Fanatically loyal readers of this column are used to it being decorated with pictures of the birds of our bird-rich territory. But here is a fabulous creature, the Scarlet Macaw, Canberra twitchers will never be set a'twitching by locally. It is a native of South America.
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But our excuse to portray it here in this parochial backwater of The Canberra Times is that an intrepid Australian National University PhD scholar, George Olah, is studying and is campaigning for the glamorous species. He is presently crowdsourcing the shekels that will enable him to complete a 26-minute documentary about macaw conservation research in a rainforest parish of Peru, a south-eastern stretch of the Peruvian Amazon.There are less than three weeks of this crowdsourcing left. So open your wallets (liberating those endangered moth species!) today.*
He himself is engaged in that research in Peru and in links about to be mentioned you can see, in a kind of trailer of the film that's underway, glimpses of intrepid him and intrepid others going about it in the macaws' impossibly remote and indescribably lovely rainforest habitat.
The macaws he's studying and their habitats are in good shape for the moment. He tells us he's focused on a remote rainforest area of 10,000 hectares that can only be reached by boat.
But environmental problems galore loom on the macaws' horizons, including gold mining that uses mercury ("It's bad poison for the whole eco-system"), tree-felling, oil extraction and road construction. Olah wants his film to, among other things, direct public attention towards the problems these birds are facing in their habitat and towards the importance of scientific conservation research to be done (some of what he and others are doing with the macaws in the new field of "genetic tagging" is new and exciting) on the future of macaws in this region.
In conversation with us Olah explains that his research into the not-well-understood macaws involves "a whole new method" that promises to be a model for researches into all sorts of species. So for example, instead of putting birds through the trauma of capture to take genetic material from them, increasingly there are ways of getting what biologists need from shed feathers found on the rainforest floor.
One of his challenges is to persuade locals and governments that regions like this blissfully intact 10,000 hectares will in the long run give more from "eco-tourism" (with macaws a special tourist magnet) than can be got by the short-term plundering of them.
He's a scientist but of course the sheer loveliness of the objects of his scientific affections is not lost on him. He rhapsodises about the early-morning spectacle of hundreds of them milling around spots along the river where they nibble at a special salty clay. His studies include looking into why they do this. Yes, they're doing it for the salt, but perhaps, too, the clay is helpful by providing a protective layer in their gut so that all the unripe fruit they guzzle doesn't give them tummy aches.
*Details of how to contribute are at http://igg.me/at/macawmovie
and there is more, much more about the project, at http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0617-devitt-macaws-olah.html
Andrew Leigh's book
Behold, I tell you a mystery.
For 30 years up until June 30, 2004, Andrew Leigh MP, member for Fraser, reports in his new book, The Economics Of Just About Anything, the average number of babies born each day in Australia hovered at about 600.
Then "On 30 June 2004, it spiked downwards. Then on 1 July, Australia recorded 1005 births: the highest number of babies born in a single day since records began. The 'baby bump' continued well into mid-July. Altogether ... over 1000 births were moved from June 2004 to July 2004."
Why and how did this ostensibly eerie phenomenon come to pass? Was there a freakish alignment of the planets? On to Leigh's cerebral explanation in a moment.
In a celebrated English play, a character says of an especially well-educated young man "My dear, he's absolutely verminous with degrees!"
She wasn't speaking of Andrew Leigh (he wasn't invented then) but she was speaking of people like him. Flyers for his approaching book launch and lecture remind everyone that Andrew Leigh " ... holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Law and Arts ... is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and the only parliamentarian to be a fellow of one of the four national academies".
Yes, he may very well be the sharpest tool in the shed (Parliament House) and must sometimes feel intellectually lonely there. With no intellectual equals to talk to at work he gets on with writing books, like The Economics Of Just About Everything.
And in it he explains that the 2004 baby "bump" is a perfect economists' illustration of how incentive drives behaviour.
Not long before the "bump" occurred Treasurer Costello had announced in his Budget that the parents of all babies born on or after July 1, 2004 would receive $3000 from the government. Lots of canny parents, in a nation where "around half of all births are medically induced or delivered by caesarean section", responded to this incentive by delaying births until July!
The launch of The Economics Of Just About Everything comes with a lecture of the same name, and is at Lena Karmel Lodge, corner of Barry Drive and Marcus Clarke Street from 5pm on Tuesday July 29, 2014. As a cunning incentive to you to attend, the occasions is free and open to the public.
