This month there will be 3 presentations of roughly equal length.
First David McDonald will present on COG’s 2019 member survey: topline findings.
Earlier this year COG’s Committee of Management invited the members and friends of the association to complete a survey. It aimed to ascertain what parts of COG’s activities matter to members and friends, and what the association could usefully change or improve. COG’s Committee of Management is really pleased at the feedback it received through the survey, and its findings will be summarised by David on behalf of the Committee.
The second presentation will be by Claire Taylor, a PhD student at the Research School of Biology at the ANU (and Canberra Birds Conservation Fund grant recipient) on “The effect of the physical and social environment on maternal investment of cuckoo and their hosts”.
Parasitic cuckoos use mimicry to fool hosts into raising the cuckoos offspring. However, hosts have developed methods to detect these intruders. One such instance of mimicry is that of host eggs, often in shape, size, colour and pattern. Horsfield’s Bronze-cuckoo eggs look remarkably like that of their host, the Superb Fairy-wren. Despite the cuckoo’s best efforts to date, some Superb Fairy-wrens are able to detect cuckoo eggs and abandon the parasitized nest. Claire has compared the shape and size of Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoo eggs to those of their hosts and in the context of nest abandonment to shed light on how Superb Fairy-wrens are able to detect these parasitic cuckoo eggs.
The third presentation will be by COG member Alistair Drake entitled “A trip to the Top End of Australia”.
Alistair will discuss and show bird photos from a recent trip to the Northern Territory.