Dear all,
My take on the recent discussion about what to do with a dead bird is here: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2010/06/27/roadkill-of-the-week-what-can-you-do-with-a-dead-bird/
I’ve also looked at the law in the NT on the taking and possession of roadkill birds – an the huge fines you can get caught with…
— Bob Gosford Crikey.com The Northern Myth blog http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/ Alice Springs, NT Australia Ph: (+61) 0447024968 Twitter: @bgosford “The NT Government does not respond to random electronic gossip sites.” ===============================
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Picking up a dead “roadkill” is far better than having someone from a museum going out and shooting them, to add to the collection.
Yours in all things “green”
Regards
John Harris Manager, Environment and Sustainability Donvale Christian College 155 Tindals Rd Donvale 3111 03 9844 2471 Ext 217 0409 090 955 john.harris@donvale.vic.edu.au
President, Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV) Past President, Victorian Association for Environmental Education (VAEE)
G’day Bob,
The secret to collecting useful dead specimens is to ring your local museum and ask if they want it because from the time they say yes you are covered. There is clearly a discretionary aspect to this law, so unless you have a freezer full of dead birds and no intension of ever handing them into a museum I suspect you are safe. Rory O’Brien will reply to this post if I am speaking a load of rubbish here. The fact is we need museum collections to grow and this is happening very slowly these days without appropriate museum budgets which allow for targeted field collection. I would never hesitate to pick up a valuable dead bird and hand it on to enhance our public collections, in fact I think it is important that people do so. I don’t know of anyone with honorable intent who has been nabbed for picking up a dead bird.
Cheers Jeff.
I’ve heard Ken Simpson talking about his bachelor days.
His old banger had rusted away underneath so he cut a hole just in front of the driver’s seat so he could just drive over a corpse, use the scoop he had made – and toss the corpse onto the back seat!
The moral to this story is that, having reached the age of wishing to be somewhat respectable, he bought a new car. It was nicked -and the entire manuscript of what was to become “Birds of Bass Strait” vanished with the car.
Anyhow, you are only in danger of a fine if someone in authority thinks it is worth a prosecution.
That means that if you were taken to a magistrate’s court there would be a significant probability that you would be faced with more than a small fine or being let off.
I don’t know about the NT but down here in Vic my experiences suggest you would not be in danger.
And I’ve also heard a public servant explain that you can be nicked for having an egg shell, but that would only be if that were evidence in a whole case about you raiding birds’ nests…..
Michael Norris
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