Oh dear what have I started? We seem to be
working on several different wavelengths here. As I said right at the beginning
of this series of emails I am NOT criticising anyone, really I am trying to get
people to think about how we “describe” the status of our birds.
For a long time after COG managed to get the Brown Treecreeper listed as a
vulnerable species in the ACT it kept turning up in the Annual Bird Reports as
a “Common, breeding species”. People obviously were not reading
these descriptors. I think it was after a Rarities Panel meeting where I
pointed this sort of thing out that the descriptors where they needed it, were
changed. Benj and Harvey are both right when they say theBlack Honeyeater is rare
in the ACT but COG (and the Annual Bird Report) does not cover the ACT alone.
Unless we specify that we are ONLY dealing with the ACT we are giving a
false impression to someone from say Tasmania, or probably from overseas, that the Black Honeyeater is rare when,
in parts of NSW and elsewhere in Australia, it can be abundant. As I said earlier see what Michael Lenz said
about the confusion that could be created by the “DY” issue.
mark
