I am so grateful to Chris Watson and Birdlife Australia for
organizing John Young's talk last night. I am filled with admiration of
John's persistence, determination and skill in his search - he really
deserves his success.
Brian and I hope that John Young will NOT release a spectrogram of
the Night Parrot's call. It would be possible for an electronic expert
to re-engineer a replica of the bird's call from that information, and
then try to call up the bird with it. Which for such a very shy bird
might be fatal.
In the short video segment, the bird's movement was definitely
unorthodox - John assured us it was not injured but the action seemed
one-sided - a scurrying, bustling hop rather like a crouching version of
the Common Mynah's one-sided fast movement of the ground. At all times
the bird kept very low, not lifting its head as several artists have
tried depicted it.
Incidentally, I was also thrilled with John's wonderful photos of
the Flock Pigeons, both individually and as a mighty flock throwing
themselves into water for a hasty drink on the wing. And all his other
pictures of birds, beasts and amazing landscapes.
The Feral Cat menace has never been made clearer or more urgent.
Anthea Fleming
On 2/03/2015 8:27 AM, Peter Shute wrote:
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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