Wildlife Surveillance

If you look carefully at the bottom left of the above photo, you can see a small brown box mounted to a branch in this beautiful Marri tree. This is a motion-sensing camera which belongs to the Mundaring Shire, and I installed it today at this Black Cockatoo nest box at Mundaring Primary School (click here to read more about the nest-box installation).

Sensor cameras are a great way to monitor wildlife, and just the sort of thing that can help determine which type of animals might come along and investigate a nest box. Although the box is designed for cockatoos (especially the Red-tailed variety), tree hollows can be hard to come by and many other creatures may show interest in boxes. We want to see who they are!

Although it now has a hollow home, this enormous Marri was clearly an important habitat tree before. While installing the camera I noticed a Common Bronzewing nest built on a thick limb a few metres above my head. Here you can see the male pigeon on the nest with his almost-ready-to-fly chicks. Fantastic!

There is always something to see when you spend time up a tree! Let’s hope we get some interesting photos from our motion camera. Keep watching this blog for updates!