Searching for koalas in the ACT

ACT Government ecologist Jaimie Hopkins is leading a project to determine whether there are koalas in the territory.

Transcript

00:00 [Sounds of a forest fire]

00:07 My name's Jamie Hopkins and I'm a fauna ecologist in the Office of Nature Conservation in the

00:12 ACC Government.

00:13 There are lots of different methods you can use to detect koalas.

00:16 For example, you can search for them with drones, you can look for their droppings around

00:21 trees, you can simply walk a line and look in the trees.

00:25 But something that is quite useful for detecting them is passive acoustic monitoring, which

00:29 is when you just place a sound recorder out in the bush.

00:33 With us, we're leaving them out for two weeks and they record every night from sunset to

00:37 sunrise.

00:39 And the idea with those is that if there are koalas in the area, they should detect male

00:43 koalas bellowing.

00:45 Males bellow from approximately October, November-ish to February, and it's a sexual advertisement

00:51 signal to females, so it's something that they do during the breeding season.

00:54 It's going to be a really significant finding, actually.

00:57 We know that the community really love koalas, they'd be really supportive of having them

01:01 here.

01:02 Also, too, koalas are what we call an umbrella species.

01:06 So if you find them in an area, it often means that the area is productive and doing really

01:09 well and you can assume that potentially other species are doing well also.

01:15 So if we manage areas to protect koalas, we're going to also be managing it to protect a

01:21 lot of other species as well.

01:22 We do know that every now and then there have been some sightings here in the ACT, so it's

01:27 possible that the sightings that we do see here are individuals wandering over from New

01:32 South Wales, but there's also a chance, too, that they could just be coming from small

01:36 populations that we have here in the ACT.

01:38 (cat meows)

01:40 [BLANK_AUDIO]