Field Practice readings build directly on the Foundations. Read Doc 7 before your first field trip — the FID science is the basis for every field decision a Steward makes. Doc 9 is the long-form companion to ShorelineWatch and FlagWatch — what to write down, and how, after a season of records.
Field Practice Pathway · Doc 7 · ~30 min read
FID and Disturbance Science ● Available
The numbers a Steward uses every day — dog 200 metres, human 75 metres, drone 150–200 metres — come from peer-reviewed flight-initiation distance research, primarily the Australian synthesis by Weston, McLeod, Blumstein and Guay (2012). This document is the working translation of that science into Steward field practice.
The four distances
Disturbance does not begin at the moment a bird flies. It begins much earlier, and the bird is paying a cost across all of it. The literature distinguishes four sequential thresholds along the disturbance continuum, which a Steward must understand because the operational decision sits between the second and third, not at the fourth:
| Distance | What it is | Visible to observer? |
|---|
| Detection Distance | Bird registers the stimulus. No visible reaction yet — but the bird now has heightened attention which interrupts foraging or rest. | No, except by inference |
| Physiological-Initiation Distance | Heart rate rises, corticosterone (the stress hormone) increases. The bird is paying a metabolic cost. | No, invisible without instruments |
| Alert Distance | Head goes up, foraging stops, alarm calls or postural shifts visible. | Yes — and this is the Steward's operational threshold |
| Flight-Initiation Distance (FID) | Bird actually takes flight. The full energy cost has begun. | Yes, but already too late — disturbance has fully landed |
The point a Steward must internalise: by the time you see flight, you have already missed the disturbance event by two thresholds. The job is to manage approach so that nothing crosses the Alert Distance — head-up, foraging-paused — let alone the Flight-Initiation Distance. This is why the published FSB buffers are not the FIDs themselves but the FIDs plus a working margin.
Why the buffers are what they are
Weston et al.'s 2012 review compiled FID data for 137 Australian bird species and showed that body mass alone explains roughly half of the variation in FID across species (R² = 0.480). Larger birds flush from further away. Among shorebirds specifically, a tight relationship holds: Eastern Curlew (the bay's largest common shorebird, up to 800 g) had the highest measured FIDs in the dataset — a maximum of 196 metres for human approach. Smaller migrant shorebirds (red-necked stint at 25 g) flush at distances below 30 metres. The Hooded Plover (a beach-nester, not a Moreton Bay species) had the highest residual sensitivity in the analysis — it flushes further than its body mass alone predicts, suggesting the species has been under particularly strong human-disturbance pressure historically.
The FSB-published buffers are 95th-percentile values across the relevant species pool, plus a working margin. They are intentionally conservative: they assume the most sensitive species in the bay's flock is present, even if you cannot see it. This is the precautionary approach the bird-first record requires.
- Dog 200 m — the highest FID measured for shorebirds with off-leash dog approach. Dogs trigger a predator-response that humans do not.
- Human 75 m — the conservative human-approach buffer, scaled from large-bodied curlew/godwit FIDs (~50 m) plus a 25 m working margin.
- Drone 150–200 m — drones are read as raptor-like overhead threats; FIDs are similar to or higher than dog-approach.
What changes the FID on any given day
FIDs are not fixed numbers. The same bird, at the same site, will flush at different distances depending on factors a Steward can read on arrival. Higher FIDs (more sensitive) when: the flock is at high tide and committed, the season is pre-departure (high metabolic stakes), the species in the flock are EPBC-listed, or the approach is novel (a person walking a different angle than usual). Lower FIDs (less sensitive, but never zero) when: the birds are foraging on the flat with multiple escape directions available, the approach is along the same vector as established human use, or weather conditions make flight costly anyway. The Steward's read of these conditions is what produces the field judgement — the published buffer is the floor, not the ceiling.
Companion materials on FSB
The full Weston et al. 2012 summary is in the Research Library below, with links to the free PDF and the publisher version. Doc 8 (Yellow Sea: The Staging Bottleneck) explains why FID matters most acutely in the pre-departure window. The ShorelineWatch wizard records disturbance type and the bird's behavioural response — these are the field-level data points that feed back into the FID literature when aggregated across the program.
Field Practice Pathway · Doc 9 · ~20 min read
Writing a Site Report ● Available
A Steward's records exist to be read — by council officers, contractors, conservation bodies, and the volunteer who comes after. The site report is the formal long-form version of what the field tools capture. It is written so that someone who was not there can reach the same conclusion the Steward did, on the same evidence.
What the site report is for
A site report is not a complaint, an accusation, or an opinion piece. It is a structured record of what was observed, when, by whom, under what conditions, and what those observations imply for the management of a specific site over a specific period. Its function is to be defensible — to hold up if a council planner, a contracted operator, or a conservation funder reads it and asks where the figures came from. The defensibility is what gives it weight in the rooms where decisions are taken.
The five required sections
| Section | What it must contain |
|---|
| 1. Site and period | Site name, GPS coordinates, the period covered, the Steward (or Stewards) producing the report, the program record IDs (ShorelineWatch / FlagWatch / RMDP records) the report is built from. |
| 2. Methods | What was measured and how. Tide reference station used. Count protocol followed. Disturbance categories applied (per Doc 7). Equipment. Anything that another Steward would need to know to repeat the work. |
| 3. Observations | The data, presented as plain numbers. Species and counts by visit. Disturbance events recorded — type, distance, behavioural response. Site condition assessments. Photographs only where they support a specific factual claim. |
| 4. Findings | What the observations show. This section reasons from the numbers — patterns, trends, comparisons against the same site in earlier seasons, against the QWSG count series. Where the data are limited, that limit is stated. |
| 5. Recommendations | The bird-first reading. What management actions the observations support, why, and at what level of confidence. This is the only section where the Steward's judgement is on the page. |
The voice the report must hold
Plain, direct, evidenced. Every claim followed by the data point that supports it. No grandstanding asides — every sentence must carry new information. Past tense for what happened, present tense for what was observed, future tense only in the recommendations. The tone is collegial, not adversarial. A council officer reading the report should feel they have been told what was seen, not shouted at.
Two specific tonal rules from the program: the report equips, it does not direct. The Steward is producing evidence; the decision-maker is making the decision. The report makes the bird-first reading legible — it does not demand that the reading be acted on. The report does not challenge salaried professionals. A council officer or contracted operator brings their own information to the question. The report's job is to ensure the bird-first information is on the table alongside theirs, not to argue that the bird-first reading should override theirs. Over time, repeated reports compound into an evidence base; that compounding is what shifts decisions, not the rhetoric of any single report.
What a strong recommendation reads like
A strong recommendation has three parts: the action proposed, the evidence supporting it, and the level of confidence. Example: "Recommend that any maintenance activity at the south end of the roost during late February be scheduled outside the two hours either side of high water (PROCEED outside this window; STOP inside it). Evidence: 12 disturbance events recorded across 11 site visits over the 2025–26 season, 9 of which occurred during the high-water window and 7 of which produced flush events involving Eastern Curlew. Confidence: high — the pattern was consistent across observers and conditions." Compare with: "The contractor should not work near the roost." The first is a record. The second is an opinion. The first survives review. The second does not.
Companion materials on FSB
The site report draws on the records produced by ShorelineWatch (public-tier observations and site condition), FlagWatch (Steward-tier flag reads and behavioural data), and the RMDP (the bird-first signed recommendation at site-level). Once the RMDP working tool is deployed, the site report will be the long-form companion to the RMDP record — the report explains what the dated, signed RMDP recommendation rests on. For the science that validates the disturbance categories used in section 3, see the FID summary (Weston 2012) in the Research Library below.