50 years of Australian mutton bird research
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Some dedicated bird watchers have notched up what appears to be a world record for an ongoing, annual survey.
They've spent 50 years surveying shearwaters, or muttonbirds -- on Montague Island on Australia's New South Wales south coast.
There are something like eighteen-thousand breeding pairs of muttonbirds on Montague Island.
They've been there since October, and the chicks -- now the size of bantam hens -- will soon leave their sand burrows, fully fledged, and head north to the Bearing Sea.
The team leader, an eminent ornithologist, Peter Fullagar, says the survey may have global implicatons.
After 50 years, the populations so far seem to be stable.
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