Blackhearts: Ecology in Outback Australia by Richard Symanski

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By Richard Symanski

A firsthand account of the adventures of an ornithological box crew learning long-tailed finches in outback Australia. It presents an perception into the calls for of professor-student-based fieldwork, fairly whilst generational conflicts and differing expectancies complicate doing technology.

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Females found red-banded males attractive, those with green bands unattractive. In long-term breeding experiments on captive birds, red-banded males raised more offspring than green-banded ones. If the EPF rates were the same in the clutches reared by red-banded and green-banded males, then the generalization that attractive males had enhanced reproductive success was true. But what if attractive males, which Nancy had also found showed lower rates of parental care, fathered fewer of their socially reared young?

That zebra finches needed water every hour was a fact that would surely rattle Nancy’s sense of reality. I spent a couple of days scouring the countryside around Winton in search of zebra finches: redbeaks, blackbeaks, their nests, flocks of them. I drove through sheep country, all the way to Longreach. I headed south down the awful Jundah road, through Wamambool Downs, past the Kangaroo Mountains. And then I crawled up the Landsborough Highway, on toward Cloncurry. Twenty-five kilometers north of McKinley I found the only thing that remotely resembled a finch gold mine.

I decided to look elsewhere. I walked several blocks west and wandered into a flashy, flag-covered lot full of new cars, old cars, vans, four-wheel drives. Forty minutes later I counted out more than $A, in cash and signed some papers and insurance forms, for an ugly green  two-wheel-drive Toyota van. I bought it because it didn’t have a low wheelbase; it would carry several bodies, lots of equipment. It looked resilient, as if it would take abuse. I had wanted to drive away in the van immediately after signing the papers.

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