Emi Arnold

They can't fly in a straight line.

They're dipping and weaving and all over the shop.

Whereas yellow-tailed black cockatoos, they...

kind of fly like they're in slow motion or they're flying through soup your honey eaters are like a little missile they're just like straight to the point which makes it really really helpful or not helpful at all when you're trying to just catch a look like was that white eared was that loons i'm not sure and then you'll get fairy wrens that kind of just flit around on the ground and just little short bursts and kind of bob up and down

When I first started bird watching five years ago, a friend and I went to Long Forest State Park out in the western suburbs of Melbourne.

We got there bang on dawn.

Like, oh, we're going to see so many birds.

We're going to learn so many things.

But we were both new to birding and we were just there at dawn and there's all this amazing stuff going on.

It was just a wall of sound, the birds.

dawn chorus and we realized like oh we don't actually know any of these except the magpies and the cockatoos and eventually we worked out oh there's a butcher bird in there as well that was kind of a bit of a wake-up call like okay I have to take this a bit more seriously I have to like actually get

get up early and go and learn it.

I find it's really helpful camping as well because I love camping and I love birds so you're kind of stuck there and like oh I'm awake because of the birds I'll just poke my head out and have a look.

So I think the main thing to learn all the calls the first one is be kind to yourself because you're never going to learn it all super quickly and so I figured if I can come away from

a particular trip you know with one bird call associated to a species you know that's a nice realistic target and then you can build on that each time you go and if you're going regularly it all adds up pretty quickly but it's just so unrealistic to expect to know them all

you know super quickly and you know if you're going to new areas as well with new species coming in yeah I guess the main thing is like be kind to yourself and be realistic about it but even still I've been doing this for four and a half years and I'll still get caught out you know by you know eastern yellow robins and eastern spinebills and white-throated tree creepers like oh you know did you just stop early or are you actually a tree creeper because all their calls are so short and sharp and very similar and

And it's just kind of how long they go for being the key determinant or, you know, I've done a survey where I was looking for diamond fire towers and I could hear them all around me.

I was like, oh, this is fantastic.

I'm getting so many.

And then realized it was a crested bellbird sitting up in the tree.