This place is for the birds

Australian Park offers an ornithological smorgasbord

Author: By Bud Collins

Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998

Page: M6

Section: Travel

No, he's in a constant blue period -- one that another artistic dallier, Picasso, would have envied -- as he decorates the interior of his tender trap hidden away in the bushes. And it works.

``Give 'em blue and more blue,'' the satiny seducer would advise as he strews items of that shade about his ground-floor flat. A strip of plastic here, a drinking straw there from his ongoing rounds as collector. Perhaps a piece of paper, a barrette, a bottle cap. Anything will do as long as it's blue.

``Irresistible to the birds,'' he'd tell you, strutting like Mick Jagger in a come-hither dance. ``Along with me, of course.''

Michael O'Reilly, urging silence to the few of us following him on this pre-breakfast stroll, points to the underbrush, and whispers. ``There he is, getting ready for love.''

We would have walked right past the Satin Bower-bird's playpen, but Michael knows all the residents' haunts, and delights in showing them to visitors at his family's place, O'Reilly's Rain Forest Guesthouse. Middle-aged, droll, and gregarious, Michael is a second generationer, born to the bush, and continuing the tradition that is just as strong in the third.

This is basically to let folks soak up the wilds of the Green Mountains in Queensland's Lamington National Park while enjoying a few civilized touches -- hot showers and good grub -- in rugged country that is virtually unchanged since the O'Reilly invasion of 1911. Eight frontiering O'Reilly boys, brothers and cousins from two branches of the family, hacked their way through thickly-woven, primeval forests, uphill and across ridges to find this marvelous hideaway where they cleared land for a dairy and horse farm.

``The going's a little easier today, mate,'' says Michael, smiling. ``Don't know how they did it.''

Like the rest of his clan, he has forsaken horses for automotive horsepower whenever it's necessary to crash the outer world, such as the silver-towered citadel by the sea, capital city Brisbane, a two-hour drive. When the O'Reillys decided in 1926 that dispensing the milk of human kindness as innkeepers might be preferable to milking cows, it took two days: train, bus, overnight in a country hotel, and finally a precarious 15-mile climb to their isolated mountaintop on horseback.

Even now, following a skinny hardtop road right up to the front door, you get an idea of how arduous, even forbidding, the journey used to be. Sometimes the road clings to the rim of a ridge with harrowing drops on either side, swinging in and out of dark, spooky alcoves of tangled vines, offering glimpses of pastoral valleys and breasty mountains that seem snowcapped in snoods of clouds. Furry, spoon-eared wallabies (mini-kangaroos) clutch hillsides, and so do mini-wallabies that are called pademalas as their young peep from maternal pouches.

Days are hot, nights pleasantly cool, accommodations and family-style tucker (dining) most agreeable. Down-home, moderate, and comfortable -- an outright steal, considering the way the US dollar is slaying its way-down down under cousin.

``What a great time for you Yanks to visit us,'' says the genial boss, Peter O'Reilly, son of one of the founders. ``But when I go to America . . . well . . . I can't go as often as I'd like the way the exchange is.''

O'Reilly's is an ``Antipodal Shangri-la,'' in the words of my friend, Aurelio. ``A place where Mother Nature is always on holiday, an ornithological smorgasbord.''

There's no way to give nature the slip. While you dine, a glamorous bush rat or a sad-eyed tree frog, and any number of birds, may kibbitz your table manners through a window. You can have your nature hard, along rugged bush trails that radiate for miles, or very easy, within a few yards' walk from your room.

``Doesn't matter to us,'' says Michael O'Reilly. ``We'll lead you anywhere, or send you on your way there. If you don't care to walk through the forest, you can sky-walk over it.''

Swaying and creaking (but firmly anchored-and-fenced 100 feet up), the ``tree walk'' is a stunning wooden pathway that gives you a Tarzan feeling of promenading across the ancient forest.

``Of course'' Michael says, ``if you just want to sit on the balcony of your room or in the bar looking at the mountains, that's fair enough. Not much eyestrain involved.''

We're barely out of the lodge's entryway, and beyond the Bower-bird's makin' whoopee blue-room-for-two, and Michael is picking out something new for us practically every step of the short way.

``There's a rare one -- Albert's Lyre Bird.'' Hunched-over, it looks like a wary, jaywalking pedestrian in a brown overcoat. ``Got to be cautious, alert. Pythons like to drop on Lyre Birds.''

A tiny Eastern Whip Bird has a big siren-like voice, though cracking like a whip. Sitting in the catbird seat, a comfortable bough, and meowing is a smug-faced Catbird in champagne-bottle green raiment. A Royal Regent bird, black with yellow-waistcoat, named for King George IV, looks just as pompous.

Rainbows on your shoulder, multicolored Rosellas and King Parrots, perch and gently peck passersby, looking for breakfast, which Michael supplies by scattering raisins. The Rosella on my head doesn't want to leave.

After our own breakfast, Michael assigns us to another sharp-eyed resident naturalist, Glen Threlfo, who has made an international reputation in wildlife photography. As much fun and knowledgeable as Michael, he notes a thick and powerful, high-rising tree called a buttressed booyong.

``However, you see, that strangler fig has the booyong in its grip, wrapped right around. It's a death hold. Mark my words, that booyong's centuries are numbered.

``Now over here,'' he indicates that quiet tip-toeing off the path is called for, ``is quite a mansion. Belongs to a Southern Log Runner and his wife. Old Queensland style, up on stilts.''

A work in progress. She, a small, snowy-throated gray bird, is the builder, adding moss and ferns to the nest that is propped up on tiny sticks almost under our feet.

``Ah,'' Glen says, ``here comes orange-throated dad with the bucket brigade lunch. He brings the tucker, feeds her, and she in turn feeds the babies. This is a hard-working family.''

Excusing ourselves from their lunch, we move only a few yards until he spies ``the home of a single parent. Quite a girl.''

On bended knee with pocket-knife, he pries at an ordinary-looking plain-faced dirt rise. Open sesame! He lifts a hinged circle of earth, about the size of a quarter, revealing a hole.

``In there,'' Glen says, ``is a Golden Trapdoor Spider. She holds the door slightly ajar with one of her eight legs -- a real strain all day long -- and is very sensitive to vibrations at her doorstep. An insect comes by -- wham! -- she's got it. Take a look at her and the family.''

Down on hands and knees we snoop. Vision is obscured by something that looks like a loaded clothesline: her new babies in creamy egg sacs.

``Romance isn't that big a deal, not like with the Bower-bird. It's even risky for the guy, a little spider half her size. Love on the run. He comes by, deposits a packet with her, and gets the hell out of there. If he isn't quick, she'll eat him.''

This brings to mind that old Mills Brothers ballad: ``You Always Hurt the One You Love.''