Reducing your sphere of disturbance and learning bird language - How to increase your wildlife observations

This blog takes it up a notch to expert level zoology. The concepts might seem a little far fetched to non-biologist types, but when you see it in action you will also become a believer.

Need to throw a shout out to good mate Nigel Jackett (The Warden) who first starting looking in to this stuff and then getting me on to it. The ideas and concepts we have gathered from the authors Tom Brown Jnr and Jon Young. Tom Brown Jnr is a tracker extraordinaire from the US and has numerous books regarding tracking. I have his book Tom Browns Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking, which i highly recommend. Jon Young is a past student of Tom Brown's tracking school (https://www.trackerschool.com), and his book What the Robin Knows is also critical reading (http://whattherobinknows.com/).

Firstly, the concept of your sphere of disturbance. I like to use an example which I'm sure most people can relate to. How often is it that when you stop doing something for whatever reason, you see a little skink pop out of a crack, a crevice, behind a rock etc. Think about it, it happens everywhere, all the time, and it correlates with when you relax. Out on a bushwalk you stop and sit down for a drink and "hey, look at the little skink". Your running around outside cleaning up the patio, sit down and then bam, out pops a Cryptoblepharus buchananii and runs around on the bricks. This is because when you stop and sit down, your sphere of disturbance immediately decreases. Basically, humans are large animals, extremely noisy, clumsy, and no longer belong in nature. As a result, when we move, particularly out in the bush, all the animals hear us coming a mile away, and disappear long before we get anywhere near them, known as the bird plow. A diagram of the sphere of disturbance is below which i have screen grabbed out of What the Robin Knows.

Sphere of disturbance diagram from Jon Young's book What the Robin Knows

So firstly, if you want to see more wildlife, just slow down. Slow right down. If you need to walk then walk slowly, much slower then what you normally would. And look up! Next time you are walking down the street, have a look at how many people have their heads down looking at the ground. When out the bush, i keep my head and eys up, don't even look at the ground, just go slowly and feel the ground before committing full weight. One of my favourite things to do is just to find a good vantage point over the landscape or somewhere of natural high wildlife activity (such as a dam or pool of water) and just sit. When you first arrive, all the animals will scatter, but after 5-10 minutes you become accepted as part of the mob, and all the animals go back to their daily tasks. So thats the simple idea, a normal person bashing around through the bush has a high sphere of disturbance and will be lucky to see anything, while the person walking slowly and quietly will see far more animals.

Then it comes to bird language, which is about understanding what is happening around you, based on the bird calls around you, and bird behaviour. Birds are smart, they have to be, every day offers a life and death proposition for them, something we can not even comprehend. Their senses, unlike humans, are fully tuned in all the time. From a basic evolutionary perspective, most humans (especially us white fellas) stopped utilising their full array of senses a long time ago. But those senses are still there, you just need to tap back in to them. And if you start recognising what the birds are talking about, who pick up on things quicker then us, then you start knowing whats going to happen, before its happened. 

But you are going to have to start listening to birds, a lot! Its about learning the 'baseline' of your environment. Baseline is when everything is normal, so as soon as baseline changes, you recognise something is happening. Alarm calls and behaviour are the key. Birds make alarm calls to warn against a potential threat, this could be you, a cat, bird of prey, reptile etc. And they even have specific alarm calls or behaviour depending on the threat. So an aerial predator such as a hawk will see smaller birds seeking shelter low in a tree, where as a ground predator will see them seek shelter higher up etc.

Impress your friends with matrix type predictions, where looking outside the window you see a ground foraging bird hook up in to a tree, look and keep watch in the ground while issuing an alarm call. At this stage declare to the person next to you "look a cat is going to walk past", and watch the disbelief when a couple seconds later a cat does walk past - priceless! Once you see it happening in real life, you can't argue with it. You will spot a Tiger Snake from 200 m away, by seeing the characteristic mobbing behaviour of Willie Wagtails. I tracked down a large Yellow-spotted Monitor up a tree the other day by following the alarm calls of some Yellow-throated Miners. While watching a Grey-tailed Tattler foraging on the mudflat and craning its head towards the sky, then seeing the shorebirds suddenly group up, myself and Nigel turned around and looked up to see a White-bellied Sea-eagle flying overhead. You will see it happening everywhere!

So if you want to see more wildlife, slow down and tune in to whats happening around you. Learn what baseline sounds like around you, and when it changes get ready to see a falcon swoop past :)