Helping the Bilbies of South Australia
|
| |
| |
Ed Note: Senior volunteer Warren Strotroen shares his Earthwatch experience as a volunteer abroad in Australia.
By Warren Stortroen
The sun was just about to set as I settled into the warm sand of a red dune in the Arid Recovery Reserve in the outback of South Australia. Earlier that day we had located active Bilby burrows and marked them for observation. Then, the Earthwatch volunteers and staff were joined by volunteers from nearby Roxby Downs for an evening of watching for these little nocturnal marsupials to emerge at dusk for nightly foraging. Just after the sun disappeared I saw movement at the burrow and a gray head with big ears and a long pink nose appeared! He looked around, hopped out, moved toward me, and after a couple of minutes bounded off into the swale. His bounding took him past another volunteer who was thrilled to see him! It was a great thrill for me too, since Bilbies are seldom seen in the wild except by dedicated researchers!
This Earthwatch expedition, BRINGING BACK THE BILBIES, with Principal Investigators Katherine Moseby and John Read, and their dedicated and competent staff has to be one of my all-time Earthwatch favorites! The reserve was 60 square kilometers in the red dune country enclosed in a fence to exclude rabbits, foxes, feral cats and domestic grazers. The feral animals were eliminated inside the reserve and locally extinct nocturnal animals including Burrowing Bettongs, Western Barred Bandicoots, Greater Stick-nest Rats and Bilbies were reintroduced to the habitat where they once had thrived.
From Adelaide the twelve volunteers from the USA, Australia, Japan and Malta flew into the Western Mining Corporation airport near the reserve, and were assigned private rooms in the company's surplus temporary housing. The corporation is one of the major sponsors of the Arid Recovery Project along with the University of Adelaide and Friends of the Arid Recovery Project. Western Mining operates a huge underground copper and uranium mine nearby. During the expedition we ate our meals and prepared our field lunches at their miner's mess hall where the food was excellent and plentiful! They also had a nearby pub where we would sometimes relax after a hard day's work!
The red desert was beautiful in the Spring with colorful flowers such as the poached-egg daisy and Sturt's desert pea all around us. One task which I enjoyed was early morning tracking of the Sleepy Lizards over the colorful dunes in and outside of the reserve to determine what succulent plants they were eating, collect any scat found, and occasionally capture them for weight, health and census data. This was part of a vegetation recovery study now that plants in the reserve were protected from rabbits and grazers.
Each evening a team of staff and volunteers would set out and bait cage traps for the little nocturnal animals and another team would check them in the early morning and process the animals caught for size, weight, health, reproduction and census purposes. We had to let them get back to their nest or burrow before it got too warm or before they became targets for birds of prey.
Another study was shovel testing for the presence of Bilby food - worms, termites, grubs, beetles, etc in the dunes and hardpan swales. I remember Laverne, a young volunteer from Malta, at first saying "I don't touch worms!" but eventually she was able to!
With so many tasks at different times and in widely spaced parts of the reserve I was really impressed with the staff being able to juggle the transportation and meal needs, and to get the volunteers to the correct place at the proper time! This was a very well run and enjoyable expedition! I went back in 2004 when the reserve was being expanded to 85 square kilometers and found the desert to be even more beautiful and the little animals just as charming!
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
