Indoor Meeting, Monday 17th February 2020

Local birder and ecologist Colin Davies stepped in at the last minute to deliver a presentation on his trips to Australia, after the scheduled speaker was forced to cancel due to illness.

Colin Davies, photo by Debra Williams

Colin birds around the St Helens and Pennington Flash areas, but has also made a number of trips to Australia, and tonight’s presentation combined images and information from these trips. Intriguingly entitled ‘Wanderer at 6 o’clock’, it led us on a whistle-stop tour of the country’s coastal and oceanic regions.

Starting with an image of St Kilda Marina, many of the place names were reminders that the country was ‘discovered’ by inhabitants of the British Isles, and it was fascinating to compare the Australian St Kilda with our own uninhabited archipelago: very different in many ways but also, as Colin highlighted, similar in terms of the sea birds – and the guano!

Other highlights of his talk included a photo of the aptly-named splendid fairywren – a long-tailed passerine in hues of the most brilliant blues; the incredible fact that the white patches on southern right whales’ heads are actually rough calcified skin caused by the lice colonies that live on them; the living rocks (stromatolites) along the Western Coast; and – of course – the albatrosses, mollyhawks and wanderers, seen in abundance on pelagic boat trips.

Splendid fairywren, photo by Colin Davies

Serendipity has played a role in Colin’s Antipodean journeys: not only did he meet this group’s leader on a pelagic trip off New Zealand a couple of years ago; this year, on a road trip around Bruny Island, Tasmania, he stopped at a random beach and found a king penguin there amongst the human beach-goers. An exceedingly rare bird for an Australian beach! His blog contains more details of the species he has encountered so far: http://birdingsthelens.blogspot.com/.

We were also pleased to welcome Amy, who will be volunteering with the group for the next three months as part of her activities for the Duke of Edinburgh award. She competently introduced our speaker and then helped Chris with the 100 Club draw and raffle at the interval. Young people are crucial to the future success of any conservation group, and we look forward to seeing her and other young folk at further meetings and on field trips.

Debra Williams