I peered at where he indicated but found nothing. Effective bird-watching requires you to enter a zone of heightened concentration, becoming acutely aware of the tiniest action--a shiver of leaf, a fleck moving across the sun, a shape crawling along a branch. If I didn’t obtain this level of attentiveness during a trip, I had ill luck spotting unfamiliar species, let alone novelties. To see properly, I needed to be still, to crouch and listen and wait.
Rooster was taking no chances; our target was in the vicinity. My guide began to make buzzing, clicking and whistling sounds with his mouth. My throat felt dry and my heart pounded. Under no circumstances could I move or speak. After about ten minutes, Rooster unwound a cord that connected a small microphone to an MC3 player clipped to his belt. For a moment he looked like a motivational speaker on television, about to address his audience. The technology was part of Rooster’s bird-sighting toolbox and contained recordings of golden bowerbird vocalisations: mating calls, distress sounds and territorial warnings.
A flash of feathers in the canopy; I twisted my neck, catching a glimpse of olive plumage. The bird had settled on a branch about twelve metres above. I’d studied the bird-guide, and could tell by the animal’s dull plumage that it was the female. I desperately turned the focus on my binoculars, wishing to study it at length, but in my haste, bumped my elbow against a branch, creating a rustling of leaves. The bird scared and flew off.
Rooster reckoned we should wait, in case she returned. But we were swarmed by mosquitos. Wiping blood off his neck, he conceded that the female would likely make her reappearance later rather than sooner. In the meantime, we might take a look at the maypole bower he’d discovered.
To begin construction on his bower, the male selected two saplings that grew close together. During several seasons he decorated the bases with sticks, creating a maypole-shaped structure. Rooster waved me over to a small clearing, alerting me to a horizontally jutting branch. The male would collect white jasmine flowers, which he smeared into the assemblage of sticks at its base. The placement of flowers apparently directed the female bowerbird’s eye. She would glance at the sweet-smelling buds and then at the bough, upon which the male perched to perform his courtship dance. His serenade consisted of a series of head-shaking, wing-flapping and whole-body jerking movements. Finished, he presented the female with sprigs of pepper flower. All in the hope she’d copulate with him.
When the female wasn’t in attendance, Rooster explained, the male spent his time maintaining the bower. He replaced the browning flowers. He swept fallen leaves off the ground. He added new twigs to the maypoles and practised his dance moves. He gathered bearded lichen to decorate the courting platform. The satin and great bowerbirds had even more tools in their seduction kits, using their bills or a piece of bark to paint crushed berry juice or charcoal onto the bower, further enhancing its beauty in the female's eye. And yet, despite the male’s efforts at maintaining his bower, most attempts at seduction were unsuccessful. The male was too aggressive, causing the female to take flight. I learned that in satin bowerbirds, this violence was so common that the female watched the male’s antics screened behind a wall of sticks. If he caught her observing, he was liable to subject her to attack.
A movement in the treetops had me fumbling with the viewfinder on my binoculars. The breath caught in my throat. There, in the feathered flesh, was an adult male bowerbird. He sat so calmly on his perch that I regretted leaving my camera at the holiday villa. At the beginning of my trip, I’d entertained fantasies of photographing the region’s birdlife and posting my portraits on Flickr and Instagram. But whenever I tried to train my equipment on an unknown species, the fiddling about with lenses and settings absorbed all of my attention and I missed the opportunity to study the animal. The images I came away with were blurred--a fan of feathers in the left hand corner of the frame, a moving bill, eyes glancing in the wrong direction. I realised I was better off not trying to record a sighting, but rather giving my full concentration to the living bird.
I had a good look at the male with my binoculars, marvelling at his magnificent golden and yellow plumage. Dappled sunlight fell through a leafy gap, picking up the iridescence of his crest. He had a long tail and pale eye, his bill and the shape of his head sharing a quality I recognised in the satin bowerbird. From his perch high in the canopy, the male observed his empty bower, eyes darting about its crushed flowers and mound of twigs, while he awaited the female’s return.
What sustained these creatures in building their elaborate constructions? How had sex become so complicated, I wondered. It was for these reasons that researchers believed bowerbirds highly intelligent. They were artists and architects, followers of a unique culture. The polygamous males expended their energy maintaining an artificial structure, all for the sexual status it afforded. Zoologists had observed females selecting breeding partners on the basis of a bower’s aesthetic qualities. A theory had been suggested that the bowerbird’s platform-construction was a learned behaviour, a sort of social activity that involved all members of the bowerbird community. A male took seven years to develop sufficient skill to construct an effective platform. Younger males, as if attending class, gathered in groups to observe the experienced male maintain his bower. Depending upon the age of a female bowerbird, she selected for different qualities in a breeding partner. Younger females fell for the glossy plumage and vigorous posturing of less experienced males. Older, more knowledgeable females made decisions according to the quality of bower-construction; the freshness of the fruits laid out on the courtship platform; how neatly-kept the maypole.
We hung around for some time but the female didn’t return. Driving back to Julatten, Rooster tried to make light of the fact I’d missed out on observing a courtship display. He told me about a website I could visit, which posted high quality video recordings. In a way bowerbirds were like brush turkeys, I thought. Brush turkeys constructed enormous incubation chambers so as to avoid the time-demands of sitting on a nest. However, they had become slaves to their technological expertise, expending most of their energy keeping their heat-producing mound in top repair.
The platform-building behaviour of bowerbirds brought me unexpected comfort. It seemed human in its excess and folly. I was able to forgive my extravagant holiday bird-watching, a form of collecting where I accumulated ticks, or sightings of new species--encounters, you might say--rather than physical objects. I even excused the three hundred dollars I’d paid Rooster, to spend a morning at the mountaintop home of the elusive golden bowerbird.
Melissa Ashley writes poetry, reviews and fiction. Her collection of poetry and prose, The Hospital for Dolls, was published in 2003. She tutors in Poetics at the University of Queensland where she is completing a PhD in creative writing on the artistic career of Elizabeth Gould, a nineteenth century ornithological illustrator.