34 Brolgas and Sarus Cranes - with Ed
Grow your knowledge about Australia’s two largest waterbirds.
This episode is about Brolgas, Sarus Cranes and the Crane Count held each year in the Atherton Tablelands.
Edward Bell has worked and volunteered across a wide variety of conservation projects, including surveying parrots in the Caribbean and assisting in microbat research on three continents. His interest in birds developed with his arrival in Australia in 2019. He is the coordinator for the Crane Count on behalf of Birdlife Northern Queensland, which has been monitoring Sarus Crane numbers with citizen scientists for over twenty years. He is also currently studying a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and Ecology at James Cook University in Cairns.
Available on your podcast app or listen below.
Links
* BirdLife Northern Queensland - Crane Count - www.birdlifenq.org/crane-project
* BirdLife Northern Queensland on Facebook - @BirdLifeNQ
* Australian Crane Network - Introducing Australian and New Guinea Cranes - www.ozcranes.net/species/
Bird calls were recorded by Marc Anderson and licensed from www.wildambience.com
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Kirsty: There are hundreds of First Nations across Australia, each with their own unique songlines and links to birds. I would like to acknowledge the deep connection that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have with birds and the importance of valuing traditional knowledge in order to understand the birds that are around us. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and any First Nations person listening to this podcast.
Kirsty: This is Weekend Birder podcast and I'm your host and birdwatching buddy, Kirsty Costa. In the last 15 years, Edward Bell has worked and volunteered across a wide variety of conservation projects. He has studied parrots in the Caribbean and assisted in microbat research on three continents. Today he is here to share what he knows about Brolgas and Sarus Cranes. Ed always liked noticing birds, but never grew up thinking that he was a birdwatcher.
Ed: I was always outdoors, always enjoying being around and around with my mum. But the actual kind of like watching of birds, I always thought, "Oh no, that's something weird twitchers do". But then, yeah, fast forward to my late 30s or my mid 30s. Me and my partner, we started trying to see a bit and back home in the UK that had been popping up on those Facebook wildlife groups at a local wetland centre. We'd gone down there and obviously they're very cryptic, elusive birds, so never saw it. But we did start noticing all the other ducks and the little birds around the edges, the warblers and the things that hide around. Once you've actually started taking notice of all that, you can't help but then continue noticing. And then we start looking at things on the beaches and in the woods and all sorts. Yeah, slippery slope downhill from there. So I think it was like we moved out here. We kind of had a date for coming out here. My partner is from Australia and we had a six month period of like setting up and getting ready to leave where I'm from in the UK. And then in that time our friends set us a challenge to see how many birds we could see in that period back home. It's a small island where I'm from and there isn't exactly a huge number of birds, so we managed to see about just over 100, which was pretty impressive for a short period of time in Australia, just so much. And obviously where we live, we're very lucky. We're having such incredible diversity on our doorstep. So yeah, we don't even have to try to see birds over here. There's not like chasing them around. It's literally just going wherever we go and we get to see some incredible stuff.
Kirsty: When Ed and his partner arrived in Australia in 2019, they were drawn to the Atherton Tablelands area, which is near Cairns in northern Queensland.
Ed: We're kind of just on the periphery, so we're just outside of town called Kuranda, which is up from the main kind of town in north Queensland, Cairns. So for us to get to kind of heart of the Atherton Tablelands is about an hour's drive, so not too far really. So yeah, we've got it right on our doorstep. So we've got high altitude rainforest, we've got the edge of the savannah country. If you go north and west a little bit, you've got the tropical range as well. So we've got a real nice diversity. We get the Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfishers that come down from New Guinea got all the Metallic Starlings, all those lovely Golden Bowerbirds and cassowaries. We don't have them unfortunately, come and pass the house. But just driving up from Cairns today, actually there were a couple of cassowaries just on the Kuranda Range kind of quickly scooting across the road so that never gets old, seeing them kind of just wandering around through the area. So yeah, just quickly looked on eBay to get that number off. Obviously it's not a true reflection of what you're going to see on a day out. There's always going to be extra migrants and rarities and things that maybe blow up onto the table and normally down on the coast. So numbers can always be a little bit variable. But yeah, on an average day, I think we've done a few of the bird big days over the years where we've tried to kind of see how many birds we can see in a day and I think we can usually get over 100 quite easily.And I know some of the big bird tour guides can usually get much higher than that. And you can kind of start with dry country and go from like you've got all your kind of White-winged Trillers and your small finches. Some of your pigeon species get into the nice kind of tropical areas where we've got I think I can't remember how many endemics we've got in the wet tropics now, but there's Fern Wrens, there's Golden Bowerbirds, there's some of the monarch species, some of the robin species. And then we've obviously got all the common kind of farmland, birds as well, like, you know, the galahs, the Magpie Larks, Masked Lapwing kind of chasing around everyone. Magpies, butcherbirds. So yeah, we've got the whole gamut of birds up here, which is pretty good. And then you hit the coast and you've got the Great Barrier Reef, you've got shorebirds and we've had the Nordmann's Greenshank hanging around now for about the last two years in the winter seasons, which I know people from all over the country, even during COVID, were rushing up here to kind of get a glimpse of.
Kirsty: As Ed explained, the wetlands and grasslands of the Atherton Tablelands is a birdwatchers delight. It's not just the huge variety of birds that can be found there, but also the large numbers they flock in. That's why thousands of birders and nature lovers visit there each year to bird species that people come to see are the Sarus Crane and the Brolga.
Ed: They're just big birds. They're considered one of the tallest flying birds in the world. They stand easily my height, I'm about six foot, so they're kind of eye to eye with me when they're standing on their back legs. Nice big wingspan. The thing that would separate them out from, like your other big birds up here, like the cassowary and the emu. And that is these guys can still fly. And when you watch them in flight as well, two way to split them from some of what people think are still big birds like the herons and egrets is these guys fly over their neck outstretched whereas a lot of the egrets and herons, they'll bunch their necks right up. So that's a nice kind of tip for spotting. And the two species we've got over here are the Sarus Crane and the Brolga. Now the Brolga is the one that most people know, and especially down south, because it's the one that does go all the way down the East Coast, all the way down to Victoria. We've got good numbers of them up here, but we've also up in north Queensland and just into a little bit of the NT, there is the Sarus Crane as well. Sarus Crane is actually found in quite a few different countries, but we've got what is a different subspecies of the bird over here. So it is pretty unique to Australia and previously they thought it was possibly a new arrival. And I think in history of the Earth kind of sense, it is still a relatively new arrival, but it has been here for tens of thousands of years. So it's not like it's just flown over in the last 20-30 years as a new arrival. Thing for me and it's kind of done me right most of the time is when you're looking at it and they're both big birds. As much as they say. There is a difference in size when you're looking out across a paddock or something like that, you cannot tell. No one's got their yardstick out and measuring them. So just they're big birds. They look similar in size. It all comes down to the colour of the head and the redness. So with the Sarus Crane, you've got a very nice red and it goes two thirds of the way down the neck. So it will actually descend over the head and down, whereas the Brolga, it kind of cuts off. You follow your fingers along under your chin and you go back around your head behind your ear. That's kind of the extent of the red on a Brolga. And you'll often see in the male Brolgas as well, they've kind of got almost like a chicken kind of wattle underneath their neck. Like I've got like a dewlap - a little dangly bit of like skin, which appears really black and dark.
Kirsty: It says that not only should you look out for the red colouring on the head and the dark pouch under the Brolgas throat also focus in on the leg colour. The Sarus Crane has reddish pink legs while the Brolga has dark grey legs. Sarus Cranes and Brolgas are a bit skittish and are always on alert for threats in their environment. So Ed has some tips about how to watch them without scaring them off. Which we have learnt in previous episodes, isn't ideal for the bird or the birdwatcher.
Ed: I know people down south struggle to get really good looks and unless they're in like the Werribee Treatment ponds or something like that, they don't like you getting too close. So we always recommend using your car as a hide. If you're ever kind of pulling along a country road, just look through your window. Don't get out because you'll start to scare them off because obviously the better look you can get without disturbing them is going to help the minute they start to move away. Normally up here as well, even though it's winter when we usually get them up on the table and they can still get some wicked heat haze on the paddocks when they're a distance. And that could really start to then affect your ability to split them out. There's plenty of times when I'm doing a quick count of days on the table and during the day just to get an idea of numbers and I have to put them just down as a crane, you can't always confidently ID every bird. That's just one of the things that comes with it. They're always going to be those mysteries in life.
Kirsty: The reason that Ed knows a bit about Sarus Cranes and Brolgas is because he is a citizen scientist and he's also studying a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and Ecology at James Cook University. Since 2021, Ed has been the coordinator of BirdLife Northern Queensland's Crane Count.
Ed: We're really lucky to have partner branch of BirdLife Australia. We've got BirdLife North Queensland, which is all run by volunteers, all the projects, all the various outreach and stuff done. And I saw an ad two years ago now I'd already helped out in a few things, go along to their talks and stuff like that, but they were looking for a coordinator for the Annual Crane Count and I was like, "Oh, that could be interesting". Not knowing fully what it was, what it entailed or anything like that. I just thought it's always a good thing. I'm still kind of an early career stage at certain points, so I thought it's always good to build new skills. So I kind of signed up and went in at the deep end with Graham Harrington, one of the older, older members of BirdLife up here who's been involved for over 27 years now. He kind of showed me the ropes and helped me out and really got me going with it. And my role as the Crane Count Coordinator is a voluntary position and it's herding cats is probably the easiest way to describe it. I get a lot of people and I have to get them to a lot of places to try and count cranes in the pretty much dark and hope they enjoy themselves in the process and actually then get some data out of it that's useful on paper. It's actually an impossible task and it's why would anyone do it? But it's a lot of fun. It's a great community event and it's also a really long running citizen science program. So it was first started by a lady called Eleanor Scambler over 20 years ago. They wanted to do it because they kind of started to notice an increase in the number of Sarus Cranes actually on the Tablelands. And what they do is they come down to the Atherton Tablelands to take advantage usually of a lot of the harvested kind of food crops and stuff. So we've got a big agricultural land up here. They usually like going through the harvested maize, the harvested peanuts, the harvested lupins. There are odd instances where they can come into conflict with farmers because they will occasionally go for freshly sown crops. I'm sure it happens elsewhere as well. The bulk of what they're looking for is actually the kind of leftover from the harvesters and slowly but surely their numbers have been increasing. They actually breed up in the Gulf and up the side of the Cape, all around the Gulf of Carpentaria. So they'll spend the wet season up there and then they come down to us for the beginning of the dry season as we go into winter up here in the north.
Kirsty: The Crane Count has been running every year since 1997. This year it is on Saturday, the ninth and Sunday, the 10th of September, we are all invited to join in and a link to the Crane Project website can be found in the notes for this episode. Both the Sarus Crane and the Brolga feed and breed in wetlands, coastal mudflats and irrigated farms. They need water every day to drink and to bathe. They tend to fly shorter distances following the seasonal rainfall. As mentioned before, Sarus Cranes live only in far north east Queensland, often in remote areas around Cape York Peninsula. Brolgas can be found throughout Queensland and in parts of western Victoria, central New South Wales and south east South Australia. Both birds breed during the raining season in southern Australia. This is between September and December and in the northern part of Australia it is between February and June. Both Sarus Cranes and Brolgas build nests using grasses, sticks and mud. Cranes prefer to hide away in a bit of a swampy woodland scattered with trees, while Brolgas are happy to nest in more open sites. And they have been known to use the same nesting site for up to 20 years. Both birds are known to stay with the same partner for life. They usually lay two eggs and both the male and the female sit on the eggs until they hatch about a month later. Once born, the chicks are able to fly within two weeks, and the parents continue to raise the young for roughly one year after birth. The Crane Count takes place in the Atherton Tablelands during the Non-breeding season, which is known as the flocking season. Pairs and their young join other large groups of birds to feed and to roost. Editor says that there is still a lot to learn and that's why the data that he and his team are collecting is so important.
Ed: They're really charismatic. They're great birds to be able to see, and they're vulnerable, according to the IUCN Red List globally. And we actually have quite a large percentage of the global population here in Australia. So it was decided to start kind of tracking their numbers and trying to evaluate as best as we can how many we have. So we then have a better understanding of how many there are in the world. So the numbers we count on the Tablelands do really play into like a kind of both national, state and international significance, really helping to report on their status as a species. So yeah, numbers have increased over the years. Now we're at a point where we see fluctuations and we have seen a few years now of a slight decrease in numbers. But as to why that is, there's like so many things. There's a lot of things we just don't know and we still need to study. And one of the things that we need to kind of better understand is how many cranes like we don't know necessarily what percentage of the cranes in Australia are coming down to the Atherton Tablelands because we can't be spread out across the Gulf looking for single pairs, because the reason we count on the Tablelands is they congregate at roost sites at night, so they'll go to swampy areas, water bodies, farm dams and it gives us a really good opportunity to count en masse rather than looking for small pairs or flocks in agricultural paddocks and pasture. So it kind of enables us to kind of get a much better idea in one area and it's achievable because we have a body of population here. The Gulf is a lot more spread out with people and a lot more roads, a lot more land to cover and you'd be looking for a lot less cranes in a widespread environment. So them coming to us has really helped us be able to better understand them. But to understand them better, we need to think of ways to kind of improve our understanding of their breeding successes and that but it's also a very wet, croc infested area with remote and limited access in the wet season. So those are some of the challenges as to why no one's just kind of nipped up there and done some intensive breeding surveys on them at the minute. Some of the initial surveys done over here were done back in the 70 seconds when croc numbers were so much lower. And I think in that time since then, now there's just yeah, that is a big area. I think there's some old footage and videos of researchers from the International Crane Foundation just wading through thigh high kind of water, going up to these crane nests in the Gulf and estuary areas and that and it's just no one in their right mind would do that in this day and age. So, yeah, got to be croc wise and croc country.
Kirsty: During the flocking season, hundreds of Brolgas and Sarus Cranes can be seen in the wetlands and farms of the Atherton Tablelands. This can make it really challenging to get accurate data during the Crane Count. Here is Ed explaining his team's special technique.
Ed: They'll be there for quite a while. So you can really systematically like pan around with binoculars, scopes or just your eyes and just count them one through two or however many are there. The trick we have with the Crane Count is because we're counting them as they come into roost. So we rock up about 430 in the afternoon, which is a little bit before they'll start to kind of leave their feeding grounds. So a roost is just somewhere. They spend the night where they feel safe and they usually choose water that's below the knee. They don't like it too deep. They don't like it too shallow. The water kind of provides a level of protection. Obviously, if they kind of walk out into the middle of the water body, then they'll obviously be a little bit safer from predators. They'll go out to these boys, they'll fly in, they'll usually land in the kind of pasture surrounding these water bodies and then kind of start to walk on down into the water just on dusk. Some of them will go in for a bit of a bath and a feed beforehand. So what we're trying to do, we set up in groups, try to always have a minimum of two for safety, but some sites, depending on the number of cranes coming in, we now have better ideas of which sites are usually busier, so we can kind of put more people on it. We'll try and count them as they fly in. So it's a case of just constantly scanning the air, looking for a flock of cranes coming in, and they can be sneaky sometimes they can call it beautiful, cool in the evening when you hear it across the wind. But they don't always make it guaranteed as they're coming in. So you're kind of looking for like silent shapes. They're big birds. But as the light starts to go, they disappear. And if you've got inclement weather, we've had a few raining pretty much the whole evening, so that really impacted on visibility. But we will have people looking out for them so they'll spot them coming in. They will start the kind of count. So we'll have someone that is a dedicated scribe as well. So for us, we really need the data kind of recorded. So we've got a dedicated scribe and they're just not really focusing on looking at the cranes too much. They're just listening out for people shouting out numbers to record on our data sheets, and then we can try as well to have a secondary person. If the first person seeing them coming in hasn't got a perfect view of them or a perfect idea, we'll try and get a second person on to them so that then if that first person then has to spot a second flock because they can start to come in thick and fast at some times, especially as it gets darker, you'll have another person or another couple of people maybe taking over and trying to confirm identities on them. And obviously you're doing this with birds that fly relatively fast due to a big wingspan with ever decreasing light as the sun sets. So yeah, it's challenging and it does lead to a lot of our data usually about I think the last couple of years we've had about 40% bird records as unidentified because we just can't split them down further. And unfortunately the distances we're looking at them were usually greater than 50 to 100m away. Because it's a citizen science project. It has to be accessible. So we can't have people belly crawling down to the edge of dams and setting up in bird hides and sitting there the entire night till the morning just to get us a perfect bit of data because it's just not practical. And also, a lot of this land is currently in production. It's agricultural land, it's usually cattle, dams and cattle paddocks and stuff. So you can't have people wandering in and around the cattle. So we usually on public roads looking down into these wetland areas or looking across at them. So we've always got to like bear that in mind when looking at how we count them. So yeah, practice is a good thing. More you see, the better you get with some of these birds. It's the same with anything. The more you see a species, it becomes second nature. But with these, because you're always against the challenging light conditions, it's practice and just a lot of patience and good luck and the acceptance that, yeah, you never will get all of them. We're always hoping to improve. We're hoping to get more scopes so that people can see further down into the dams. But yeah, it's always it's always one of those issues.
Kirsty: Here is Marc Anderson's recording of Sarus Cranes in flight <sound of sarus cranes>. And here is Marc's recording of Brolgas in flight <sound of brolgas>. The name Brolga is taken from the language of the Gomeroi people who call them Burraga. Brolgas are famous for their dance. A number of First Nation dancers use movements that mimic their graceful performances. Brolga partners begin by picking up grass, tossing it into the air and catching it again in their beaks. The birds then jump up to a metre in the air with their wings outstretched before performing an elaborate display of head bobbing wing beating, strutting and bowing. Occasionally they stop to trumpet loudly. I've heard this call from the Brolgas who live at the Western treatment plant in Melbourne, and the sound can be so loud that you feel it in your chest. It's really amazing. Sarus Cranes also have their own dance and song, and both of these bird species dance all year round in pairs or in groups. Watching Brolga and Crane behaviour is a joy for Ed and his team of volunteers.
Ed: Oh, it's the thing I love watching or seeing in the Cranes is that kind of family, that social behaviour and interaction. They're just they're very much. I've heard a friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Tim Nevard, he always describes them as being really close to humans. They're the most human bird you can think of. You'll often see them in like pairs where you'll have two parents and an offspring or a couple of offspring. You will get to see them when they reconnect, especially if they've flown in and kind of catching up when they land. They will often kind of do a little bit of like a dance kind of courtship. When you actually see them going full into it. Like you can find lots of videos online of their courtship displays across a lot of the species. It's very musical. It's very flamboyant. It is why cranes have often been symbolised across especially a lot of far Eastern culture. And even in Europe, they're often in heraldry, they're often in artwork, tapestry, paintings, poems. They're just a very symbolic bird that are so elegant and easy to capture and stuff. And just that movement is very fluid. So yeah, they're always a pleasure to watch. But there's been some incredible papers out from people that have also been lucky enough to see them feeding and chatting to one of the local farmers up here who really enjoys getting to see the cranes following his tractors along when he's ploughing his fields, even to the point where he'll see them not just pecking through for leftover vegetation and kind of material, but also he sees them every now and then managed to actually grab hold of rats and other mice. So they are actually playing a good component in terms of like vermin control in these pastures for them. So he appreciates them for that reason, just getting to watch them interact with each other. There's been some great footage of them, like playing around, fighting over bits of like kind of like a maize stalk and stuff like that. They're just, yeah, very personable birds and it's easy to anthropomorphize, like, you know, when you put like human emotions or human behavioural traits onto them and you kind of look at them in that way. But yeah, I think their size just helps as well. You can kind of almost imagine very easy to kind of think of those wings as hands and arms and legs and see like members of your family mucking around or a loved one kind of reuniting.
Kirsty: I don't know about you, but hearing Weekend Birder guests talk about watching and listening to birds never gets old, does it? Pure joy! Let's finish off with some final words of wisdom from Ed.
Ed: Don't stress. Enjoy it. We're bombarded these days like a work in conservation and ecology. I'm student studying as well. We're forever hit with how bad everything is, and there's no denying there is a lot of precious face in the world. But you've got to love something to be able to want to protect it. And if you're constantly worrying about numbers and identities and going out there and you've got to make sure you see these birds because it's going to get on a database to add to kind of like importance. It takes the fun out of it a lot of the time. It's good just to just enjoy them. And if you never record a single bit of data about birds in your life, but you love them every day, then you're still like an advocate for them. So that's the most important thing. It's always good if you can record data, if there's many ways to do it, do learn how to do that eventually, but don't let it overcome and take away from the fun and enjoyment you get from just seeing them do what they do, no matter what species it is and where you are in the world.
Kirsty: That's great advice. Many thanks. Ed. If you would like to find out more about the Crane Count, read the episode notes or visit weekend birder.com. Many thanks to everyone who's been recommending weekend birder to their nature loving friends and sharing their ratings and reviews on Apple. We were recently number two on the chart for science and nature. What a delight! I'm so glad that you're loving listening to this podcast as much as I enjoy creating it each week. See you next time.
