‘David, it’s better to be born lucky than brilliant.’ These were the words of surgeon John Fulford, for whom the author worked in his first year after qualifying.
This is the theme underlying David Hollands’ account of his long and fascinating life. As a child, he lived through World War 2, when his love of the natural world had already started and was then nurtured by inspiring teachers at boarding school.
He recounts his time at medical school and then as a fledgling doctor and in the British army, tackling problems which would stand him in good stead for the rest of his medical career. Then came the move to Australia, leading on to what was initially a single-handed rural practice and, later, in partnership with his wife Margaret, which would test him to the limits of his capability.
His love of nature, photography and birds in particular also went hand in hand with the medicine and these passions bore fruit with his first book ‘Eagles Hawks and Falcon of Australia.’ The spark had been lit and this was followed by six more books, some of them involving travel all around the world.
By his own admission, David has been lucky beyond belief in a host of ways. Now 90 years old, he feels that it is time for his story to be told.
This is my second venture into the lives of this remarkable group of birds.
In ‘Eagles Hawks and Falcons of Australia’, published in 1984, I covered all the 24 mainland species of Australia but the emphasis throughout was on birds at the nest. The equipment of the time virtually dictated this and I was fortunate to have one of Jack Cupper’s portable aluminium towers, enabling me to get level with or above almost every nest.
Then, four years ago, when I decided to re-visit the birds of prey, I needed a new approach and modern equipment has made this possible. I would still do a little work at the nest but the digital camera allowed me to go far beyond this. The list of its attributes is long; rapid, highly accurate autofocusing, image stabilising, extremely rapid shutter speeds, ISO levels that were unheard of in the days of film, a multiplier on the focal length of long lenses. Added to all these is the ability to take hundreds or more pictures, viewing them at once on the camera’s screen, making adjustments as required and instantly delete any unwanted images.
The results of these attributes were that I was no longer tied to the nest, could work from much greater distances and could concentrate on flight and movement, aspects of the birds’ lives, which have long fascinated me.
Out of this came the concept of an entirely new book. I would still need to visit and study every species but I could do it from this new and exciting angle. It has been almost entirely successful, although Covid-19 has made some expeditions difficult or impossible. Twice, I managed to escape from Victoria within hours of the start of lockdown, which enabled me to do some absolutely thrilling work on Osprey. However, forced to head to outback Queensland at an inappropriate time, I got less than satisfactory results on the elusive Grey Falcon. To return to Christmas Island for its endemic goshawk was never a proposition.
Despite these problems, it has been a fascinating journey and, out of this, has come ‘David Hollands’ Birds of Prey of Australia’.
This book is both a study and a celebration. Cranes, Herons and Storks are not closely related but they share many characteristics, including all being fascinating and it was very much a personal choice to work on them all as a single project.
It took 16 years to complete. A number of the species were comparatively easy to find and photograph but, at the other end of the scale, some were so difficult that I began to doubt if I would ever manage to complete what I had set out to do. In the end, I did manage to study and photograph all 17 species, including 15 at the nest.
There is a chapter devoted to each species. This was a personal study in the field and the text reflects this, detailed and accurate but also bringing out the colour and drama in these birds lives. In particular, the Sarus Crane and two of the bitterns, Australasian and Australian Little proved to be the most difficult of all and the lengths of their three chapters bears witness to the dance that they led me.
As much as possible, I tried to make the photographs and the text complement each other. A story has more impact if there are pictures to go with it and there were a number of instances where this was possible but there are many other photographs which stand alone.
We live in a rapidly changing world, where many of the old constants are no longer constants at all. My aim in this book was to give as complete a picture as I could of these three groups of birds in the early 21st century. Hopefully, it is a picture which will remain constant into the future and not become merely a record of what we once had.
This was a combined effort with the late Clive Minton, arguably the world’s greatest expert on waders. Clive and I had been friends since schooldays and so, when he suggested that we should work together on a wader book, there was only ever going to be one answer. Clive knew just about everything that there was to know about waders and so the arrangement was that he would provide the expertise, while I took the photographs and did most of the writing. It worked very well.
There are 80 species of wader on the Australian list, divided almost equally into thirds, the resident breeding species, the non-breeding migrants and the vagrants, accidental rarities which have lost their way during migration and arrived by chance in Australia.
With Clive, I undertook many expeditions to Broome and Eighty Mile Beach in Western Australia, Corner Inlet and Western Port Bay in Victoria and a number of sites in South Australia, while my personal searches took me to North Queensland, the Riverina district of New South Wales and, in Victoria, my home district around Orbost, plus many visits to that bird-watching nirvana, the Western Treatment Plant at Werribee. Through all these trips, I managed to study and photograph all the residents and regular migrants and some of the accidentals. Photographs of the remaining accidentals were provided by a number of contributors.
Migration plays a major role among Australia’s waders and four of the early chapters are devoted to this subject and to wader study, which, under Clive’s leadership, has made huge advances in our knowledge of migration, breeding, longevity and the harm being caused by the destruction of coastal wetlands in places like the Yellow Sea. Topics covered include cannon-netting, banding, flagging and the use of both satellite transmitters and geolocators.
The next 19 chapters are devoted to the birds themselves, with species by species of varying length; from 23 pages for the remarkable Banded Stilt down to less than half a page for some of the vagrants. Clive wrote chapters on moults and breeding productivity, there is a chapter on changes around the Yellow Sea and another on wader sites around Australia. The book ends with a Field Guide section for all 80 Australian waders.
Tragically, Clive was killed in a road accident in 2019 and a new edition of ‘Waders’ seems unlikely to happen.
This was a fun project. Kingfishers and kookaburras are a colourful group and a joy to work with but it still took eight years to find and photograph them all and I never did find a nest of the Little Kingfisher, even though I was able to track it down elsewhere.
Even though there are only ten species, it still entailed a lot of travelling, particularly to North Queensland but also to the inland in search of Red-backed Kingfishers.
Kingfishers and kookaburras lend themselves well to light beam photography with the bird triggering the camera when it passes through an infra-red beam, dispensing with any need for the photographer to having anything to do with the process once he has set it up. Using this technique, I was able to photograph Sacred, Forest, Red-backed and Azure Kingfishers, Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfishers and both species of kookaburra.
Sadly, this book has been out of print for some years with no certainty that it will ever be re-printed.
With ‘Owls Frogmouths and Nightjars’ completed, I could not bear the thought of no longer working with owls. I had already photographed a few owls overseas and so was born the idea of travelling to a number of countries with the specific purpose of finding and photographing one or more owls there. It worked beyond my wildest dreams and, in a total of 12 expeditions, I had only one total failure.
There were many memorable ones; the thrill of finding the nest of the spectacular Snowy Owl in the snows of the Alaskan tundra and then, at 2.00 am, photographing the female by natural daylight as she flew in to feed her chick; the fleeting sights of the beautiful Spectacled Owl in a Costa Rican rain forest, shy and wary, yet prepared to stay if I made my movements with the utmost care; the shadowed appearance of two endangered Blakiston’s Fish Owls, one of the world’s rarest owls, fishing only metres in front of my hide in Hokkaido, Japan.
All these sights and many more made the project well worth the expense and effort. Since then, I have photographed several more owls overseas but there is unlikely ever to be a revised version.
Owls have always been my greatest love but are extremely difficult to study and photograph. Fortunately, I had the help of John Young, Australia’s greatest living naturalist, whose skill at finding owls and building hides high in trees is legendary. With both John and a number of other owl enthusiasts, I found and photographed all of Australia’s owls plus the frogmouths and nightjars, often staying all night in hides high in the trees.
Australia’s owls are mostly very little known and most had never been photographed at the nest prior to this project.
This book went a long way to filling in all of those gaps; the Powerful Owl, often stolidly indifferent at its daytime roost but incredibly shy and wary around the nest; the Rufous Owl, so brazen that it flew in over John Young’s shoulder and into the nest when he was clinging onto the tree, barely a metre from the hole.
This book evolved in two parts. It was initially published as ‘Birds of the Night’ but I was never entirely happy with the result. Some years later, a young scientist, Rohan Bilney, was studying owls in eastern Victoria for his Ph.D. thesis and he and I spent a lot of time in the field together. The result was a greatly expanded and improved version, now entitled ‘Owls Frogmouths and Nightjars of Australia’. This book, together with three others of my books, also won Whitley Award for the Best Illustrated Natural History book s of the year.
As a postscript, I was once told that my owl work would never be surpassed because nobody else would be mad enough to try. There may well be some truth in that.
© David GW Hollands - https://www.davidhollandsbirds.com.au/ all photographs and contributions 2021
