Bilbies, great desert skinks, malleefowl and stick nest rats. Burrows, mounds, and many kinds of excretment. Clues, fragments, and ancient relics.
No matter what team you were on, everyone on Desert Discovery was told to keep an eye out for these rare and unlikely species or what they may have left for us to find in the landscape.
Links:
Amberat as archeological resource
Arid Recovery’s re-introduction efforts
Victorian Malleefowl Recovery Group
Transcript
Jeremy: We were just walking through the spinifex and, 10 or 15 meters up the slope I saw this red soil that was piled up higher than it should’ve been with natural erosion. I thought, “That must be something caused that.” So we walked over and there we were. What I’d seen were the massive spill mounds coming out of these tunnels, which had been created obviously by creatures, and it looked like a classic bilby.
Allie: Have you seen bilbies before?
Jeremy: Never in the wild. No, only in enclosures
Mark: When we were in the Kimberly, at Ellendale Diamond Mine we did see some. They looked very much like this.
Allie: So the entomology team claims a win in the bilby search.
Jeremy: Yeah, Bevan’s gonna wear this-
Allie: The badge of honor.
Jeremy: He’s gonna say, ” we had an okay day as far as insects, but breaking news…”
Mark: Now we just need, the entomology team, we just need to find malleefowl mounds. Yeah. Then that would really make us, I think.
Allie: Then you’d be the gun team.
Bevan: A-team.
Allie: If you wanna find anything, send out the insect hunters.
Bevan: ‘Cause we look everywhere.
Mel: Attention for detail, for the small.
Bevan: Oh well! Let’s break out the…
Allie: Champagne?
Bevan: Lady Grey
Allie: Cups of tea!
Bevan: Fruitcake.
Mel: We’ll pat ourselves on the back.
Jeremy: Every day is, you know…
Allie: Every day’s an adventure, isn’t it?
Jeremy: Yeah, every day something good happens
Saltgrass theme music and standard episode intro:
A couple of years ago, my partner and I drove three and a half thousand kilometers from our home in Castlemaine, Victoria, across the Nullarbor and into the remote deserts of Western Australia. Our destination was a place called Yeo Lake Nature Reserve to join a citizen science group called Desert Discovery.
For two weeks we camped with them and each day was an adventure to see what life is out there in the desert. A treasure hunt for rare and obscure species. I took along my sound recorder and went on a treasure hunt of my own for stories about who these people were and why they were doing this. Season six of Saltgrass is still about salt of the earth people and grassroots change.
It’s just a bit further from home.
You can hear all episodes of Saltgrass on your podcast app or at saltgrasspodcast.com. Saltgrass is produced on Djaara Country, home of the Dja Dja Wurrung. Yeo Lake Nature Reserve is on central desert country where the Yuka people, the Sullivan and Edwards families, and the Ngaanyatjarra and Nangaanya Ku peoples have walked for thousands of years.
Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Allie narrating: On Desert Discovery there were several species that were on everybody’s list. No matter what team you were on, we were asked to keep an eye out for it. We were given a briefing about what the various signs or indications of these animals might be. The animals that we wanted to find are very elusive, and all that you might find in the landscape to tell us that they were actually there was a burrow, or a nest, or a pile of poo. it’s amazing how excited everyone got about different forms of excrement. These animals were all long shots. It was not likely that we would find them, but it would be amazing if we did. The main ones we were looking for were bilbies, mallee fowl, stick nest rats, and great desert skinks.
And it fed into that attitude of treasure hunting that a lot of Desert Discovery people have, that way of really wanting to be the one to find the rare thing, the treasure, the unusual thing, the thing that everyone else is also looking for and then having bragging rights really. (Laughter) So yeah, we’re gonna be talking about the long shots, the hard-to-find things, and the things that maybe there would be no indication of them except for what they’ve left behind, sometimes a very long time ago.
And we’re gonna start straight away with bilbies, because last episode when we were talking to the entomology or invertebrates team they were the ones who found potential bilby mounds. And as we follow the story of this investigation into the mounds, we will find out about a few of these other rare species that everyone had their eyes open for. We’ll finish the episode with Merinda, who tells us all about malleefowl
In Australia, bilbies are really well known because they’ve become an Easter mascot for us, really. At one point, people started a campaign to replace the Easter bunny with an Easter bilby. So every Easter, we get lots and lots of chocolate bilbies on the shelves of shops, and it’s all to help us culturally integrate, some of the amazing native wildlife that we’ve got here in Australia. Especially really cute ones that look a little bit like rabbits and are endangered or threatened instead of always harking back to European species, which are now absolute pests in the Australian landscape.
The greater bilby is the only bilby left. There used to be a lesser bilby, but it’s considered to have gone extinct in the 1950s, and the greater bilbies are now listed as vulnerable, due to habitat loss from things like farming, mining, building houses and roads, all of that kind of thing. And of course also invasive introduced predators like cats and foxes, which have become a massive problem right across the continent. We were finding cat footprints out at Yeo Lake
So bilbies, they’re super cute characterized by its long, silky blue-gray fur, they have long pinkish ears black and white tails. They belong to a group of ground-dwelling marsupials known as bandicoots. They have very strong forearms because they do a lot of digging, they can be found in a range of habitats. They do very well in arid and rocky environments, shrublands and woodlands. Bilbies are omnivores and nocturnal, so they shelter in their burrows to avoid the heat of the day and emerge after dark to forage for food. They eat insects, particularly termites, and we did see a lot of termite mounds out at Yeo Lake. They also eat seeds and fungi and bulbs and fruit, all sorts of things.
The reason they have so much sand and soil at the entrance to their burrows is that they can dig burrows that spiral down into the earth, and they can be several meters deep, so it’s a lot of soil to shift. Female bilbies have backward-facing pouches like wombats, so the soil and dirt doesn’t enter the pouch while they’re digging.
Bilbies hadn’t been seen this far south in a very long time, so when Jeremy from the invertebrates team found what may well have been bilby burrow entrances, and big piles of red soil, the whole team got really excited. The audio at the start of the episode was us at the end of the day after Jeremy had found them celebrating the idea that we may have found bilbies.
The team that would verify that for us was the tracking team. I’ll introduce the tracking team to you in this episode, but we’ll talk more about them in the next episode.
And of course, the mammals and reptiles team was very interested ’cause bilbies are mammals. So, the mammals and reptiles team seeks direct evidence, for example, a dingo on motion-sensitive camera, and we got some amazing nighttime shots of dingoes that way at a waterhole. Or they put out live traps, so that they catch animals alive, and then they identify them, because often it’s really tricky to identify these animals, so they have to spend some time with the actual animal, a photograph is often not enough to identify these animals. There are some really subtle details they need to look at and compare to their notes before they can be really sure what type of animal it is, they need to handle them very gently before re-releasing them.
So the mammals and reptiles team does really hands-on and very direct observational identification, whereas the tracking team deduces what’s in the landscape by what’s left behind. So that can be burrows, mounds, tracks, footprints in the sand or in the clay, scat – which is poo, droppings, nests and anything maybe that gets shed from the animal, so scales or feathers or fur. So any of those things can indicate to the tracking team what animals are in the landscape without actually needing to see the animals themselves.
The tracking team was also known as ‘the bilby team’ because they were really interested in finding bilbies, and had a couple of bilby experts. So, they knew what they were looking for, and they knew how to differentiate between a bilby mound and some other kind of burrow.
So to find bilby mounds was a tracking team conundrum.
After our celebratory cup of Lady Grey tea and some fruitcake, we went in search of the tracking team leaders, Trish and Joss, to show them the photos we’d taken that day and talk to them about the site that we’d found.
Allie: The area of all the mounds, we were walking over and across them, maybe between that little shrubby tree and this one.
Trish: Yeah. And they were separate mounds?
Allie: Well, it’s sort of all undulated and there were piles of diggings and stuff outside that.
Trish: It looks remarkably like a bilby mound, the ones I’ve seen in the photos, and the scat, looks right.
Jeremy: There was hardly any scat there.
Trish: No, no. Bilbies have multiple burrows in a region
Jeremy: there would’ve been five or six there together.
Trish: Well, not necessarily. That sounded, like, really dense. So what bilbies do is they dig down and they do a corkscrew burrow down to three meters.
Everyone: Wow. That’s really deep.
Trish: And that’s where their final burrow, their resting burrow is. Yeah. So it’s very deep down they have multiple of them in the landscape, so there will be times where, like, I would say at least 80% of burrows that I’ve seen have no scat on them. So finding scat, is indicative that it’s been used in the last six months I would think. Because it, in this environment, the scat would decay and just-
Jeremy: It looked pretty fragile.
Trish: Oh, it looks pretty good for the environment that’s here at the moment… It’s bloody awful. Sorry. It’s really dry. incredibly dry.
Mark: In the general scheme of things, how common is it to find an active bilby?
Trish: That’s the thing. Down here, they haven’t found active bilby mounds for a long time. Since the 1980s.
Allie: You’re gonna make it into the history books, Jeremy
Jeremy: You were there. Yeah. We were all there.
Bevan: I decided which direction to walk in!
( laughter)
Jeremy: “straight ahead and left” to the team, that was great.
Mark: So does that habitat that this mound was in, does that meet…?
Trish: I have to see what vegetation’s around
Allie: Sandy … spinifex
Bevan: Spinifex, eucalyptus….
Trish: Yeah, yeah. So there’s particular species of plants that they like.
Bevan: Bilby grass …
Trish: Yeah
Allie: Is there such a thing?
Trish: Yeah. Well, that’s the common name That’s what they call it.
They like cockroach bush or, acacia notabilis, but that’s not particularly in this area, it doesn’t come down this far, that particular acacia. That’s a favorite food of theirs.
Also Bardy bush, which can be a number of different acacias, and they’re going for the witchetty grubs that are in the stems and things.
Allie narrating: You can start to hear some motorbikes in the background. We’d had that day a… what’s it called? A flock? A pack? Of motorbike riders coming through and they’d stopped at the homestead. The homestead’s open to the public, and it was a common stopping point for people, who were doing that highway.
So a lot of people when they travel through the Outback in Australia, they ‘do’ a highway so they’re just really just driving down the road and then they can say they’ve done it. And obviously they’re looking at things and enjoying themselves, and that day we had a big group of motorcyclists rumbling around, and then they were gone again.
No one ever stayed overnight at Yeo Lake Homestead aside from us, and we were there for two weeks. But it was a historical site that people were interested to see on their trip down the highway.
On different days we got four-wheel drive convoys of tourists who’d obviously paid a tour company to take them through the Outback and the Red Centre. Sometimes we’d chat to the people who arrived and they were really interested in what we were doing and what we were finding, because it is a really different way of interacting with the landscape than just driving through it.
And often they were really, really surprised that we were finding anything alive out there, because when you’re going fast along those highways and roads, it doesn’t look like there’s much. You just see shrubbery and trees, and everything looks really dry and dusty. But when you really stop and look, like Desert Discovery does, you find things.
Allie: Are they insect eaters? Or herbivores or?
Trish: Omnivores … you’d have to say. So that’s very exciting. Nathan was beside himself.
Allie: I know. He talked himself out of it a little bit. He was trying to be skeptical and remain calm. But, once you showed openness to the idea he was like… (gasps)
Allie narrating: And then as often happened in Desert Discovery, the conversation rolled around several topics at once, And after mentioning how Nathan had responded to the potential bilby find, it prompted Jeremy to mention that Nathan had also helped us identify what might have been stick nest rat remnants I’d found the day before under a little crevice in a creek bed.
So a lot of the waterways in the desert are ephemeral. They only run when there’s water to run on them. So when we have a big rain event, the creeks or rivers might run, but aside from that, most of the year they’re quite dry.
I’d been out with the invertebrates team, and I’d just been poking around. I was quite like Jeremy because I didn’t have any expertise in pseudoscorpions, spiders, moths, beetles, any of those things. I often was just looking around randomly at what I thought was interesting, and I’d spotted, under a little crevice, a tangle of dark sticks. And I thought, “Oh, you know, if there’d been a flood, maybe the sticks got pushed back into the crevice and stuck there.”
But we had been told about stick nest rats and what their nests might look like, and so I thought “it could be that too, I wonder…”
I showed Bevan and the team they weren’t really sure either. But, we took Nate out there later, and he was like, “Oh no, I think it might be, a small part of what’s left of a really old stick nest rat nest.”
So stick nest rats are native Australian rodents There were greater and lesser stick-nest rats that were heavily impacted by colonization. The impacts of, Europeans landing here with all of their pests, including cats and foxes, and rabbits that may be outcompeted for the same food sources.
So the rats, all of them, the greater and lesser, became pretty much extinct on the mainland. The lesser stick-nest rat is considered extinct, and the greater stick-nest rat, there was a population or two on some islands off the coast that got preserved, and organizations like Arid Recovery, have reintroduced them to the mainland in protected areas.
So they’ve fenced off a zone to keep out predators, and they’re monitoring those populations. So there are some greater stick-nest rats back on the mainland these days, but any evidence of them that we would find would be historic. It would be from populations that lived a very long time ago in this area.
They’ve even found stick nest rat nests, in the northern part of the Flinders Ranges, which is in South Australia. They found some nests that have been dated to ten thousand years old. So the nests these rats build were really hardy. It takes many rats to build a nest, they live communally and they actually pass the nests down through the female line, so the daughters take over. They all use their urine, which is really oily and acts kind of like a linseed oil to help preserve the sticks, and it also acts as a glue, and it becomes, really, really hard.
And this is why some of these nests have survived so long and obviously, if they’re in a cave, they’ve also been able to survive ten thousand years. It’s amazing. So they’re actually looking at some of these nests to try and find evidence of what sticks were used, so what plants were around 10,000 years ago, and also in the scat that’s remained, they can find what those stick nest rats were eating back then.
So, as we were talking to Trish about the bilbies, we also mentioned that we’d seen this stick nest rat remnants, and she got enthusiastic about that too!
So that was another one of our long shots that we’d found evidence of.
Trish: So it’s the amberrat that you found. It’s called amberrat.
Allie narrating: The remnants of a stick nest rat nest is called amberat, and Trish will explain why.
Trish: Because it’s rock hard. Ah. Is it rock hard?
Allie: We didn’t touch it.
Trish: Black? Black, treacly? With stones and if you touch it, it’ll be rock hard, like amber. I’ve been doing some reading up on, and sometimes they use caves, and that’s why it survived because it’s protected underneath that.
Allie: Well, both of these were in caves.
Trish: But in the landscape, they actually built them out on plains.
Bevan: Yeah, I’ve seen them on plains.
Trish: And the descriptions… huge.
Bevan: With lots of tunnels in.
Trish: Well, these were the descriptions around the Flinders Ranges area.
Well, the amberat lasts a long time. That’s the thing. It’s their urine and feces and it just glued everything together as they built these huge mounds and the mounds were then big enough to avoid other predators. And they would have nursing platforms down in the bottom inside.
Allie: Aww. So, are these nests that we’re finding at all helpful for DD? Because it’s an artifact really, isn’t it?
Trish: I would record that it was found here and put that in the report. Because I have no idea what the records are and you would just record it as amberat.
Whether they can take that amberat and do analysis to say whether it’s greater or lesser stick nest rat, because I haven’t looked at the range out here.
Allie: They were both only about that big and in a crevice.
Bevan: A bit over a meter long, wide.
Trish: Cats and foxes just took them out. The same thing as everything. Cats and foxes, all the little things.
Allie: Bloody cats. I love my cat, but I don’t love them out here
Mark: We were in the Robertson Ranges, Mikatharra. We came across a whole breakaway, and all the walls were all these, the tar-like substance with the twigs on top. And then it had the poo in it and everything. It was like going into a museum, a mausoleum. You felt that there just should’ve been the critters hopping around. But when we collected some of the poo samples, and when we dropped a bit of the bottom, they clink ’cause they were almost like fossils. There must have been about 10, 15 of the nests in perfect condition. It was quite reverential. You know, we were talking in hushed voices because it was almost like it was sacred ground.
Now, there’s one critter I’m still hoping that some environmental group in some out and out place are gonna find an intact group.
Jeremy: Anyway, it’s been a big day then.
Trish: Yeah. Very exciting.
Allie: So these guys wanna go looking for our bilby mounds. We got the GPS, didn’t we?
Bevan: Yeah, just don’t get bogged when you cross that little creek.
Trish: Really well done, you guys. It’s exciting.
Jeremy: The insect team is just going above and beyond, you know?
Trish: Finding two millimeter pseudo scorpions is unbelievable, I think.
Mark: What we’re planning tomorrow… we’re going to find some mounds.
Jeremy: Mallee fowl.
Trish: Oh, mallee fowl? Thank you very much.
Allie: That’s the only thing we haven’t seen yet, so…
Mark: Yeah, so well we’re gonna find those tomorrow.
Trish: Well no, we need you to find some great desert skink.
Jeremy: I don’t know what to look for, honestly.
Trish: Okay. Well, I’ll show you. We’ll bring a book tonight to talk about it, and you can have a look at some of them. It is a little bit confusing. So it’s a skink about that long. And it’s chunky …
Bevan: It’s more like a blue tongue
Trish: And he’s orange.
Bevan: He’s orange?!
Trish: Orange, and he’d be hibernating. And they won’t come out of hibernation till it’s about 28C degrees minimum during the night.
Bevan: Oh. (laughter) So, we’re not gonna see any.
Trish: I’m never gonna see a great desert skink, because I’m never coming when that’s the conditions.
Allie: I don’t blame you.
Bevan: And who’s out here in summer?
Allie: No one wants to be here.
Trish: Yeah, a friend of ours did her PhD on it, but you’re out there in, you know- 40 degrees during the day and 28 at night. It’s horrid you know, that’s not me. I like cold.
Bevan: The flies carry you around
Allie: You don’t wear clothes, you just wear flies.
Trish: That’s right. And they’re big enough that of course the predators go for them, but they live in a burrow that would be 10 to 12 centimeters wide, the entrance. And so the reason we’re looking for them here is that the local Aboriginal people talk about Tjakura. When we were at Tjirrkarli, the women were really keen, because we were also looking for Tjakura, and we did find a couple of potential nesting burrows for them up there.
They were so excited and they said, “Oh, we’ve got you one. We’ve got you one.” And they showed it to us, and it was a night skink. It was exactly the same as the desert skink, but it’s much smaller. It would be really good to be looking out for that in this environment to see if we got any evidence that it may have been here.
And the difference with them as to other reptiles, is that they have communal latrines. So the night skink has a communal latrine, but it’s in a burrow. But the great desert skink has a communal latrine that’s outside.
And then the latrine will be away from the burrow sites. It won’t be at the burrow entrances or in the burrow. It’ll be slightly to the side.
Allie: I bet they hate getting up in the middle of the night to go for a wee as well.
Trish: And interestingly, they have an adult latrine and a juvenile latrine.
Allie narrating: So as you can hear, everyone was looking for and interested in these long shot species. Bilbies, malleefowl, stick nest rats, and great desert skinks.
Each of them had a unique set of indicators that we would need to look out for in the landscape, and every time we potentially found something, it was a huge conversation. Examining the evidence and deducing from what was there, which is often incomplete evidence, whether or not it truly was that species
We never did find any indication of great desert skink, or malleefowl.
We haven’t talked about malleefowl yet, but I will introduce you to Merinda later in this episode. She’s been involved in a massive citizen science project looking for malleefowl, and is able to explain to us how a nationwide search for things like these species can happen in a high-tech age. It’s really interesting.
The stick-nest rat nests were very exciting and several instances of those were found on the Yeo Lake site.
The Bilbi mounds though, were the main headline. Everyone got really excited about it, and multiple teams came over to inspect the site.
Trish and Joss, who are the leaders of the tracking team took their team out to where the burrows had been sighted. I went along with them because I wanted to record it all, and I wanted to be there for the moment that they declared whether it was or was not truly a bilby mound.
This is Joss.
Allie: What are you keeping an eye out for in terms of knowing whether or not it’s a true bilby den?
Joss: Massive, spoil mounds coming out of burrows. It’s large, but not overly large. We’re looking for prints and scats. Apparently Mel collected a scat, it needs to be sent for testing, but on our observation is within the realm of bilby.
What else? We would like to see tracks if it was an active system. Having said that, we’re interested in recently abandoned or old, ancestral systems as well.
For instance, the other day we found a soil mound that high, with no evidence left of the burrow. So that could be 10, 20 years since a bilby was there. But it stands out, as you walk along these sand plains, you don’t see a mound that high for no reason.
Trish may have a different take on it, but, it would be sort of unusual, to have one bilby hole, especially if it was active, and nothing else, no other holes around. Because when they’re out feeding, they like to have a mental map of where they can hide, and have a few options. So this wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities, I wouldn’t have thought.
Allie: So have any of you been on a bilby team on previous projects?
Libby: I have.
Allie: What do you think of these, Libby?
Libby: They’re bigger than any that I’ve seen before. And they’re more in open area, but this could be one that’s old.
Allie: Could be a ghost town. A bilby ghost town.
Libby: Yes. And then the other theory I think is just that, it could be being used by dingoes as a den.
Allie: Do you think that’s big enough for a dingo? Or for the puppies, not for the parents.
Libby: Well, the parents would have to go down to, to put the puppies in. It’s very big for a rabbit burrow or warren, so unless they started it and then other animals have taken it over… I don’t know what Josh and Trish are thinking?
Trish: So this is probably one of the smallest ones. It’s definitely the smallest and it’s still quite a large hole for a bilby. But the other holes are massive by comparison. They’re four times that size. I’ve never seen one like this before. You know, I’m not an arid zone ecologist, so I haven’t necessarily been around enough to know. What we’ll do is we’ll take some photos and maybe some measurements, because we didn’t have scale in the photos before.
But I’ve never seen anything like it. Neither has Libby.
Joss: When you think about it, what else other than dogs or dingoes could do this massive amount of earthwork with such large holes other than a wombat? But, we’re told that there are no wombats in the whole region here, so you have to rack your brains to come up with some other animal that can do it.
Libby: Wombats certainly could. But I agree that they’re not supposed to be in this area. It’s hard to judge how old this would be, because it doesn’t look as if it’s been used for a while.
Joss: The other one that we found, interestingly, had very old and decayed into little white splotches, dog droppings all around it. So that really, sent us in the direction of dingoes for that.
Allie: Would cats ever live in tunnels that are left behind by another creature?
Trish: Oh, yes, cats would use them, but cats wouldn’t dig them as such. So cats will, especially in desert conditions, that’s exactly how they survive. On the hot days, they’ll be underground and then they’ll come out at night.
Some of the things you could do is see if you had some flexible thing that could see what’s happening with the tunnel underneath, but we don’t have anything.
Allie: You need one of those plumbers’ cameras that goes down pipes.
Trish: Yes, or there are things called burroscopes, which have cameras on the end of them.
Libby: Wonderful photographs of the platypus puggles and echidna in burrows.
Allie: You’d need something that’s not gonna cave the walls in or anything.
Trish: Oh, no, it’s just a little cord with a camera on the end and it’s kind of flexible, so you can push, when it hits a wall, it’ll turn and move around.
Libby: If I were a baby dingo, I would love to slide down there. (laughter)
Allie: It would be fun.
Trish: So, so it’s very exciting. Even if it’s a dingo den, it’s still very exciting. We’ve got two of them now that have been identified.
So when we’ve finished, have a look around. If you can, stay on the spinifex and then, before we leave, I’ll sweep with a branch so that if we come back, at least we don’t have footprints all over the place. If there’s any print at all, we might be able to see it.
Allie narrating: Trish and Libby were being very generous by being excited by the potential that it was a dingo den. But to be honest, the rest of us were quite disappointed it wasn’t a bilby burrow. We had been perhaps prematurely triumphant in our celebrations of finding the burrows and imagining that it would be a bilby one.
If it had been, that would’ve been truly exciting. And of course, finding a dingo den is very interesting. We had several sightings of dingoes on the trip, and as time progressed and they got used to us being there, we found that they entered our camp more and more overnight.
I heard them howling in the middle of the night a couple of times, and I’d sit bolt upright and try and grab my sound recorder and turn it on in time to catch the howl. But I never did get a dingo howl and by the end, we had dingo prints circling our tents and looking for food, scavenging.
So we knew already that there were dingoes around, so it wasn’t as exciting that this pile of holes and the mounds and the spills of soil that came from digging the holes were from dingoes.
Potentially it was a bilby burrow originally, but it hadn’t been for some time, and the size of them, as you heard Joss and Trish talking about, and Libby as well, confirming that the holes themselves were just a bit too big for it really to be a bilby burrow. And the density of the holes all together in a group like that was just a bit too close together to really be something like a bilby would do.
So, the invertebrates team did not get to chalk that one up as a win. But we did have, the stick nest rat nests as a little notch in the belt, and in reading the report that was written at the end of the project, I saw that the tracking team did indeed find other evidence of bilbies, but it was all old and degraded.
There was no recent bilby activity.
All of these reports from every single one of the Desert Discovery projects through the years is available on the Desert Discovery website if anyone wants to have a look.
Now, the other long shot animal that we were all keeping our eye out for while we were out on the project was malleefowl.
And more specifically, the mounds that they scratch together as a huge incubating nest for their eggs
We didn’t see any malleefowl mounds on the trip.
But there was someone on the trip in the mammals and reptiles team who knew a lot about how malleefowl live, and how they’ve been a topic for citizen science projects. I had a really big chat with Merinda one day. We were sitting in her ute, because it was a really windy day, and wind is not your friend when you’re doing sound recordings. We talked about her life and her studies and how she got to Desert Discovery and I’ll include some of that in future episodes.
But today I just wanted to focus on what she knew about malleefowl and the Victorian Malleefowl Recovery Group, which is the citizen science project that’s regarded as potentially the largest single species citizen science project in the world.
Merinda: So the Victorian Malleefowl Recovery Group’s a citizen science group that have long-term consistent data collection that’s usable on malleefowl breeding in Victoria. So they’ve been trying to replicate that system throughout the country because malleefowl in New South Wales, South Australia, and West Australia.
And Victoria’s kind of the model of having consistent data for over 20 years. Largely because of that group, but I’ll say largely because of Joe Benshemesh. So partnering with a scientist who’s passionate about that species, and he helps with the analysis of all that data, collates it, and the volunteers collect it.
We have a yearly training session to train new volunteers, but also to, remind volunteers, because we only meet once a year otherwise, or actually meet twice a year, but you monitor once a year, because you’re monitoring the mounds in summer when the malleefowl mounds are active, to see if they’re active and breeding or not.
Allie: So you’ve got people who are volunteers and associated with the group, and they’re on the lookout for malleefowl mounds, and then at a certain time of year you go back to those mounds and see if they’re active.
Merinda: Yeah. So they’ve got grids throughout the state, which is just like a defined area with a number of mounds in it, because you can’t necessarily monitor every mound every year.
So they have these grids that get monitored every year with the mounds that are in it. And you go back to those same mounds every year. It might be a different volunteer, it might be the same.
And they’ve set up a system, CyberTracker, on a Android phone. And CyberTracker was initially, my understanding is, it was designed for Kalahari Bushmen, the San people in Namibia, to use. It’s very pictorial. And so they’ve been using it in Australia as well and sometimes with traditional owners. So it’s basically got a series of questions you go through. You get to the mound, you use GPS to get to the mound, and then there’s a series of questions that help identify the activity of the mound, if it’s active or not, and the questions have a series of checks.
So, if you’re inconsistent in your answering, then Joe can look at it and be like, “Oh, they said that the mound is active, but then in the next question they said that there’s some plants growing on it. Or moss growing on it, or it’s got crust which indicates it’s not active.” Because if it is active, they’ll be scratching it and working it every day. So there’s all these checks so you can get pretty confident quality data out of it, even with less experienced volunteers.
Allie: Yeah, so that’s a really good example of citizen science working.
Merinda: Yeah, such a good model. And again, if you calculate the hours and fuel input and everything, it’s a massive free labor. And if you had to actually fund that, like you can’t get that level of funding often for threatened species monitoring or any monitoring.
Allie: So tell me a little bit about malleefowl. What are they?
Merinda: I can certainly say I’m no expert. They’re a megapode, which the megapodes are a group of mound building birds.
So Australia’s got a few species of mound building birds, malleefowl are one of them, and then there’s some in Papua New Guinea I think as well.
Allie: So the mound is their nest?
Merinda: Yes, and they use composting to incubate the eggs.
Allie: (gasps) They make a hot compost!
Merinda: Yes, exactly.
Allie: Oh my God, I love hot compost. I’ve just joined a hot composting community group in my local town. And I’m learning all about how to do hot compost.
Merinda: Yes! Just watch a malleefowl.
Allie: And we were actually talking in one of the meetings, we were talking about it, and someone was like, “Can we use that heat in any other way?” And we’re like, “We’ll invite some malleefowl in.”
Merinda: Yes, I love that someone said that.
Allie: We should be able to utilize the heat.
Merinda: It’s amazing ’cause they’re the only species of megapode that are mound builders in arid areas. Like you can understand composting bush turkeys up north. You can understand in humid environments.
It’s not hard to compost.
Allie: There’s a lot of green material that will compost. But in arid areas everything’s so dry.
Merinda: Exactly.
Allie: Surely it’s hard for them to get that composting heat up.
Merinda: You need leaf litter and you need moisture. So, they’re amazing. And at one of my uni assignments I looked at malleefowl, and this particularly you had to look at a paper for a species and on their ecology.
I looked at this paper, and they did this experiment measuring the energy requirements for a mound building bird, being the malleefowl, or a nest building bird. Because malleefowl have no parental care. So they spend heaps of time and energy on these mounds to incubate their eggs.
Allie: And then just walk away.
Merinda: And then this little bird, little baby, like hatches out of the egg underground, digs its way up, pops out, and then that’s it. It’s on its own. They wander off. They’re like a miniature version of the adult, so they’re not super fluffy like a little chicken. And then other birds build a nest, which doesn’t take too much energy in comparison to a mound, but then they have high levels of parental care initially.
So they looked at energy requirements, and the malleefowl still had far higher energy requirements in this no parental care mound building than a nest with parental care. So that’s amazing in itself, that these little birds dig their way out and fend for themselves.
Allie: But also, like, how does nature do that?
Make a species that knows how to make a composting nest that will get the required temperature so the eggs have time to incubate, and then the eggs just pop up, and with no parental care that creature then can repeat that cycle just instinctively.
Merinda: Exactly. It’s purely innate. They don’t have to learn. They’ll practice, you get young birds that will practice…
Allie: I have a really strong urge to dig some dirt and push it in a pile. Why am I having this urge?
Merinda: Exactly, yeah.
Merinda: Yeah, they’re fascinating birds.
Allie: And do they partner just seasonally or do they partner for longer than-
Merinda: The theory is they partner for life, but sometimes a partner will die, so they’ll have to re-partner up. I’m not exactly sure with malleefowl, but with other fauna species, but some other bird species like blue wrens, where they used to think they partnered more but they’ve actually found that they’re a lot more polygamous than what they thought. So I think I’d heard that there had been some DNA stuff done on eggs in the past, and there was variation in that. So sometimes the female might zip off and find another man, and it’s interesting the size area that they would utilize seems to be quite variable.
So they did some LiDAR flyovers to look at the topography to pick up the shape of a malleefowl mound, and then they checked some of what the computer said this looks like, the shape of a mallee fowl mound. They checked some. Out in that area, they’re really quite spread out in this arid environment.
So they fly over, and it’s like a laser thing that shows the topography. So if you look at a map of what, of an area that’s been LiDARed, you just get all these…
Allie: It’s almost like echolocation. It’s like how quick the bounce back is from the ground.
Merinda: Yeah, it is. Exactly.
Allie: It tells you how far away it is.
Merinda: So you end up with this image, with all the hills and gullies or whatever. And so you can create an algorithm that is specifically looking for, in that data, the shape and size of a mallee fowl mound. So, that cone shape, like a little volcano or that doughnut shape, like when they’ve dug out the middle bit.
So they program the computer to look for that, and then it spits out all these points. You can then categorize these – category one points are the highest likely mounds based on that data, and then you might get a category two or three that say, “Oh, these are maybe 50% chance, and these ones are, like, maybe 20% chance of being a mound.”
And then you go and check that. So they’ve done that in Victoria and Western Australia. But yeah, they’re quite spread out in these more arid environments. Whereas we’ve got a reserve just near where we live in Victoria that we monitor now every year, and it’s got the highest density of active mallee fowl mounds in the state.
They’re so close together. There’s heaps of active mounds. It’s thick bush surrounded by cropping land, and the cropping land is actually a good food source ’cause there’s heaps of grain. So they think that’s food-related in that respect.
Allie: So abundance of food equals abundance of population.
Merinda: Pretty much. There was another girl who did a master’s project on malleefowl, and she was looking at the vegetation cover and active malleefowl mounds and the relationship between it. And part of the reason for that was, the thought that predation was the biggest factor on malleefowl populations, and they’ve now found that it seems to be rainfall is the biggest influencer.
And that’s largely food-related, i.e. you have things flowering and seeding and producing a lot more seed for the malleefowl, and also have more invertebrates around for the malleefowl, if you have good rain years. And also, they need rainfall to be able to activate the composting system.
Dig a hole, they fill it with compost, and then they wait for the rain. And then when it gets wet, that’s when they close it up and then it starts composting, and then they keep opening it up for her to lay an egg. So open it up, lay an egg, close it. And when she’s ready to lay an egg in another, I think it’s another few days, they open up again, lay an egg.
And so they just keep opening and closing until she’s done with her eggs, and then they just manage the mound and the temperature.
Allie: That’s just incredible.
Merinda: I know, and how do they do that? They don’t have a thermometer. I’ve heard people say it’s the feet or the beak.
Allie: As in can feel how warm it is?
Merinda: Yeah, stick their beak in.So, yeah, beak or feet, but from what I’ve heard, they stick their beak in. And so they think that’s what they’re doing, is measuring the temperature.
Allie: They might also be smelling it to see if it’s…
Merinda: Maybe?
Allie: I mean, a bad compost smells bad.
Merinda: Yeah. And a good compost smells good.
Allie: Yes. And what does a mallee fowl look like?
Merinda: Traditional owners out here often call them turkey.
Allie: Oh, are they big?
Merinda: They’re bigger than a chicken, but beautifully patterned. They’re like browns and whites and stuff, but their patterning is just magic, and when you see them in the bush, they wander away. And when they’re not panicked, they rarely will run unless you make a big noise or run after them or something.
They’ll just walk really slowly away from you, and then they just meld into the bush and disappear.
Allie: Perfect camouflage. The dappled light.
Merinda: It’s so weird. You’re just like, now you see it, and now you don’t.
Allie: It’s like a ghost.
Merinda: It is.
Allie narrating: So there you go. That’s all our long shots that we’re gonna explore in this episode. Bilbies, stick nest rats, great desert skinks, and malleefowl. There were, of course, many other rare and unusual animals that people were looking out for, but these ones were a full project effort everyone could get involved in trying to identify any signs or clues in the landscape that any of these critters might have been around.
Theme music and outro
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My name is Allie Hanly. Thanks for listening.
