Well what an eventful first week…Stepping into the office on
Monday morning we were told that most of the roads on the reserve were water
logged and impassable due to the heavy rain. However, this did not stop us from
doing work we just had to plan our route carefully and we headed out onto the
reserve to set some camera traps…We were just extra tentative to drive over
possible boggy patches, especially Bec who regularly scuttled out the car to
assess the ‘stickiness’ of iffy looking areas. We were just determined not to
get bogged, well not today anyway (read on)…
The rest of my first week was met with more challenges- but
who said fieldwork was easy! Unfortunately on Monday night there had been more
rain so on Tuesday I was given a day off, the roads were just too wet. Thankfully
on Wednesday it was back to business…and important business at that! Adorned
with a radio transmitter, yagi (arerial), cage trap, towels, spades and nets Bec, Lisa (a PhD student working on bilbies), Rob (her volunteer) and myself headed out to catch a feral cat
whose expensive super high tech radio collar was not working. This feral cat
goes by the name of Beethoven (following the composer theme as the previous cat
was named Wolfgang). Poor Beethoven was only released onto the reserve 2 weeks
ago into Red Lake (the feral predator treatment area) and had already been
through the stress of being not only caught, but having his balls chopped off
the week before. But one cannot get tied up in pitiful feelings towards
Beethoven, Beethoven needed his collar fixed for the sake of the project. I’m
sure he’ll understand… or not... It took a team of 4 people 3 hours to dig
Beethoven out! The whole escapade ending in Bec digging on top of him grabbing
him with gloved hands from above! Later that evening Beethoven was taken to the
vet to be sedated whilst Bec attempted to work out the problem with the collar.
Thursday began with the release of Beethoven. Despite
problems with the remote download function of the collar (which enables the
cats locational data to be downloaded from the collar, at upto 500 metres away
from the cat - pretty fancy, all be it expensive, technology) Beethoven could
not be kept in his cat crush forever, so it was back to Red Lake for Beethoven…
However not before we were met with challenge number 3… It seems on Thursday
Bec became a little lacidaisical of the potential sticky roads and got us
bogged. Sorry I stand corrected…’almost bogged’. Apparently it’s not classed as
bogged if you can get yourself out! Which we did after realising that the wheel
caps were not locked into 4 wheel drive, unfortunately for us we realised this
after lugging sticks across the swales to put under the wheels. Oh well I’ll
know for next time...check your wheel caps are on 4 wheel drive first!
Despite some slow progress at the start of the week, we
worked hard the rest of the day baiting and setting traps ready to catch some
stick nest rats (Leporillus conditor). The main purpose of this: to catch the collared rats to check
they were okay and their collars weren’t too tight or rubbing. I was very
amused when tracking the collared stick nest rats by their names … Twiggy, Fluffy, Tricky Sticky (because he’s difficult to track),
Princess Charlotte, Sparkley, Ratapooey, Madonna (because she lives in what can
only be described a palace, on top of one of the biggest bettong warrens seen
on the reserve... so what better name to call her than the queen of pop!) and
Casper (who like a ghost sometimes is invisible and impossible to find). It
must be noted that some of these names were given by a daughter of the
Arid Recovery Scientists, Katherine Moseby. I wonder if you can
work out which ones!
Bec and I awoke at 5am the following morning full of
excitement. The anticipation of what we were going to find in the traps was
similar to the feeling you get on Christmas morning wondering what goodies
father Christmas has delivered. And this morning Father Christmas had not
disappointed… We had caught a total of 12 stick nest rats from the 8 sites (32
traps)! On par with Becs record. Bundled into fleecy bag (to keep them cosy and
dark) in packed into the back of the car we headed back to the equipment shed
in the reserve to process our rats (check collars, take measurements, sex and
tag new rats). 5 which we had caught were our collared rats– bingo, our
tracking and placing of traps had worked, and the rest newly caught rats, some
of which were very little, or ‘ratettes’ as they are called by Bec. Stick nest
rats are prone to capture myopathy so
we processed them carefully and quickly returned them back to their stick nest
homes (see the photos below). We then attempted to track Beethoven, driving
around Red Lake with the Omni (radio tracker which is fixed to the top of the
car and has a range of 1km) but we heard no pip coming from the receiver…looks
like we’re going to have to do some more extensive radio tracking next week.
Lets just hope he hasn’t got out the reserve.
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