Once extinct in the ACT, bush-stone curlews have been brought back to the territory. Using GPS backpacks and sniffer dogs, the conservation program at the Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve is returning remarkable results. And it’s been so successful, the model has been adopted on Victoria’s Phillip Island.
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00:00This way, yes.
00:04Bush stone curlews were originally in the ACT, but they went extinct in around the 1970s.
00:10And that coincides with clearing of this kind of habitat, as well as incursions of red foxes
00:16that became more and more common in the territory.
00:18So back in 2014, we started with a pilot release of 12 birds to see how they'd go.
00:23And in the first year, we only had one third of those birds surviving the first year.
00:28And so by adapting the tactics for bush stone curlews, we've improved the survival from
00:33a third in the first year to over two thirds in the second year.
00:38And our most recent translocation down in Victoria, we had 95% survival.
00:42So it's gone pretty well.
00:44So when we release those reintroduced founders, we fit a tiny GPS backpack on them.
00:51So we can find out what they're doing, check the survival rates, and also ask questions
00:56about the reintroduction program to improve the science of reintroduction.
01:00But when they come off the bird, because they're the size of a USB stick in this kind of habitat,
01:06they're really hard to find.
01:08Fortunately, the GPS units have their own scent signature.
01:12And so I trained my dog Koda to sniff out the GPS units and find them for us.
01:18Yes, there you go.
01:20Good job.
01:21So these are two units that I picked up from mortality retrievals where they'd unfortunately
01:27be killed by foxes.
01:28So we'd be able to find the evidence of what actually happened to the bird with the units.
01:33One of the coolest things about this reintroduction project is that it was community led.
01:37So it was started by a joint project between the Woodlands and Wetlands Trust, which is
01:42a non-government organisation, and the Canberra Ornithologist Group, now Canberra Birds.
01:47So now a decade on, off the back of its success, we've expanded it.
01:51So it's no longer just a Canberra project, but homegrown, shipping it out to Victoria
01:55to improve the trajectory of bushstone curlews across their former range in southeastern Australia.