May I offer yet another 'slant' on this? Not quite "watching", but related.
To get a quality recording of an Albert's Lyrebird for sound analysis, my
standard practice is to place a mic at what I hope is one of his favourite
display platforms with 50 m or so of cable back to a place of concealment.
A male will have a dozen or so platforms in his territory, so inevitably on
some occasions he will start singing at one of the others. In which case I
try to "herd" him to my mic. And I've developed a reasonably successful
technique.
What I must not do, is to get on the opposite side of the bird to the mic
and walk towards him: the equivalent of looking straight at a bird that will
tolerate a human within sight? No, were I to do that, he would note the
direction of my approach and move to one side or the other away from my
apparent route.
So what I do is to walk at 90 degrees to the direction of a line from mic to
bird, and sufficiently on the far side of him from the mic, so that at my
closest, I'll be just near enough for him to cause him to decide to move.
Then when he moves away from my line of travel, he'll be heading towards my
mic, and may well continue his performance on the platform with it.
Syd
> From: "John Leonard" <>
> Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 11:26:22 +1000
> To: Birding-aus <>
> Subject: Re: [Birding-Aus] Do you think birds know when you are watching?
>
> By "walking obliquely towards them with your head turned away", I
> meant decreasing the distance between you and the birds without
> heading directly for them, and making sure that my face was pointing
> away from them.
>
> John L
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