The koalas of St. Bees Island were probably wondering what all the fuss was about on my recent trip there. As well as tracking night and day, the Earthwatch team I led managed to catch and collar nine adult koalas and had our first meeting with one of the latest batch of pouch young. I had a diverse group of volunteers, from as far away as Bangladesh, United Kingdom, USA (yes, that’s a long way away for me!), and even Australia.

We encountered a lot of rain during the trip, but somehow managed to meet all our tracking goals, finding each koala every day and on each night of tracking. I am presently addressing some basic questions of koala ecology; the main goal of the night tracking is to examine whether basic ranging patterns vary between season and between sex. We also hope to gain some further insights into how koalas respond to the spatial arrangement of the koalas around them. Since they do most of their activity at night, this is a good time to watch them.

The Earthwatch Institute sponsors four field expeditions a year, which either I or my colleague Dr. Alistair Melzer run (we take it in turns), so we have the opportunity to collect data in February, May, July, and October. October is the peak of the koala breeding season at St. Bees Island, so hopefully this year a few of us from CRES will be able to get some good recordings of the males bellowing and we will be able to monitor the movement of the bellowers and other koalas. This ties in neatly with work carried out in the koala barn at the San Diego Zoo (see Jennifer Tobey’s blog, Motorcycles and Koalas), but we figure the logistics are going to be a bit harder in the wild!

Also on this trip I took the opportunity to trial some new data collection methods using bluetooth-linked GPS units and handheld computers, which made monitoring the movement of the koalas very easy indeed. I also used this technology to see just how far the average volunteer moved each day - boy, they work hard!

The koalas at St. Bees Island live in a national park where there is no development and they have few threats or predators. Despite this, they have not become overcrowded and we have yet to see any serious defoliation or other signs to suggets they are “out of balance” with their environment. I am looking at the similarities (such as introduction) and differences (such as population dynamics) between this population and the southern Australian island populations in the hope that some answers can be found to the problems the managers of the southern groups have.

For this trip, though, my team caught several koalas for collar changes (all the koalas we study are radio-collared), caught several “cleanskins” (koalas that we have never seen before), and found some koalas that had been tagged as juveniles last year and were now big enough to be fitted with radio collars. When we caught “Yellow,” an adult female, we also caught her young, “Esmeralda.” Esmeralda (pictured above) was named by Karin, a German volunteer in the group; it is customary for the first volunteer on the spot to have naming rights for the new koalas (and it saves me thinking up names!). My goal is to have all of the adult koalas in one area of the study site collared and monitored by the time October arrives, so that there are no “known-unknowns” lurking in the bush when we start our bellow study!

Dr. Bill Ellis is a Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellow for CRES. Here’s more information about his koala project.

Here’s Bill’s previous blog, Island Koalas.

Posted in Default, Conservation, Field Studies, CRES (Conservation and Research for Endangered Species), General | Link to this post

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