A quick cheat sheet for the moving car: silvery low shrubs = saltbush/bluebush;
grey-green scrubby wattles = mulga;
dark smelly wattle up north = gidgee;
crooked grey gum near water = coolibah;
huge mottled gum in a creek = river red gum;
Spiky golden domes = spinifex;
lone weeping tree on a red dune = desert oak.
Nardoo, a small clover-like fern that appears around drying waterholes in the channel country.
For photos, the Merlin Bird ID app with the Australian pack downloaded,
The Pizzey & Knight field guide apps,
Around Uluru
Dawn and dusk at the waterholes are the show. Listen for the chiming, far-carrying song of the pied butcherbird — many people's pick for Australia's finest songster.
Zebra finches move in tight, bouncing flocks with a call like a child's squeaky toy; where they gather, water is near.
Spiny-cheeked and singing honeyeaters work the grevilleas,
Galahs — pink and grey, raucous, tumbling out of the sky like larrikins — will be your constant companions from here to Melbourne.
Screeching cockatoos.
Coober Pedy to William Creek and the Oodnadatta Track
This is raptor country.
The wedge-tailed eagle is unmissable: enormous, dark, diamond-tailed, usually standing on roadkill and lifting off insolently late.
Nankeen kestrels hover beside the road like little rusty helicopters,
Brown falcons sit sentinel on every second fence post.
On the gibber itself, watch for two specialists found almost nowhere else:
The gibberbird, a yellow-faced chat that runs rather than flies across the stones, and
The cinnamon quail-thrush, which materialises out of ground that looks utterly lifeless.
Orange and crimson chats flare like sparks in the saltbush after rain,
White-winged fairy-wrens — the males electric blue with white shoulders — tinkle along the bluebush.
Male White-winged fairywren
Emus will pace the car.
Australian bustard will stalk haughtily through the mitchell grass.
Lake Eyre and the flood spectacle
In flood years the lake hosts breeding events that are genuinely world-famous.
Australian pelicans arrive in their tens of thousands from as far as the coast — nobody fully understands how they know — and raise young on islands in the lake.
Banded stilts, elegant white waders with a chestnut breast-band, breed almost nowhere else on Earth except flooded inland salt lakes; a mass breeding is a once-in-years event.
Red-necked avocets with their upturned bills,
Red-necked Avocet
Clouds of whiskered and gull-billed terns,
Rafts of ducks, and your scenic flight may pass over more birds than you'll ever see in one place again.
From the air, pelican colonies look like drifts of snow on the islands.
Toward Birdsville and the channel country
Boom seasons here produce the phenomena Idriess wrote about:
Budgerigar flocks in their thousands, wheeling like green smoke over the waterholes, and if the season is right,
Flock bronzewings — pigeons that mass in whirring thousands at dawn drinking spots near Birdsville.
Black kites swarm over the town itself, especially around the bakery.
In the coolibahs along the Diamantina look for
Brolgas — tall grey cranes that dance —
Corellas in shrieking white clouds.
The Flinders Ranges and south
At Wilpena listen for the
Australian ringneck (the local race is the Port Lincoln parrot — black head, green body, yellow collar)
Watch the red gum creeks for the red-capped robin, a tiny jewel of scarlet and black.
Wedge-tails ride the thermals off the Pound walls.
And if your drive to Melbourne takes the coastal route through the Coorong, you'll close a literary loop: this is the setting of Storm Boy by Colin Thiele — the same Barossa author I recommended —
and its pelicans,
along with fairy terns and
migratory waders from Siberia, are still there.
A glovebox tip: keep a running list, even a casual one. The Oodnadatta Track in a flood year can turn a non-birdwatcher into a birdwatcher in about three days, and the list becomes a lovely artefact of the trip — perhaps even a page in a future photobook.
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