Good morning COG members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the first normal COG meeting for 2023 will be held tomorrow evening Wednesday 8 February at our usual Canberra Girls Grammar School venue from 7:30 pm. Details are below.
Everyone is welcome so please come along and listen to a couple of very interesting talks.
For the first time in several years you will also be able to have a cup of tea or coffee after the meeting. Many thanks to Lia Battisson for having volunteered to organise this so that we can again enjoy this very important part of COG
meetings.
Jack Holland
The February meeting will be a normal face-to-face one held at our usual venue, the multi-media centre at the Canberra Girls Grammar School in Deakin. Attendees should
heed social distancing and good hygiene practice etc, and use their common sense and stay home if they have COVID symptoms. Mask wearing is recommended.
The first presentation “Extreme Birding on Christmas and Cocos Islands” will be by
Sue Beatty on her recent trip to these islands, with the Cocos part probably to be deferred to the following meeting.
The main speaker will be
Dr Janet Gardner who will be updating COG on her very important studies in her presentation entitled “Bush birds and climate change: what does the future hold?”
We are all aware of the increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as heatwaves that are a signal of contemporary climate change and that harm
birds and other wildlife. However, we know little about how temperature extremes affect the survival of natural populations. This makes it difficult to predict how they will respond to ongoing climate change, and what we might do to manage this. In this
talk Janet will describe how they used bird banding data collected over decades to show how climate affects mortality in populations of bush birds in semi-arid sites in NSW, and how they used this information to project survival patterns to the end of the
century. She will also talk about their detailed study of colour-banded Jacky Winters that allowed them to understand how individual birds respond to temperature extremes and how that translates to the survival patterns they observed.
