The value of small patches of remnant vegetation: 14 May 2020 webinar

Posted on 7 May, 2020 by Ivan

One of the biggest challenges for restoration projects across the region is habitat fragmentation and how to manage isolated patches of remnant vegetation. Connecting Country has been working for over a decade to restore our fragmented landscape through strategic planning, and working with local landowners to help protect and restore wildlife habitat and connect areas of remnant vegetation.

Although traditionally, conserving large patches of intact habitat is considered a priority, the value of smaller patches is less clear. Connecting Countries biodiversity monitoring programs have highlighted the value of the small patches of remnant vegetation for woodland birds and the Brush-tailed Phascogale, among other species.

We discovered a useful upcoming webinar that explores the value of small patches of remnant vegetation. It is hosted by Ben Zeeman, a vegetation ecologist working at the Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority. Ben will discuss recent research examining the relevance of habitat fragmentation theory when conserving critically endangered ecosystems in highly modified landscapes. The results of this work challenge some long-held conservation principles, identifying that small habitat patches often have high ecological value.

This talk will be delivered online with time for questions and conversation at the end. Please register for the session and you will be emailed a link before the event.

Topic:           The value of small patches of remnant vegetation
Date:             14 May 2020 at 6.45 pm
Venue:          online
Host:             Ben Zeeman
To register:  click here

Agenda:

• 6.45 pm – Livestream starts – allowing for the resolution of technical issues
• 7.00 pm –  Ben to speak about remnant vegetation
• 7.45 pm – Ben to take questions

Small patches of remnant vegetation are vital in connecting larger tracts (photo: Connecting Country)

Calendar competition highlights: Week 3

Posted on 7 May, 2020 by Ivan

A couple of weeks ago we announced our inaugural Connecting Country calendar competition and entries have been flowing in steadily. 

Our theme is woodland birds and this photo competition is open to all Connecting Country members and people of the Mount Alexander region. The aim of the competition is to highlight our special woodland bird community and share the passion and skills of our passionate local photographers, as well as produce a beautifully printed calendar for the year 2021.

The calendar will be available to purchase and will feature the top 12 photographs, as selected by the Connecting Country team. There is a limit of two entries per photographer, and the competition opened on Monday 20 April and will close at 5 pm on Monday 18 May 2020. Both experienced and amateur photographers are encouraged to participate. Simply email your chosen images to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au by 5 pm on 18 May 2020.

We have been extremely impressed with the quality entries so far and thought we would share the highlights from this week in a gallery below.

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed so far! Keep the entries coming until Monday 18 May 2020.

Musk Lorikeet by Noel Ruedin

New Holland Honeyeater by Noel Ruedin

Red Browed Finch by Deb Worland

The Swift Parrot uses habitat in both Bruny Island and the Mount Alexander area. Photo by Deb Worland

Calendar competition details:

• Photos must be relevant to the theme of woodland birds and taken in the Mount Alexander region in central Victoria.
• There is a maximum of two photo entries per photographer.
• Entries must be submitted by email to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au, including the location, date and subject of the photo.
• Original photos must be at least 3 MB for image quality, but to enter please email files under 1 MB.
• Entries close on Monday 18 May 2020.
• Winning images will be selected by Connecting Country and published in a 2021 woodland birds calendar.
• There will be no commission paid to competition winners, but full recognition of your work will be featured and acknowledged.

Further details on the competition format and conditions are provided on our website: click here

Biodiversity Response Planning: project update

Posted on 30 April, 2020 by Ivan

During six months of 2018, a diverse array of government, Traditional Owners and community organisations from across Victoria came together to participate in an intense Biodiversity Response Planning process. Connecting Country was one of these organisations!

After a lot of hard work, 89 new projects were announced by the Hon. Lily D’Ambrosio MP, including 85 projects for on-ground biodiversity action worth $33.7 million. These projects are part of the government’s investment to implement ‘Protecting Victoria’s Environment – Biodiversity 2037’ to be delivered by various stakeholders.

Connecting Country was excited to be selected for funding through our project: Remnant rescue – restoring woodland bird habitat in central Victoria.

Connecting Country is proud to have overseen this three year project in collaboration with our project partners: local landholders, Dja Dja Wurrung, Trust for Nature, Parks Victoria and Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. The project extends to the end of June 2021.

To date we have achieved some excellent on-ground outcomes, as well as building landholder capacity to understand their land and restore woodland bird habitat on their land. We have delivered strategic revegetation across 150 hectares of land, adding much-needed diversity and habitat, including may prickly understorey shrubs. Planting included locally threatened species such as Late-flowered Flax-lily (Dianella tarda) and Buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii). We have also delivered weed and rabbit control across 190 hectares of private and public land, which will allow for natural regeneration of many indigenous plant species.

Project highlights

Some project highlights so far:

• Meeting with landholders on site to discuss their property goals, values and threats to their biodiverse and beautiful properties.
• Working with keen and enthusiastic landholders to support them to commence landscape restoration.
• Collaborating with project partners to help our local environment and restore important habitat.
• Empowering landholders to manage their land for biodiversity.

Landscape Restoration Coordinator, Bonnie Humphreys, said ‘The project has allowed Connecting Country to align our habitat restoration goals in priority areas with the State Government’s Biodiversity Response Planning. We are delighted to deliver the on-ground works to our regional landowners, and contribute our skills to restoring native vegetation and ecological assets in the region’.

Project property in Walmer with a new fence protecting regenerating Buloke plants from stock grazing (photo by Connecting Country)

Why is this project important?

We know that much of central Victoria’s native woodland has been heavily disturbed by a long history of mining, clearing, woodcutting, grazing, and changes in fire and water regimes. The Box-Ironbark landscape contains provides habitat for many threatened species including members of the threatened Temperate Woodland Bird Community. Scientific studies demonstrate an alarming acceleration in the decline of most species within this community over recent years.

Habitat loss is the single greatest threat to woodland birds, and exacerbates other threats, such as predation by cats and foxes, and prolonged drought. Many of the remaining woodlands lack complexity and are missing the key understorey species that provide food, nesting sites and protection from predators for woodland birds and other animals.

Gorse treated in Metcalfe to allow regeneration of critical native understorey species (photo by Connecting Country)

Bird of the month: Eastern Spinebill

Posted on 23 April, 2020 by Ivan

Welcome to our third Bird of the month, a partnership between Connecting Country and BirdLife Castlemaine District. Each month we’re taking a close look at one special local bird species. We’re excited to be joining forces to deliver you a different bird each month, seasonally adjusted, and welcome any suggestions from the community. We are lucky enough to have the talented and charismatic Jane Rusden from BirdLife Castlemaine District writing about our next bird of the month, with assistance from the brilliant Damian Kelly. You may be familiar with the third bird off the ranks.

Eastern Spinebill (Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris)

This month has seen the return of the Eastern Spinebill to Central Victoria, as they leave higher elevations for the winter. I’ve noticed them feeding on Rock Correa around my house and Geoff Park wrote about their return on his blog, of course, accompanied by his stunning photos. This is a species that has adapted to gardens and will utilise non-native species of flowering plants, such as Salvia, in their search for nectar. Did I mention Correa, they LOVE Correa.

The Eastern Spinebill, though a Honeyeater, is arguably our local answer to the humming bird, as they have a habit of hovering whilst using their long curved bills to probe flowers. This ability means they can feed on nectar plants too delicate for birds to actually land on. In addition, they eat plants and a large assortment of insects. If you’ve read Tim Lowe’s book ‘Where Song Began’, you’ll know birds use nectar for energy, but its’ relatively low nutrient levels mean birds look to insects for minerals and other nutrients.

Pineapple Sage is a favourite of the Eastern Spinebill (photo by Damian Kelly)

So here’s an interesting thing: through our research on this gorgeous little honeyeater, Damian Kelly and I noticed an anomaly that we can’t get to the bottom of. The guide books say that during the summer Eastern Spinebills retreat from low elevations to higher elevations and can be found in places like the High Country. However, around mid elevations such as Cottles Bridge (north east of Melbourne VIC), they can be found all year round. Young birds are known to travel larger distances and usually appear locally before the mature adults do. However, an extensive long-term study across most of their range (from South Australia, through Victoria to New South Wales) from 1984 to 1999 involved mist netting and banding 39,572 Eastern Spinebills with a re-capture of 3,602 birds. The study discovered that 99% of re-captured birds were less than 10 km from their original banding location. In short, they had moved very little distance at all, but the same cannot be said for our local birds. It would be fascinating to know what’s going on here.

Perhaps this is a highly adaptable bird? It will nest under verandahs and utilise non-native food sources such as fuschia, move if it has to, or not if it doesn’t. For a small bird they are reasonably long lived. In the  study mentioned above, one individual was banded as an adult, then caught six more times during the study period, which means it was an adult for at least 13 years and 2 months.

I suspect there’s much going on with the Eastern Spinebill, much more than feeding on their favourite Correa and being chased across the garden by other honeyeaters, which is how we often see them. Anyone up for a PhD on Eastern Spinebills …?

To listen to the varied and lovely calls of the Eastern Spinebill, and see a map of its distribution, please – click here

The eastern spinebill is a species of honeyeater found in south-eastern Australia in forest and woodland areas, as well as gardens in urban and rural areas (photo by Damian Kelly)

Written by Jane Rusden
Research by Damian Kelly and Jane Rusden
Photos by Damian Kelly

Backyards are a beautiful bird haven: Cornell Lab

Posted on 23 April, 2020 by Ivan

Fortunately there are many online resources that can keep us learning and connected to nature, while we stay safely at home. Here are some great suggestions about how to improve your bird watching skills, using the excellent Merlin Bird ID app on your smart phone or other digital device, and via educational videos from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A reminder though, to ensure you use Birdlife’s Birdata App, when entering your data, surveys and observations.

One of the delights of bird watching has always been that you can do it anywhere, including right at home. Take a quiet walk or enjoy a moment of reflection at your window: birds will be with you. Now is a great time to deepen your knowledge and appreciation with resources like these:

• The free Merlin Bird ID app helps you identify more than 6,000 bird species on six continents. Answer five simple questions to get a short list of likely birds near you. And if you already have Merlin, don’t miss these five advanced tips, including amazing Photo ID.
• Practice the Four Keys to Bird Identification. Put names to the birds you see by focusing on Size & Shape, Color Pattern, Behavior, and Habitat. Learn from experts through their Inside Birding videos.
• Play Bird Song Hero and brush up on birding by ear so you’re ready for the sweet songs of spring.
• If you do Project FeederWatch, they’re extending the season through the end of April so you can keep right on counting. And now’s the time to set up nest boxes—NestWatch has amazing resources at All About Birdhouses.
• Take a free eBird Essentials course to get the most fun from your outings, save your birding memories, and contribute to science.

Click on the the above links and following images to access these resources.

Backyards: Still The Best Places To Go Bird Watching

Get More From Merlin Bird ID With These Powerful Features

Inside Birding: How-To Videos For Learning Bird Identification

Bird ID Skills: How To Learn Bird Songs And Calls

Connecting Country calendar competition: entry highlights so far

Posted on 23 April, 2020 by Ivan

Last week we announced our inaugural Connecting Country calendar competition and so far the entries have been flowing in steadily all week. 

Our theme is woodland birds and this photo competition is open to all Connecting Country members and people of the Mount Alexander region. The aim of the competition is to highlight our special woodland bird community and share the passion and skills of our passionate local photographers, as well as produce a beautifully printed calendar for the year 2021.

The calendar will be available to purchase and will feature the top 12 photographs, as selected by the Connecting Country team. There is a limit of two entries per photographer, and the competition opened on Monday 20 April and will close at 5 pm on Monday 18 May 2020. Both experienced and amateur photographers are encouraged to participate. Simply email your chosen images to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au by 5 pm on 18 May 2020.

We have been extremely impressed with the entries so far and thought we would share the highlights this week in a gallery below.

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed so far! Keep the entries coming until Monday 18 May 2020.

White-eared Honeyeater by James Bowden

Eastern Yellow Robin by Peter Boekel

Varied Sittella by Mick Evans

Square-tailed Kite by Damian Kelly

Calendar competition details:

• Photos must be relevant to the theme of woodland birds and taken in the Mount Alexander region in central Victoria.
• There is a maximum of two photo entries per photographer.
• Entries must be submitted by email to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au, including the location, date and subject of the photo.
• Original photos must be at least 3 MB for image quality, but to enter please email files under 1 MB.
• Entries close on Monday 18 May 2020.
• Winning images will be selected by Connecting Country and published in a 2021 woodland birds calendar.
• There will be no commission paid to competition winners, but full recognition of your work will be featured and acknowledged.

Further details on the competition format and conditions are provided on our website: click here

Announcing our new woodland birds photography competition!

Posted on 16 April, 2020 by Frances

We are super excited to announce the inaugural Connecting Country calendar competition ….. drum-roll please!

Our theme is woodland birds and this photo competition is open to all Connecting Country members and people of the Mount Alexander region. The aim of the competition is to highlight our special woodland bird community and share the passion and skills of our passionate local photographers, as well as produce a beautiful printed calendar for the year 2021.

The calendar will be available to purchase and will feature the top 12 photographs, as selected by the Connecting Country team. There will be a limit of two entries per photographer, and the competition opens on Monday 20 April and will close at 5 pm on Monday 18 May 2020. Both experienced and amateur photographers are encouraged to participate. Simply email your chosen images to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au by 5 pm on 18 May 2020.

This stunning image of a Diamond Firetail is one of our most treasured photographs from over the years (Photo: Geoff Park)

Calendar competition details:

• Photos must be relevant to the theme of woodland birds and taken in the Mount Alexander region in central Victoria.
• There is a maximum of two photo entries per photographer.
• Entries must be submitted by email to ivan@connectingcountry.org.au, including the location, date and subject of the photo.
• Original photos must be at least 3 MB for image quality, but to enter please email files under 1 MB.
• Entries close on Monday 18 May 2020.
• Winning images will be selected by Connecting Country and published in a 2021 woodland birds calendar.
• There will be no commission paid to competition winners, but full recognition of your work will be featured and acknowledged.

Further details on the competition format and conditions are provided on our website: click here

Checking the health of our habitat: project update

Posted on 16 April, 2020 by Ivan

In 2009, Connecting Country created a Biodiversity Blueprint with the help of the community and our partners. From the outset, scientific monitoring has been a high priority at Connecting Country. Monitoring allows us to observe changes in biodiversity over time, which gives us valuable information for ecological decision-making.

One of our monitoring priorities is the Brush-tailed Phascogale (photo by Jess Lawton)

We’ve been fortunate to have a world-class landscape ecologist, Professor Andrew Bennett, assist in creating our monitoring programs for woodland birds and the brush-tailed phascogale.

After the success of our ‘Stewards for Woodland Birds’ project, in 2018 we were delighted to announce we obtained funding from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to support the review and transition of our monitoring programs. Habitat ‘Health Check: empowering citizen scientists to monitor habitat health in Central Victoria’ has been the project we required to transition to a citizen science model, with volunteers managed and supported by a paid Monitoring Coordinator.

Project achievements

After two years, Habitat Health Check is nearing completion. Our aim was to create a collaborative, robust, citizen science project that monitors native animals and plants in the Mount Alexander region. The project involved reviewing our four existing long-term monitoring programs: birds, nest boxes, plants, and frogs and reptiles. We then developed a new community-driven model that empowers our enthusiastic and skilled volunteers, maintains scientific rigor, and promotes online data sharing. We’re now sharing our valuable data with the community via the Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity online portal and the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas.

During Habitat Health Check, our hardworking volunteers collected 2,280 new bird records, bringing our total bird records to over 26,000 individual bird records, and 541 records for our nest box monitoring. This is an amazing effort from our volunteers and a huge achievement for our Monitoring Coordinator. After reviewing our existing monitoring programs and running a series of community workshops, we have focused our resources and volunteer base, ensuring we have a sustainable monitoring program for the future.

Connecting Country’s Monitoring Coordinator, Jess Lawton, said: ‘We have held many workshops and meetings over the past two years to review and refine our monitoring program to ensure we make the best use of community resources, and that our work is congruent with both Connecting Country’s goals and areas of interest in the community. We value our volunteers and have included them in every stage of the development of our monitoring programs. I believe we now have a stronger and more focused program, after careful consideration of feedback from the community, volunteers and other stakeholders’.

Latest monitoring reports

Here are the most recent reports on our nest box and woodland bird monitoring:

It is a joy to get out and monitor birds such as the lovely Spotted Pardalote (photo by Patrick Kavanagh)

Still time to get involved

We are still open to more volunteers for our bird and nest box monitoring programs, if you are keen to be involved in our ongoing monitoring for ecological change. Bird monitoring is conducted each winter and spring, and nest box monitoring is conducted in autumn. We’re closely monitoring the COVID-19 restrictions and will adjust our activities as required to keep everyone safe. For more details, please contact our monitoring coordinator Jess Lawton (jess@connectingcountry.org.au).

Listening Earth: morning bushwalks online

Posted on 16 April, 2020 by Ivan

Each week we are discovering more and more unique projects that are being delivered online and to your desk from a variety of scientists, institutions and other clever folk. One local project to watch and interact with each morning is Listening Earth’s daily morning bushwalks, delivered through the Facebook platform.

The beauty of the Listening Earth morning walks is the commentary from Newstead local soundscape guru Andrew Skeoch, who gives an entertaining and informative insight into the forest ecology and birds present in the morning chorus. Many of you will be familiar with Andrew, who spoke at Connecting Country’s 2019 Annual General Meeting. Andrew has an amazing personal collection of sonic and natural landscapes that transport you to wild places and remind us to tune into nature. To revisit our blog on Andrew’s talk at our 2019 AGM – click here.

The daily nature walks take place on Andrew’s property near Newstead in central Victoria, and have unearthed many treasures to date, including the sounds of the morning bird chorus and some unexpected guests. We also enjoy the insights he has into our local ecology and his connection to this land. Click on the video below to watch the nature walk, or visit his Facebook page – click here

https://www.facebook.com/listeningearth/videos/310664423232330/

Andrew also has an excellent series of talks and presentations, which can be viewed by clicking on the image below. In nearly 20 years of recording in remote locations, he has been fascinated by the diverse, wondrous and delicate sounds of our natural world.

A mountain of monitoring data added to Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity

Posted on 16 April, 2020 by Ivan

Connecting Country has partnered with Federation University to incorporate our monitoring data into the State Wide Integrated Flora and Fauna Teams (SWIFFT) ‘Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity’ project, an online data portal. This will give the community, landholders and our stakeholders a chance to see how our data looks across the landscape, and will allow for easy access to the data for anyone who is interested.

With coordination by Connecting Country’s Monitoring Coordinator, Jess Lawton, the data has been submitted to SWIFFT and is expected to be available for access later this year. ‘We will be very excited to see our mountains of monitoring data on a visual platform such as VVB and we believe this will make it much easier for the community to visualise the valuable work they have been involved with for over a decade,’ said Ms Lawton.

Many beautiful birds in our region are now well documented in online databases (Yellow-tufted Honeyeater photo by Jane Rusden)

Sharing our data with SWIFFT is part of our Habitat Health Check project, funded by the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to empower citizen scientists to monitor habitat health in central Victoria. The project is nearing completion in June 2020 and has enabled Connecting Country to review our existing biodiversity monitoring programs and transition to a sustainable model for future monitoring.

Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity (VVB) is a place to discover and share spatial information on Victoria’s environmental values, conservation activities and research. VVB is a community resource and welcomes your feedback, input and contribution. VVB brings together existing environmental data sets and information created and managed by government agencies, organisations, community groups and individuals.

VVB allows users to create maps and view projects (image by VVB)

Connecting Country is excited by the potential to represent over a decade of biodiversity monitoring data in a simple visual format. We encourage anyone wishing to share spatial information on biodiversity values from anywhere in Victoria to contact VVB to explore options for visualising your data on VVB.

The VVB provides tools to:

• Generate a report with lists of environmental features, such as flora and fauna records, for a selected area of interest
• view map layers of environmental features and observations in any area of Victoria.
• Share information about your environmental project or research.

For further information on the Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity project – click here.

All our Connecting Country monitoring sites will be added to the visual database (image by VVB)

Online training in wildlife acoustics

Posted on 9 April, 2020 by Ivan

Self-isolating? Unable to get out in the field or to the office as usual? Why not take advantage of this time to brush up on your recording and analysis skills? (and get some grown-up conversation if you’ve got kids at home!)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, US Company Wildlife Acoustics will be running a program of online events to help keep you sane. They are starting with some free training courses and drop-in sessions. Wildlife Acoustics create wildlife acoustic monitoring tools, specially designed to help scientists make impactful discoveries that expand our understanding of this biologically diverse planet. They are also keen to engage with the global monitoring community and ensure we can chat online, compare projects and listen to experts in their field.

Wildlife Acoustics has a full list of courses available for free online – click here. Popular courses book out quickly, but new courses are being added all the time. One of the most relevant ones for Connecting Country and our community is the following training session on Kaleidocope Pro, a suite of software tools that let you cluster, visualise and analyse wildlife recordings, and automatically identify species.

From Wildlife Acoustics:

Introduction to Kaleidoscope Pro for Birds and Land Animals

Date: Tuesday 14 April 2020

Time: 6-8 am Pacific US time, 9 am-11 am Eastern US time, 2-4 pm UK time, 3-5 pm Western European time – by our calculation this corresponds to 11 pm to 1 am in Victoria, Australia.

Are you interested in checking out Kaleidoscope Pro software for your acoustic file analysis? Have you just started to work with Kaleidoscope Pro and would like an in-depth primer on the basics of the software? Even if you are a power user of Kaleidoscope Pro there’s a good chance you’ll pick up a few new tips in this webinar. We’ll cover the basic functions of the Control Panel window. We’ll then spend time examining audio files and going through all the details of what the Viewer window has to offer. This webinar is an excellent foundation for more advanced topics such as cluster analysis and building classifiers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWjTWUJXGzw

Live cams bring the birds to you

Posted on 9 April, 2020 by Ivan

As we look out the home office window today, it is a picture-perfect autumn day: windless, colourful, mild, and particularly vibrant and green due to the recent rains. In many ways, it is the perfect day to go bird watching, even from the comfort of your home. Most of us are already craving interaction with nature, walks, rides and group gatherings, but for now we will be isolating in the nature of our homes.

Fortunately there are many online resources that can keep us connected to nature, such as numerous nature-based identification exercises, skill testing, live cameras, videos and online quizzes. While these are never as exciting as seeing or touching the real thing, we are very impressed with the list of activities put together by the experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Below is a summary of their suggestions for live cameras that can be viewed from the comfort of your home. You can watch the action live on the webcams setup all over the world – allowing for time zone differences. We particularly like the very lively and colourful tiny toucans in Panama.

From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

Stream one of our Bird Cams for peace, beauty and intimacy with wild creatures. Many of our users keep a cam streaming all day long just for the calming outdoor sounds that filter in.

• Bring nesting owls, hawks, and ospreys into your home

Or watch a rotating cast of birds at our feeder cams:

• Ruffed Grouse and Evening Grosbeaks in snowy Ontario
• Blue Jays and Northern Cardinals at our offices in Ithaca, New York
• Tanagers and tiny toucans  (called aracaris) in tropical Panama

Backyard science cures for boredom

Posted on 2 April, 2020 by Ivan

No doubt you have seen some great ideas of how to remain engaged and occupied during the isolation phase of the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s a very challenging time and impacts continue to spread across the globe. Connecting Country is adapting our community engagement model, to deliver some events to our audience, community and stakeholders in the comfort of their own home. Stay tuned for when we advertise these events in the coming months. We also hope to produce some videos down the track to keep everyone engaged.

We have discovered some excellent activities you can do from the safety of your own backyard and still contribute to science.  ‘The Conservation’ recently published an inspiring article. Please enjoy the following extract highlighting many useful activities and ideas to contribute to backyard science. To view the full article  –  click here.

Environmental projects need your support too

The yellow-footed antechinus (Antechinus flavipes) is a curious little marsupial (photo by Jane Rusden)

If you’d like to get your mind off COVID-19, there’s a plethora of other options for citizen scientists. You can contribute to conservation and nature recovery efforts – a task many took to after the recent bushfires. Some sites ask volunteers to digitise data from ongoing environmental monitoring programs. Contributors need no prior experience, and interpret photos taken with remote digital cameras using online guides. One example is Western Australia’s Western Shield Camera Watch, available through Zooniverse.

Other sites crowdsource volunteers to transcribe data from natural history collections (DigiVol), historical logbooks from explorers, and weather observation stations (Southern Weather Discovery).

Citizen science programs such as eBird, BirdLife Australia’s Birdata, the Australian Museum’s FrogID, ClimateWatch, QuestaGame, NatureMapr, and the Urban Wildlife App, all have freely available mobile applications that let you contribute to ‘big’ databases on urban and rural wildlife.

Nature watching is a great self-isolation activity because you can do it anywhere, including at home. Questagame runs a series of ‘bioquests’ where people of all ages and experience levels can photograph animals and plants they encounter.

In April, we’ll also have the national Wild Pollinator Count. This project invites participants to watch any flowering plant for just ten minutes, and record insects that visit the flowers. The aim is to boost knowledge on wild pollinator activity.

The data collected through citizen science apps are used by researchers to explore animal migration, understand ranges of species, and determine how changes in climate, air quality and habitat affect animal behaviour.

This year for the first time, several Australian cities are participating in iNaturalist’s City Nature Challenge. The organisers have adapted planned events with COVID-19 in mind, and suggest ways to document nature while maintaining social distancing. You can simply capture what you can see in your backyard, or when taking a walk, or put a moth light out at night to see what it attracts.

For those at home with children, there are a variety of projects aimed at younger audiences.

From surveying galaxies to the Bird Academy Play Lab’s Games Powered By Birds – starting young can encourage a lifetime of learning.

If you’re talented at writing or drawing, why not keep a nature diary, and share your observations through a blog.

By contributing to research through digital platforms, citizen scientists offer a repository of data experts might not otherwise have access to. The Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA) website has details on current projects you can join, or how to start your own.

Apart from being a valuable way to pass time while self-isolating, citizen science reminds us of the importance of community and collaboration at a time it’s desperately needed.

Take a guess….how many Eltham Copper Butterflies did we see last summer?

Posted on 2 April, 2020 by Ivan

The Eltham Copper Butterfly (ECB) is one of our most treasured and interesting threatened species, and we are fortunate enough to have the largest population in the world right here in the Mount Alexander region of central Victoria. In the past 12 months, the special little butterfly has attracted much-needed attention, attracting funding for three separate projects in our region.

Connecting Country obtained funding from the Mount Alexander Shire Council to increase community awareness and education regarding the butterfly, and to support citizen science monitoring in key locations to learn more about the local populations. We worked closely with local ecologists Elaine Bayes and Karl Just, who with support from Wettenhall Environment Trust continued their vital work on mapping local Eltham Copper Butterfly habitat and distribution. We also joined in the excellent Butterfly Celebration Day held in Castlemaine Botanical Gardens in November 2019. Our hope is that all Castlemaine residents now know about this amazing threatened species living on their doorstep!

Connecting Country delivered a popular community education workshop, and worked with ecologists Elaine and Karl to promote and coordinate four community monitoring sessions for Eltham Copper Butterfly around Castlemaine VIC over November 2019 to January 2020, when the adult butterflies were out and about (for details – click here). These events attracted excellent numbers of people keen to learn more about the life cycle of this butterfly and to participate in butterfly monitoring within local butterfly habitat. The aim was to support interested community members to learn how to monitor with expert guidance, providing skills for them to become citizen scientists, conduct more monitoring and (potentially) discover new populations.

photo by Connecting Country

Photo: Connecting country

Photo: Elaine Bayes

The Eltham Copper Butterfly is a small and attractive butterfly with bright copper coloring on the tops of its wings visible during the summer flight season (photo: Elaine Bayes)

Well, the results are in, the numbers crunched and the maps produced! We now have some great insight our local Eltham Copper Butterfly populations, including previously unexplored areas of potential butterfly habitat. In total 113 individual Eltham Copper Butterflies were observed in the prime flying period between 15 November 2019 and the 3 January 2020.

Monitoring results

Our monitoring experts, Elaine Bayes and Karl Just, provided the following summary of the results, accompanied by a very detailed and useful map of the areas they visited:

• The monitoring team searched, ranked and mapped all of Kalimna Park (170 hectares) for butterfly habitat in November 2019. Time spent to carry out rapid assessment was 48 hours.
• This work determined that out of 170 ha of Kalimna Park, 73.25 ha was classified as prime potential Eltham Copper Butterfly habitat (i.e., medium or high quality Sweet Bursaria habitat).
• Using Eltham Copper Butterfly habitat mapping, the team searched areas that were determined to have good butterfly habitat potential. Using this method the group located five new Eltham Copper Butterfly sub-populations and extended the area of known Eltham Copper Butterfly occupancy from 3 ha to 8 ha.
• In total 113 individual Eltham Copper Butterflies were observed in the prime flying period between 15 November 2019 and the 3 January 2020 (some of which may have been double-counted from resurveying same area).
• The total survey effort or time spent searching for butterflies in this period was 187 hours.

More about wonderful Eltham Copper Butterfly

Castlemaine’s Kalimna Park is home to the largest remaining population of the threatened Eltham Copper Butterfly in the world. To learn more about this fascinating little butterfly, including ecology, distribution and information on how to identify this species from similar look-alike butterflies – click here. Please enjoy the video below, courtesy of the N-danger-D Youtube Channel, that has some excellent footage of this wonderful butterfly and symbiotic ant species.

We would like to thank the Mount Alexander Shire Council and Wettenhall Environment Trust for providing the funding for these projects. We hope to continue to monitor Eltham Copper Butterfly and implement management actions to help our local butterfly populations thrive over the next decade and beyond. 

Frogging on

Posted on 31 March, 2020 by Frances

Autumn is a great time for frogs and recording frogs using the excellent FrogID app developed by the Australian Museum. The Mount Alexander region is home to around ten native frog species. Perhaps you have some frogs in your backyard, property or local dam that you can visit safely while adhering to current safety isolation requirements.

We know that the reduction of permitted leisure activities is presenting challenges – so here are some froggy suggestions from the FrogID team to help make the most of your time at home:

• Record frogs in your back yard: if you already have frogs in your garden or property then we want you to record them daily if they are calling. Send those records in, our validation team are working from home and are keen to hear your submissions. If government advice has not changed, record frogs on your daily walk, whilst maintaining physical distance from others.
• Download an activity sheet: if you have children looking for a fun activity, we have a fantastic activity sheet you can download – click here. There is a quiz, colouring in, and other cool activities. It’s all set up for you to print from home!
• Explore the FrogID app or website: the FrogID app and website have hundreds of species profiles for all of Australia’s frogs, you can play their calls, view pictures and learn all about where they live and how they breed.
• Build a frog habitat in your garden: for those who want to get your hands dirty and don’t yet have a frog pond, this could be a good time to start. Upcycle that old bathtub, recycle some old downpipes, create an oasis for your froggy friends. Don’t forget to record any frogs once they arrive, and send in pictures of your garden with your submissions on the FrogID app.

To learn more about the FrogID app see our previous post (click here) or download the FrogID app (click here).

Our Director, Frances recently spotted this handsome Spotted Marsh Frog.

Spotted Marsh Frog (photo by Frances Howe)

Tanya’s tawny tales: a good news story

Posted on 27 March, 2020 by Ivan

We were thrilled to receive a well-written story from our former superstar staff member, Tanya Loos, about the journey of a Tawny Frogmouth. Tawny Frogmouths are often confused with owls, but are actually more closely related to the nightjars. Tanya gives us a great insight into these magnificent creatures and the journey of a special Tawny’s road to recovery. Please enjoy the following words and photos from Tanya.

The question I am most frequently asked is ‘I have found a bird that seems to be hurt – what should I do?’ It is always the same answer – capture the bird using a tea towel or towel, and place into an appropriately sized cardboard box. Then pop the box in a quiet room away from pets and people – and call a wildlife rescue number for assistance.

Usually it is a friend or local person – but a couple of weeks ago I got ‘the question’ via text from my teenage nephew! Heart burst moment! Nephew and Mum had seen a bird on the road in Hepburn – an owl they thought, that wasn’t flying away.

The owl turned out to be a Tawny Frogmouth – a much loved night bird that is commonly found in local forests and gardens. Even though Tawnies are brownish grey in colour, like owls, with big round eyes, like owls, they are quite different , and in a completely different bird family.

Owls (Strigidae family) are predators who hunt and kill their prey with their huge fierce talons. Tawny Frogmouths capture their prey – mice, frogs, and insects with their beaks. Their feet are strangely weak, without big claws, and are used only for perching.

In Australia, we have three species of Frogmouth in the Podargidae family – the Tawny which is found all over the country, and the Papuan and Marbled Frogmouths which are found in Cape York and southeast Queensland.

Another difference between owls and Frogmouths is that Frogmouths are masters of camouflage, with finely patterned feathers, who adopt a special ‘broken stick’ posture, where the Frogmouths close their eyes and point their heads up to the sky. Owls never do this.

One of the golden rules of wildlife rescue is that if an animal survives and can be released, it must be released where it was found. Animals such as Tawny Frogmouth have specific territories or home ranges – where they know where the best places to find food are, the best sleeping (roosting) sites and nesting sites. This area is also where their mates or family members are! Our family Tawny was taken to a wildlife carer in Gisborne – and after a week or two, I travelled down to see if the bird was ready for release.

In the picture you can see the loving hands of Lynda the wildlife carer as she was checking whether Tawny’s wings were strong enough to fly. You can also see that the feathers are slightly brown – which means she is a female bird! The males are completely grey – a lovely ash colour, with the same fine patterning.

Tawny Frogmouths are often confused with owls, but are actually more closely related to the nightjars (photo by Tanya Loos)

Tawny wasn’t ready then, but yesterday Lynda texted me saying that Tawny has made a full recovery and is now ready to go back to her Hepburn forest.

The car collision must have been a mild one. Sadly this is the exception – as animal loving folks know – death by car is all too common. Driving slowly and carefully at night, dusk and dawn is the only solution.

To contact Wildlife Victoria phone: (03) 8400 7300 – and they will refer you to one of the many local wildlife carers in our region.

by Tanya Loos

Connecting Country still hard at work!

Posted on 25 March, 2020 by Frances

Koala at Moonlight Flat (photo by Frances Howe)

Here at Connecting Country we take our social responsibility seriously, and while there are landscapes and people needing our help, we continue to operate and support our community. However, it may be in a slightly different format to normal to reduce infection risk.

In the interests of health and safety, all our staff are working from home as much as possible. Therefore our office at the Hub is temporarily closed. However, you can still contact us via phone or email. If there’s no answer on the office phone, please leave a message and we’ll get back to you. Our operating hours are unchanged: 8.30 am to 4.30 pm Monday to Thursday.

We are reworking our planned community events, converting them to online workshop format or postponing to later in the year. We’re reviewing our other activities with the aim of continuing our important work where possible without risking the health of our staff or community. Although some tasks will not be possible, there is much we can still do.

We will be adaptable and stay focussed until we all come through the other side of this difficult time.

We appreciate your support in helping keep our community and environment healthy! Please enjoy our favourite video below, from Remember the Wild, about our Woodland Bird Program.

Bird of the month: Australian Owlet-nightjar

Posted on 25 March, 2020 by Ivan

Welcome to our second-ever Bird of the month, a partnership between Connecting Country and BirdLife Castlemaine District. Each month we’ll be taking a close look at one special local bird species. We’re excited to be joining forces to deliver you a different bird each month, seasonally adjusted, and welcome any suggestions from the community and our supporters. We are lucky enough to have the talented and charismatic Jane Rusden from BirdLife Castlemaine District writing about our next bird of the month, with some assistance from the brilliant Damian Kelly. You may be familiar with the second bird off the ranks.

Australian Owlet-nightjar (Aegotheles cristatus)

The Australian Owlet-nightjar almost looks like a sugar glider, very cute with huge dark eyes peering from a hollow. Well known local author and photographer, Damian Kelly, has been trying for several years to photograph the resident Owlet-nightjars on my property as they soak up sun in their hollow entrance. However, they seem to know when he is coming and vanish.

Until recently, when he finally managed to coax the two birds at my place into modelling for him. Thanks for the photo Damian. The Owlet-nightjar is a near ground level, small and agile, insect and spider hunter, who emerges on dark often to drink and then search for prey. They will take prey on the wing, by pouncing from a low perch or running along the ground. So if you’ve got too many spiders for your liking, install a couple of nest boxes for Owlet-nightjars as they love them.

The Australian Owlet-nightjar is one of Australia’s most widespread nocturnal birds (photo by Jane Rusden)

The Australian owlet-nightjar is colloquially known as the moth owl (photo by Damien Kelly)

Interestingly they are neither owl nor nightjar, but blend of these two, and a distinct species. Around their small bill and wide mouth are long rictal bristles for nocturnal hunting, reminiscent of nightjars. Like owls they have a round head and huge forward-facing eyes. Unlike nightjars, the eyes of the Owlet-Nightjar do not reflect light and they can be a very hard bird to see at night. Both male and female birds look indistinguishable, although the female can be slightly larger by 2-5%, which is impossible to actually see. Mostly they appear soft mottled grey with darker head stripes running back from the eyes middle of the head. If you see a rufous coloured Owlet-nightjar, it is most likely female.

Immature birds look almost the same as their parents, which is a nice change when you are trying to identify birds, as in many species they can look quite different. This species, thought relativity common in Box Ironbark Forest, can be incredibly difficult to find and see. They have a habit of dropping low in their hollow and out of sight before we’re aware of them.

Occasionally you may be lucky enough to see one that has flushed and is perched on a branch, but your best hope is in a hollow in just about anything from trees, to rocks, to buildings, usually not overly high up. I started putting up nest boxes when our resident bird tried to roost amongst tools in the back of the ute for several days! This year I discovered two Owlet-nightjars habitually roosting about 200 meters apart. The photos show the one in the nest box and the one in the tree hollow. Damian’s research found that pairs mate for life, but reside in nearby hollows.

Owlet-nightjars are often heard though rarely seen (photo by Jane Rusden)

They will have a dozen or more hollows they use over their home ranges of up to 80 hectares. I wonder if the two I see every day are a mated pair?

To listen to the varied and lovely calls of the Australian owlet-nightjar, please – click here

Words by Jane Rusden
Research material contributed by Damian Kelly
Photos by Damian Kelly and Jane Rusden

Prickly plants providing homes for wildlife

Posted on 19 March, 2020 by Ivan

Eucalyptus trees, their abundant nectar-rich flowers and the hollows that develop in older trees are typical habitat elements that spring to mind when thinking about wildlife habitat in Box-Ironbark Forests and woodlands. While these overstorey habitat elements are important, we also know that a diversity of understorey plant species are necessary for healthy resilient local forests and woodlands. And importantly for wildlife, this layer of vegetation within our local forests, gives protection, food and places to nest for many species of insects, small mammals, reptiles and birds, allowing them to survive and reproduce, and disperse through the landscape.

From clearing and disturbance that occured during the goldrush, the introduction of grazing animals over time, and invasive plants and animals, understorey plants have been lost or have greatly decreased in distribution and regeneration success throughout our landscape. This loss of species diversity reduces the complexity of habitats and their ability to respond, or bounce back from threats such as climate change.

Thankfully Connecting Country have secured funding over the past few years to return a suite of these understorey plants (many of which are prickly) to our region through landholder support and education to restore these vital species.

The most recent project supporting this work is ‘Prickly Plants for Wildlife on Small Properties’. The main focus of this two-year project is assisting landholders on smaller properties who may have missed out on previous Connecting Country projects that typically targeted larger properties (>10 Ha).

Connecting Country staff met with landholders who expressed interest in restoring the bush on their property, to assess the vegetation, identify threats and provide tubestock plants of local species suitable for their vegetation type. Where older eucalypts with hollows were lacking within the bush on these properties nestboxes were installed for species such as Brush-tailed Phascogale, Owlet Nightjar and microbats. This project is generously funded by the North Central Catchment Management Authority to improve the health and management of our landscape.

Landholders in the Mount Alexander region of Victoria have planted local indigenous species of understorey appropriate for their vegetation type.

Microbats were provided with homes through installation of nestboxes on properties lacking natural tree hollows.

Connecting Country upskill on Climate Future Plots

Posted on 12 March, 2020 by Ivan

We’re very proud of what we do at Connecting Country. After a decade of landscape restoration, we have helped restore 9,500 hectares of habitat, equating to around 6% of the Mount Alexander Shire. We know this is only the beginning, and more is needed to provide vital habitat, vegetation, education and monitoring across our region for years to come. We also know that we must keep learning and updating our skill set to adapt to climate change and the likely scenarios that will occur across our region.

It was with great excitement that some staff members attended a recent Climate Future Labs workshop in Bendigo. The workshop was hosted by Greening Australia and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP). Greening Australia and DELWP have been working with a range of organisations to develop guidelines for community groups and agencies to improve the resilience of plants in your neighbourhood by planting Climate Future Plots.

What are Climate Future Plots?

Climate Future Plots are simply areas of revegetated and restored land that include plant species that already occur naturally in the area, but also include plants of the same species from other areas with different climates. This genetic mixing helps increase the capacity of the plants in our natural environment to adapt to a changing climate. As the climate changes, these plant communities will be better equipped to change with it. By including a mixture of local and climate pre-adapted plant genotypes (such as seed from hotter and drier, or cooler and wetter climates) the plots aim to enhance the resilience of natural landscapes to the changing climate. Through monitoring, we will also have more accurate information to actively inform future restoration and biodiversity conservation management.

Climate Future Plots are valuable because they:

• Develop climate-resilient habitat by creating natural areas that maintain ecosystem function in uncertain climate scenarios.
• Act as nursery sites due to their high genetic diversity.
• Enable testing of predictions and proposed management strategies under a changing climate.
• Inform future adaptive management by showing how species respond to climate interventions.
• Enable community engagement and awareness by providing opportunities to work together.

Connecting Country and Climate Future Plots

Connecting Country have conducted strategic revegetation across hundreds of properties in our region. We found the Climate Future Plots training and guide an excellent resource for our future activities and climate-proof revegetation projects.

Restoration Coordinator at Connecting Country, Bonnie Humphreys, said ‘This workshop provided us with a guide to how to plan revegetation under a changing climate, including working out what our future climate will look like, and how to select the appropriate species and provenances to plant’. ‘It is important that we plan our habitat restoration practices in line with future climate predictions, based on the best science we have available,’ said Ms Humphreys.

While the guide is a great resource, it will still require a lot of planning to coordinate and implement the guidelines. Our staff and committee are urgently seeking funding to start implementing the guide, and expand our networks so we can source suitable provenances of plants and seeds. Once we secure funding, we will start work on planning and constructing Climate Future Plots in the Mount Alexander region.

Guidelines

A copy of the ‘Establishing Victoria’s Ecological Infrastructure: A Guide to Creating Climate Future Plots’ is available online for downloaded – click here.

The purpose of the guide is to provide a step-by-step process for organisations and community groups to plan, establish and monitor Climate Future Plots, and to establish a network of climate-resilient plant communities across Victoria and ideally nationally.

Here are some highlights from our revegetation program, which have survived well in the recent extreme weather, so far (photos by Connecting Country)

photo by Connecting Country