At the risk of fuelling the inevitable interstate rivalry, and getting into
meaningless debates, here¹s a quick response...
Last time I looked, there are approx 535 species in NSW, 469 in Victoria.
So our score as a percentage of birds seen is almost identical.
As far as the sleep is concerned, the ³valuable birding time² wasted would
have (if you were very lucky), maybe got us 1 bird (Barn Owl). We already
had several night birds, so why would you wander around for 3 hours at
2:30am getting nothing? We can easily get over 200 with some tweaking to our
route...
If you look at the past 5 years+ of thons in Victoria, 211 by the Bush
Turkeys (Sean Dooley¹s team) is the highest... And there have been some
pretty good birders compete over this period. So to get over 200 in Vic is a
pretty good effort!
Having said that, we are determined (with some tweaking) to get over 200
next year!!
Cheers,
Greg Oakley
7 Year Twitchers team member
Tim wrote "After 3 hours sleep" and "After packing up our tents".
Tim, there's your problem ...
Tents??, three hours sleep?? No wonder you fell short of 200.
If you want to give your sponsors full value for their money you need to
ditch the tents - it's wasting valuable birding time putting them up and
then pulling them down!!. Try sleeping on some hard concrete or a picnic
table if you want a bit more luxury. Sleep simply cuts into yet more
valuable birding time. I will concede that you might need a hours snooze
at some stage (but no more!) to ensure you can tell the difference between
the real birds and those hallucinations. You might feel like crap later
but the adrenalin should get you through until 4.00PM Sunday - and that's
all that matters! Mind you, a down side, as one of my team members found,
is that there may be a tendency to drop off through the proceedings at the
post-twitchathon BBQ.
As a twitchathon veteran I've discovered that there is always room for
improvement. The mighty Whacked-out Woodswallows managed 229 in NSW
several weekends ago. Today I got a phone call from one of my team
members telling me she's working on some minor tweaking of our run for
next year so we can better our effort. I'm scared, very scared!
Cheers
David Geering
Regent Honeyeater Recovery Coordinator
Department of Environment & Conservation
P.O. Box 2111
Dubbo NSW 2830
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