Wildfowl
63: Editorial
The year 2013 has been a particularly busy one for
Wildfowl
. Two volumes of the journal have
been published – not only this standard issue (
Wildfowl
63), but also a special issue on Brent
Geese
Branta bernicla
(
Wildfowl
Special Issue No. 3), which draws together papers on a range
of Brent Goose subspecies and populations presented at the 15th meeting of the Goose
Specialist Group, held at Arcachon, France, in January 2013. Additionally, much work has
gone into preparing electronic copies of the entire
Wildfowl
back catalogue, and I am
delighted to report that pdf files for all papers published from 1948 onwards are now
available for reading and downloading on the Open Journal System (OJS), accessible via the
Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) website at
. This
greatly facilitates dissemination of the results of studies published in the journal over the
decades, as the papers can now be found not only by visiting the websites but through search
engines such as GoogleScholar. It is particularly pleasing to have the early volumes stored for
posterity as these, then known as the
Severn Wildfowl Trust Annual Reports
, serve to describe the
history of the WWT. Equally importantly, electronic
Wildfowl
should help to improve access
to recent publications, including papers in the current issues, making the authors’ work even
more widely known. Immense thanks are due to Christine Orchard, a volunteer at WWT, for
her sterling work and expertise in scanning the printed editions of
Wildfowl
and for using
OCR (optical character recognition) software to make each of the papers searchable. That
these papers are now available is also thanks to the efforts of my colleague Robin Jones, who
not only set up but developed and improved the look of the
Wildfowl
pages on the OJS
website, and most importantly added all the titles, authors, abstracts and pdfs of papers onto
the system.
The current issue,
Wildfowl
63, is a relatively slim volume but I think of high quality and
interest. The review of Madagascar’s endemic wildfowl is not only timely, with the increased
focus on these little-known, endangered species in recent years, but it provides useful insights
into the development of knowledge and conservation of these birds. Observations made by
Russian scientists of Barnacle Geese
Branta leucopsis
breeding on Kolguev Island since the
1980s give a fresh understanding of the colonisation of new high-arctic nesting areas by the
geese, whilst the study of Barnacle Geese from a recently established breeding colony in the
Netherlands illustrates how new populations develop. Preliminary results are also presented
from a study of the secretive Spotted Crake
Porzana porzana
, a stocky Starling-sized bird which
tends to skulk in thick cover, but which has a noisy whiplash-like
hwuit, hwuit
call during the
breeding season. Counts made of calling males, combined with tracking of radio-tagged birds
to follow the movements of individuals caught and fitted with these devices, are providing
valuable information on habitat use by the crakes at a restored wetland in Denmark.
In January 2013, we were saddened to hear of the death of Prof Geoffrey Matthews, who
for many years was Director of Research and Conservation at WWT, and editor of this
journal. Tributes to Geoffrey’s impressive and influential career have been published in the
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©Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust
Wildfowl
(2013) 63: 1–3
