Just five days to go and I will be on a plane to Broome in the far north-west of Western Australia. I've down loaded my bird cannon netting manuals, dehydration charts and filled in my health and safety forms.
I'll be four weeks in a tent at the Broome Bird Observatory with a group of 20 others, counting, tagging and geo-locating migratory wader birds. It will be my first time with the expedition which has undertaken wader research annually now for some years.
Every month I count waders at a couple of sites in Moreton Bay near Brisbane, Queensland, but I never get beyond a thousand of so birds at a time. Broome will be very different. 6000 to 20,000 at a time will be the typical count outing numbers. I'll be using my click counter. In Moreton Bay I usually count each individual bird but in Broome the large numbers means I'll be counting in blocks of ten or more for each click of the counter. Hopefully I'll learn a lot.
I'll be four weeks in a tent at the Broome Bird Observatory with a group of 20 others, counting, tagging and geo-locating migratory wader birds. It will be my first time with the expedition which has undertaken wader research annually now for some years.
Every month I count waders at a couple of sites in Moreton Bay near Brisbane, Queensland, but I never get beyond a thousand of so birds at a time. Broome will be very different. 6000 to 20,000 at a time will be the typical count outing numbers. I'll be using my click counter. In Moreton Bay I usually count each individual bird but in Broome the large numbers means I'll be counting in blocks of ten or more for each click of the counter. Hopefully I'll learn a lot.