Book Review
Willunga Birds
Willunga Environment Centre, 2018
For most of us a passion for nature started young and was often triggered by the sights and sounds of our wonderful garden birds. Certainly I was one!
Caught by splashes of bright colour, loud or raucous cacophony, or trees alive with hundreds of uttering brown shadows, I was hooked on birds. As a boy with my brother we would spend hours out the back with our father’s old binoculars watching the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos raid the pinecones in the old Aleppo pine trees behind our house. Or if not these cockatoos then the Sulphur-crested or the Adelaide Rosellas were always fun to watch.
This love of birds can lead anyone down one of many paths. One can become a ‘Birdo’ or a ‘Twitcher’ or simply remain an old-fashioned amateur birdwatcher. Here in South Australia we need more ‘birdos’. Those passionate people with the time and the knowledge to make detailed observations about the birds around them. We know that we are living in highly changing times. Whether it be through climate change, habitat clearance, population growth, or suburb development, our region is changing and changing fast.
We need to understand the effects of these changes on our wonderful local birds. The Willunga Basin, placed as it is to the north of the Fleurieu, south of the city and west of the Mt Lofty Ranges, contains hundreds of species of generalist and specialist birds of grasslands, wetlands, woodlands, coast and marine environments.
Chris Daniels,
Professor of Biology, UniSA and Presiding Member, Adelaide and Mt Lofty NRM Board
This book is also available for purchase from the Fleurieu Environment Centre, Normanville.