Bobby and the Banded Stilts
Producer David Luffman, Jeremy Hogarth
Banded Stilts - they have been called the flamingos of the Australian inland. Because of the vastness of Australia, the breeding habits of the Banded Stilt have remained one of the great riddles of Australian Natural History.
Editor David Luffman
Narration Hugo Weaving
Script Jonathan Holmes
Music Tom Fitzgerald
Dur 28 mins
Banded Stilts are wading birds of the coast, but can only breed when conditions are exactly right in the Australian desert.
In the hot summer month of February 1995 a cyclone built up in the Indian Ocean, it increased in intensity and was given the name Bobby.
Cyclone Bobby hurled itself upon Western Australian where it dumped 380mm of rain in four days of continuous downpour into salt lakes of the desert. Lakes that had been dry for a decade became instant seas, and before the rain had even stopped, the first Banded Stilts had arrived from the coast over 1000 kilometres away.
The specific requirements that Banded Stilts need for breeding had been met. Shallow and warm water with an abundance of brine shrimp, and a low island in the middle of the lake where the birds can nest.
Within days, 5000 nests had been scraped out of the sand, and more birds were arriving all the time. The first eggs were laid in early March, less than 12 days after the rain had started. As soon as the chicks hatch they are taken to the water by one of their parents.
The first chicks were met with incredible hostility from other adults, who pecked at them and jumped on them while their parent tried to shield them. Once at the water, the chicks form crêches, feeding themselves on the billions of brine shrimp that have also reacted to the rain, for without these minute shrimps the Banded Stilts could not survive.
The eggs of the brine shrimp, Paratemia, lie for decades in the dry salt of the lake. It is only when rain falls that the eggs hatch. The shrimps rapidly multiply, for like the Stilt, this is their one chance of breeding. Rain is such a rare event in the Australian deserts that Banded Stilts have only been recorded nesting twenty times in the two hundred years of European settlement, and has never before been filmed.
'Bobby and the Banded Stilts' tells the story for the first time of this remarkable dependence between the shrimp, the Banded Stilts and the year when Cyclone Bobby for a brief moment made a dry salt lake an inland sea.
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