VALE RICK WEBSTER On Tuesday 12 March, my mate Rick Webster passed away. Rick was fifty-seven and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer December last. I first met Rick in the mid 1980s when he came to Deniliquin to study superb parrots for the NSW Forestry Commission. I assisted Rick with that study and we became good friends. Rick also met his partner Gail, who worked in the Forestry office in Deniliquin at that time, and became a Deniliquin resident. Over the years we worked together doing various eco-surveys. The first was in the late 1980s when we worked with Jim Shields, a NSW Forestry ecologist, over at Waratah Creek — out of Eden, doing bird counts and all bonding over Bob Dylan. In the early 1990s Rick secured a contract to do pre-logging bird surveys for NSW Forestry in the mountains behind Taree in the Dingo Tops area. We spent a couple of weeks staying in a ramshackle campsite known as Boot Hill in the mountains, doing bird surveys and having a great time (as well as getting eaten alive by ticks and leaches!). At that time the forests in that area were alive with birds including sooty, masked and powerful owls, paradise riflebirds and glossy black-cockatoos, and mammals such as parma wallabies and tiger quolls. In the mid 1990s Rick and I worked for a month or more for Richard Loyn from the Arthur Rylah Institute doing owl surveys in the High Country of Victoria. We recorded good numbers of powerful and sooty owls and lesser numbers of masked and barking owls (in the foothills) as well as boobooks everywhere. Some of the mammals we recorded included greater, yellow-bellied, sugar and feather-tailed gliders. We had a ball. Several times in the 1990s Rick drove a 4WD for me on our Strzelecki Track tours, usually when it was too wet to take a bus. Some of these tours we did in conjunction with Field Guides Inc from the USA. Their guide was John Coons. John, who is a great character with a peculiar sense of humour, insisted that every old guy in Australia was called Reg so started calling Rick and me Reg. Rick and I responded by calling him Reg and from that point on we referred to each other as Reg or Reggie. Rick had a great sense of humour, giving John as good as he got! What memorable tours these were! Rick was a great fighter for the environment and did what he could to conserve the native vegetation in the district as well as endangered species including superb and regent parrots, which he had worked on. He became expert in wetland management and for the last dozen years or so, this was his main focus. He had worked for five or so years for NSW National Parks Service managing wetlands on the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers until he had had a gutful of the bureaucracy. He spent the last four or five years of his life working for a private organisation managing wetlands, which he seemed to enjoying. He acquired a huge knowledge over the years of what makes the eco-systems in the Riverina tick and tragically much of this knowledge has now been lost to us. In 2018 Rick and Gail had white-fronted honeyeaters breed in their garden and Rick seemed chuffed when I told him this was almost certainly the first breeding record of this species in the district. Rick was a good mate. His many friends are left with great memories. Our thoughts are with Gail and their children.