Geoff Jones Australian Birdlife cover photo

G’day all, Chris Baxter’s request for Geoff Jones’ contact details has reminded me that I was going to post about the March issue of Australian Birdlife. It should have arrived in all BirdLife members’ letterboxes by now and for those in NSW and Victoria who are not members, it is now available in selected newsagents over the next few weeks. We are running a special on the plight of the grasswrens featuring some incredibly good photos by a number of brillaint photographers such as Graeme Chapman, Chris Tzaros and of course Geoff, whose stunning pair of Kalkadoon Grasswrens grace the cover. For all but the hardcore birder, grasswrens often suffer from a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ so we are really trying to spread the word that these quintessentially Outback birds are in serious trouble- 8 of the 11 currently recognised species have populations that are considered endangered or extinct. Yet we rarely hear about them. The grasswrens happen to be emblematic of many of the problems facing our Outback and tropical wildlife, being threatened primarily by innapropraite fire regimes which are a problem in themselves but also exacerbate other threats such as predation by feral pests such as cats and foxes. Hopefully by alerting people to the state of our grasswrens we can draw attention to campaigns trying to protect the ecology of remote Australia such as BirdLife’s Important Bird Areas in Danger program and Pew Environment’s Outback campaign. The threatened closure of remote Indigenous communities could further exacerbate the decline of our wildlife, especially if it was to affect schemes such as the Indigenous Ranger Programs which are starting to have a positive impact in certain areas (e.g. for White-throated Grasswrens in Arnhem Land). And if you need any other reason to get a copy of Australian Birdlife, we also have some very cool articles on Colombia’s birds, the translocation of Cocos Buff-banded Rails and Tim Low writing about what the recent bird genome project means for how we view the bird evoluntionary tree. I didn’t put “advertisment’ at the top of this email as I figure most of you are already subscribers but for those of you who aren’t BirdLife members, I thought it was a special issue worth mentioning. Keep on twitchin’ Sean Dooley