The February meeting will be a normal face-to-face one held at our usual venue. 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.
The first presentation “Extreme Birding on Christmas and Cocos Islands” will be by Sue Beatty on her recent trip to these islands, with the Cocos part probably to be deferred to the following meeting.
The main speaker will be Dr Janet Gardner who will be updating COG on her very important studies in her presentation entitled “Bush birds and climate change: what does the future hold?”
We are all aware of the increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as heatwaves that are a signal of contemporary climate change and that harm birds and other wildlife. However, we know little about how temperature extremes affect the survival of natural populations. This makes it difficult to predict how they will respond to ongoing climate change, and what we might do to manage this. In this talk Janet will describe how they used bird banding data collected over decades to show how climate affects mortality in populations of bush birds in semi-arid sites in NSW, and how they used this information to project survival patterns to the end of the century. She will also talk about their detailed study of colour-banded Jacky Winters that allowed them to understand how individual birds respond to temperature extremes and how that translates to the survival patterns they observed.