There is a sort of funny thing to this. About 25 years ago when I was working on my report on the GBS, I decided on the title “Canberra
Birds: A Report on the first 18 years of the Garden Bird Survey” (for the first edition but as they sold out I updated it and the next two editions had 21 years). Although
I commonly abbreviate it as just “The GBS Report”. Partly emphasizing THE as distinct from A. The funny bit is that I had not thought that years into the future that COG would give itself the alternate name
Canberra Birds. Thereby part duplicating the name of the book. And I don’t think I noticed or mentioned this at the time of discussions into the name change. So, a search on “Canberra Birds” will or can find both. Obviously, the club gets more finds.
I realized this recently when I did a search and found that an antique boutique in Canberra has on its catalogue a listing of my book for sale at $80! About four
times the original price.
Philip
From: Canberrabirds
On Behalf Of Kim Farley via Canberrabirds
Sent: Saturday, 28 March, 2026 2:19 PM
To: Geoffrey Dabb <>
Cc: Canberrabirds <>
Subject: Re: [Canberrabirds] You are probably all way ahead of me on this
Nope, I hadn't seen this before, but it prompted me to look at another web resource about us - the COG entry in Wikipedia
Canberra Ornithologists Group - Wikipedia. Very minimal in terms of content, out of date, with dead links....
Does anyone know if any COG/Canberra Birds people had input to this? The View History link at the top of the page may be enlightening to others, though not to me.
On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 10:25 AM Geoffrey Dabb via Canberrabirds <> wrote:
… but I recently came across Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia developed and operated by xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk. There is a long and remarkably informative
article on COG. I read this carefully for any inaccuracies, but it performed quite well, given that this is a view from a distance, through slightly out-of-focus binoculars.
One point that puzzled me was where Elon’s AI elves found a current Pocket Guide to the Birds of Canberra (from 2010s) (see attached). This may be a reference to the 2004 brochure
by Peter Marsack, Penny Osen and Tom Green sadly no longer in print.
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