Away With the Birds and Loving It
Anita Smyth
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Landscape Ecologist, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Alice Springs, Northern Territory |
Anita’s childhood years were spent in the outback in the mulga country between St. George and Bollon, western Queensland. Most of her time was spent outdoors playing in the bush with her sisters and brother. Anita had a secret place in the house paddock that she used to visit when she felt disgruntled with the whole world…usually after she’d been naughty.
At this place I’d watch a spotted bowerbird decorating and displaying in its bower. Often I’d play ‘house’ and move the green and white ornaments around the bower and be thrilled when ‘my playmate’ would move them back to their original place. When I moved to the city and met other teenagers interested in wildlife and the outdoors, my passion was reborn thanks to birding and field naturalist clubs. I spent lots of fun times going bush, camping and birding. So when I started university, I was destined to major in evolutionary biology and animal ecology, especially birds and other terrestrial vertebrates. Doing science in the rangelands is like coming back to my country.
My childhood passion has become my career although over the past three years I seem to be spending more leisure than work time in the field. My science career has a chequered history. In the ‘70s, before the growth of non-government conservation organisations, some of my friends and I formed a conservation lobby group called the Wildlife Research Group in Brisbane. Our major focus was to lobby for additional reserves and the conservation of threatened species in southeast Queensland. To help promote the uniqueness and conservation values of an area, we’d conduct wildlife surveys on weekends to support our submissions to parliament. I did this while working in libraries in my early 20s, which also supported my travels to every type of Australian habitat so that I could see as much of Australia’s wildlife as I could.
I’ve seen just about all the bird, mammal, frog and to a lesser degree reptile species in Australia. I once held, and possibly still do hold, the Australian record for the female with the highest number of bird species recorded in a lifetime in Australia. I enjoy birding immensely especially when I find nests or am challenged by an unfamiliar call. In the dry season I do reptile night drives here in central Australia just to understand patterns of occurrence and diversity. I don’t fit the mould of a ‘ticker’ or ‘twitcher’ as invented by Bill Oddie. I’ve just loved and cared about nature since I can remember.
I went to university, gained an honours degree, worked in quantitative educational studies to develop my quantitative skills and then returned to university to do my doctorate. I’ve been doing ad hoc consultancies since the early ‘70s but have professionally been working in the fields of animal ecology, landscape ecology, biodiversity and natural resource management planning for the past 12 years.
Most of my work has been based in southeast Queensland in rainforests fragments of agricultural lands and open eucalypt State Forests but I’ve spent the past four years in the arid rangelands. Working in CSIRO gives me opportunities to work across State and Territory boundaries with land managers to understand and develop scientifically rigorous ways of caring for the land and nature. Living in the desert is all about the deep blue skies, grey-green vegetation contrasting against the red rugged ranges and undulating sand hills, the diversity of wildflowers, grasses and geckos. The smell of rain on the parched earth always heralds excitement like the afternoon thunderstorms on a hot summer’s day in the tropics. There’s no other place like it.
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Anita Smyth birdwatching at Fish Hole, Ellery Creek, central Australia |
The achievements I am most proud of are my doctorate on habitat fragmentation and its effects on the foraging and breeding patterns of birds. My post-doctorate work was on the habitat requirements of hollow-dependent birds in production forests. I’ve discovered a new population of the marsupial pouched frog Assa darlingtonii in southeast Queensland, and was a co-observer with my sister and friend Chris Corben of a world first – the gastric brooding frog ‘vomiting’ fully-formed young frogs in an aquarium in our house!. What an incubation technique – published in Science by Chris.
Before living in the desert, whenever I made trips to arid Australia it would always rain and needless to say we would always get bogged up to the axles and need to make changes to our travel plans. Recently when I hiked the Larapinta Trail in central Australia for the first time, we were justifiably looking forward to seeing the wonderful vistas of the ranges – after all, most days here are cloudless. Not so on this day. A front moved in from the west rapidly and, on the range where we were walking, fast moving clouds akin to those in the alpine mountains rolled over us. It was cold, windy and totally unexpected but amazingly beautiful with the grey-whitish cloud against the red rock and droplets of water on the vegetation. I felt like I had been transported into the Scottish highlands for a day!
To ease the tension of a working day I cycle or walk an hour five days a week, meditate daily, juggle birding/hiking/camping, read widely, paint, woodwork, chill out with friends and often fly to a city for cultural, cuisine and ocean fixes.
We asked Anita about someone who has inspired her in her research and why:
No one person was a role model but my Mum encouraged me to go for the best in everything I did and my Dad regarded me as one of the boys who could do anything.
Books or reading material Anita recommends on her area of research:
“Never Cry Wolf” by Farley Mowart is a non-specialist text describing the awesome behaviour of wolves that is gripping and full of excitement and a great introduction to behavioural ecology.
