Report – Friends of Tarra-Bulga National Park

On Sunday May 9th we held a fungi foray starting at Bulga Park. The conditions were favourable and we had a great turn out with 30 people signed up and ready to go at 9.30am. After an introductory presentation we set off for a very slow loop down to the suspension bridge, returning via the Fern Gully and Link Tracks. Understandably some families with small children and others with Mother’s day lunch commitments dropped out along the way, but even on a short walk they would have experienced a wide variety of fungi displaying their spore bodies.

It has been a big job documenting the finds, between my daugher and I we have added over 170 sightings to iNaturalist for the day https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tarra-bulga-national-park This includes sightings from the Tarra Valley (I couldn’t resist checking out what fungi could be seen there as I was going past on my way home). Overall the total species recorded to date is 68! I wonder if anyone that attended has got photos of species that we missed? Anyway enjoy the gallery below which contains some examples of the variety of fungi seen on the day.

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 2^nd 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.