The Rose-crowned Fruit-dove’s first call brought me to a dead stop. I stood under the rainforest canopy, scanning a riot of foliage, ears straining to fix my bearing. Again, the telltale accelerating “woop, woop, woop…”, perhaps 200 metres away. I call back. Nothing. Then, after a span of pessimistic silence, a small, precious treasure hurtles overhead.

The slightest wavering of a branch and I know the fruit-dove has landed. It’s close. Improbably close.

My fingers scrabble with the apparently rusted-on camera lens cap. Up swings the big lens and, after what seems a ridiculously prolonged moment of further fiddling, the brightly coloured little dove crystalises into view. The shutter opens, momentarily capturing the world in perfect statis and I know I have my shot. I’m stoked.

I lower the camera and just stood there gawping up at that adorable little fruit-dove for long minutes afterwards. Pursuing your quarry is one thing, but meeting the bird on its terms is quite another.

Given the climate emergency we are all living through currently, I don’t feel good about jet-setting about the planet just to spot novel birds. Besides which, I’m still deeply curious about discovering avian secrets hidden in plain view for even our more ‘common’ birds.

But, if I had a magical ‘golden ticket’ to go anywhere to see birds, I rather fancy spending a late afternoon sunset floating high above the coast in a hot air balloon while surrounded by a flock of feeding White-throated Needletails. There’s something absolutely giddy about being close to these enigmatic and racy birds.

From the vantage point of watching them from the ground they can appear and disappear in breakneck moments of winged acceleration, but from the balloon I’d hope to accompany them as the last rays of the evening light faded. I want to watch through night vision goggles as they somehow manage to fly under conditions of total darkness. Do they glide while they sleep? How do they stay together as a flock while their sleep?? I want to know.

I teach people about how to listen for, and interpret, bird language, by which I mean not just learning which call belongs to which species, but rather how each species of songbird uses distinctly different ‘voices’ to communicate specific meaning about its’ physical and social environment. I’m interested in showing people how listening deeply to nature can be transformative for our health and wellbeing.

To do that I need a large collection of audio recordings of bird calls. For each species I try to capture instances of voices such as ground mobbing alarm, aerial flee alarm, spring territorial song, autumn territorial song, courtship calls, mimicry, aggression sounds, begging calls etc.

Each call represents a particular situation for that bird, so I spend hundreds of hours trying to be in the right place at the right time with my audio gear running and no leaf blowers or chainsaws nearby.

It’s challenging, especially for momentary situations like aerial alarm which are typically over in seconds, but it gives me a terrific excuse to wander aimlessly around in the bush.