Creature of the night.

I have started out my time in Oz volunteering with Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA).  During my second week, we worked with some folks at the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service in the Girringun National Park, which is located about halfway between Cairns and Townsville.  The home range of the endangered mahogany glider includes that area.  Gliders have a fold of skin that stretches between their front and back legs allowing them to parachute from tree to tree.  The mahogany glider is the second largest glider species out of the six found in Australia.  It is a nocturnal gliding possum (Aussie possums are a bit cuter than American opossums), and this marsupial is fairly elusive having “disappeared” for 100 years.  It is believed that the current population consists of approximately 1,300 gliders.

The mahogany glider is flexible in its diet, adjusting to what is available (such as nectar or insects).  The bigger threat to the gliders is fragmentation of their range.  The gliders prefer to stay up in the trees, although they will come down to feed on the sweet nectar from the white flowers of the grasstrees (see earlier post).  This species can glide distances up to 60 m, but the average glide is 30 m.  Because the gliders want to stay up high, treeless roads like the Bruce Highway and right-of-ways challenge the movement of gliders.  Some locations have installed special glider poles to help them cross.  The ideal gliding habitat is a fairly open forest rather than dense rainforest areas.  In February 2011, Cyclone Yasi heavily hit the range of the mahogany glider.  Forests can easily take a few years to fully recover from such natural disasters.  During this period, food options are likely impacted; plants may place more energy into growing new leaves rather than flowering.  Also, the loss of trees from the cyclone allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor.  New trees, especially the seedlings of non-native pine trees from the nearby pine plantations, could change the density of the forest.  Even though Yasi came through 1.5 years ago, it is still important to see how the mahogany gliders are responding today.

We started each morning with our mahogany glider survey.  On Monday, we made a fresh batch of bait – a mixture of honey, fruit juice, syrup, and a dash of vanilla.  We put the new bait in the traps and set them.  Some of the traps also had motion-triggered cameras.  You can see both the trap and camera in this photo:

 

For the next four mornings, we checked the 20 traps along a grid, designed to be 100 m apart.  The QPWS folks also set another two traps where the odds of trapping a glider were much higher.  The grid we covered included the sites used by someone’s 1997 Ph.D. research, so this area has been monitored for awhile.  Normally, they would expect a 15% trap rate, but we saw none in our grid.  Fortunately for us, “Princess” was trapped in one of the extra two traps.  Here she is, looking as though she took a bath in the sticky bait:

Cute, right?  Princess has been trapped before and chipped (not all trapped gliders are chipped).  She looked good, and based on her swollen pouch, she was caring for young back in her den.  Mahogany gliders are monogamous, and both parents care for the young, so the babies would be okay without her for a day.  She was trapped last December and had young then, so she likely had two broads in one year.  They typically have only one a year, so it is a good sign.  However, the QPWS rangers didn’t know why we failed to trap any in our grid during this survey.  Clearly, there are some factors in play.  We left the cameras up for continued monitoring.

Here’s a group shot of the crew over the week, after some hard work maintaining the ideal gliding habitat.  For those of you who know me, we are required to wear pants and long sleeves.  Otherwise, I would be wearing shorts if I could.