Hi again from St. Bees Island. It has been a busy year and we have been scouting the nearby islands for koalas as well as following the usual suspects on St. Bees. (Read a previous blog, Keepers Track Koalas in Australia.)

During the last trip to the island, we caught almost all of the koalas that had been fitted with GPS collars. The exception was Quest, a male that had wandered to the other side of the island. When we found him, he was in a very tricky position high up a gum tree, so we left him for the next trip. It is always both exciting and worrying when we get to download the GPS collars. Unlike the normal radio collars, which we follow using a radio receiver until we find the koala and then record the location manually, these new-generation collars record the location of the koala every two hours. The worrying part is that for the last 12 months, we have had some teething problems: some of the collars have not collected as much data as we would like. Fortunately for us, on this trip all the collars worked well, with some collecting even more data that we expected. For one male, we collected a position every two hours for five months, so there is not much that he had been up to that we don’t now know about!

This means we now know when Quest left “The Knoll” (our main study site), what time of day he traveled, and whether any of the other collared males or females were near him when he decided to move. It turns out that he was very close to another large male (Trotsky, also with a GPS collar), so it seems that Quest will have to wait until he is a bit bigger if he wants to get back on The Knoll. Several of the large males have stayed near to one another, but they certainly don’t spend a lot of time socializing.

The other good thing about this trip was the number of pouch young we found. Unlike in San Diego, where it is now summer, we have a lot of seven-month-old pouch young just starting to put their heads (and more often arms and legs) out of the pouch, so we all got to see some interesting pouch behavior. It was also interesting to have some volunteers from San Diego on this trip (via Earthwatch), too. They were great!

We are now ready to start recording the movements of our females through the breeding season. We have already seen that some males wander far and wide when we are not around, but so far this year the females have moved less than they did over summer (that is, our summer: don’t forget that right now it is winter here!). We have several breeding females and males with collars on and it’s just a case of keeping an eye on them, crossing our fingers, and hoping that the technology keeps working for us.

Bill Ellis is a conservation research postdoctoral fellow for the San Diego Zoo.

Here’s more information about Dr. Ellis’ project…

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