Good morning COG/Canberra Birds members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that our monthly will be held tomorrow evening Wednesday 12 November from 7:30 pm in the Chapel
of the Canberra Girls Grammar School venue.
Detailed directions to this venue may be found on
Meetings | Canberra Birds.
Everyone is welcome so please come along to our AGM and then hear a great presentation by Lucy Aplin on about how clever our Cockies are. This is a fascinating story which
Lucy tells very well, so don’t miss it.
You will also be able to enjoy a cup of tea or coffee after the meeting.
Jack Holland
The November 2025 meeting will be a normal face-to-face one at the Canberra
Girls Grammar School but will again be held in the Chapel where we will be meeting for the rest of 2025 while the Multi-media Theatre (MMT) is being renovated (see details below).
AGM – see details under
2025
Annual General Meeting - Canberra Birds
Lucy Aplin
- Clever Cockies: Innovation and urban adaptation in Sulphur-crested Cockatoos
The Chapel is much easier to find than the MMT. As for previous 2025 meetings entry and
exit for the Chapel are from the main gates on Melbourne Ave, which automatically open and close. The Entry gate will be open, so please drive through and park in the main parking area to your left. Once parked proceed to the Chapel using main path as previously
before turning left at the Admin Hub, or use the more direct (but darker) route keeping the Boarding House to your left – see the amended map to that provided by the Canberra Girls Grammar School on
Meetings | Canberra Birds.
Limited parking will also be available using the Chapel Drive entrance on Gawler Cres and
car park, this gate should also be open.
Though it is well lit, as it will be dark after the meeting, a torch for finding your way
to the Chapel and back to your car is recommended. The Exit gate is on a sensor pad, so please drive up to the gate and it will open for you.
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.
After the AGM (for details see
2025
Annual General Meeting - Canberra Birds)
there will be a single main speaker, Dr Lucy Aplin, Associate Professor, Research
School of Biology at the ANU on “Clever Cockies: Innovation and urban adaptation in Sulphur-crested Cockatoos”.
Lucy and her team investigate social behaviour, cognition and culture in urban Sulphur-crested
Cockatoos, asking whether the spread of new innovations can facilitate adaptive behavioural responses to anthropogenic change. While some of her team have presented to COG/Canberra Birds before, Lucy will be giving a broad overview of the program. So come
to hear about, inter alia, how a group of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos in one part of Sydney learned how to operate drinking bubblers, and how another group open and steal from rubbish bins, with this behaviour spreading in an ‘innovation arms race’ with
local residents. Lucy will also tell us about how citizen science can be used to characterise when and where such innovations first emerge and present some recent experimental work in Canberra’s cockatoos identifying the factors that influence the spread
of innovations.
