At 5 a.m., daylight began tugging away at the blanket of darkness over Townsville, bringing with it clear skies and birdsong in an eclectic collection of voices that included  the sweetly husky tremolo of the olive-backed oriole, the raucous screeches of rainbow lorikeets and sulphur-crested cockatoos, the monotonous, descending ‘fear-fear-fear’ of the brush cuckoo. I quickly strode the river parkway and crossed the Bowen Road bridge just as the rising sun shot streaks of golden light through parkway trees. It seemed a perfect metaphor for Vilis’s and my lives – the bridge our incipient crossing from one continent to another, the rising sun a beckoning future back in Canada as the year draws to a close.

On my return to the house, we made the final preparations for our garage sale and then sat and read in the shade of the garage awning while potential customers scanned the goods. Four hours passed surprisingly peacefully, granting me two boons, the first of which was a glimpse into the amazing cultural diversity of Australia, and the second, the opportunity to finish The Big Twitch, written by Aussie birder extraordinaire Sean Dooley. Aussie accents abounded as Vilis and I chatted with bargain hunters, but so did those of Australians possessing obviously foreign roots – a woman from the Seychelles whose family immigrated 50 years ago, a Polish family with a penchant for haggling, a young Irishman who so loved Australia that he said he’d shoot himself if he was told he had to return to Ireland, and so on.

Sprinkled into this interrupted collage of ethnicity were Dooley’s birding adventures in The Big Twitch, wherein he described how he unsuccessfully sought the grey falcon in the central deserts, then carried his quest to break the Australian record for number of species observed in a calendar year to Western Australia, the Top End, and tropical North Queensland as his twitching year headed into the crunch of December. I could relate to the timing. He finished with a whopping 703 species after essentially covering the continent twice and sampling offshore waters for pelagic species. Last week, in the November 2010 issue of The Bird Observer, which is published by Bird Observation & Conservation Australia, I noted an ad for a twitching book with a scope that eclipses even Dooley’s efforts. Written by Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, it’s called The Biggest Twitch: Around the world in 4,000 birds. If ever I had a doubt that twitchers are obsessed, both Dooley’s book and the ad for The Biggest Twitch vapourized it.

Today’s post is the third of Nams bush portraits, these originating in adventures Vilis, I, and our son Janis embarked upon in Queensland and the Northern Territory during August through October. They include photo ops from Wet Tropics rainforests in Paluma Range, Hinchinbrook Island, and Daintree National Parks, from the Great Barrier Reef, from Mount Stuart in Townsville’s back yard, and from the red desert landscape in the Northern Territory, at the heart of this continent. Tormorrow, Vilis and I head to Canberra, the nation’s capital in the Australian Capital Territory, but that’s an adventure as yet untold. Here’s Bush Portraits III.