Another great turnout of 34 volunteers for this year’s survey, our annual Lyrebird Survey is by far our most popular activity and once again we were able to cover all 16 monitoring sites.
Weather conditions were quite good, at 5.30am heading up to Balook there was a substantial amount of moonlight with a clear sky and some cold air, At Balook however it was darker because of cloud cover blocking the moonlight and there was a slight breeze in the treetops.
Our full crew of volunteers arrived in good time and by 6.30am everyone had arrived and signed in and by 6.45am everyone had been briefed on their tasks and had headed out in the dark to their assigned monitoring stations.
Once in position there ended up being quite an unexpectedly long wait until Lyrebird calls were first heard, only a couple of locations recorded birds calling before 7am; which was when the majority of the sites started hearing birds, the latest any group had to wait to record any calls was 7.10am. Last year (2017) every site had birds calling by 6.55am.
The official sunrise time for Saturday June 2nd at Balook was 7.22am and first light was scheduled to appear at 6.52am which was almost identical to last year.
From our results we detected 8 birds calling in our search area, this figure was slightly down on recent years. It is hard to read too much into one years results but potentially the dry summer and autumn we have experience may be having an impact. Most birds appeared to be calling from forest areas with established Eucalyptus over-storey or rainforest. It would be great if some action can be taken to re-establish the original canopy species into areas of the park that have been degraded.
As usual we only count birds that are detected by at least 2 monitoring stations and some stations heard birds calling that were not in our survey area so are not included in the final tally.
Thanks again to AGL who generously supported the breakfast provided for the early rising volunteers.
Lyrebird Survey Results Summary Table 2010-2018
|
Year |
Number of Males Calling |
Monitoring
Points Covered (out of 16) |
Weather Conditions |
| 2010 | 4 | 9 | |
| 2011 | 9 | 13 | Windy making it hard to hear calls, especially in the more exposed sites. |
| 2012 | 9 | 12 | Still and Calm |
| 2013 | 3 | 10 | Wet, may have discouraged birds from calling. Several males sighted feeding but not calling. |
| 2014 | 14 | 15 | Perfect calm morning |
| 2015 | 6 | 12 | Windy |
| 2016 | 9 | 15 | Ideal – slight wind, relatively warm |
| 2017 | 11 | 16 | Ideal – slight wind, relatively warm |
| 2018 | 8 | 16 | A little overcast with a slight breeze. |
