We ended up catching only 11 birds, out of 15 nets, in a day and a bit. Not great going. The seemingly never-ending drought has had a big impact on the local birds. However, nine of the birds we caught were retraps, which was quite impressive. We caught Brown-headed Honeyeater, Chestnut-rumped Thornbill, Peaceful Dove and Common Bronzewing.
Our new trainees ended up getting a fair bit of experience in setting up and packing up nets which was good for them. Not so much extracting and banding birds though. Never mind, things will pick up.
I brought along my new elevated mist net apparatus for a test run. It turned out to be quite a success. It takes a bit of getting used to, particularly in the setup, but it appears it will be an excellent addition to our mist netting gear. I have included some pics of the rig, now dubbed 'Lofty' (thanks Stuart!).
Lofty consists of two guyed out poles with a mist net strung between them that can be raised and lowered on a pulley system. The rig reaches nine metres in height.
Suzi and I lower the mist net on Lofty (photo by Stuart Rae).
I extract a Peaceful Dove from the Lofty net (photo by Stuart Rae)
We opened the Lofty net at night to see if we could catch the local Australian Owlet-nightjars. We ended up with a couple of mammals!
I'm about to extract a Sugar Glider as Mark watches (photo by Stuart Rae)
Me holding the bitey (hence the glove) Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps) (photo by Suzi Bond).
We also caught a Lesser Long-eared Bat (Nyctophilus geoffroyi) (photos by Suzi Bond)
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