Jeffrey Krieg (part 1)

Vision Australia ID 0:01

Music. This is a Vision Australia radio podcast.

Kate Cooper 0:19

On Vision Australia radio, welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced, creative voices in our community, on air now and also available on vision. Australia radio, podcasts. I'm Kate Cooper, and our guest on today's program is ornithologist, writer and musician Jeffrey Craig. Jeff has just released his first book, a photographic study and guide to South Australian diurnal birds of prey and the result of a 13 year passion project. Welcome to the program, Jeff. Thank

Jeffrey Krieg 0:55

Thank you so much for having me Kate, it's great to be here.

Kate Cooper 0:58

Before we talk about your book and your music, I have a question that is popular with listeners to this program, would you tell us about where you grew up and what that place means to you now?

Jeffrey Krieg 1:10

Yeah, absolutely, that's a great icebreaker question I think. So the small answer, or the short answer to that, is in small country towns. I didn't grow up in one place, but I absolutely loved every place that I grew up in. And I can give you a quick rundown of that. The first of the places is Minlaton on the Yorke Peninsula. I don't know if you're familiar with York Peninsula I was, I was born in militant and then spent probably from birth up to about eight years. No, no, it would have been shorter than that. Would have went from about birth up to five I did kindergarten and reception at Minlaton. 

I then... my Dad was a teacher. And like yourself, Kate, I heard that you were a teacher at one stage. So Dad was a teacher, so we did a lot of moving around as kids, and he did a teacher exchange to Australia in that... so that would have been my first year of actual school. So not reception. That was year one. So I went and did year one over in Australia. It's near Bunbury, south of Perth, beautiful spot, the West is a beautiful place to live. I was grateful for living there for a year, and I still have memories of that place, even though I was only young back then. So that then from Australia we came back, we came back to Minlaton. 

I was then spent I did year two and year three at school there. And then after that, Dad moved again. So we went... Mum and Dad picked up the whole family, we moved over to the Eyre Peninsula in Cummins there, right in the center of the peninsula. Beautiful spot. I feel like everyone knows, if you haven't lived in Cummins, everyone knows someone that's been there, or has been through there, or or grew up there, or in Port Lincoln, lovely, lovely part of the state as well. So I was there. That was probably the bulk of my... growing up. So I did from year four all the way up to the end of year 10. So I kind of it kind of feels like my home in terms of schooling, because that's where, that's where most of my... good mates are to this day are still from and and I loved growing up in Cummins. 

It was a beautiful place. I had a great year level of kids to go, to go through school with as well, which was fantastic. But living in small country towns is it's really a blessing. I absolutely loved it thoroughly. And from there we went. Dad did, which was probably his last move with the family, which was to turn under in the Barossa Valley, which is where mum and dad still are. Now they're retired up there. So the Barossa Valley, beautiful spot. Little plug for the Barossa for those of you that haven't been there yet, and check it out. It's fantastic. So I did year 11 and 12, at 10 under and then came down to Adelaide to for university. So did University four years in Adelaide, and then I've been in Adelaide pretty much ever since then. 

So... no longer a country boy, but I still love, I still love the country. If things were different, I'd still go out and live in the country. So every one of those places has special memories for different reasons. At times, you know, there's probably moments where I thought, I wish my parents hadn't, hadn't moved me, because I was, you know, I was really settled here. But looking back in retrospect, you go, I wouldn't change any of it. Every single place, shapes you and shapes who you are. And I think that's important. It's important to look back at those things with positive memories and try and pull out the positives of it and not look, not focus on the negatives. So I'm completely grateful for every part of the country that I've grown up in. Kate, so yeah. 

Kate Cooper 4:18

Sounds brilliant, and even though you now live in the city, listening to you, you are a country boy at heart...

Jeffrey Krieg 4:25

(LAUGHS) Absolutely, absolutely. (LAUGHS)

Kate Cooper 4:28

So Jeff, your book, Raptors at a Glance, a Guide to Identifying South Australian Birds of Prey, has been described as an outstanding example of a lifetime of ornithological research. So, and bearing in mind that you've talked about growing up in the country, what are your earliest memories of being interested in the lives of birds?

Jeffrey Krieg 4:50

Ah, yeah. Great question. Great, geat question, Kate. I... my first, my very first memory would have to be, and this is going to seem like a like a strange story, but. That my Dad grew up on a farm, but didn't like pets - so as kids, we weren't allowed to have pets, and I don't hold that against Dad now, but all my cousins and that had pets, like pet dogs and cats and things, and so we always felt a bit left out. And I want think one time I brought home a piece of bark and I kept it in a jar, and it was my pet frog. So I was only little, but I think after that point, Mum had a quiet word to Dad and said, I think we need to get him a real pet. 

So they went out and got the only thing which Dad could tolerate at the time, and that was a budgie. So he got us a pet... budgie, which we had in a cage and which we had for a long time. And so that that was my first introduction to birds. It wasn't what got me into, like, massively into birds that came a bit later, but it was when I moved over to Cummins and we were back visiting my family on the Yorke Peninsula. We have school holidays there, and myself, my younger sister and my younger cousin, and my cousin, who's year older than me, all went for a walk to one of their salt lakes one day, we were just mucking around having fun in the paddocks. It was... good fun, but we went and walked across to the island of this salt lake, and we found... these eggs on the ground. 

Now we didn't know what they were. Growing up in the country, you kind of get taught to be wary of magpies around breeding season, because magpies will swoop and defend their nests. So we knew about that, but these eggs were on the ground. We didn't know what they were. None of us were ornithologists. None of us knew about birds and what types of what. But all of a sudden we hear this ferocious screeching noise coming at us, and these birds just started swooping us like crazy. And you know, when you when they're magpies, you get taught, wave your hand around or look directly at them, and they won't swoop you anymore if you can. 

And we tried all of that. Nothing worked. These birds just kept swooping us. They were relentless. We didn't know what we'd done, but, and it was, it was so bad it that the youngest of us were actually, I won't say that, I'm so they don't get embarrassed on radio if they're listening, but the youngest of us were actually in tears. It was pretty... frightful for little kids, you know. And we just had to... scatter. We just had to get as far away from there as we could, as quickly as we could. So we ran back across the salt lake. We ran back across, back across the paddocks, and back to the farmhouse. And I think my dad was there at the time, and we told him the story, and none of us knew what it was, and I said, And Dad said to me, it sounds like they might have been Spur Wing Plovers. 

Spur Wing Plovers are known as Masked Lapwings. These days, their names kind of changed, but people still know them as plovers or spur wing plovers, and they will defend their nests ferociously, if any of you out there, any listeners out there, know what Spur Wing Plovers are like, or you've trodden too closely to one of their nests, you know what I'm talking about. But it was that moment, I think it just, it just aroused my curiosity and and I remember, once the holiday was over, we went back home to Cummins, and my Dad pulled out the Reader's Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds and showed me it, opened it to the Spur Wing Plover page, and said, Here, this is the bird that swooped you. 

From then on, that that was it. I was gone. From then on, I think I I looked at that book over and over again. Every night I got home from school, I'd look at the book. I'd go out into the surrounding parts of the town and look for as many of the birds as I could, and try to, you know, try to remember which species it was and, and I think just by flicking through that book over and over and over, I really developed a love for birds and and a bit of a knack for being able to identify them. And, yeah, that was... probably my, the introduction to it all. And that's how, that's how I got into birds. 

And that book, seriously, I used it so much that it was literally falling apart. Mum tried to revive it a couple of times, but the dust jacket was gone. That got that got ripped and torn, that all the pages, all the stitching, the saddle stitching, started wearing out, the pages started falling out. But it was a well used book. And if my book ends up, in two years time, a young child's got it, and they've used it so much that it's falling apart. I'll be grateful for it, because it means that they're actually getting something out of it, which is, which is fantastic. So, yeah.

Kate Cooper 9:08

It certainly is. And so we know how you got interested in birds, but what was it about birds of prey in particular that to use your words captivated your mind, heart and attention and inspired you to undertake the 13 years study and produce such an impressive books, the one that's just been released?

Jeffrey Krieg 9:29

Yeah, yes, that's another good question. Kate, that... it's probably... I could put it down to one moment, I reckon, where I really got into birds of prey. It was one of my good mates at school was also I was actually, I was really lucky. A lot of my mates at school were actually like birds as well, which was cool. So one of my really good mates was... into birds of prey in particular. And he was telling me stories he lived on a farm. He was telling me stories about Wedge-tailed Eagles, one that he actually saw at a particular spot every time, at his farm at night, and at that stage, I'd never... seen a Wedgie. I'd never heard of a Wedgie. I  mean, sorry, I probably had. I had seen them in books, obviously, but I hadn't seen them in out in real life. 

And this mate of mine invited me out to his house one day, and he said, we'll go. I'll show you. I'll show you this wedgie. And so we went out to his house, and sure enough, he rode me out there on his motorbike with young kids growing up. And riding motorbikes on farms was another cool experience, but we went out to one of his scrubs, and sure enough, soaring over the over the scrub, just low and being swooped by ravens and magpies, was this beautiful Wedge-tailed Eagle. And if you don't know which I don't know - do you know Wedge-tailed Eagles, Kate, are you familiar with...?

Kate Cooper 10:47

I don't know that I'd know one if I spotted it, to be honest.

Jeffrey Krieg 10:50

Okay, so they're the largest bird of prey that we have. They have a wingspan of around 2.3 metres on average. And they're big black eagles, yeah, if you see them out soaring, it's so majestic. And also, I think kids, or there's this innate, this is an innate quality in humans. I think that we love the thought of being able to fly, or, you know, and a lot of kids when they're young, have dreams of flying. And my girls now say, Oh, this cool dream. And I was flying last night, Daddy, it was really cool. And I said, Yeah, I used to have those dreams too. 

I think there's, you know, we invented flight because we're so we're so endeared by it or drawn to it, that, yeah, we I think that quality exists in me as well. Definitely, I was always into things that flew. I was always into planes and and jets. I thought I'd be a pilot one day. So seeing this wedgie, like this massive bird, beautiful bird of prey, soaring. That was the moment. From then on, I thought everything to me was just birds of prey, and it has, it has been, and I don't mind being called a birds of prey nerd. I have no no shame in that. I just I love them, and they really are inspiring. 

And I think the more I learnt about them, I hired a book from our school library, which was called hawks in focus by Jack and Lindsay cuppa now, they were a father and son duo that basically went, this was in the late 70s and early 80s. They basically went on a on a mission, the two of them to go around the entire country, find every single species of raptor that we have and photograph them at the nest. So it was a massive undertaking for them. And I... that book is kind of what inspired me to write my book. I always, I remember thinking when I was little, looking through the book, and I go, one day, I'd love to do something like this, and it's a fantastic resource. 

I don't know... how many copies it ever sold, or anything like that, but I I've owned my own copy now. I used to hire it out from the library all the time, and I finally, finally bought my own copy. And it's a very inspirational book, just to see their journey and how they did it. Yeah, I'd spent so much time looking through that, that book, and seeing, looking at all the color photographs and just being inspired to think, one day I'd love to do that myself. And it took a long time in coming like that was back in the 80s. It wasn't till, you know, 2010 or '11 that I really the idea of writing this book actually really started to happen. 

That was when technology sort of caught up a bit as well - when cameras were made more affordable in the digital era. All the things sort of fell into place at the right time. And because I was so confident and and comfortable identifying birds of prey, I wanted to share that knowledge, all the stuff that I'd learned over my years. I really wanted to share what I had learned with other people. And think my Hawks in Focus, I thought was... a fantastic book, and it was back in the '80s, and I kind of that was all I kind of knew at the time. And in 2010 I'm thinking, what has there been? What has there been since then? What, like a massive study like this? 

There really hasn't been heaps. There's been some in that have been written, kind of in recent years and in parallel to mine, which I didn't know about until I was writing mine. And I kind of found, found those, and found some other great writers at the same time. But it was like we were kind of riding in parallel. And yeah, I thought I'd love to be able to share mine, all the things I've learned, and try to help others out there be able to identify these beautiful birds, because they are a hard group to identify. There's there's many of them. They can look quite similar from a distance. So yeah, that that was kind of how the whole journey started, and that was... what inspired me to write the book. (MUSIC)

Kate Cooper 14:28

On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is ornithologist, writer and musician Jeffrey Krieg. And you mentioned cameras and technology before, and your book has over 550 color photographs. Like any art form, photography does require skill, talent, dedication. So what.. yeah, what preparation or study did you do to learn as much as you could about the photography that you needed for your project?

Jeffrey Krieg 15:01

I'd like to say a lot, I'd like to say a lot of formal study, but I didn't. I was lucky enough to have a mate of mine at work that sat sat right next to me. He was already a photographer. He used to photograph in a very different genre to me. He'd take portraits and photos of events and things like that, and weddings, which is a very different concept of photographing wildlife. But obviously you can take a lot of the principles of photography and apply them to any any genre that you're actually photographing. But I had him to kind of to kind of learn off of I remember having lots of chats to him about about how you do things and how and what he uses and the best way to get good photos. 

So I spent a lot of time gleaning information, little bits of little, little bits of wisdom off of him, before I ever bought my own camera. And finally I decided, well, well, I think it's probably time I got my own camera so and the technology was just, it was just right at the time, because there were a lot of these bridge cameras coming out that have that had really big telephoto zooms on them, which makes it which they were kind of geared towards amateur bird photographers. 

And I make no claims to being a professional photographer, by the way, I'm just someone who loves birds of prey, and I picked up a camera later in life just to try and document what I see and what I'm learning and to create books such as this one. So I learned a lot through trial and error. You can learn. You can kind of learn as much as you want out of books and by watching people and by listening to people, but at the end of the day, it's one of the things you have to get out there and try it. You need to know a few key pointers and a few and a few tips. 

But, you know, I felt like when I first went out, I heard all this stuff and I learned all this stuff, but then I got out, got out there, and it all sort of there. Was like a deer in the headlights. It all sort of slipped my mind. I couldn't remember what was what, but over time, you get better at it, and you just have to, you just have to practice, especially with birds of prey. The good thing for me was that I knew my subject really well already. If I didn't know birds of prey, I would have found it impossible to get photos of them, because they're a very timid group of birds. It's hard that they're scared of... usually very wary and scared of humans. It's hard to get close to them. They're not very approachable. 

So which makes the one part of photography, being able to get close to your subject, it makes that really difficult. So at least I knew my subjects first. I knew sort of where the limits were, where I could get to, how I could approach them, when I could when I couldn't approach them, and all that kind of thing, which made my job a lot easier, but I still made so many mistakes. Like I I was taking thousands of photos before I got anything that was worth using in the book. And I remember taking some photos early on in the past and thinking, Oh, that's that'll be in the book. Two years later, I looked at that photo, went that that's, I don't know how I ever considered that, putting that in the book, it just... wasn't great. 

And that's another thing, your perception of what a good photo is changes as your skill level goes up. And so, yeah, a lot of the initial photos that I took were just lessons learned. They were just, you know, I had to throw them away later. But yeah, it really is, and it really is a, it really is a tricky skill. My hat's off to these, these wildlife photographers that spend years out in the field just to get one really good shot. It really is amazing and and unfortunately, probably the only ones who really appreciate photography and the art of photography are other photographers, because they know what they go through, especially wildlife photography, but yeah, it's amazing fun, and it's, it really is addictive if you do get into it. So yeah.

Kate Cooper 18:26

Well that's a really healthy attitude, though, to see it as a learning process, and to be able to go back and recognise that something, when you were early in that learning, wasn't up to where you were then at over time, and that's... yeah, a very constructive and positive way to to treat your learning. And then you realised that the learning is something that never stops.

Jeffrey Krieg 18:51

Absolutely, yeah... yep.

Kate Cooper 18:52

You might you might have a milestone, like your book... but then you're still learning, you're still out there, and that's really exciting.

Jeffrey Krieg 19:00

Absolutely. I mean, I've taken so many photos since the book that I go, Well, I wish I had have gotten these when, you know, when I was still writing the book. But you have to make, have to have a cut-off point at some point. And I had to make a cut-off point. There's photos now that I that I love way more than some of the stuff in my book, but it just wasn't ready at the time. So I am still learning, like you say, Kate, it's absolutely... spot on.

Kate Cooper 19:21

And Jeff, your book focuses on 24 resident species of diurnal birds of prey, would you explain to us, first of all what diurnal means in terms of the behaviour of these birds?

Jeffrey Krieg 19:33

Absolutely. Yeah. Not all people realise this, because we all hear about nocturnal animals in school. Diurnal is basically just the opposite of nocturnal, which means active during the day. So what that equates to, in terms of birds of prey, is that there are diurnal hunters, so daytime hunters and there are nighttime hunters. So if you're thinking, if you think of ours, everyone knows, you know, knows what ours are. They are the nocturnal hunters. So they're still birds of prey. A but they're not diurnal hunters, so I've not the scope of my book was to cover all the daytime hunters. So what it basically means is diurnal cover all the daytime hunters, but I'm not covering the owls, basically, because they're the nighttime hunters. So yeah, that's what diurnal means.

Kate Cooper 20:16

Thank you. And would you share with us the names of these different species? I wonder how many will sound familiar to those of us who don't know as much as we should about birds - like me, for example.

Jeffrey Krieg 20:27

(LAUGHS) Yep, okay, I play this fun game with my girls at the moment, so I hope you'll indulge me here Kate. Alright, so I've got two, two little girls, 10 and 10 and eight. They're fantastic little rippers. And they've, they've got a copy of my book, and they love it. They flick through it all the time. They may not be able to identify the birds out in the wild yet, but they are getting really good at naming all 24 species. So when I say 24 resident species, that's 24 Australia-wide. And when I say resident species, I mean the species that that are known to live in and have been known to live in Australia for a long period of time. 

There are other species these days that are that are vagrants or come over, sometimes from neighboring islands, and some books do cover those as well. I don't cover any of those species. I'm just focusing on the ones that are considered resident to Australia. So there's 24 in Australia. There are 21 of those that are found in South Australia. So we play this fun game at home where we go through we try and name them all. So I'll try and name them all. If you can just keep a quick tally, Kate that because I'm not going to know where I'm up to. 

So there's 21... in South Australia. I'll try and name them all without cheating and looking at my book, if I have to refer to it, I will. But I think I can get through them. There's 21 in South Australia, and then I'll do the the other three remaining. Okay, so if we start off and break it down into the groups, we have six Falcons in Australia, and these can all be found in South Australia. We've got the smallest of which is the Nanking Kestrel. It's funny, it's named as Kestrel, but it is a falcon member of the Falcon family, Nanking Kestrel. Then there's the Australian Hobby, again, another one that doesn't have Falcon in its name, but it does have a second common name, which is little Falcon. They're both falcons, obviously. 

The third would be the gray Falcon, which is one of the rarest birds of prey that we have in the country, probably in the world. And then there's the Peregrine Falcon, which many people would know about, because it's, it's kind of a cosmopolitan Falcon known well around the world as for its speed, fastest animal in the in the world. Then there's the Brown Falcon, and finally, the Black Falcon, which is the largest of all our Falcons. So that covers the six Falcons. How am I doing so far? Did I get six?

Kate Cooper 22:37

You have got six. And I have heard of the Peregrine.

Jeffrey Krieg 22:40

Yeah, well there you go. Many people have, because it's... massive. It goes on all the TV shows that talk about birds of prey. They'll always do a segment on the peregrine, just because it is so impressive and its speed is very well publicised. So, yeah, so that's six Falcons. Alright? Other than that, there's... two small kites that we have, which are predominantly white, and they are shaped much like a falcon, in similar size to a falcon. So I'll cover those two next, and that's the Black Shoulder Kite and the Letter Wing Kite. Black Shoulder Kite is quite common. Letter Wing Kite is another one of our species that is really quite rare and only found in the arid zones of the country. So that covers those two. 

Then I'll move on to the the true what we call the True Hawks. So the True Hawks are that are the real hunting hawks, the ones that that hide within foliage and and hunt via stealth. Or they'll sit inside, sit in, hidden in foliage, and wait for for prey to fly past. And they'll burst out, you know, ambush hunters and attack in small bursts and catch, prey that way. So there's three of those in South Australia. They are the Coloured Sparrowhawk, the Brown Goshawk, and then the Grey Goshawk - which can be found, which sometimes people call it the white Goshawk, because it's found in two colour morphs. It's found in a grey variety and a white variety. So that's those three. 

And then we move on to the to the medium sized hawks and kites, and there's quite a few in this category. There's the Whistle... these are all of a really similar size and shape, and these are the ones that probably most people confuse with each other, because they are all quite similar in in size, shape and the way they behave. So there's the Whistling Kite, the Black Kite, the Squaretailed Kite. Then we've got the Black Breasted Buzzard - which is another... kind of rare bird, not, not really sort of found up in the in the northern parts of our state, only occasionally you might see them come down a bit further on very rare occasions. 

Then there's, we've got two Harriers which are of similar size to all these medium sized hawks and kites, and that's the Spotted Harrier and the Swamp Harrier. Then after that, there is the Little Eagle, which is actually an eagle, but it's much smaller than most eagles in the world, and it is around it's more similar in size. In shape to those medium sized hawks and kites. So that's that's the Little Eagle. And then we only have one more True Eagle, and that's the Wedge-tailed Eagle, obviously our largest bird of parade, beautiful, magnificent birds. Then there's the White Bellied Sea Eagle, which is... not a True Eagle. It's more closely related to some of the other birds, which I won't go into, but I classify, you kind of classify it as a Sea Eagle, and an eagle people think, kind of lump it into that category because it is of similar size. 

They're actually quite similar in size to a Wedge Tailed Eagle. They're beautiful birds, lovely, lovely colour scheme that they've got. They're one of my, one of my personal favorites. And then there's the Osprey, which is one of those birds that another that is, again, well known around the world. A lot of people might have heard of the Osprey because it's highly photographed. It's a fishing it's a real fishing hawk. You'll see it at oceans and around the coastline of this country and many places around the world, around wetlands. 

It predominantly feeds on fish by diving into the water and catching it and actually, actually submerging itself and catching it in its talons are quite impressive, I think, if I've done my maths properly, yeah, Kate's giving me the thumbs up. So that must be all 21 so there's, there's 21 for South Australia. There are three more that aren't found in South Australia, obviously. And they are the Brahminy Kite, which is another medium sized Hawk, similar, similar size to Whistling Kite... Black Kite, that we get here. 

And then there's the Red Goshawk, which is arguably one of the rarest birds of prey in Australia as well, only found in the in the sort of top end of Australia and down the eastern coast, but really becoming quite almost extinct in the eastern coastal areas as well. So that probably is me one, which ones that I missed. I always do this. The Pacific Buzzard is the next one. So that would, that would round out all 24 hopefully, yeah. And so those three are the ones that I have found in South Australia, but found in Australia. So, yeah.

Kate Cooper 26:53

Well there were a few there that I did recognise the names of...

Jeffrey Krieg 26:56

Oh yeah?

Kate Cooper 26:57

But I was busy concentrating on counting. (LAUGHTER) I can't tell you what they were, although I have also heard of Ospreys. Oh yes, that one, that one, did leap out. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's fascinating to talk with you, so let's continue our conversation in next week's program. 

Our guest on Emerging Writers today was ornithologist writer and musician, Jeffrey Krieg. This program is produced in our Adelaide studios, and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio, VA radio on digital, online at varadio.org, and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes. (MUSIC)

Vision Australia ID 27:55

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