The October 2024 meeting will be a normal face-to-face one held at our usual venue. As COVID is still widespread in the community attendees should heed social distancing and good hygiene practice etc, and use their common sense and stay home if they have COVID symptoms. Mask wearing is recommended.
Please note that construction is currently occurring around the Gabriel Drive parking area, and access to there is not available. So please use the Chapel Drive entrance and park there. Then proceed to the Multi-media Centre (MMT) using the alternative route the Canberra Girls Grammar School has provided as shown in the map which can be accessed using the link under LATEST MEETINGS on this web site.
Once parked proceed down past the Chapel and smaller Admin Offices, keeping them to your left. Just past the latter turn left along a relatively flat and straight broad path keeping the columns to you left. Near to the end, go left up the 3 m wide steps, turn half right and you will find an open glass door. Go through this, across the empty room and past the toilets, and then either enter the MMT either through the bottom MMT door or go further along and up the steps where you reach the usual entry door. Though it is well lit, as it will be dark a torch for finding your way to the MMT and back to your car after the meeting is recommended.
The shorter presentation will be by Paul Russell, the Birdlife Australia Birds on Farms Project Officer (ACT Yass), on “Learning from the Birds.”
Birds on Farms, run by BirdLife Australia, is a citizen-science monitoring program assessing woodland bird communities in agricultural landscapes. The original aim, in its first iteration in the 1990s, was to assess whether the environmental work carried out by organisations such as Landcare and Greening Australia was drawing birds back into our rural landscapes. Birds on Farms was re-established in 2017, and since then more than 5,000 bird surveys have been conducted across south-eastern Australia.
Paul will be presenting some of the research results of the national program and provide an update on the ACT-Yass Birds on Farms project. This project not only conducts woodland bird surveys, but also assists landholders with the development of Habitat Restoration Plans for their property. It shows how our research can be used in the field to extent, improve and connect woodland habitat on private property to the benefit of bird populations.
Paul has been the Project Officer with the ACT-Yass Birds on Farms team since September 2023. He was born and raised in the ACT with strong connections to land, nature and community. His upbringing imbued him with a special love of Australian birds and their habitats, particularly those of the ACT region. After leaving school, he worked in farming, studied Agriculture and later graduated as a Social Ecologist and has worked in the community sector for over 25 years.
The main presentation will be by Chris Davey, Peter Fullagar and Nick Nicholls on “Potential impacts of a rodent eradication program on the Lord Howe Island lowland terrestrial avifauna”.
In response to a request from the Lord Howe Island Board, spring surveys were conducted on the lowland terrestrial avifauna in the spring of 2013, 2014, 2016 to 2018 prior to the rodent eradication programme that commenced in 2019, and a final spring survey was conducted in 2022.
The spring surveys were based on 96 2 ha plots each surveyed four time during a one-week period and the number of individuals recorded. The plots were spatially stratified across the northern and western part of the Lord Howe Island lowlands. The count data were analysed using a generalized linear mixed model with Rodent control, Vegetation type and Time after sunrise as fixed effects and Observer, Plot and Year as random effects.
Of the 15 species recorded across the 96 plots only nine were recorded with sufficient frequency to permit analysis. Our emphasis here was to assess the extent to which the rodent control programme had caused a detectable change in abundance (were the numbers in 2022 outside the range of abundances recorded across 2013 to 2018) and to match avian response to rodent removal in terms of the known biology of the species. Emphasis was placed on the Lord Howe Island Woodhen to see if this endangered species would show a positive response to rodent removal.