Hello COG members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the September monthly COG meeting will be held tomorrow evening 14 September at the usual venue, the multi-media centre at the Canberra Girls Grammar School, from 7:30 pm. Further
details are below.
Everyone is welcome. There will be 2 interesting though quite different presentations so I look forward to seeing you there.
Jack Holland
Kevin Windle -
Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov’s ornithological notes: an introduction.
Heather McGuinness -
Satellite-tracking the movements of waterbirds.
The short presentation will be by Kevin Windle
on “Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov’s ornithological notes: an introduction”
Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov (1882-1975)
was a well-known Russian writer in a minor genre, not much translated into English. He had a long and varied career, as a soldier in the Imperial Russian army in World War I, Arctic explorer, sailor and journalist. He is remembered mostly as a naturalist,
writer and memoirist, whose observations of bird life covered many regions of the then Soviet Union.
Sokolov-Mikitov wrote in the tradition laid down by a novelist, naturalist and memoirist of an earlier generation, Sergei Aksakov (1791-1859). Many years ago, Kevin published a translation of Aksakov’s hunting
notes – in effect the first Russian bird book - Notes of a Provincial Wildfowler, first published in the original in 1848. In 2021, he published a small selection of Sokolov-Mikitov’s ornithological pen-portraits in English translation in the US journal,
Cardinal Points.
The main speaker will be Dr Heather McGuinness,
a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO Land and Water with the title: “Satellite-tracking the movements of waterbirds”.
Heather and her team at CSIRO have been tracking the movements of waterbirds across eastern Australia since 2016, using GPS backpack satellite transmitters. They have fitted transmitters to over 150 birds
of a range of species (mostly Straw-necked Ibis, Royal Spoonbills and Australian White Ibis) at breeding sites across the Murray Darling Basin and have plans to expand the number of species and sites. This work is being done as part of Commonwealth Environmental
Water Office Monitoring, Evaluation and Research programs (https://flow-mer.org.au/;
https://flow-mer.org.au/basin-theme-biodiversity/). The research aims to inform better water and wetland management, including the timing and location of managed ‘environmental watering’, through better understanding of bird movements and habitat use.
