Jonah Lafferty

Yeah, I have a, I actually have an interesting story that I spoke to someone about, about a week ago and Sean, that was so fascinating because it was sort of piecing together in my brain how this may have happened.

I, um, I work up on Groote Eiland, which is an island in, uh, Northeast Arnhem Land, and it's, it's a quite a large island.

But then off Groot Island, there's lots of small islands as well.

And on one of these small islands, I was speaking to an ecologist, Paul from Groot, and he told me that there's a population of zebra finch on this tiny island.

um in the gulf of carpentaria and they're not found on groot and they're not i don't believe they're normally found anywhere else near this tiny island um in fact he even was so the ecologist was so um struck by this he i think he sent some off the genetic testing and they're not unfortunately you know some new species wow

Yeah, they're not the Timo one.

They're related to the Australian one.

And so they must have flown out there in a period of, you know, of dry in the desert.

And I know up on Groot, when the desert dries out, that's when you'll start to get some interesting things like records of cockatiel or budgerigar.

And so even potentially crossing over to islands, even off the coast of Australia when this happens.

And so I thought that zebra finch population is fascinating.

And yeah, the fact that birds can do that and then, you know, I guess give it another few thousand years and they might even evolve into their own species themselves.

I was actually wondering that I'm not, I'm not sure.

Cause I haven't heard it up here or seen it.

Um, but you would know, Sean, do we get them up here?

i love field guides like i i like to sort of collect field guides i actually grabbed a few um and put them next to me uh to help me answer this question uh but i've got a big pile because i i don't know if anyone else does this but um i just love i love bird books i think they're fascinating and i love

it like it really captures that um that child like imagination um like because when you flick through a bird guide you can just imagine all of the amazing birds that are out there to see so whenever i travel overseas too i make sure to get like a physical bird guide that's one of my favorite things to do but speaking australian bird guides i could talk about this all day but

Um, my first one was, uh, this one, the Simpson a day.

Um, but I, you know, there's, there's the Slater field guide, the, the Pizian night, um, one as well, but the one that I, I use the most for sort of day to day is the CSIRO one.

Um, one of the newer ones.