A birder?s eye view of Kakadu: ?Don?t give up until you go to bed?

“There are two rules you need to follow on board,” Luke Paterson informs me as I step on to a large flat-bottomed boat. The first is to keep my limbs inside to avoid tempting the myriad crocs that call these waters home, and the second is just as important: never use the t word.

“In the birding community, birders are enthusiasts,” he explains, “but twitchers are real list tickers who’ll drop anything at the promise of seeing a rare bird.” Though some obsessives self-identify as twitchers, they’re few and far between and the consensus in our group is that placing too much focus on list-ticking saps much of the joy from this pursuit.

A lifelong bird enthusiast, Paterson looks like he was born in an Akubra and sports a broad smile that is undimmed by the oppressive heat of the build up and the regular pre-dawn starts required to lead tours through Kakadu national park. Today he’s taking us through the maze of channels that cross a broad floodplain and before we launch he’s already begun pointing out birds lining the banks.

For an hour we watch azure kingfishers with orange bellies and iridescent royal blue backs pose obligingly in the sun as fantails and flycatchers pirouette through the undergrowth nearby. It’s proof that a bird need not be rare to get birders excited. Our boat is captivated by what we see until Paterson suggests visiting a different spot. “Oh yes,” says Robin, whose hat is adorned with emu, buzzard and cockatoo feathers. “I tend to get distracted by whatever bird is in my binoculars.”

He tells me that it was a trip to Kakadu 30 years ago that transformed an interest into an abiding passion. “Birding is really an excuse to explore nature and look around you,” he explains. “Even if you’ve seen a bird before, there’s always some new behaviour to observe, whether they’re courting or preening or sitting on the nest.” Over the years he’s spotted more than 600 of Australia’s 828 bird species, and hopes to add several more to his list on this trip.

We keep our eyes peeled as we follow a narrow waterway lined with impenetrable groves of bamboo and flakey melaleucas that leave a sweetly medicinal perfume in the air. Inscrutable reptilian eyes watch us from the murky waterline and the chittering of crickets is punctuated by the deep hoot of a barking owl before Paterson suddenly cries out.

“Look at the size of that beak folks, what a stonker!” He’s pointing at a great-billed heron, a giant bird with a spear-like bill that stalks along the waterline. It’s a “lifer” for two in our group, the first time they have ever seen one. The excited chatter continues as it darts out of eyesight but Paterson ensures us that we’re not done yet. “You never know what you’ll see on the way home,” he says before sharing his mantra: “ don’t give up until you go to bed.”