Good morning COG/Canberra Birds members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the monthly COG/Canberra Birds meeting will be held tomorrow evening Wednesday 12 February
from 7:30 pm at our usual Canberra Girls Grammar School venue. However, please note the changed access arrangements which will be in place while the construction in the Gabriel Drive parking area continues.
Details are below; unfortunately, the map is too big to put on the COG chat line.
Everyone is welcome so please come along to hear 2 presentations about two different fascinating bird species that occur on two different continents.
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 February 2025 meeting will be a normal face-to-face one held at our usual venue. As COVID is still widespread in the community 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.
Jack Holland - Eastern Koel as the Bird of the Month
Antonia Hürlimann - Spatial memory strategies of a highly social bird - Collective navigation in a changing environment
Please note that construction is still occurring around the Gabriel Drive parking area, and access to there is still not available. So please use the Chapel Drive entrance
and park there. Then proceed to the Multi-media Centre (MMT) using the alternative route the Canberra Girls Grammar School has provided as shown in the map for which the link can be found under LATEST NEWS on the home page of the Canberra Birds web site.
Once parked proceed down past the Chapel and smaller Admin Offices, keeping them to your left. Just past the latter turn left along a relatively flat and straight broad path
keeping the columns to you left. Near to the end, go left up the 3 m wide steps, turn half right and you will find an open glass door. Go through this, across the empty room and past the toilets, and then either enter the MMT either through the bottom MMT
door or go further along and up the steps where you reach the usual entry door. Though it is well lit, as it will be dark after the meeting and a torch for finding your way back to your car is recommended.
For the first meeting of 2025, there will be two presentations of roughly equal length:
The first talk will be by Jack Holland
who will be presenting the “Eastern Koel as the Bird of the Month”.
The
Eastern Koel is a parasitic cuckoo which is a total spring/summer migrant in the ACT. It has been very prominent again this season, including the reporting of many fledglings to date, already well over last season’s total. Jack will show how to separate
in particular the females from the juveniles, and discuss their range of calls. He will show how they have only come to Canberra in the past 50 years, and outline both their increase in numbers and in breeding since the first young were reported in 2009.
He will also briefly discuss some unanswered questions which has risen again this season for this enigmatic species.
The second speaker will be
Antonia Hürlimann
who will be
presenting on “Spatial memory strategies of a highly social bird - Collective navigation in a changing environment”.
Most animals - including humans - have to make movement decisions every day while navigating through complex habitats. Spatial memory can help adapting to this complexity and
substantially increase fitness. This effect is especially notable in group-living animals, as collective intelligence can improve decision-making accuracy during navigation. However, to date, our understanding of how group-living animals make use of spatial
memory in habitats with changing environmental conditions is still limited. In this talk, Antonia will present the fascinating
Vulturine Guineafowl, a highly social terrestrial bird that inhabits the Kenyan savannah, which is very prone to drought. Based on fine-scale GPS tracking of their long-distance movements, her research gives insights into drivers of spatiotemporal dynamics
of movement patterns and the collective use of spatial memory, shedding light on behavioural and cognitive adaptations to harsh and changing environments.
Antonia completed her B Sc in Biology and Philosophy, as well as a M Sc in Animal Behaviour, specifically Behavioural Ecology, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. For
her M Sc she spent some time in Kenya researching a wild population of Vulturine Guineafowl. Currently she is a visiting researcher at the ANU in Prof. Damien Farine's group, collaborating with different people on her project as well as some of the
projects conducted with Australian birds.
