THE Hamilton Field Naturalists Club is hosting an expert on the migratory bird, Latham’s Snipe, this Friday at a new venue for the organisation.

Dr Birgita Hansen is a senior research fellow in the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation at Federation University Australia and her research focuses on the conservation of shorebirds, waterbirds and their wetland habitats, with a growing emphasis on achieving conservation outcomes through technology-enablement.

Dr Hansen is a long-term member of the Victorian Wader Study Group, and an executive committee member of the Australasian Wader Studies.

Her topic is entitled ‘Building our knowledge about habitat requirements and movement of Latham’s Snipe’ and she will describe the bird’s highly cryptic nature and the details of the project to monitor and plan for this species’ conservation.

The Latham’s Snipe Project was established in 2014-2015 to address knowledge gaps about the species.

It includes thrice-yearly monitoring across much of their national range and tracking of tagged birds using geolocators, radio transmitters and satellite tags.

To date, the project has identified around 60 sites that meet the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act threshold for national importance, determined some key migration stopover areas between Australia and Japan, and characteristics of daily movement behaviour.

Of concern is the finding that many important sites regularly supporting large numbers of snipe (>50 birds) have no formal protection, and the majority of these occur in urban areas, placing the species at a high conservation risk from land development.

The presentation will be held at the Red Shield Hut at the Hamilton Showgrounds on Friday, September 23 at 7.30pm.

Members and visitors are welcome to attend this presentation and a gold coin donation to help cover the club’s costs in hosting these presentations would be appreciated.