The November 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 which can be accessed through the link under LATEST NEWS on the Home page.
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.
After the AGM (for details see //canberrabirds.org.au/about-cog/annual-reports/) there will be a single speaker, McComas Taylor on “Through the binoculars backwards: how the ACT Bird Atlas and Field Guide came about, and other ancient history.”
McComas will talk about his experiences during the planning and development of the ‘Birds of the ACT: an Atlas’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Atlas was the first attempt to map the distribution of every bird in our region. This was followed by the ‘Field Guide to Birds of the ACT’, generously funded by late COG member Alastair Morrison, and which has just been reprinted for the sixth time.
McComas has been involved in birds in the ACT since the day he arrived from Melbourne in 1979. He continues to watch every bird he sees and is not ashamed to admit that he likes Blackbirds.