Apart from getting out into the fresh air and looking at birds and stuff,
one of the advantages of living here is the information that can be
effortlessly picked from the tree by simply pricking one's ears, to stretch
a metaphor.
I was reflecting on this after getting the benefit of what was on offer in
Canberra over only 6 days. To start with last night's meeting, we had a
short exposition from Joe Forshaw, drawing on 40 (well just about) years of
involvement with Superb Parrots on what was really going on with them
(probably) and what might be behind the recent influx, the short answer
being a good breeding season and the longer, more speculative, answer being
a possible, partly human-generated, upswing in the population.
Caroline Blackmore's talk on Grey-crowned Babblers was one of those witty
and insightful feats that we associate with Andrew Cockburn and fairy-wrens
and Rob McGrath and blackbirds. Caroline sharpened the suspicions of most
of us with her elucidation of the 'Infidelity lurks everywhere' text,
although,we must remember that what is true of the Swinging Songbird might
not be true of the rest of us - unless of course we are speaking in a
(Jimmy) Carterian sense.
Last week, in the CSIRO Gungahlin Friday afternoon series, there was a
riveting cameo by Leo Joseph that I thoroughly enjoyed but am unable to do
justice to. The surprises from mitochondrial DNA analysis continue to pile
up. In South America Leo found that, in a flycatcher group, a population of
so-called Species X is more closely related to so-called Species Y than to
other populations of Species X. This was all linked to migration patterns.
The question is, what other eyebrow-lifters might lie in store from more
comprehensive MDNA work? Already, it seems that our Masked and White-browed
Woodswallows are genetically not only closely-related but the same species,
so don't get the next edition of your field guide just yet. MDNA or not, I
bet nobody relinquishes their 2 ticks.
And then, on Tuesday, we had the chance of a bit of a birdwatch with no
other than a visiting David Bird of McGill U, the compiler of that
extraordinarily useful compendium 'The Bird Almanac'. David's talk at UC on
the Tuesday afternoon was, in short, an authoritative summary of where
things stand at the cutting-edge of raptor conservation. One detail sticks
in my mind. In view of the now-recognised promiscuity of the passerine,
David and one of his students took a stern look at his private kestrel
colony from that point of view. You will be delighted to hear that they
(the kestrels) proved to be models of fidelity, so perhaps the unhappy truth
is that the tendency to misbehaviour increases as one moves up the
evolutionary ladder.
OK, maybe you can read about most of this somewhere, but not with the same
point put on it. All the above was audience-friendly, offered on a
drop-in-if-you-want basis, and totally free to anyone with the time.
Geoffrey Dabb
email :
ph/fax : 02 6295 3449
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