I have found this an interesting debate
and whether rare or common, no one can doubt that this honeyeater has generated
a lot of interest on ‘canberrabirds’.
Judging by the number of Canberra birders who have reported visiting
the Gallery to observe the bird, this species is ‘rare’ within the geographical
boundaries of the ACT, which I think is Marnix’s point. Certainly it is
the first time that I have observed the species in nearly 6 years of Canberra
birding and I got a great thrill pointing it out to a couple of birders last Friday
and hearing their exclamations of delight.
From: Philip
Veerman [
Sent: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 2:55
PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: [canberrabirds]
Yellow-tufted HE status.
Thank you for the publicity. I knew full well what was in
the GBS Report. I knew that it didn't say what you were quoting and I know that
this text about some birds occurring more often in outer areas actually is in
there for other species, so I was curious as to how those ideas came together.
I knew that the GBS Report described that the bird is "uncommon" and
in spite of clumsiness of all of these terms, that is ranking is consistent
with the whole point I was making, which is that it is not "rare". I
was lamenting that we don't have a word for something between
"uncommon" and "rare". As for your further
point that "The species in this list are ranked by No. of
Records, and as we all know this can be deceiving, as the same bird or group of
birds can be recorded many times." To clarify this. One record is a
species at a site on a year. One record is one record whether it contains 52
observations of species presence (the maximum possible number) or one observation
of species presence (the minimum possible number) and it is
independent of abundance. Really I should have quoted the "A"
value and given a level of greater detail, your comparisons on this are quite
correct. These birds, like a lot of honeyeaters when they are in high
densities, are very noisy and obvious but individual birds are much less
obvious. I have no doubt that they are often around us in small numbers passing
through and they just don't get noticed. I hope this is my last bit on this.
