This month there will be three shorter presentations of slightly increasing length:
To start Chris Davey will give a presentation about “The Canberra Nature Map and how COG members can participate in this exciting initiative.”
The Canberra Nature Map is a unique partnership between nature lovers, nature experts and the ACT Government that allows anyone to report sightings of rare or endangered plant and animal species as well as any of the many treasures that Canberra’s Nature Parks are home to.
With your help, the aim of the Map is to:
- Accurately map every rare plant and endangered animal in the ACT and maintain records for future generations.
- Improve public education and awareness of the diversity and significance of Canberra’s Nature Parks.
- Influence development decisions and protect Canberra’s treasures by providing critical species location data to Government.
Michael Lenz will then present on Observations at a suburban Welcome Swallow roost
Welcome Swallows roost communally outside the breeding season. One such roost is located at Norgrove Park/Kingston Harbour in Kingston. The numbers of swallows that can gather there are the highest recorded to date in COG’s Area of Interest. Counts in 2015, and more comprehensively in 2016, reveal the importance of weather factors on Welcome Swallow behaviour. The housing development around Kingston Harbour is a mixed blessing for the swallows: it provided a good and safe roost site but can cause stresses to the birds, notably at morning departure.
Finally Richard Beggs will give a presentation on Removing a reverse keystone species: Impacts of an experimental cull of Noisy Miners on small-bodied woodland birds in remnant woodland fragments within an agricultural matrix
Birders love to hate Noisy Miners and the clamour for a terminal solution is getting louder. In this talk about his PhD project Richard will attempt to bring a little scientific restraint to the debate. Noisy Miners were a part of the eastern Australian landscape long before 1788. They haven’t changed their behaviour since then but we have changed the landscape so significantly that they have managed to colonise huge areas of remnant woodland and in the process deny access to many already threatened woodland birds. Whilst culling seems an intuitively attractive solution, we don’t have hard evidence that this will benefit small woodland birds in the long term. Richard’s study aims to carry out a carefully-controlled experimental cull to attempt to find out what the impacts are on small woodland birds.