With perhaps 300(?) others I attended John's talk at Federation Square last
night. We've had reports about earlier talks he's done, so I'm only going to
mention a couple of things that stood out for me.
1. John mentioned that the description of the call in P&K is spot on - "A far
carrying two note whistle". I was under the impression that we'd been told that
this description wasn't correct, but I could be wrong. John said that we should
imagine the call as two Bell Miner notes, about half a second apart, with the
second note half an octave lower. I think he said half an octave - can anyone
confirm that? John said there's also a four note call, but didn't describe it.
2. John repeated his reasons for not releasing the call. I asked if there was
any reason why he couldn't release a spectrogram of the call, and he expressed
his intention to do that "within 12 months". I think this is an important step
towards allowing others to help in the search for more populations.
3. I'm sure we'd been told that in the video the bird hoppped "like a
kangaroo". We watched it three times, and I didn't see it hop once. Did we see
the same video as everyone else? Does this bird hop or not?
4. The bird in the footage had lowered both wings to the ground as it moved
around (in a sort of distraction display?). I'm not sure if that's been
mentioned in previous reports of John's talks. I certainly haven't seen photos
of it before.
Thanks to Chris Watson and others for organising the talk, and to John for
taking the time to fly down to do it. I greatly appreciated the chance to
finally see the footage and more photos for myself.
Peter Shute
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