Let's start...
I have lived and worked on the APY Lands for 5 of the last 7 years in two communities in the far NW corner of the state. I lived way out west of Ernabella and Amata and many of the larger communities in the 'far east', preferring to live in two of the smaller, mnore isolated communities. My partner and I moved there for a bunch of reasons initially, but over time I really became attached to the idea of being able to wake up, get in the car, drive in any direction for 5 minutes and feel totally alone. Some people dread this feeling, but I really love it. To stand in the middle of what is essentially relatively uninhabited land and feel the silence ringing in your ears is a truly wonderful experience... only bettered by the silence being broken by the calls of Arid Land specialists like Crimson Chat, Black Honeyeater, Banded Whiteface or Dusky Grasswren. In my 5 years in/on 'The Lands' I put together a loose list of 117 species, I say loose because one or two sightings were made on the periphery of the APY Lands in the east. However, the majority of my birding was done in and around the Mann, Tomkinson and Musgrave Ranges.
So few 'white' Australians ever get the chance to spend a decent amount of time out there that many people don't give the area a second thought. But in my experience, it has to be one of the great untouched wilderness areas in the country, particularly the country due west of Amata to the W.A. border. This area supports a vast array of Arid Land habitats/ecosystems that, in turn, support a vast array of Avifauna. In this area pockets of Desert Oak forest border enormous stands of Mallee and Mulga woodland, vast Spinifex plains and the highest Ranges in South Australia. The variety of plant life, particularly in the last three 'wet' years, is astounding to a first-time visitor (who looks closely, of course!)
I did the bulk of my birding alone, the way I usually like to do it, but during my second stint in the Mann Range I began to let the kids in on why I would pull the school bus over a any given time to run off into the scrub chasing things. I was lucky to be given the chance to work with a small bunch of kids for three years on the trot. Which meant by the time I left, they were well and truly used to my idiosyncratic behaviour and yabbering and many of them grew to love it! At the beginning of 2010, and after many hours of blabbing on ad-infinitum about 'my plan', the school principal decided to give me a chunk of the school budget to spend on a year long unit of work centred on 'Bird Watching'. I decided to structure the unit around educating the kids in identifying/distinguishing species, analysing how birds have 'specialised' according to habitat/diet and how to record and report data. These skills have a 'knock-on' effect for the kids who wish to move in to the area of Land Management (one of three 'real' employment opportunities in the whole area). So, I set about writing things up and the boss loosened the purse strings.
In no time at all we had blown about $2700 on Binoculars and field guides - but, to see the kids eyes as they adjusted the straps on their own bin's and thumb through their own field guides. It was a sweet moment! I then spent time making the requisite speeches explaining how these weren't 'take home' gifts and how the kids had to look after them. So, I taught them how to clean the bin's, fix loose straps, adjust the eye cups and (one of the lessons they enjoyed the most) how to focus the bin's quickly at different distances AND under pressure.
I set up a kind of 'bird-nerd' Olympics in which kids had to work in teams to read notes from different distances and decode them to win points - they were mad for it! I also printed different sized images of bush birds from the web and placed them at varying lengths away from the kids and (again...) got them to work in pairs to i.d. the birds using their bin's and field guides. As they got better and better I reduced the amount of time they were given to view the different images....this drove them wild but also forced them to work quickly and, maybe most importantly, quietly. We spent time in class learning the names of the different physical features of birds and worked on expanding our technical vocabulary. This part was crucial as many of the kids had a limited knowledge of the many parts of birds and how they related to making field notes and decent observations. I even managed to link this to some art activities where the kids had to illustrate and colour images of birds according to a written description (eg; red lores, yellow lower mandible, red rump etc...) All of this helped to better equip them for our weekly field trips and turned our outings from all-out madness into relatively pleasant and organised excursions.
By the end of term one, there was a palpable sense of 'something big' going on with these older kids, especially some of the more difficult boys. I would go into the store on weekends and I would hear kids telling their parents and grandparents about the birds they had seen on our recent trips, the kids were then getting a double-dose of schooling as interested family members began to impart local knowledge about certain species we had encountered. This all fed back into our class work and really energised our (usually...) lack-lustre afternoons. We had Science lessons slated for three times a week and the kids continually bugged me, "When do we do more Birds?" - it was a buzz!
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