20 November 2010. Tonight we had our first surveying evening for gliders along the strip of bushland from behind Ferny Grove State High School and across McGinn Rd into the bush there.
The evening started with a workshop held in the Multipurpose Hall at the Ferny Grove SHS with 2 platters of delicious nibbles from Coles Ferny Grove and tea/coffee.
[url=http://www.ddwfauna.com.au]
Damien and Narelle White[/url] are Coordinating the Glider Survey. They are environmental consultants.
Ten people took part.
There are 6 types of gliders and all 6 are found in Queensland with 5 types found in SE QLD (the yellow-bellied squirrel greater sugar and feathertail). The mahogany glider is found in Far North QLD.
The feathertail glider is the smallest glider and not seen often on surveys. In the canopy it is hard to see.
Sometimes you can hear bigger gliders hit a tree as they leap or you might catch sight of their movement.
Books recommended:
[ul]Tracks scats and other traces
Wildlife of Greater Brisbane (everyone should have a copy)
A field guide to the mammals of Australia
Key guide to Australian mammals
Tree hollows and wildlife conservation in Australia
Gliders of Australia a natural history
Mammals of Australia. 3rd edition[/ul]
Size of gliders from smallest to biggest is feathertail sugar mahogany squirrel yellow-belly and greater.
Yellow-belly found in wetter areas and higher altitude (Mt Nebo Mt Glorious). The greater glider likes dryer areas not rainforest.
Sugar and squirrel gliders are reasonably common.
They are most closely related to the ringtail possums.
They are nocturnal with bulging eyes and their eyes reflect the light with a shine. Their eyes have more rods than cones to catch the light. 1 photon of light can excite the nerves of a glider’s eyes.
Only the feathertail glider has no eye shine.
The squirrel and sugar gliders’ eye-shine is orange.
The greater glider has a brilliant silvery white eye-shine.
They are diverse in their diet eating pollen resin manna sap. The exception is the greater glider which just eats eucalyptus leaves.
They make their dens in hollows in trees. The number of hollows in trees is a major limiting factor. They need denning locations and 1-2/hectare is not enough. They need more or you’ll lose the species there. They use more than one hollow to keep parasites down and to avoid predators spotting them.
Feathertail and sugar gliders live in family groups of up to 20. Greater and mahogany gliders are solitary.
Owls feed on them (powerful masked sooty..). Sometimes you might just find a tail after an owl has eaten one. The owls don’t eat the tails.
It is hard to see hollows in trees from th ground. The entrances can be small.
Sugar and squirrel gliders are quite similar. Sugar gliders occasionally have a white tail end. The squirrel gliders tail is bushy right up to its body.
They have characteristic calls and warning sounds.
The greater and the yellow-belly can be hard to tell apart except that the greater has fur coming out of its ears.
Threats to gliders are:
[ul]Habitat destruction and fragmentation
Disease as areas become smaller and stress levels rise
Natural predators[/ul]
Gliders need larger habitat systems. They call them an umbrella species.
Brisbane City Council’s website has information on gliders.
The Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland’s website has a page on each species.
Gliders vocalise most after leaving their den in the half an hour after dusk.
A full moon is not a good time to see them.
The greater glider can glide over 100 metres.
The Kedron Brook Catchment Group started thinking about putting up nest boxes and have been having a lot of discussions and learning about nest boxes and hollows in trees.
Q. How many trees have hollows?
Q. What sort of hollows?
Q. Have we got the species around here that might be using those hollows?
Q. Are there enough hollows?
After a species has bred the young tend to disperse. Corridors are important for this to happen safely.
Even a big population of a species does not mean it will survive if the bushland remnants are too small. It will die out.
QLD National Parks permits and ethical clearances are required before doing a survey like this. It has to go to a committee.
Ways of doing surveys include cover trapping fish trapping call playback spot-lighting fluke netting…
You should have dimmer switches and reed filters to protect the animals’ eyes from very bright spotlights.
Just after dusk is the easiest time to spot.
Stag-watching: Pick a likely tree before dusk and watch it in silhouette and see what comes out as night falls. Similar to process used for counting bats emerging from bat roosts.
Call playback: Play the call using a megaphone and a CD player. They respond. Doing it from the top of a ridge works best. Another approach is to play an owl call and the glider may give an alert response. There are ethical considerations and the glider’s response can alert a predator. Can only play the call once in a night.
Hair traps: This is a plastic trap about 30cm long and semi-circle at the front. Inside the top is a sticky part that an animal’s hair can stick to. A bait is put right down in the toe to attract the animal in. Hairs that stick on the sticky bit are later collected and taken away for identification of the animal.
Bait: Rolled oats honey peanut butter vanilla essence. Apple. Bread & jam.
Arboreal traps: Using a ladder against a tree a long bracket is screwed to the tree and a trap placed on top of it with room between the tree and the trap for the glider to land them enter the trap. The tree is sprayed with honey and water as a lure and a bait put in the trap.
Scratches: When extracting a glider from a trap they will scratch so the idea is to put a pillow case over the trap and get it out in the pillow case.
Scats: Look on the ground during the day for scats under trees. They are small droppings and different sizes for different species.
Scuffing on bark: Places where gliders regularly land may be scuffed or worn on the bark.
Scratches on trunks: koalas goannas lace monitors brush tailed possums. Grey gums great for showing up scratches.
Spotlighting: You don’t need a permit but the letter of the law is not to interfere with animals. A 3000 watt spotlight is interfering. A camera probably not. Some people may have a problem with you spotlighting in a reserve.
With spotlighting you are shining the spotlight on trunks and foliage and looking for eye-shine. You need to hold the spotlight close to your own eyes so that the reflection comes back to your eyes. Also turn around and shine on trees behind where you have come from. It’s good to have 2 of you so one can use the torch and the other look at the animal through binoculars.
Question: What is the range of animals you get eye-shine for?
[ul] 2-3 dozen possibilities
moths
common brushtail possums
ringtail possums
3 species of bats
spiders (the biggest eye-shine often from the littlest spiders)
geckoes
koalas
owls[/ul]
To determine if a species is there you have to go out time and time and time again. 6-20 nights!
You have to be careful about saying a species isn’t there just because you haven’t seen it.
A koala found its way all the way down Cedar Creek to Ferny Grove State School. It was in the top of a tree at the school for a few days and the crows were attacking it. Then it vanished. This was 2-3 years ago.
The best way to look for koalas is to look for scats on the ground beneath trees. If you do find a fresh koala scat sniff it. It smells of eucalyptus leaves.
The country behind us up Cedar Creek is pretty hard in the dry.
It is common for brush tail possums to eat fruit but their main natural source of food in the wild is eucalyptus leaves.
Official sunset today was 6.30pm. We headed off spotlighting at 6.45pm.
[b]We found a squirrel glider[/b] in a tree near Cedar Creek below Ferny Grove State High School. It crawled up the tree trunk quite rapidly looking very cute went behind the trunk then glided down across the clearing. Damien mapped it’s location on his GPS to record in the database. He had thought it unlikely we’d find any gliders and we all feel very lucky and we all got a very good look at it.
We saw a tawny owl and 3 sulphur-crested cockatoos.
We walked along next to Cedar Creek then crossed McGinn Rd and walked along the track into the other patch of bush. There were cane toads on the ground near puddles. This bush area had a lot of ringtail possums (we saw 8). We got good at spotting their shining orange eyes and then watching to see the animal. We saw some spiders in trees a very bright-eyed moth and a water dragon in a tree.
There were a few mosquitos and I regretted not putting on the mosquito repellant we had brought but left back at the hall.
We are constrained by the terms of the grant to run the program on the land designated for the survey.
The next survey will be in the New Year.
We headed back to the hall to collect our bags and have a drink and a few more nibbles. We felt very fortunate to spend the evening the way we have. It feels very special. The magic of being local.
Back at home I couldn’t resist spotlighting around our garden and promptly spotted eye-shine which turned out to be a big moth.
Later I discovered I’d picked up a tick. We’ll have to do full checks all over.