The introductory chapter explains that the stories in this book were chosen to illustrate different responses by bird species to environmental change. An understanding of how species respond to change is a valuable asset for conservation planning, especially in these times of rapid development in inland and northern Australia, combined with the threat of climate change. The focus on arid Australia makes sense because it is one of the most variable and unpredictable environments on the planet. In order to survive there, species must have evolved sophisticated but flexible strategies to respond to unpredictable changes in their environment. The line-up of contributors is impressive in the depth and breadth of its expertise, covering bird ecology and behaviour, the evolutionary history of Australia’s birds, palaeontology, anthropology and ecologically focused human history. All bar one are professional scientists, mostly based in Canberra.

The Australian inland is characterised by a cycle of ‘boom and bust’. Unpredictable and infrequent heavy rain, especially when followed by warm conditions, triggers rapid growth of vegetation, proliferation of insects and the flooding of shallow wetlands. These conditions produce an upsurge in food for birds. Some bird species have a remarkable capacity to track these boom periods through space and time, so that they can take full advantage of them. How they do so is one of nature’s mysteries and is the subject of four of the essays in this book. How do waterbirds taking refuge in moist coastal environments ‘know’ that significant rain has fallen hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres away? How do they know when to navigate to the wetlands that form at the end point of inland drainage systems some weeks after the rain event, and hundreds of kilometres from it? And how do they know when to mate so that hatching of their young coincides with the peak of food availability within the wetland? David Roshier sheds some light on these questions by describing the movements of Grey Teal that have been fitted with tracking devices to relay their position via satellite. The results suggest that this small duck develops an intimate knowledge of the many thousands of square kilometres of landscape, and that it may make regular exploratory movements of hundreds of kilometres in search of good feeding and breeding conditions.

As I write, rain in northern parts of the Lake Eyre Basin last summer has filled the innumerable channels draining south towards Lake Eyre. Several vast, shallow, ephemeral wetlands are slowing filling, and huge colonies of waterbirds have gathered from afar to breed. In a few months, this bonanza will be over and the tens of thousands of pelicans, cormorants, ibis and ducks, old and young, will leave for destinations unknown and futures uncertain. In contrast, the tiny Zebra Finch survives in situ by specialising on eating the seeds of grasses that can grow, flower and set seed rapidly, even after low rainfall. This means that food can be found somewhere in the landscape at almost any time. During extended dry periods, the species survives as small populations in refuge areas where water remains available, ready to rapidly expand into new habitat that develops when the good times come again. Careful population demographic analysis has shown that the response to rain is even more sophisticated, with the finches timing their mating so that the hatching of their young coincides with the availability of half-ripe grass seed. CSIRO zoologist Steve Morton provides a clear and highly readable narrative about how a Zebra Finch might gather and retain knowledge of where in the landscape at any given time it might expect to find surface water or grass seeds suitable for feeding to young yet to be conceived. In extended good times, the Zebra Finch can breed continuously for long periods and the population grows rapidly, only to contract again when extended dry conditions inevitably return.

The mysterious Night Parrot, the only surviving Australian bird never to have been photographed, remains an enigma. Virtually all that is known of its behaviour was gathered by one observer, Frederick Andrews, in the Gawler Ranges, South Australia, during the 1870s. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Night Parrot had all but disappeared, probably another casualty of overstocking with sheep and cattle. However, the chance finding of two separate carcasses beside outback Queensland roads in the last twenty years, and a few plausible sightings, indicate that it has survived almost unnoticed for the past 140 years. These chance finds give a glimmer of hope that this ‘fugitive of the inland’, as Penny Olsen has dubbed it, will one day yield its survival secrets.

Genyornis is a uniquely Australian group of extinct, giant, flightless birds related to geese. It is used by palaeontologist Mike Smith as an example of a specialised bird that could not cope with change. Genyornis was probably long-lived, slow maturing and slow breeding, making it susceptible to a gradual population decline under a regime of Aboriginal harvesting of its eggs. It also had a rather specialised vegetarian diet that may have been adversely affected by Pleistocene climatic fluctuations. Smith skilfully recounts the complex story of how details of the diet of Genyonis were elucidated from fragments of fossil egg shell. In contrast, a more familiar giant bird, the Emu, has survived because it is highly mobile, able to move considerable distances to escape harsh conditions or to take advantage of a flush of green following rain, and has successfully adapted its diet to include introduced pasture and weeds.

Leo Joseph takes an even longer-term evolutionary perspective, and shows how the boom and bust strategy can result in more intense natural selection and thus hasten evolution. During the boom times, a population can increase rapidly, producing more individuals and enhanced genetic diversity. This provides a greater pool of individuals from which the next generation is ‘selected’ via the variability in breeding success.

Australia has considerable expertise in ecology, especially in the ecology of arid, highly variable and unpredictable ecosystems. Yet little of this understanding filters down to the general populace, or drives the important decisions made by government. If we are to ever be truly at home on this continent, living within its ecological tolerances, then the understandings of ecologists must be central to all decisions about land use. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Tim Flannery and the Wentworth Group of Scientists), our ecologists have not participated effectively in debates about important national issues. This publication is another small but commendable step along the path towards achieving a widely held ecological understanding, and applying it to debates about the wise use of our dry continent.