The final day of work involved digging one last line of plots in the early hours to avoid the heat. After that we needed to make sure we had enough photos to document the foraging pits. It was nice to be able to drive around with the soul purpose of photographing. […]
Day 4 and Day 5 were digging holes. Lots of holes. In all, there were 1440 holes dug. It took just over 2 days to dig them all. The biggest impediment was heat. There was a slight heat wave for Spring there, and it did reach 39 degrees at some […]
The third day was spent marking out pits. Basically, these were 2m x 2m square plots with a metal stake on the north corner and then tent pegs on the other 3 corners, plus one in the centre. Each stake was marked with a copper tag with its density and type. […]
On the second day, we looked at doing transects where we took counts of how many Bilby/Bettong foraging pits and Rabbit foraging pits there were at regular distances. This would provide a baseline of what the density would be for naturally occurring foraging pits. The interesting thing for me was […]
Scotia Sanctuary is a nature reserve between the NSW and SA borders. I visited on the 30th of September as a volunteer to help conduct my partners PhD fieldwork. I say conduct, which really means, digging over a thousand holes in the soil. This was a 2 week trip which I’ll retrospectively write […]