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AGRICULTURE & FOOD PRODUCTION
The wonder of the Wanderers Dust storms, snakes, bats and long nights are all part of the lot of a bird researcher at Charles Sturt University.
 Wildlife ecologist Ms Kylie Eklom describes being caught in a massive dust storm during her most recent visit to Oolambeyan National Park in southern NSW to study the endangered bird, the Plains-wanderer as “really exciting - I’d never experienced anything like it before. My adrenalin was pumping.” For 20 minutes Ms Eklom, a PhD student with Charles Sturt University’s (CSU) Institute for Land, Water and Society (ILWS) took refuge in her four wheel drive vehicle, unable to see through the thick wall of dust ahead of an afternoon summer thunderstorm; typical weather conditions for the Riverine Plains at this time of the year.
“I went out to change the insect traps and I could see the black clouds in the distance but I thought I would have enough time to go out and come back,” says Ms Elkom. “I was driving east but when I turned and looked west, an enormous cloud of dust was almost on top of me.”
Ms Eklom did drive for a little while before deciding to stop and wait it out.
“It wasn’t dangerous but Mick was great and radioed through to check I was OK,” says Ms Eklom. Mr Mick Domaille was Oolambeyan Station’s overseer before it became a national park. He has been retained as its senior field officer and lives at the park in a cottage with his wife.
The dust storm was followed by six millimetres of rain. Fortunately Ms Eklom was in the northern paddocks of the former merino stud property where the wet sandy red soils are more ‘vehicle friendly’ and she was able to drive back to the refuge of the rambling 1920s homestead on Oolambeyan.
Oolambeyan, a 21 000 hectare property located 81 kilometres south east of Hay, was purchased by NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Federal Government in 2001 because of its importance as habitat for the Plains-wanderer, a ground dwelling native bird found only in grasslands of eastern Australia.
In October 2002, the property was gazetted as a national park, one of a handful of grassland national parks in NSW. It is also one of only two where sheep grazing is used as a management tool. However, because of the drought there have not been any sheep on the property since the end of 2007.
Well into her third year of research, Ms Eklom has collected data three times during her month long trips to Oolambeyan..
She says last year everything was really dry and the Plains-wanderer habitat was much sparser compared to previous years.
“Rainfall at Oolambeyan to late October 2008 was 154 millimetres, less than half the 2007 total of 355 millimetres. It is shaping up to be similar to 2006, which had a total of 189 millimetres,” says Ms Eklom, who is working on a NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change funded project and supervised by Associate Professors Gary Luck and Ian Lunt from the ILWS.
 Ms Eklom’s research is contributing to the department’s Draft Recovery Plan for the Plains-wanderer. Specifically she is researching food resources in grasslands and how that relates to the Plains-wanderer.To that end she has spent long days, often on her own, on Oolambeyan and neighbouring properties, assessing vegetation; setting up invertebrate pitfall traps to catch beetles and other ground-dwelling insects; sucking up seeds using a domestic vacuum-cleaner powered by a generator set up on the back of the ute; and spot-lighting for Plains-wanderers at night to catch and take blood samples so she can determine the proportion of seeds and invertebrates the birds are eating.
On her most recent visit she took blood samples from seven birds - five males, one female and a juvenile - so she has now taken blood samples from a total of 14 birds. Over the last three years, Ms Eklom has seen about 30 Plains-wanderers including chicks.
“To find them I either walk or drive at five or six kilometres an hour, spotlighting from the window and logging positions on a global positioning system device,” says Ms Eklom. On her last trip over 10 nights, Ms Eklom spotlighted for over 72 hours and travelled more than 170 kilometres.
She has seen other birds including Inland Dotterels, Banded Lapwings, Zebra Finches and Crimson Chats. Reptiles and mammals include the Curl snake, a legless lizard known as a Hooded Scaly-foot and the small carnivorous mammal, the Fat-tailed Dunnart.
“Although I saw the same species as on previous visits, their numbers were much lower compared to what I saw in 2007. That’s to be expected given conditions are so dry,” says the PhD student..
All the Plains-wanderers Ms Eklom found this year were in the one paddock. “But it was the one with the best habitat and there was even some green growth,” she says. “It may have got a bit more rain, which can be very patchy out there.”
She was encouraged to find evidence of breeding activity last year: the juvenile with a male; old nests with pieces of egg shell; and a nest during an earlier visit in March.
Ms Eklom says the biggest threat to the birds is the loss of their habitat, with suitable grasslands being replaced for cropping and overgrazing of suitable grasslands by livestock, particularly during drought.
While at Oolambeyan, Ms Eklom stayed in the homestead complete with noisy possums in the roof and old photographs of prize-winning stud rams on its walls, testament to its heyday in the 1960s.
She admits, at first, it was easy to get a bit disorientated. “But as Michelle Ballestrin, the park ranger says, the good thing about Oolambeyan is all the windmills are numbered so if you get lost and as long as you have the map, just head for the nearest windmill and you can find your way back,” says Ms Eklom.
Ms Eklom now has lots of laboratory work to do, sorting through her arthropod samples, separating seeds from litter, data analysis and writing up her doctoral thesis … probably not as exciting as being out in the field.
ends Author: Margrit Beemster Publication Date: 12 Jan 2009
Editor's Note: Ms Kylie Eklom is a PhD student with the CSU Institute for Land, Water and Society. She is due to complete her PhD thesis in 2009. Media Note: For interviews with PhD student Ms Kylie Eklom and print quality pictures, contact Margrit Beemster from CSU’s Institute for Land, Water and Society on (02) 6051 9653. Related Images:  |
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Fact file: Plains-wanderer
