Lloyd Nielsen update on Olsen saga..22nd August 2020

 

                  Update sent to me by Lloyd Nielsen on the Olsen saga - 22nd August 2020

John – just an update and comment on the Penny Olsen saga. It seems that her dishonesty and fraudulent writings are being exposed more and more and day by day. 

At the moment, it appears she is desperately trying to save her skin. She is apparently attempting to have the report from the Independent Review Panel, (which was appointed by Australian Wildlife Conservancy to review your data and photographs), published on various websites. (Makes one wonder if she could have been responsible for organizing that in the Mt Isa paper – the timing looks very sus?). 

It seems she is unable to come up with anything worthwhile and seems to be the only thing she has left to support her false claims. If this is used again it will only be a rehash of old information. What she should accept is that the report was done by people way out of their depth and that their final conclusions came up with NOTHING. There is no value in this report and to refer to the panel as an “expert panel” is ludicrous. The panel consisted of four people, (plus Olsen obviously giving advice from the sideline from her emails) who knew nothing about the Night Parrot. It is pretty obvious it was really a “kangaroo court” with the purpose of “getting John Young” as others have said and which she has stated in an email to a senior AWC scientist. Remember too that she could not tell the difference between a Brown Quail’s egg and a parrot’s egg.

The plain, hard facts are that she is responsible for the loss of three vital Night Parrot breeding records, plus other important data on the parrot. It is very obvious that they would have been accepted had she not interfered. The loss of good records of such a rare species at the inexplicable whim of one person is a huge loss to science. 

It is interesting that when one starts making things up with no solid evidence as she has very obviously done, one is eventually exposed.  As an example of the unresearched statements she has used, there is one of mind boggling proportions  – she claimed that the Night Parrot nests and eggs which you found on Diamantina NP did not agree with those in the historical literature. Well guess what? There is simply NOTHING in the historical literature. The Night Parrot has always been so extremely rare, even in those days. No actual nests had been found and recorded. There was no data, no photos of nests and eggs as she should have discovered had she read the literature. In those times a century and more ago when the last Night Parrots were recorded, people were hell-bent on collecting birds and their eggs for specimens. The actual nests, their construction and sites placed were mostly ignored – scientific worth of detailed nest data generally began years later. No nice little cameras that fitted in the palm of one’s hand with a handy little inbuilt flashlight, that could take thousand’s of photos in those times. Instead, cameras of the day were huge and simple things which needed a horse and cart to transport them around. She even failed to work that out. More of her wild guesswork.

The naivety is just as astonishing. To set yourself up as judge and jury in the first instance is not only completely ludicrous but to name someone publically as she and Menkhorst did to you in their paper in The Emu without any solid evidence is simply stupid. Aren’t they aware of Australia’s defamation laws? Other than a report with no concrete findings the only “evidence” seems to be that from Olsen’s imagination and propagated by her to some on the AWC board (we received copies of emails to this effect) and her supporters. The report from the independent panel, composed and conducted by people unfamiliar with Night Parrots and well out of their depth, resulting in no worthwhile conclusions, is so devoid of real fact that even a junior lawyer would have no trouble chopping it up and spitting it out!  

The one thing which stinks is that her interference has also directly killed off our project on the Buff-breasted Button-quail, mostly done on a large AWC property. It is a bird on the edge of extinction as we both worry about and may even now be beyond recovery. But that does not seem to bother her, it appears.

Such idiocy, such negativity, such naivety, such fraudulent writing, such lies are not needed in Australian ornithology. Perhaps she should take her ipad/tablet, her dartboard and dagger and head off into the sunset. No birding community, least of all Australia’s needs such nasty craziness. As one prominent ornithologist (one of her colleagues) stated “Penny Olsen has turned an ordinary situation into a bitchy business and some very good people have had their reputations destroyed”. So true!

Lloyd  

PS. Just heard more negativity about the report from the panel. One person very close to some members of the panel gave his opinion that it was nothing more than a “kangaroo court” and agreed that the underlying purpose was “to get John Young”, spear-headed by Olsen. Even she admitted this in an email to a senior AWC employee! (See my original paper). More to come!!

OK to pass this around if you wish.