A couple of years ago I accompanied a whole Bert B....n
busload of birders (please forgive the diarrhoeic alliteration), many
of them hawk-eyed, on an extended trip from Alice Springs up to
Katherine and over to the Kimberleys ( and West Kimberleys) and
back to Alice via Hall's Creek and the Tanami track and we did not
see a single emu! I was stunned, but someone did suggest that
they were never common in the North West. A view which would
need strict critical appraisal, but perhaps is not to be dismissed
out of hand, was that indigenes had exacted a heavy toll in fairly
recent times. I mention this at all only because it came from a
local, apparently informed and fair-minded source, viz. a station
manager himself married to an aboriginal lass.But someone like
Denise Goodfellow would be in a much better position to comment
on this than I. In any case I think one should be wary of single-
explanation theories.
Ted Nixon
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
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