2011 Emily Bedggood
RESEARCH: A new PhD Student has begun looking at some of the important factors impacting upon reintroduction success and failure for rock-wallabies. Rebecca West began her PhD with the University of Adelaide and Conservation Ark—Zoos SA in March 2010.
She is looking at two species of rock-wallabies; the Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies in the Grampians National Park, now in their third year of reintroduction and Black-footed Rock-wallabies (known to traditional owners as Warru) who will be reintroduced to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia this year.
Rebecca is using GPS collars to monitor the movement patterns of wallabies at each site to assess how they use the habitat and how they interact with one another. This will provide critical information on the possible capacity of each site and the effects of population density.
At both sites Rebecca is using experimental patch burns to look at how fire regimes can be used to improve the habitat structure and food availability for rock-wallabies.
RELEASES: October was a busy and wet month in the Grampians with Mt William receiving over 109mm of rain. This, following Septembers 137mm, made for boggy tracks in the Grampians. It seems to be becoming the norm that traps are filled overnight. Traps were set on Sunday afternoon and by Monday morning all the animals we were after were sitting patiently in traps. Only the eastern half of the site was trapped, as Shadow, the pouch young at the western end, was reaching 7 months and we were not yet ready to disturb him. Photographs over the last few months have shown him growing and begin to venture out of the pouch. Four adult BTRW were trapped, three female and one male. All animals were in good health. One female, #110, released in 2009 was found to have a small one month old pouch young. It was a male, taking our number of wild born young to two.
In the week following trapping five more Rock-wallabies were released into the Moora Moora Creek site. The released animals were stud book numbers 129, 133, 135, 136 and 137 consisting of two females and three males. All animals were fitted with GPS collars as part of Rebecca West’s PhD studies. The collars take multiple fixes during the night and a 2 to 3 fixes through out the day. This has been a big advantage for the monitoring team as it is much less intensive and will hopefully be more accurate than radio tracking which has been done in the past. The collars still have a VHF radio transmitter on them which allows monitoring for mortalities and general locations.
THE FLOOD: Access to the rock-wallaby release site was blocked for two weeks before staff were able to go in and clear trees off tracks Also the fox baiting programme had to be suspended. But the new collars proved very valuable as they could be read from the air, demonstrating that all animals were well and safe.
VOLUNTEER INVOLVEMENT: Recently the Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby has been included in Conservation Volunteers Australia’s (CVA) Wild Futures Program. CVA is an Australia-wide, not-for-profit organisation assisting the community to volunteer in hands on environmental and natural resource management projects. For more information visit www.conservationvolunteers.com.au/wildfutures/
Ed: There is a heap of information in The Shadow, the newsletter of the BTRW Support Group, which Emily edits. To get a copy, Ph 53 622 111 or email:
Note: Adelaide and Healesville Zoos have breeding BTRWs on display, and Halls Gap Zoo has some “retired” animals.