I’m making my first trip to the Northern Territory this weekend, and in the extreme excitement of holidaying and the extreme boredom of unemployment, I’ve been going completely overboard in preparation.

I’ve never previous birded north of the Gold Coast, so I have a lot of targets for this trip. At the high end, eBird tells me there are 115 birds that can be found regularly, uncommonly or rarely in the July-August dry period in Darwin or in Kakadu, where I have four nights each.

That’s a lot to try to see (and I won’t achieve it!) in a very limited amount of time, so I’m trying to give myself the best chance possible in a couple of ways.

The first thing that I’ve done is pull down a list of all the vaguely possible species into a spreadsheet. I tried to exclude the international vagrants, of which Darwin gets many, and the more extreme domestic rares (though looking at this, the grey-headed and grey-fronted honeyeaters shouldn’t be there – that was a once-off at East Point a couple of years ago).

I then identified endemics to the Northern Territory, as these obvously the highest priority. I have five here: chestnut-quilled rock pigeon, banded fruit-dove, hooded parrot, white-throated grasswren, white-lined honeyeater. All except the parrot are in Kakadu, though the grasswren is locked away behind some pretty formidable terrain (the Kakadu website says 4WD with snorkels only on the road to Jim Jim Falls, and my rental car agreement specifically bans that road) so I won’t be seeing them. Hooded parrots I can find in Pine Creek, and though they seem pretty reliable it’s a fairly large detour for a single species so that one is dependent on how my trip is otherwise going.

After NT endemics I went for northern Australian endemics. This is another 54 species that, while not limited to the territory, are going to be far easier to find here than elsewhere in Australia. Mostly they’re birds that I could also get in the Kimberley or FNQ, and perhaps they’re more abundant in those places, but the access to them is going to be far easier around Darwin than elsewhere.

From here, I went and pulled down the species abundance stats from eBird for the July-September period. I am very confident this could have been scraped, but I’m very dumb, so I just did it manually over a couple of hours while watching Dimension 20. In most cases there were at least 100 checklists in the Jul-Sep period and so I felt confident reproducing the results. I’ve got a separate note of those that had fewer. Typically these are in Kakadu and are old stakeout spots, like at a red goshawk nest from a few years ago, where I already have no actual confidence that I’ll find what I’m looking for.

The abundance stats then suggested the top locations for each species, which are in column G. I’m very dumb but I’m still just smart enough to know how to use INDEX/MATCH/MAX to generate that particular list automatically based on the values in the following columns.

The companion to my species list is my locations list, which is what I’m more likely to rely on day-to-day, and which I’ll have to update as I go.

These are broadly based on eBird hotspots, with a few small additions where I’ve identified or heard about promising spots for particular species. Each has a link back to the hotspot, has access instructions based on what I’ve heard from birders, observed on Gogle Maps and read in the very useful Finding Australian Birds book.1 It also identifies the absolute needs in the location, the photo needs, and the number of species for which this is the ‘best’ location.

Based on all of this, at each site I have identified:

  • Key targets to try to hit, being the birds that are most likely in this location and which I won’t have another or many further good opportunities with.
  • Secondary targets, being species that may not be in their highest density here, but are uncommon enough at other sites that it is nevertheless worth keeping an eye out for, as well as rarer birds that appear at lower frequencies.
  • Additional targets are birds which are likely to be abundant at the site but which I should also have many opportunities to see, particularly parrots, some waterfowl like Radjah shelduck, and orange-footed megapodes.
  • Stretch targets are typically the one-offs or things that have been reported, but not in the past year. These I have no expectation of getting at these sites, it’s really just for record keeping purposes.

My plan is to update the ‘Key targets’ as I go to reflect my progress. Obviously if I manage to find and photograph a rufous owl at one location, I don’t need to prioritise it at the next, so it drops out. Conversely, if I dip on sandstone shrikethrush at Nourlangie, my trip to Ubirr becomes that much more important.

One change that I’ve already made since I first developed this spreadsheet (and took this screenshot) was moving Gouldian finch out of ‘Stretch’ and into ‘Key targets’ at Lee Point. I remember the campaign last year against land-clearing by Defence Housing Australia in order to protect their habitat,2 but when I was pulling data there hadn’t been an observation here since 2023. That has changed just in the past week, when there have been three sightings of a black-headed male in a group of double-barred finches.

That’s a very welcome change – it’s great for the finch if it is still able to use the location, and it’s great for me having the chance to find such an incredibly iconic bird much closer to Darwin than the location 90 minutes south that I had been planning to visit.

All the preparation in the world means nothing if I’m a bad birder on the day, of course, and a bird with a 90 per cent observation rate is still missing ten per cent of the time. Of my 115 species, I’m hoping I’ll come away with 70 sightings, and perhaps 30 good photographs. That would be a great success.

This all looks like I’m trying to minmax my trip for ticks at the expense of just enjoying being there. That’s obviously not my goal. Instead, I’m trying to deal with the anxiety that can come with destination birdwatching. When I went to England earlier this year, I didn’t do enough work, and as a result there were some species I really wanted to find – like bearded reedling, for example – which I was never in a position to get, or snow bunting, which I saw but couldn’t have photographed.

I’m hopeful that with this preparation I can let go of the worry that I’m not using my time well, that I’m missing out on something else just down the road, and instead be confident that I’m putting myself in the best possible position to see the birds I want to see.

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References

  1. Dolby T. and Clarke R. 2025. Finding Australian Birds. A field guide to birding locations. Second edition. Melbourne, VIC: CSIRO Publishing. ↩︎
  2. Rendall J. 2022. Endangered Gouldian finch returns to Lee Point, prompting campaign to stop Defence Housing Australia development. ABC News. 24 September. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-24/lee-point-darwin-gouldian-finches-defence-housing-development/101452040 ↩︎