August
A collection of photos and videos from August, 2022. (Please do click on the gallery photos to see them in full size!):
Jazz finding quail, our weeding volunteers, monitoring Ogyris habitat, a multitude of Springtails and a brand new Pine Woodland.
This is Jazz the Hungarian Vizsla. She thinks it is her job to show us how many quail are on our conservation property, Raakajlim.
These are Brown Quail, but we're always checking for a wayward, visiting Plains Wanderer!
We have some amazing volunteers who help out on Raakajlim. None more so than Phil and Judy. They arrive quietly, set to work and the only sign they've been are some huge piles of weeds. Thank you Phil and Judy. Conservation in the Mallee is lucky to have you!
Back on the tools! I spent the weekend with my old friends: the transect tape, gps, field notebook and a packed lunch. I’m collecting information about the habitat preferred by our rare Arid Bronze Azure butterfly.
Sadly, my “real” job is office bound so it was nice to get out and enjoy the bush.
When the ground turns out to be alive!
These are Springtails: primitive, wingless, not-insects in the Order Collembola. Springtails are ubiquitous soil dwellers and it's not unusual to find more than 25,000 per square metre (imagine counting them ...). They are soil heroes feeding on, and breaking down, decomposing organic materials and fungi. They also assist with nutrient cycling.
Have you seen a purple scum on puddles? That's a raft of Springtails, flushed out of the soil by rain and floating on the surface of the water. When not floating on puddles, they escape predators by "springing" away. They can reportedly jump up to 10 cm, that's amazing for a 3 mm long critter!
(Murray Sunset National Park)
Creating a native Pine woodland! Semi-arid Pine woodlands are a threatened vegetation community in Victoria. The new woodlands on Raakajlim are really coming along.
(Can you see Phil in this video?)
This is a round-up of our social media posts from August 2022. This collection is for those who don’t spend much time on Facebook or Instagram, and apologies to those who have already seen these.