As a regular dry season visitor to Darwin I have noticed that in the last month several serious birders, contributing bird lists to the Eremaea site, have passed through, and missed out on unusual, or seasonal specialties in this area. They were clearly people with regular internet access. They could have avoided “missing out” by joining the local messaging service ntbirds (ntbirds.yahoogroups.com) at least for the time they were up here ( it is free). Conversely if visitors see birds that are highly unusual, the locals would appreciate hearing about it on their local site: eg: recently red goshawk sightings at Edith Falls and Corroboree Billabong, both unusual, did not get onto our local network .
Two birders, who took the trouble to walk around the Leanyer Sewage Ponds, hard work in buid-up conditions, missed the little ringed plover(s) and white-winged black tern, which have been there since late August and were reported on ntbirds.
A current example is the twice daily ( 9 am and 6.30 pm) visit of a flock of 18 flock bronzewings, since Sept 2, in the swamp area to the north of Holmes Jungle Nature park (access through the park, watch out 6 pm closing for cars). Another is the unusual singing honeyeater at Nightcliff rock platform, and the recent arrival of the first oriental plover there. On past performance, the plovers should soon be there in the mornings on a regular basis for the next month or so.
Find out up to date info about the easiest place to see chestnut-backed button quail, gouldian finches and more.
Enough said, happy Birding, Bas Hensen ===============================
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Hi
This example only supports the need for a central database/information distribution centre such as has been attempted, under much critisicm, by a couple of individuals in the birding community. I have just spent a week in NT and information like this would have been valuable… if we could have accessed it. I doubt we could have because we had no phone reception for most of the trip, right thru Kakadu and Mataranka, we did get some signal in Katherine but accessing the internet would have been difficult elsewhere.
Having said that does not diminish the need to centralise the information birders need. I see someone has asked ‘how many other local lists are there out there?’ The question better asked is ‘how can we do this better, so we don’t have dozens (?) of semi private, local lists floating around that noone ever hears about”. No one can keep a track of these sites as they do come and go, I found one that was recommended to be two years out of date.
Currently Eremaea probably comes closest to achieving that goal, but everyone has to get involved and enter their sightings – the difficulty will be in convincing those to contribute and that’s not easy. I know several good birders who, while not turning up any extreme rarities, could offer good solid contributions, but don’t. However, even getting the ones who contribute to these ‘local’ lists to change their pattern would be more than worthwhile. The SMS system currently being trialled is very useful, but does tend to highlight extremes rather than really interesting stuff – such as those described below.
Until this happens and we actually take some action, we will continue to experience the issue raised by Bas – and we will continue to bird with one eye only.
Colin
On Friday, September 09, 2011 8:05 PM, “Bas Hensen” wrote:
The address seems to be http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ntbirds/, and appears to have been running since 2002.
It’s good to know it exists, but it makes me wonder how many more local mailing lists there are around Australia. Has anyone got a list of them?
Peter Shute