Birdwatching: combining leisure and conservation.

Crimson Rosella are easy to see in Boho South. Photo by SouthernAnt on Flickr.

BOCA bird camp

The Strathbogie Tableland is a special part of the world, hidden on a plateau in the Strathbogie Ranges, 200 km north-east of Melbourne. It’s here that Bird Observation and Conservation Australia (BOCA) spent five days camping and birdwatching recently.

Both BOCA members and non-members are welcome to join in on holidays like this, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. The aims are to socialise, to relax, and to watch birds and collect valuable information on them.

I joined this BOCA camp for one afternoon for a walk in a private property in a part of the Tableland called Boho South.

Birdwatching

Birdwatching isn’t difficult. All you need are a pair of binoculars, a bird identification book, and an interest in birds. Of course, it helps to have the company of a more experienced birder, which is why joining a bird camp is a great way to learn more.

Birdwatching isn’t boring, either. Many people envisage birdwatching as sitting silently in a hide, watching birds as they pass by. In reality, there are many ways to watch birds. On this bird camp, we simply went for a small walk and kept an eye out for birds. The aim was to enjoy the bush as much as it was to enjoy the birds.

Conservation

Birdwatching is more than a sociable and leisurely pastime. Data collected from birdwatching can be valuable for conservation. Many landowners who are actively engaged in revegetating parts of their property ask BOCA and other birdwatching groups to survey their land.

The result is that land owners find out which bird species are found on their property, and the ornithological community—that is, the community concerned with the study of birds—can add to its bird distribution records. Ultimately, we can determine which areas are the most important to protect, depending on species diversity and the presence of threatened species.

Why birds?

Birds are good indicators of how healthy an environment is. What’s more, generally, they’re easier to see than other fauna, and research suggests that rises and dips in bird populations can indicate environmental change.

Join in

Anyone is welcome on BOCA camps, regardless of membership and birding experience. It’s a relaxing weekend activity where you can combine leisure-time in the bush with a little bit of conservation, and learn something new. Contact BOCA for more information.

Helping life return to the Yarra Ranges after bushfire

 

Clearing Cumberland Walk. Photo by C Eaw, used with permission.

 

Bushfire recovery

Two weekends ago, I volunteered for Bushwalking Victoria’s bushfire recovery effort in the Yarra Ranges, east of Melbourne.

About 38% of Yarra Ranges National Park burned in February’s bushfires. Our task in the Yarra Ranges for the weekend was to clear bushwalking tracks to make them safe for people again. This meant removing logs, pruning branches, and casting away any twigs or bark that might trip up a person.

People can be in danger in the bush even after a bushfire has passed. Limbs can fall without warning, and tracks can become heavily eroded.

The track we worked on was no exception. That weekend, as I stood on an exposed section of Cumberland Walk—a once beautiful rainforest walk, now burnt, that takes visitors through roughly 4 km of Myrtle Beech forest—charred timber crumbled beneath my boots. The wind roared and tree limbs creaked, threatening to fall at any time. Imagining how frightening the place would have been in a fire wasn’t difficult.

After a fire, it takes time for people to return to the bush. Bushwalking Victoria’s ultimate goal was to make the Yarra Ranges accessible to walkers once more, and engage the community in a positive way post-bushfires.

War against trees

The crumbling track on Cumberland Walk. Photo by C Eaw, used with permission.

One negative result of the bushfires—among the many—is that people have turned against trees. In a way, it’s understandable; when a bushfire is raging, people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. But is the answer to destroy already depleted vegetation?

Trees are home to wildlife that are already suffering from rapidly increasing urban encroachment. To clear yet more land would be disasterous for wildlife; not to mention, for people—experts argue that trees can mitigate bushfire by reducing windspeed. In this way, actually, trees can help protect homes.

Consequently, conservationists and people whose homes are at risk from bushfires needn’t be at loggerheads. Yet there seems to be a local dilemma that reflects a global predicament; can humans and wildlife co-exist?

Regardless, Bushwalking Victoria’s bushfire recovery effort aims to encourage people to return to the bush. And, the more people spend time in the bush, the more people grow to love it and consider it to be valuable to both humans and animals alike.

You can help

To get involved with Bushwalking Victoria’s conservation activities, contact Bushwalking Victoria directly.

Melbourne’s Western Treatment Plant is world-class for birdwatching.

Birds of the Western Treatment Plant

Waders are challenging to identify. Even Fred Smith—birdwatcher extraordinaire—once called them “little brown jobs”. In other words, they all look the same.

One of the best places to see waders in Australia is the Western Treatment Plant. For the uninitiated, the idea of a sewage plant being a RAMSAR site may be puzzling. But birds flock here from as far as Siberia and Alaska to spend their summer months down under, and once you see the variety of birds here, you won’t question why it’s been hailed as a world-class birdwatching venue.

Exploring the Western Treatment Plant isn’t as messy as you might expect. Most people take a 4WD and, essentially, go on a bird safari. So, trudging knee-deep in waste isn’t on the cards. Instead, armed with binoculars the size of my head, one Sunday, I piled into the car with four other birders. I was prepared for anything.

Golden-headed Cisticola http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozjulian/285405132/

For a city-dweller and a person relatively new to birds, the Western Treatment Plant doesn’t disappoint. The treatment plant is only half an hour from Melbourne, yet the range of birdlife compared to inner-city Melbourne is astronomical. The day I joined the other birders, we picked up 97 species. That’s a high number, even for an experienced birder.

Instead of being restricted to the usual Common Myna, Common Blackbird, Australian Magpie and Silver Gull—all found in Melbourne—the treatment plant was home to raptors, waders, wrens, finches and more.

My favourite bird of the day was the Golden-headed Cisticola; a small orange grassbird with dark streaky plumage. Though not a wader, it could be described as one of Fred Smith’s “little brown jobs”. It wasn’t until I looked at one carefully through my binoculars that I noticed what a beautiful bird it was.

Tips for the traveller

For those of you toying with the idea of spending a day at the Western Treatment Plant in search of birds, I have a few tips for you.

• Go with someone who knows birds. You will see double (if not more) the amount of birds you would have seen otherwise.

• Definitely bring binoculars. You won’t see a thing without them.

• You need to a permit to enter the Western Treatment Plant. Join someone who has one.

• Open your mind.

Many people think of birds as simply part of the landscape—like a blade of grass in a meadow. But birds are everywhere; they come in all different shapes and sizes, and it’s not until you realise how many birds there are around us, and the different roles they play in the same ecosystem, that you’ll come to appreciate those “little brown jobs” for what they truly are. That is, anything but something that is simply little and brown.

This article is part of this exercise.

See elusive Australian marsupials up-close, and help conserve their future.

Photos by C Eaw, used with permission.

Secretive small mammals

Enveloped in the blackness of night, the single light beam struck the tree like a Light Saber. Crouched on a limb was a large possum, round as a ball, with a long tail curled in a perfect “J”. It was a Common Ringtail Possum.

Smaller Australian marsupials are elusive. Like Ringtails, you may only encounter one by wielding a spotlight at night. Even at night, seeing small mammals in Australia is a challenge. It wasn’t until I joined the Regent Honeyeater Project that I saw Squirrel Gliders up close.

The Regent Honeyeater Project

The project’s name implies it’s concerned with birds exclusively, but it turns out, it works towards conserving mammals too.

I chanced upon the Regent Honeyeater Project through the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club (MUMC). Being largely a community-based project, many people hear about the Regent Honeyeater Project through their local bird group, environmental group or walking group.

That’s how I found myself driving a carload of MUMC members to Lurg, a hilly district about 200 km north-east of Melbourne. This landscape is more famously known as ‘Kelly Country’, infamous bushranger Ned Kelly’s trampling-ground.

Today the landscape looks vastly different. Most of the bush has been cleared for farmland, producing rolling, rocky hills dotted with “islands” of Box and Ironbark trees.

Mugga Ironbarks are magnificent trees. Their bark is a deep red wine-colour, and their leaves are a misty blue. It’s in this Box-Ironbark habitat where the Regent Honeyeater Project has installed nesting boxes.

Nesting boxes

Our job this weekend was not installing nesting boxes, but checking them. Checking nesting boxes isn’t as simple as simply opening a box.

Using a contour-map, we were expected to navigate Box-Ironbark forest, towing a trailer and a ladder. Armed with pens and clipboards filled with data sheets, we piled into my car—destination; somewhere in the Lurg district, possibly off-road.

Nesting boxes were in all kinds of locations; planted roadsides, planted creek beds, and within patches of bush in private properties. Every site was different, and at each one, we wandered amongst the young trees for some time, searching for the one with a pale green nesting box.

Firmly, we planted the ladder in the ground at the tree’s base before the most adventurous of us volunteered to climb first. The atmosphere at the tree’s base was always excited silence, since we were afraid any boisterousness might scare the gliders away—if any were around.

Gliders

Bracing myself against a branch, I opened the box gently and peered in. Amongst the circular nest of dry Eucalypt leaves littering the box’s bottom, were the Squirrel Gliders. There’s something heart-warming about poking your nose into a wooden box to find a Squirrel Glider family huddling together on a brisk day. Satisfied, I lowered the box’s lid gingerly and twisted the wire latch shut.

The simple fact that the surest way I could see Squirrel Gliders was by looking inside boxes installed by the Regent Honeyeater project says something. Box-Ironbark forests are disappearing, and it’s not good news for animals like the Squirrel Glider that are found only in Box-Ironbark habitat.

That’s why projects such as these are critical to wildlife conservation. And, they’re a brilliant way to explore the Victorian countryside.

Unfortunately, in the jump from paper to screen, something happens to our penned words.

Print stories can’t be transferred online without change. Well, they can be; they may just end up being difficult to get through. And if that happens, your readers don’t read, and your site isn’t visited; advertisers run away, and you’re left wondering how your web site turned into a virtual ghost town.

Some web sites simply add headings throughout the article, to break it down into smaller bits. (Remember, Web users have the attention span of a goldfish, and need small chunks at a time. Long scrolling pages of text are a no-no.)

While this helps, there are many other things a web site can do to make its articles Web-friendly. Here are some tips:

• Use photos or videos
• Link
• Write in short pars
• Provide headings to guide the reader
• Use dot points to break down an idea
• Write lively.

Examples

My next couple of blog posts are going to be examples of Web articles. The idea is for me to attempt to write an article for a particular web site. Essentially, they’re exercises in Web writing.

The web site I’ve chosen is called G Online. It’s the web site belonging to a magazine called G Magazine. It’s concerned with eco-living.

The articles that will comprise my following two posts are meant for G Online’s travel page.

Because it may not be obvious what I’ve considered when writing the articles, I’ve decided to let you in on my thoughts here, first.

• Basically, I see the aim of my articles as encouraging eco-tourism.
• If I could choose the types of ads that would appear on the web page, I would display eco-friendly tour group ads, conservation organisation ads, and travel-related social media ads (e.g. Travbuddy).
• Without that ability, I figure the best I can do is make the trips I’m writing about seem exciting and inviting (i.e. something the reader might like to do); and provide lots of links, so the reader can find more information.

This year, PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association) awarded all its news site awards to News Digital Media web sites. The metropolitan/national news site award went to news.com.au; the rural/regional/suburban news site award went to leadernews.com.au; and specialist news site award went to The Punch.

What’s interesting – for us Melburnians – is that PANPA’s preference for News Digital Media sites isn’t reflective of news site success in Melbourne; at least, for major metropolitan newspapers. According to the figures, Fairfax Digital’s Age web site outperforms News Digital Media’s Herald Sun web site by a mile.

Right now, web site success is difficult to quantify, but both News Digital Media and Fairfax Digital use unique browsers, page impressions and average sessions to measure their web sites’ success.

Here’s how the Age web site outperforms the Herald Sun web site:

• the Age web site unique browsers is four times that of the Herald Sun web site
• the Age web site has 70 times the page impressions the Herald Sun web site has
• the average session on the Age web site is two minutes longer than that of the Herald Sun web site.

It could be that the Age web site’s success over the Herald Sun web site is an anomaly – but if not, are PANPA’s judging criteria not reflective of actual web site success?

PANPA’s 2009 news site judging criteria differed across its categories, but generally the focus was on design, use of the medium, original reporting, interactivity, promotion and site layout. Does this mean that these factors don’t contribute to a successful news site? And does this mean that what we consider to be outstanding news sites – visually, and in terms of news quality and media use – aren’t actually successful news sites?

And if so, does this merely suggest that our current methods of determining web site success are not appropriate? Or, does this suggest that widely accepted notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ news site are wrong?

Or does this point to questions about readerships, and how they affect news site success? (The Age readers belong to a higher income-earning bracket, and therefore may have more access to computers and more active computer habits – this may explain the Age web site’s success in terms of figures).

Essentially, what all this indicates are that the methods for measuring and judging web site success may need to be re-evaluated; and that other factors, such as readership, may need to be considered.

What is a community newspaper? In a reply to a comment on my first blog post, I claimed that in Victoria, community newspapers and regional newspapers are different.

And, here we are with a regional newspaper that claims to be a community newspaper. Was I wrong to exclude community newspapers from my study?

I don’t think so. The Free Press claims the newspaper “[Pages] everyday life in the Corowa & Indigo Shires”. Here, I think The Free Press uses the term “community newspaper” as a description of its newspaper, as opposed to a classification.

Newspapers like Melbourne suburbs’ Leader newspapers and Fairfax’s Community Network can be newspapers classified as “community newspapers”. They can also be described as “community newspapers”, since they’re concerned with the life and concerns of a community.

But newspapers like The Free Press, The Ovens and Murray Advertiser and The Colac Herald are classified as “regional newspapers”, since they’re based in country towns; although they can also be described as “community newspapers”.

Going off the classifications, I don’t think I’ve been wrong to exclude surburban community newspapers from my study.

I’m talking about myself, here. I’m staring at a tantalizing collection of books on my shelf that I simply can’t touch until my other commitments are out of the way. And, on the to-do list, reading comes only after these other commitments.

As person who loves reading, I struggle to find time to read. And I don’t think I’m alone.

public-domain.zorger.com

For newspapers and book publishers, time is money; readers’ time, that is. And this puts their industry’s future out of newspaper owners’ and book publishers’ hands.

The print industry is at the mercy of factors affecting how much time the average person has to read:

• career commitments
• family commitments
• and perhaps, even, the availability of public transport.

(I’ll go off on a tangent here to suggest that widely available and efficient transport systems might enable people to take public transport to work. This means they aren’t driving, which gives them the opportunity to read…)

What’s more, in a world riddled with entertainment types – movies, TV, concerts, DVDs, Web surfing, and so on – good, old-fashioned reading is facing quite a bit of competition.

So, perhaps it’s not simply the Internet that puts the print industry at risk, but a collection of factors.

www.acliparthistory.com

I wonder if regional newspapers are dealing with the same factors. Whilst public transport availability within towns may be limited – and in some cases, depending on the town’s size, unnecessary – leisure and entertainment culture may err on the side of family-oriented activities and old media culture.

I, for one, noticed that during my stint in Colac, I chose reading over Web surfing (Internet was slow), and newspapers (more local, relevant news) over TV news.

Perhaps reader habits are worth considering when pondering the future of reading and the print industry.

“… the conclusion (‘virtual space for community members’) came like a bolt out of nowhere and left me, at least, sitting there thinking ‘huh?’”

It made me realise I haven’t explained a lot of things.

I set off researching regional newspapers and their relationship with the Internet in early 2009. I started this blog a month ago (it’s September 2009 now), and sometimes I forget you haven’t been following me since the beginning. My apologies.

I began by visiting the State Library, which has a fantastic Victorian newspaper collection. This is where I got to know Victoria’s regional print newspapers.

Old Newspaper Reading Room, British Museum Bloomsbury

Then I searched for Victorian newspaper web sites.

Then I went back to the library – numerous libraries, actually – but this time in search of books: books on new media, online journalism, newspapers, newspapers and the Internet, media economics, and so on.

It turns out, I’ve developed a little theory about what I’d recommend regional newspapers do with their web sites.

I won’t cover my whole idea in this blog post, but critical to this theory is a guy called Andrew Odlyzko. In 2001, he published a paper called ‘Content is not king’. In it, he argues the money has always been in point-to-point communication, not content.

He cites the nineteenth century US postal service as an example. A postal service is, like the Internet, a distribution service. Odlyzko says the money was not in distributing content in the form of newspapers, but in letters; a form of point-to-point communication.

public-domain.zorger.com

Likewise, he argues that on the Internet, people are more willing to pay for connectivity than for content. And I think it’d be fairly safe to say he’s right – in most instances.

Given this, I believe most newspapers (all newspapers are different, but I’ll save that part of my argument for another post) should use their web sites as a virtual space for their readers to communicate with one another.

Sure, it’ll take a while to build an online community so solid people are willing to pay to stay connected to it. But if Odlyzko is right, there may be more money for newspaper owners in connecting people than in producing content.

It is a radically different approach to the one most newspapers have taken (garnering income through online advertising).

The question many people are asking now is, will people pay for content? But perhaps the question we should be asking is, will people pay for connectivity?

"The Ovens and Murray Advertiser" in an Old English-style typeface, and "Incorporating Indigo Advertiser and The Rutherglen Star" in Arial

Another Old English-style masthead. Apparently this masthead is new, but unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the old one. (How much older can it look?)

The filigree and old-look typeface is charming, but to me the Old English typeface and the more modern-looking typeface for “Incorporating Indigo Advertiser and The Rutherglen Star” are mismatched.

I guess you could say the same about my blog banner’s title (”Web Gazettes”) and its subtitle (”On newspapers and the Internet”), but I chose those typefaces deliberately because my blog is concerned with the old and the new.

Having been published since 1855, I don’t doubt The Ovens and Murray Advertiser has a history that warrants the Old English typeface, but Arial on a masthead is almost shameful. Even if the masthead designer was going for “historical but modern”, nothing about Arial says innovative. Being a standard (and sub-standard) typeface, on a masthead it gives the newspaper an amateur look.

Funny how a tiny detail can ruin an otherwise attractive masthead.