More than a century before Australians began tallying backyard birds on smartphones, a man who called himself Peregrine was criss-crossing the continent filling notebooks with meticulous observations of feathers, nests and song. His real name was Michael Sharland, and the Australian Museum is now racing to preserve his remarkable archive before it is lost to time, recruiting a team of University of Sydney students to digitise thousands of pages of diaries, drawings and photographs.
Who was Michael Sharland, the naturalist known as Peregrine?
Sharland was one of Australia's most prolific naturalists, operating well over a century before the modern resurgence of birdwatching. Working under the alias Peregrine, he travelled between Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney, Alice Springs, Lake Eyre and Lord Howe Island, recording wildlife at every stop. He filled scores of notebooks with observations, took thousands of photographs and wrote engaging stories for the public, including pieces published in major newspapers in which he championed the expansion of national parks and celebrated small but telling moments in urban bird life, such as noting that a grey thrush in Sydney sang in a distinctly different dialect to those found in Tasmania.
Sharland passed his entire collection to the Australian Museum shortly before his death in 1987. That archive includes 30 field diaries, roughly 2,600 photographic negatives and 1,600 prints, all of which are now being carefully digitised.
What the old notebooks reveal
One handwritten page from 1939, covering the Kellyville area on the outskirts of Sydney, captures daily sightings of hooded robins, grass parakeets, golden whistlers and black ducks. It also notes, with characteristic precision, the curious absence of brown treecreepers and dotterels on a warm day. Alongside the written record sits a hand-drawn map of Kellyville marking the exact locations of black falcon nests and sightings of cuckoo-shrikes, red-backed parrots and a striated pardalote.
Sharland did not keep this information to himself. He translated his field notes into more formal datasets and also wrote them up as readable stories for a broad audience, effectively functioning as both a scientist and a science communicator decades before either role had a widely recognised name.
"Scientists still use his egg collecting and nest records to understand breeding patterns," said Darcy Campbell, engagement manager at the museum's archives.
Why the digitisation project matters now
The timing of the project carries particular weight. Australia's Aussie Bird Count, the nation's largest citizen science event, is currently under way, with more than a million birds already tallied by tens of thousands of participants conducting 20-minute surveys from backyards, parks and balconies. Last year the event drew around 64,000 participants and generated five million data points. Those numbers help researchers track population trends, identify threatened species and monitor ecosystem health, a task made more urgent this year by the arrival of H5N1 bird flu.
Sharland's historical records feed directly into that same scientific mission. By establishing what species were present in specific locations at specific times going back nearly a century, his data gives modern researchers a baseline against which to measure change.
Campbell noted that the project has also had an unexpected effect on the students involved. "In the age of AI, we're seeing a big return to crafting and the 'real'," he said. "We get a lot of students coming through who want to start their own field notebooks and diaries."
A legacy written in ink and instinct
What makes Sharland's archive especially unusual is the combination of rigour and warmth it contains. He went both ways with his data: compressing observations into scientific records and expanding them into vivid public writing. That dual approach, rare in any era, is precisely what makes the material so valuable to researchers and so compelling to the students now handling it.
The digitisation work continues, with scores of diaries still to be processed. Once complete, the collection will give scientists a detailed window into Australian birdlife stretching back across nearly a century of change.
