Red letter day for atlaser Ian Rijsdijk 

What do these two pictures have in common?

Atlaser Ian Rijsdijk was the first atlaser to submit a checklist for pentad 3350_1825 which included the Rietvlei Black Skimmer (for which, not surprisingly, he received an ORF!). For those who need to know, the SABAP2 reference number for this species is 11763. In this morning's Die Burger, there is an article about this bird. This photo was taken by SABAP2 information systems manager, Michael Brooks, taking some time off from being almost continuously at the computer screen where he develops all the good stuff on the SABAP2 website.

And at the same time as Ian was out at Rietvlei, an article written by him was published in OO, Ornithological Observations. The guts of the paper runs like this: "A Black-headed Heron landed on a large bush and proceeded to capture and swallow whole two Speckled Mousebirds." You download the pdf of this paper from here. The paper contains three photos. The one shown here, catching the first mousebird, one with the big bulge in the heron's neck as the mousebird when down the gullet, and one showing the second capture. This event happened at the Wilderness.

Ornithological Observations is rapidly becoming the best birding read. It now contains 60 papers. Volume 3 runs to 210 pages; volume 2 had 104 and volume 1 had 64. Each page of the article is landscape, so they fit snugly on a computer screen – OO is designed to be an ejournal. Ian's article is the 59th in OO. The 60th was published at the same time, describes, with photographs, an incident in which a Cape Fur Seal was observed to kill a Southern Giant Petrel in Walvis Bay. This article is here. The total number of downloads of pdfs of OO articles since the journal started just over two years ago is 16500, and currently this is running at more than 100 downloads per day. Real articles about real birds.

Les Underhill
2012-10-06

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