Are our efforts to protect and recover threatened species working? Are the species we consider common still doing OK? Let’s work together to get up-to-date information, and help guide everyone’s conservation actions.
Spend a day out in may with your eyes to the sky!
You’re invited to help track the numbers of our endangered wedge-tailed eagles, as well as the other day-active birds of prey, sulphur-crested cockatoos and corellas. Decades ago, there were estimated to be as few as 1000–1500 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles. Since then, there’s been a lot of effort to reduce human impacts on these birds, but we don’t know if this is working. Are numbers now recovering, or stable — or continuing the suspected decline?
You’ll need to sign up to the Where? Where? Wedgie! web app or app, and choose a 4 km x 4 km square from the map, to survey on one or more of the official dates (Friday–Sunday 10–12 & 24–26 May 2024). Once it’s booked:
Full details and instructions including resources for you to gain or build on your bird identification skills.
There’s also a substantial schools component to this project through Expedition Class: Where? Where? Wedgie! Students learn about the birds, threatened species and ecology. Timing details on Events Calendar.
Spend a spring day — or your whole spring and summer! — helping map and monitor Tasmania’s burrowing crayfish colonies.
Five threatened burrowing crayfish species live in northern and western Tasmania, but they’re easy to miss! We’re aiming to gather more details on where they live to create predictive maps of their preferred habitat and help protect them. We’re starting out with a special focus on the endangered Central North burrowing crayfish, which is found nowhere else in the world except a small patch of northern Tasmania.
This is a very flexible project. You’ll need to sign up to iNaturalist app, practise using it and learn to recognise burrowing crayfish burrows. Then, any time you happen to spot some, you can record their location on the app (with the landowner’s permission!)
Full details and instructions including resources for you to learn more about these wonderful little animals and the science related to the project.
If your school is in the area where Central North burrowing crayfish live, you can book in a school visit in spring and join in on the annual art competition. Students learn all about burrowing crayfish, threatened species, maps and ecology.
A third NatureTrackers project, CallTrackers, is now underway. Find out more…
Two Tasmanian bats are internationally listed as threatened, and all eight resident species face many potential threats, but none are monitored. As for the Endangered Australasian bittern (Botaurus poiciloptilus), this bird’s wetland habitat is continuing to disappear and it’s currently thought there may only be 20–80 birds in Tasmania — can this be true? Let’s see if we can find out how these species are doing, and if Tasmania is managing the threats adequately.
Full details and instructions including resources for you to learn more about the animals being recorded, and the science of acoustic monitoring.
