It is winter at St. Bees Island, Australia, which means that it is very quiet; the same koalas that bellow through September and October have not yet warmed up their vocal chords, so now is the perfect time to make sure all the recording equipment is working well. (See previous post, Island Koalas: Eating Habits.)

I’ve just returned from St. Bees Island, where I was joined by two technical experts from the Queensland University of Technology, Professor Paul Roe and Jiro Sumitomo, to upgrade the listening platforms and check on the koalas prior to the onset of breeding.

If you have been following the St Bees Island koala program, you might know that koalas here in Australia operate on a “reverse cycle” to those at the San Diego Zoo; while the Zoo’s animals are busy breeding, the koalas on St. Bees show virtually no interest in one another. Right now, winter is coming to a close, and we are all keen to see what happens at the start of spring on St. Bees Island.

As well as maintaining the listening stations, we tracked some of the koalas and also found some koalas without collars or tags, so these koalas are new arrivals to the knoll, which is the main study area on the island. Among the koalas we tracked was Elizabeth, the koala who has been in the study for the longest time (since 2000). Elizabeth lives very close to the “Top Knoll” listening station, and on this trip she was only about 20 meters (65 feet) away from it when we found her.

I will return to St. Bees in two weeks for an extended stay, and on that trip I need to catch and tag all the new arrivals so that we can see if they will become residents or are just passing through, or even if they are former residents that have returned to the knoll. But most importantly, I want to find a special koala. In March, I caught Elizabeth to download all her GPS collar data. In her pouch she had a tiny joey.

Over the years, Elizabeth has raised many young koalas, including Elvis, Bingo, Ozzie, and Utopia. Throughout 2009, I have watched her little joey grow, gain fur, and now, on the recent trip, start to emerge from the pouch. With the breeding season fast approaching, the little koala will soon be out of the pouch and then off and about, becoming harder and harder to find. I will try to catch Elizabeth before this happens so that I can find out more about her baby and welcome him or her into the study population on St. Bees Island.

As interesting as the recording of bellows and tracking of koalas is, there is always something special about finding new arrivals at our study site. But somehow I know that while I will be eager and excited to catch her joey for the first time, Elizabeth will probably see me and be thinking, “Not you again.”

Bill Ellis is the Clark Endowed Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research.

Posted in Animal Stories, Conservation, Default, Field Studies, General | Link to this post

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