WILD BUDGIE CHASE

This parrot's natural habitat is the Australian outback, not a cage in the living room...

- STELLA AND JUERGEN FREUND

I'VE SEEN MANY BUDGERIGARS IN my life but never, until recently, in the wild. They'd be in cages in shops, sold as low-maintenance but lively pets. Budgies are, in fact, the most popular pet bird in the world.

But you can also find these vibrant little parrots in the wild. Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) are true Australian natives, travelling in vast flocks across much of the country's interior, bringing a splash of colour and a healthy dose of noise to the rugged desert outback.

I've always been intrigued by wild budgies, as has my husband, Juergen (Yogi). Yet remarkably, despite the fact that Yogi has been a wildlife photographer for three decades, and that we've been living in Far North Queensland for two, an opportunity to photograph the species has never arisen. These avian wonders, described by ornithologist John Gould in 1800 as the epitome of liveliness and cheerfulness, had always somehow eluded our cameras. That impasse finally ended in June 2022. Mapping out a wobbly path that would take us across three states, we made it our mission to find and finally photograph the all-Australian parrot. The seeds of our journey had been sown two years earlier, when a triple La Niña event (see box on p71) brought record rainfall to areas of the south-east.

Australia is a boom-and-bust continent, and nowhere is this more evident than in the outback. This remote wilderness can endure as many as 20 years of drought and heat, which can trigger catastrophic bush fires and ferocious dust storms, followed by shorter, wetter spells - as was the case from 2020-2022 when, finally drenched by the all-nourishing rain, the outback burst into bloom. The weather also brought another gift: enormous flocks of budgies.