White-fronted chat

Walk out onto the open samphire flats north of Adelaide and, sooner or later, something small and quick will bounce up ahead of you, flick low across the crimson ground on whirring wings, and drop back into cover with a thin, tinkling call that seems too delicate for a place this salty and hard. That is the white-fronted chat, and it is one of the few birds bold enough to live in the open rather than hide in it. The male is unmistakable once you have seen him: a face and breast of stark white, cut through by a black band like a highwayman’s mask, the rest of him grey-brown and unremarkable. The female wears the same pattern in duller, sandier tones, as female birds so often do, camouflage taking priority over show once there is a nest to sit on.

What the chat wants is not the samphire itself so much as the open, low, sometimes near-bare ground the samphire flat provides between its clumps and hummocks — short cover it can see over and run through, rich in the small invertebrates it picks off the mud and salt-crusted turf on foot rather than on the wing. That matters, because it means the “saltmarsh” is not one habitat but several folded together: the slender-billed thornbill keeps to the denser samphire itself, the mangrove holds its own set of specialists at the tide’s edge, and the chat works the open ground between and around them (Saltmarsh 2013). Three birds, three microhabitats, all packed into a flat that a passing eye would write off as a single grey-green nothing.

None of that makes the chat safe. It depends, absolutely, on the same low, salt-tolerant ground that sits on Australia’s most exposed environmental fault line — a flat built for a tide that has, for millennia, more or less held its ground (Lennon 1987) — and that ground is now retreating as the sea rises faster than the plants and the invertebrate life they support can recolonise behind it, part of the same tipping point already logged for the samphire coast’s more famous residents (Delta 2017). Clear the open flat for a road or a salt field, and the chat has nowhere else to go; it cannot move up into the mangrove or across into denser scrub, because neither is the habitat it is built for. To find one bouncing across the open ground on a summer afternoon, then, is to read two things in the one small bird: that this particular stretch of “wasteland” is still doing its job as habitat, and that the job is getting harder every year the flat keeps shrinking.