upgrade was necessary; it was replaced in 1979 by a house in Gladstone Street, Moonee Ponds. The logistics of managing a national bird atlassing project, with 3000 volunteer atlassers mapping the avifauna of a continent, stretched the resources of the organisation beyond reasonable limits, but the RAOU was forced to grow in the process. The period of the first Atlas also coincided with a move to establish bird observatories as field research centres. These were Eyre in 1976, Rotamah Island in 1979, Barren Grounds in 1982, and Broome in 1988. Later the emphasis shifted from the establishment of field centres to the purchase of large properties as habitat conservation, with the acquisition of Gluepot Reserve in 1997 and Newhaven Reserve in 2000. Reconciling with the "amateurs"... Between the beginning and the end of the first Atlas project RAOU membership grew from fewer than a thousand to over two thousand. Not all Atlassers became members, but many did, and most of them were not interested in subscribing to the Emu but were happy to receive the RAOU Newsletter that contained all the informal in-house news that the pre-reform Emu had carried. In 1991, the newsletter was renamed Wingspan, a glossy colour magazine received by all members. By 2004, fewer than 20% of RAOU members subscribed to the Emu. In 1996, the RAOU formally adopted the name Birds Australia for most public purposes, and updated its logo from a lone emu to an emu with a family of chicks, reflecting new growth in the size and number of its regional groups. ...while keeping the "scientists" happy 1996 also saw the first Southern Hemisphere Ornithological Conference (SHOC), held in Albany, Western Australia. This was an initiative of Professor Brian Collins, RAOU president at the time. Another SHOC was held at Griffith University, Brisbane, in 2000 before the RAOU refined its conference concept and initiated the first Australasian Ornithological Conference (AOC), hosted with Charles Sturt University at Bathurst, New South Wales in December 2001. Also from 2001, the direct management and publication of the Emu was outsourced to CSIRO Publishing, which already handled a large stable of international and Australian scientific journals. HANZAB Other projects, such as the Australian Bird Count (1989–1995), followed the first Atlas. However, the project that would dominate the period from the early 1980s until 2006 was the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (HANZAB). Financially it was