Re: What's wrong with this list?
Philip Veerman's reply to Steve Clark "Do I recall correctly that you were reporting on one visit? If so aren't you reading too much into the results of one visit? At this time of year, many birds of these species form mixed flocks and travel around together. Your suggestion may be relevant but isn't it a simpler explanation that they could have just been somewhere else, apart from where you were, at the time you were there."
Yes, Philip may be perfectly correct here but Steve is making a point, and a very valid one.
A visitor to many of the Victorian box-ironbark woodlands is often struck by the lack of small insectivorous birds. This is replayed time and again and as Stephen says "We all know that some of these are the birds that seem to be disappearing from our woodlands". Maybe we all don't know that this is happening in Victoria. I wish it was a simple as the birds not being where the observer is but the diversity of small insectivores that one often takes for granted in the forests of NSW and Queensland (apologies to the other states) is often just not there in the box-ironbark belt of central Victoria. It's just as likely that in a few years from now people might be getting just as excited about a Flame Robin or Buff-rumped Thornbill at Newstead as they are about the Regent Honeyeater.
Sound a bit far-fetched - I wouldn't have fancied my chances of explaining that Regent Honeyeaters would become endangered to the early naturalists!