Chapter 1: What is the significance of Wurundjeri country in this episode?
This episode was recorded on Wurundjeri Wurundjeri country, here in Naam, Melbourne. My connection to Wurundjeri country is really strong. I was born on this country and I regularly return to see my family and friends. I pay my respects to elders past and present and to their families. This is Weekend Birder. I'm Kirstie Costa.
Chapter 2: How did Emi Arnold's childhood influence her passion for birds?
And if you are a bird lover, you are in the right place, my friend. One of the best things about this podcast is its community. Each week, thousands of people from around the world tune in together. And each week, some of those people use the form at weekendbirder.com to request a topic. In this episode, we're focusing on woodland birds.
And I'm sending my thanks to Adam K., Bianca K., Emma L., John T., Shauna L., and Tony M. Some people fall in love with birds later in life, and some people grow up noticing them from a young age. For our guest, Emmy Arnold, it started in the backyard.
I first got into birds through, probably through my grandmother particularly and then my parents. I remember my grandma taking me around the backyard and pointing out different birds in the backyard when I was super young. Then when we moved to Melbourne when I was about five years old, my parents got into bird watching.
because, you know, there's all these new and exciting birds in their backyard. And so I kind of went along for the ride with that as well. And they bought me the Pizzy Night Field Guide to the Birds of Australia. And I could not put it down. I just never really stopped looking at it.
These days, Emmy spends a lot of time with birds, but in a slightly different way.
I'm a consulting ecologist, predominantly a zoologist, working for an engineering firm in Melbourne.
So a lot of my day-to-day role involves fauna-targeted surveys, so a lot of bird surveys, traditionally the two-hectare, 20-minute bird count, BirdLife Australia method, but a lot of spotlighting as well for nocturnal species and kind of more specialist stuff for, say, orange-blade parrots or plains wanderers.
so survey is predominantly something that we do to see kind of the species assemblage or species richness so how many birds are there or for occupancy so if we've got a particular target species and we want to see if it's present in particular habitats so we'll go out and we'll either just make a big old list of everything that's there everything that we can see everything we can hear or we'll go out with a particular species in mind and we'll
Do call playback or spotlighting or look for nests or look for other signs like scats or, you know, for birds of prey, we'll look for big nests with bones or fish or anything underneath them and look for occupancy that way. And this is where Emmy's work becomes really interesting. So it depends on our client's project.
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Chapter 3: What methods does Emi use for bird surveys in woodlands?
It was just a wall of sound, the birds. dawn chorus and we realized like oh we don't actually know any of these except the magpies and the cockatoos and eventually we worked out oh there's a butcher bird in there as well that was kind of a bit of a wake-up call like okay I have to take this a bit more seriously I have to like actually get get up early and go and learn it.
I find it's really helpful camping as well because I love camping and I love birds so you're kind of stuck there and like oh I'm awake because of the birds I'll just poke my head out and have a look. So I think the main thing to learn all the calls the first one is be kind to yourself because you're never going to learn it all super quickly and so I figured if I can come away from
a particular trip you know with one bird call associated to a species you know that's a nice realistic target and then you can build on that each time you go and if you're going regularly it all adds up pretty quickly but it's just so unrealistic to expect to know them all
you know super quickly and you know if you're going to new areas as well with new species coming in yeah I guess the main thing is like be kind to yourself and be realistic about it but even still I've been doing this for four and a half years and I'll still get caught out you know by you know eastern yellow robins and eastern spinebills and white-throated tree creepers like oh you know did you just stop early or are you actually a tree creeper because all their calls are so short and sharp and very similar and
And it's just kind of how long they go for being the key determinant or, you know, I've done a survey where I was looking for diamond fire towers and I could hear them all around me. I was like, oh, this is fantastic. I'm getting so many. And then realized it was a crested bellbird sitting up in the tree. Sorry, not a bellbird, a shrike tit sitting in the tree above me with a super similar call.
I'd never seen or heard one before. I wasn't to know. And so all my records of diamond firetails were probably this one bird following me around.
A lot of the time, the only way that I can remember a woodland bird's call is through repetition. Listening to a recording before I head out on a walk and listening to the actual bird while I'm in the forest. Emmy says that she's the same.
A lot of it's just through reinforcement of particularly, I'll use an example of like brown tree creeper. It's just such a short, sharp little, like a little peep.
it could be anything but it's just because I've seen them so many times just sitting on logs or on a tree trunk or you know in a campground and they'll be peeping away and so it's just kind of like that sight and sound linkage it's just like I've just formed that connection in my head and that's how I've done it it's just yeah lots of repetition yeah the first time I saw and heard glossy black cockatoos I'd done a little bit of reading up on them because I was going to be in the right habitat but I knew it was going to be a long shot
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