Jackaroo? Where are you? How can he have gone? Oh! There he is! Without his collar!

Hi again from Bill Ellis, a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Fred Bercovitch in the Behavioral Biology Division at CRES. I have just returned from another trip to St. Bees Island, where I found the koalas in some most unusual places, and most of the females had young in their pouches, which means plenty of babies to catch up with on the next trip.

Jackaroo is a big male koala that can usually be found close to the beach near the ranges of Natasha and Xena (two females). When I went looking for him on this trip, he was nowhere to be found. He had lost his collar (the collars self-release over time) and I wondered what had become of him. We sometimes follow koalas in our program for several years and then they either move away or lose their collars and we are unable to find them. However, we spent quite a bit of time following Jackaroo over the summer - we even recorded his call which you can hear on one of Jen Tobey’s blogs. He is a large male resident at our site, and we are keen to continue following him in the upcoming breeding season. So we were understandably quite eager to find him.

Fortunately, after several days of searching, we found him. My team of Earthwatch volunteers was searching an elevated knoll on the island and spotted a male with ear tags belonging to Jackaroo (each koala has its own colored and numbered tags). We managed to catch him (we waved rags above his head, which encouraged him to descend the tree, then we put him in a bag) and fitted him with a new VHF radio collar and followed him daily for the next week. Surprisingly, he wandered back to his normal range.

We know that koalas range over slightly different areas in breeding and nonbreeding seasons and over time their ranges seem to have a degree of drift (they reuse about 60 percent of the previous year’s range each year), but the excursions some of them make have us puzzled. That is why we trailed the GPS collars (purchased with an Ocelots grant) last year and why we are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next shipment of ten more collars.

This year, for the first time, we will be able to know where the koalas are constantly from the start of the breeding season until most of the young are born. The collars log the location of the animals every two hours, meaning that if koalas, like Jackaroo, move to another part of the island while I am not there, we will know. I wonder how many other koalas leave their normal areas when I go away?

Dr. Bill Ellis is a Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellow for CRES.

Here’s more information about Bill’s koala project.

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