Christmas Island was in top form for the 2010 Bird’n’Nature Week. An unusually wet dry season meant that both crabs and birds were out in force. Driving across the island to see birds often meant pausing to give way to contingents of red crabs or to enormous lumbering robber crabs. Robber crabs regularly gathered under one palm tree to eat fruit that feeding imperial pigeons were accidentally knocking down.
The pigeons are Australia’s largest and one of five endemic birds on this remote Indian Ocean island. Three of the others proved very easy to see during the week: Abbott’s booby, the most primitive member of the gannet-booby family, the Christmas Island frigatebird, and the Christmas Island white-eye. Christmas Island hawk-owls proved difficult this year, perhaps because early rain brought breeding forward, and good viewing opportunities not obtained until the third and fourth nights.
If the current trends in splitting continue, and endemic subspecies are raised to full species status, the island may soon gain an endemic goshawk, thrush and swift. The goshawks proved especially easy to find this year. Mark Holdsworth was able to demonstrate before the whole group how easy it is to lure one in with a teddy bear leg attached to fishing line, then to loop a noose over its foot to catch it for banding.
Other good birds included grey wagtails easily seen on the roads, and an Asian koel heard from the fig tree not far from the accommodation. A white-breasted waterhen was seen from the bus on the orientation tour, and a yellow wagtail landed right beside the breakfast restaurant on the last morning, although few were there to see it. Java sparrows and barn swallows perched at times near the accommodation blocks, but dwindling numbers of Java sparrows suggest this species may be on the way out from competition by increasing numbers of Asian house sparrows. A few vagrant or migrant waders were also noted, including a pied stilt, lesser sand plovers, plus one sacred kingfisher.
Hands-on participation in long-term research is a key component of the Christmas Island Bird’n’Nature Week, and opportunities were there for all to participate in the banding of young red-tailed tropicbirds and brown boobies at the nest. The distinctive golden bosuns (white-tailed tropic birds) that breed on the island were often seen at flight and sometimes entering nesting holes, as were common noddies. Abbott’s boobies were observed at nests high up in trees, and an injured adult was on hand at the ranger station where it was fed fish.
The Bird’n’Nature week also included a visit to the national park’s conservation centre where rangers have captive breeding colonies of two of the island’s critically endangered lizards, the blue-tailed skink and the recently rediscovered Lister’s gecko.