Good morning COG members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the June normal COG meeting will be held tomorrow evening Wednesday 14 June at our usual Canberra Girls Grammar School venue from 7:30 pm. Details are below.
Everyone is welcome so please come along to listen to two very interesting but different presentations about local bird life.
There will be the usual raffle and you will also be able to enjoy a cup of tea or coffee after the meeting.
Jack Holland
The June meeting will be a normal face-to-face one held at our usual venue. 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.
Emmeline Norris -
Monitoring woodland birds and other fauna to validate and refine urban habitat models and track biodiversity responses to change.
Shoshana Rapley
-
Curlews in the capital, and next stop: Victoria
The short presentation will be by
Emmeline Norris from the Conservation Research Unit, ACT Government
on “Monitoring woodland birds and other fauna to validate and refine urban habitat models and track biodiversity responses to change.”
Building on the recent talk by Melissa Snape about the Connecting Nature, Connecting People initiative and the ACT Urban Habitat and Connectivity project, this presentation
introduces the Canberra Urban Biodiversity Surveys (CUBS) project. CUBS aim to involve the community in collecting structured biodiversity data in urban areas. This data is crucial for two purposes: (1) validating and refining urban habitat and connectivity
spatial models and (2) monitoring biodiversity responses to changes like ecological restoration or urban development that impact habitat suitability and ecological connectivity. Specifically, this presentation will emphasize the models and monitoring opportunities
for small woodland birds.
The main presentation will be by
Shoshana Rapley, a Ph D candidate at the ANU, on “Curlews in the capital, and next stop: Victoria.”
Bush stone-curlews (Burhinus grallarius; warabin or mulyara in Ngunnawal) used to be found across most of the Australian continent but have declined across their southern distribution. They are now
rare and threatened across most of south-eastern Australia. In 2014, with support from COG, a project commenced at Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary to reintroduce the species after their ACT extirpation in the 1970s. So how are they faring nearly a decade
on? In this talk, Shoshana will give an update on the population. The project has now expanded to include priority areas in Victoria, where curlews were recently uplisted to critically endangered. Shoshana will give COG a first look into this study and
its next steps.
