Hello COG members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the August monthly COG meeting will be held tomorrow evening 10 August at the usual venue, the multi-media centre at the Canberra Girls Grammar School at 7:30 pm. Further details
are below.
Everyone is welcome. There has long been a call for HANZAB to be online, so I expect there will be much interest in Steve Wallace telling us it’s about to happen and what it will look like. Philip Veerman also has a very interesting story
about the naming of the Australian Sarus Crane.
Jack Holland
The short presentation will be by
Steve Wallace on “HANZAB Online – what’s different to the books.”
While the soon to be launched online version of HANZAB is mostly the content in the books, there are differences. Some new information is being added, some of the information is being updated and there are
improvements to make the information easier to read. So, what does it look like and what are these changes?
The main speaker will be
Philip Veerman presenting “On the naming of the Australian Sarus Crane”
The established story is that, even though it is a big and obvious bird, strangely the Sarus Crane was first found wild in Australia as late as 1966 and not identified until later, and that this was first
published in 1969. However, even that bit is not quite right. It is likely it had not been picked as separate from the Brolga until then. Initially it was believed to be a recent vagrant. Philip will try to clarify this twisted history, from the known
and the obscure records. He will consider evidence bearing on whether indigenous Australians already knew that the species was here. He will also revisit the story of how the Australian population of the Sarus Crane was named as a separate subspecies and
how Canberra Bird Notes fits into the story. He will tell the strange story of the Australian captive zoo population of the species, and discuss generic nomenclature, including the transfer from genus
Grus to Antigone. This history has three separate yet intertwined stories, one at each of the genus, species and subspecies level, which is surely a very strange situation in one bird. Philip will also summarise current knowledge, fix some errors
and add new historical information, particularly about the people involved.
