canberrabirds

Bird event of the year

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Subject: Bird event of the year
From: "Geoffrey Dabb" <>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:20:51 +1100

Yesterday’s all-day symposium at NMA was outstanding.  It was entitled ‘Boom & Bust – Bird stories for a dry country’.   It began with a short account of the ‘pulse of desert Australia’ being on the cycles of rainfall and temperature variation over the quarternary period.  The presentations then followed stories of particular bird species.  Bill Gammage recounted and explained the dramatic spread of the Galah since European settlement, drawing on historical sources.  (It only arrived in numbers in Canberra in 1978!).  Penny Olsen gave one of her exquisitely crafted presentations, this one on the Night Parrot.  Rob Heinsohn gave a segment of the enormous amount he knows about the private lives of choughs.  Leo Joseph again spoke on woodswallow speciation and relationships.  Deborah Rose spoke on bird associations with different kinds of ‘country’ in the Northern Territory.  Julian Reid described the enormous breeding colonies of pelicans in desert Australia and mentioned theories on what might trigger the gatherings.  Mike Smith summarised what is known and not known about the giant Genyornis, extinct a mere 45,000 years.  Libby Robin gave an entertaining presentation on the fortunes of the emu since European settlement.  There were shorter pieces on the Zebra Finch and Grey Teal.  It was a bit like a year of COG presentations in one day, and in very listener-friendly surroundings.  It deserved a larger audience, although the notice given to this list was a bit late (that being where I heard of it, on Thursday).

 

So many seminars and conferences offer subjects that are basically unrelated, but this one had a theme, if a little elusive at times, perhaps ‘Ten mysteries of the dry continent’.  One way or other, all presentations were related to ‘the pulse’.  The contributors are to produce a book that will be an elaboration of their presentations.

 

 NMA_3639.jpg

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