Sean Dooley

There are females coming down.

So this is just such a phenomenal change, a shift in migratory patterns.

And as I said, we don't really know why, but it is part of a general shift that we've seen over the last 20 to 30 years of East Coast rainforest type species that

are heading further south and then further west once they get into Victoria.

And that's birds like koels, channelbill cuckoos, a lot of the rainforest pigeons like topknot and white-headed pigeon, but even things like insectivores such as brown jirigani, which has extended its range 150 kilometres west into Victoria from where it used to occur when I first became aware of birds in the 1980s.

I'm definitely with Jonah in that I really love field guides.

I guess this is another, a hark back to the question when you know you're an expert, is that I don't look at them that often anymore.

In part because I don't have need to when I'm in the field, I pretty much know mostly what I'm seeing.

but also partly because some of them particularly i think the simpson and day one i have them i've looked at them so often that they're like they're etched on my memory like it's like i can conjure the bird and the page and and its relation to other birds

But, and that might be part of the reason why probably my favorite guide is, again, it's also the Australian bird guide, the CSIRO one.

And that's partly because it's the most recent and most up to date and it's got amazing information.

But I think it's also because it is the newest, so it's the freshest.

And I remember when I first got my hands on a copy, it was like seeing some of those birds again for the first time because I had so deeply etched in my mind what they looked like in the other illustrations.

It was like, wow.

And particularly the honey eaters, I remember just thinking, they just popped out at me again for the, going, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

They do look, oh.

They look like that and they're great, aren't they?

So I don't know if that's recency bias or, you know, you can rely on it as a qualitative actual assessment, but yeah, probably the Australian bird guide's my front runner at the moment.

and so i think like i love when birds they fall they fall into our mind and our hearts so much that so many people have very special connections and feel like they tell us nice things earlier today i was doing a talkback session a squawk back session on um abc sydney and somebody from the high country uh threadbow was talking about that they had seen gang gang cockatoos

around the village in Threadbow like just last week and that it was this was like in at the start of winter it struck me then I said to the core that that's a very unusual sighting because at this time of year you would expect gang gang cockatoos to have headed sort of to lower elevations they're one of those birds that they will breed up in the in the