Birding at a sewage farm pleases the tourist

Day two: Friday 14th November

If you want to please a birder, where do you take them? To what my Australian guide Sean Dooley calls "the happiest place on Earth" – Werribee sewage farm, a short drive west of Melbourne.

Okay, it's not the Sydney opera house or Uluru, but from a birding point of view it's up there with the very best. This is the mother of all sewage farms, the largest in the world: 30km of pools, mud and slime, simply packed with birds.

Sean is a comedy writer, lifelong birder, and author of The Big Twitch, a very funny and compelling account of his attempt to see more different kinds of bird in Australia in a single year than anyone else. It's well worth a read, even if I do now reveal that he succeeded, seeing a grand total of 703 species. As he wryly points out, it was a great way to fulfil his dream – and blow his inheritance.

Werribee is Sean's favourite birding destination, and it's rapidly becoming one of mine. It's an unexpectedly windy day, so we use the car as a hide, creeping forward a few metres at a time. But this, the wind and the jet lag all fade into insignificance in the face of the sheer wonder of the place.The main attraction of Werribee is the migrant waders: huge flocks of birds which have nested somewhere on the Arctic tundra, then headed south and east to spend the winter here in the southern hemisphere, thousands of miles away from their summer homes.

Sharp-tailed sandpipers and red-necked stints – both extremely rare in Britain – are the most abundant species. I can also see bar-tailed godwits and curlew sandpipers, black-winged stilts and red-necked avocets, and a host of different duck species, as well as massive Australian pelicans. Later on we see two bizarre grey birds, with green beaks and red legs: a pair of Cape Barren geese, a globally endangered bird found nowhere else in the world but in this corner of Australia.

After taking our fill of the Werribee wader spectacle, we head north, towards bush country. Even as we crawl around the Melbourne ring road I notice the grass looks dry and parched – a legacy, Sean tells me, of more than a decade of below average rainfall. Already this spring has been the driest ever, and the birds are beginning to suffer.

After a couple of hours we reach the little town of Chiltern, where a few years ago Sean bought a block of land – not to build on or grow crops, but to save it for the birds. We stop, and I am immediately treated to two of Australia's most iconic wild creatures: a family group of kangaroos (of the eastern grey variety), and in the branches above, a laughing kookaburra. There are also more small birds from families I have not only never seen but hardly ever heard of: woodswallows, honeyeaters and treecreepers (of the Australian rather than British variety, and quite unrelated to the bird I know).

Sean's passion for this landscape comes across in everything he tells me: its history (there are several mounds of earth and pits where gold was mined more than a century ago), its natural history (he patiently explains to me the complex ecology of gum trees and the species they support) – and most of all its future.

By buying this land, and by bringing visiting birders like me to see it, Sean hopes that the local community will eventually come to understand that what they often regard as just another patch of gum trees is a vital link in the natural chain, supporting species unique to this part of Australia, and found nowhere else in the world.

Day one: Thursday November 13

The first morning on a new continent is one of the most exciting experiences in a birder's life. Especially when I've been lucky enough to have visited six of the world's seven continents before. And even more so when that continent is Australia – where more than three-quarters of the birds I am likely to see are completely new to me.

I flew into Melbourne on Wednesday night, and after a few hours of fitful sleep I am wide awake, ready for a new dawn and the birds it will bring. I'm staying just a block away from the city's botanical gardens, which according to my guide, Where to Watch Birds in World Cities, is the best place to ease myself into the local birdlife.

In fact my Aussie birdlist already stands at one – out of almost 900 species. As we drove in from the airport last night, I saw flocks of silver gulls hawking for insects over the freeway, illuminated by the city lights. This is the gull you see on TV coverage of cricket matches in Australia; not perhaps the most exciting bird with which to break my duck, but it's a start.

As I leave the motel, my second species is a brown-and-buff coloured, starling-like bird with a striking yellow patch around its eye. It's a common mynah – not an Australian bird at all, but an import from the Indian sub-continent. Unfortunately for the native birdlife, this alien invader is doing rather well.

And it's not the only one. More or less the first birds I see on entering the botanical gardens are all-too-familiar: blackbird and house sparrow. Both were brought here in the 19th century by misguided, homesick Brits – and both have prospered in the streets, parks and gardens of urban Australia. In the distance I can also hear the unmistakable, repeated phrases of a song thrush. Have I really travelled more than 10,000 miles just for this echo of home?

Then, finally, here's something truly different: a stout, handsome, black-and-white bird hopping across the carefully manicured lawn. I turn rapidly to my bible – the Birds of Australia field guide – and discover its identity: a magpie lark. Neither a magpie nor a lark, it is, like so many Australian birds, from a completely different family to anything we see back home. With this genuinely Aussie species safely under the belt, my first from what is a truly unique avifauna, I feel I have finally arrived.

The magpie lark breaks the jinx, and I start to see more birds I've never seen before, and can't at first identify. That one looks like an elongated greenfinch, and sounds like an iron bar being banged against a wall. After some difficulty, I find it in the book – a bell miner, known colloquially as the bellbird. Then there's some kind of parrot – but faced with several pages of brightly coloured species I give up, by which time it has flown away. It's easy to get frustrated, but any bird I see here is almost certainly pretty common elsewhere, so hopefully I'll catch up with it later.

When birding in an unfamiliar location, a good plan is to head towards water, so I heave a sigh of relief when I come across a large, ornamental lake. This time the birds look very similar to ours, but with subtle differences: that's a dusky moorhen, not our common variety; while this one's an Australian, not a little grebe. Black swans are of course familiar, but these are the first truly wild ones I've ever seen.

It's time to head back for breakfast. On the way I stumble across a troupe of half-a-dozen sulphur-crested cockatoos feeding on the grass: bulky, snow-white birds with a lemon-yellow headdress. I inch slowly nearer, and eventually get so close I can almost reach out and touch them. Luckily I don't – they have a reputation, I later discover, of being able to inflict a very nasty bite.

So as thoughts of bacon and eggs lure me back towards the hotel, I feel like my nine-day flying visit to this extraordinary continent has well and truly begun.

• The Australian birdfair is being held in Leeton, New South Wales, from November 14-16