Australian Aborigines look to birds for rain clue

CANBERRA, May 3 (Reuters) With wattle trees blooming across southeastern Australia and native birds and cockatoos on the wing, Aboriginal weather watchers say rain is on the way giving some hope to parts of the country ravaged by drought.

''The cockys are flocking everywhere. That's usually a good sign that rain is coming,'' said Jeremy Clark, from the southern Victoria state. ''The way the flora and plants and shrubs are starting to react, I'd certainly be expecting rain.'' For the first time, the forecasts from Clark's Brambuk community, which covers five Aboriginal homelands, are being taken seriously by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology as it looks for different ways to better understand the changing climate.

The bureau for several years has included links on its website (www.bom.gov.au) to indigenous communities in the tropical north, but has for the first time drawn on the weather knowledge of the Brambuk people of the country's southeast.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said last month that the country faced an ''unprecedentedly dangerous'' drought. Parts of the country have been stricken for a decades.

Bureau climate meteorologist Harvey Stern said the traditional Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring seasons have little relevance in Australia's tropical north -- or even in the temperate south, where aborigines have six seasons based on the weather and changes to the natural environment.

The bureau's Indigenous Weather Knowledge programme taps into the Aboriginal philosophy that all of nature is connected, and subtle changes to plants and animals can give clues about the climate and weather.

''People have been using these relationships since long before western society was under way,'' Stern told Reuters.

''We're interested to see the way they are describing the plants, the animals and the seasons all as one body of knowledge, which certainly in the past they had to live by.'' Stern said before 1950, weather observers in Australia used to note animal and plant behaviour, but that knowledge and information was ignored as conventional forecasting developed.

Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk community which covers most of western Victoria, including the Grampians mountains and national park, said Aborigines have always had different ways of looking at the weather, reading landscape rather than a calendar.

''It's still practised. We won't go fishing for eels, for example, until wattles start flowering and the animals start moving, and the full moon comes. Then you know the eels are running on the migratory journey to the sea,'' he said.

Reuters SZ GC1330