The eastern Australian waterbird survey is a white-knuckle flight of avian accounting

One of the world's largest bird counts is 'hours of terror separated by minutes of boredom'Get our free news app; get our morning email briefing"Two-hundred pelicans breeding, 20 whiskered terns, 100 grey teal, 30 black swans, one little pied cormorant ..."Richard Kingsford, a veteran ecologist, is rattling off the waterbirds he's spotting below. He clutches his voice recorder closely to overcome the engine noise as our Cessna banks steeply, tracking the shoreline of Lake Brewster, a large lake in central-west New South Wales. Continue reading...