Hi Anthea. "One difficulty would be that one cannot use binoculars on board
an animal - however quietly an old horse stands, it still breathes, and the
movement is enough to disturb the image". If this were true no-one would
take bins on pelagic trips!
The other problem with using dogs for Night Parrots is that we don't have
any Night Parrots to train them with. We could assume they smell the same as
a Ground Parrot to a dog...but then you would have to have captive Ground
Parrots to train them with anyway...I don't think that would be too
practical.
Steve Murray
-----Original Message-----
From:
On Behalf Of brian fleming
Sent: Wednesday, 6 June 2012 5:15 PM
To: Dion Hobcroft;
Subject: Using a dog for Night Parrots
One difficulty might be that it is illegal to take a dog into National Park
areas. I seem to recall that Gould and others claimed that a Ground Parrot
is as strongly scented to a gun-dog as a quail, so it might well be
practicable to train a dog, and then try in the inland..
A story I was told was that a riding-camel made the ideal mobile observation
platform for Night Parrots. A camel's feet are silent on sandy country, so
it is not likely to disturb the parrot till it actually comes up against the
Triodia clumps. The observer is up above the tussocks and Saltbush, and the
camel could carry two observers keeping a look-out in all directions for any
parrots that flew off. One difficulty would be that one cannot use
binoculars on board an animal - however quietly an old horse stands, it
still breathes, and the movement is enough to disturb the image; I expect a
camel would be just as bad.
Still a camel-mounted search travelling in line abreast might be successful.
Anthea Fleming
On 6/06/2012 3:59 PM, Dion Hobcroft wrote:
> I have often wondered why no-one has trained a dog to search for Night
> Parrot. Get them tracking Ground Parrots and then move to the desert
> with a muzzle (to avoid eating 1080 baits and Night Parrots). Our Kiwi
> friends use this strategy successfully for finding Kakapo.
>
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