> Thanks to Andrew Stafford for reminding me of David Andrew's role in
> Australia Birding. It is easy to lose track of the history. Along with
> Andrew I hope the mag can go online.
As I understand it, Andrew Isles currently 'owns' the Australian Birding name
- but due to its commercial unviability, he's quite open to offloading it to
anyone who might want it.
Birding-Aus is certainly the place to keep up with sightings as they occur,
but it doesn't fill the other roles that Australian Birding had been pursuing
- the specialist ID articles and more detailed trip reports. A web page
could do the latter two while Birding-Aus looked after the former. In fact,
various bits and pieces of existing web pages already do this. In order to
be worth the bother, a central Australian birding web page would need to be
frequently updated and run on a commercial basis. Is it likely that anyone
will take this on? Probably not - there just aren't yet enough birders in
Australia or interested in Australia to make it pay.
Stan Davis from the UK was telling me the other day that the Birds Australia
equivalent (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or RSPB) has about 1.5
million members. That's about 3% of the total population. In contrast,
Birds Australia has about 6-6500 members - or 0.03% of the total population -
a hundredfold difference in per capita terms. It's not hard to see why
various bird-based publishing ventures are viable there but not here.
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