White-winged Choughs in the suburbs

["Philip Veerman" <>]

I started a GBS at my current house in Kambah in year 5, as did Jenny (in Weston). My experience with the species is similar, most years none, indeed none till at least after year 21, several years ago I had just one bird for several weeks and in the last about 4 years I have sometimes had one group of 7. I presume this same group of 6 to 8 are the same birds I regularly see at the Kambah sports ground, but that is over one km distant with continuous garden pathway between there and my yard. One time last year (?) I had 12 when the nearby group happened to be here when another group also passed. On my current GBS chart I have one observation of 8.

 

As for Duncan's comment, the idea of doing something like that was discussed by Ian Baird and myself in about 1992 (no Google Earth of course). It led to my idea of identifying each GBS location as a site, constant across years, (hence my numbering of GBS Site as a permanent identifier) and then mapping it using the ACT cadastral maps. Until then there was no list of names of participants or addresses of sites nor any mechanism of connecting the bird information from one location for any year to the records from the same location for any other different year (each year's data was taken entirely separately).

 

Philip

 

 ----Original Message-----
From: Duncan McCaskill [
Sent: Tuesday, 5 March 2013 10:22 PM
To: Jenny Bounds
Cc: Canberrabirds
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] White-winged Choughs in the suburbs

White-winged Choughs are commonly reported in the Garden Bird Survey. Last year (2011/12) they were reported by nearly 50% of sites - 100% of rural sites and 45% of suburban sites. The rate for non-rural sites has jumped around a bit in the last 10 years from 33% to 67%

[I don't (yet) have a more detailed classification of suburban sites to distinguish sites near green corridors from those that aren't. One of these days I'll spend some time on Google Earth trying to do that.]

Duncan McCaskill

GBS Coordinator

On 5 March 2013 17:48, Jenny Bounds <> wrote:

This afternoon, to my surprise, there were 6 Choughs in the street outside my Weston house, foraging on crushed acorns (from several Oak trees planted on neighbours nature strips).  There were a couple of young birds in the group.  This is the first time Ive recorded Choughs in my GBS for 10 years (last in winter 2002).  Later I saw a couple of them moving east from tree to tree towards the green strip between Oakey Hill and and Mt Taylor (about 350 metres away).   Has anyone had Choughs foraging similarly in their suburb away from the green strips?