Volume 55

Bee-eaters, of the Family Meropidae, are known to ingest small pieces of grit as gastroliths and while a few anecdotal reports of them eating slightly larger gastroliths exist, documented evidence is lacking. A Rainbow Bee-eater was photographed swallowing a small stone, possibly for the first time, and this is reviewed and discussed.

Observers using field glasses, not shotguns, made pioneering contributions to regional ornithology in the 20th century, but their lives and influence have received little attention in Queensland. James Andrew Leslie (‘Jim’) Bravery, a young coal miner from south-east Queensland, was interested in birds and conservation by age 14, although he never collected eggs and no other family members were naturalists. After serving in WWI, he moved to the Atherton Tablelands as a soldier-settler and farmed there for the rest of his life. The most probable influence on his early development as a field ornithologist was the ‘new curriculum’, which introduced nature study to Queensland primary schools for his last four years of education, at ages 9–12. The nature study movement encouraged children to observe wildlife for themselves, and to form a personal commitment to nature. After recording birds and their behaviour on the Atherton Tablelands for nearly 40 years, at age 60 Bravery joined ornithological societies and began corresponding with leading naturalists including A. H. Chisholm and K. A. Hindwood, who encouraged him to write. Bravery’s articles, particularly his 1970 signature paper on birds of the Atherton Shire, have attracted more than 1000 citations   in published literature and continue to provide a baseline for studies of birds and their conservation in the region.