Taking eastern bristlebirds to the Prom

Video sections

00:00 Introduction to eastern bristlebird project officers and translocation project

01:56 Translocation project segment

09:07 Monitoring bristlebirds 

Transcript of video

Beau Fahnle: Hi, I'm Beau Fahnle.

Jordan Roberts: I'm Jordan Roberts. We are both project officers for the eastern bristlebird translocation project. For those of you who might not know, the eastern bristlebird is a relatively small brown bird with distinctive bristles either side of their beak. They are critically endangered, and they are a relatively shy and cryptic species difficult to see in their coastal heathland habitat.

Jordan: But their beautiful melodic song, you can hear them all throughout the heath, which is lovely. There's approximately 2500 of them in Australia.

Beau: The reason we're conducting this translocation is to set up a second population for the eastern bristlebird in Victoria is that the one remaining population of Victoria is critically threatened. It's estimated to be around 150 birds left in the far east of Victoria. Those birds were threatened by the 2019-20 bushfires and we almost lost the whole colony. So, what we've done is decided to, as an insurance policy, is set up a second population at Wilsons Promontory. Due to the Prom Sanctuary Project, extensive predator control and habitat maintenance is being undertaken to ensure that it's a safe haven for this bird. So the Prom being a more southern location acts as a buffer for climate change and with increasing fire, that's one of the biggest threats to eastern bristlebirds in Victoria.

Jordan: By translocating these birds to Wilsons Promontory, we're creating a second population of the eastern bristlebird in Victoria and reducing the extinction risk within the state. Now we're going to throw to a video that was done on the translocation, which happened earlier this year, and you can see how it went. Enjoy.

[On-screen text: We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Country on which this video was filmed. Always was, always will be.]

[On-screen text: The sole Victorian population of critically endangered eastern bristlebird, east of Mallacoota, came under the threat of bushfire in the summer of 2019-20. To prevent possible extinction, a team of experts evacuated, and safely returned, a small number of birds from Cape Howe. Establishing a second population in Victoria has since been an urgent priority.]

[On-screen text: Eastern bristlebird translocation, April 2022, Jervis Bay, NSW to Wilsons Promontory, Victoria]

[On-screen text: Jordan Roberts, eastern bristlebird project manager, DELWP]

Jordan: We're getting ready to head out to the site and meet up with our transport team, who are dropping off eight birds this morning. We are super excited. The first birds of the translocation, so we are all amped and I don't think anyone got a wink of sleep last night.

[On-screen text: Beau Fahnle, eastern bristlebird project manager, DELWP]

Beau: Nervous anticipation. Yep, it's been a big build up.

Leanne Wicker: It's really hard not to be a little bit anxious knowing that those birds are traveling all the way from Jervis Bay down here to Wilsons Prom. And so that moment when we quietly lift that little slide and they look fine and then out they go, it's such a feeling of relief.

Michael Clarke: Today was sensational. Just to see those little birds burst out of those cages with such vigour into the heathland was just a pivotal, pivotal event in my life, actually, to see that after 30 years of working in this place. The entire population in the world of eastern bristlebirds is thought to only be somewhere between two and a half to three and a half thousand birds. And that puts them in a very vulnerable position. And in Victoria, we're down to one population at Cape Howe.

[On-screen text: Dion Maple, natural resources team leader, Booderee National Park]

Dion Maple: Because of a sustained level of fox control at Booderee for the past 20 years and combined with good fire management, there's a good, resilient and quite large population of bristlebirds here, and that just means they're the most suitable for a translocation like this.

[On-screen text: Darren Sturgeon, Traditional Owner, director, Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community Council, director, board of management, Booderee National Park]

Darren Sturgeon: Significance of these programs is it doesn't just affect the bristlebirds or the quoll, it just brings everything else back as well, brings a balance back to the community.

[On-screen text: Emily Cordy, natural environment programs officer, DELWP]

Emily Cordy: The process for capturing eastern bristlebirds is setting up something called a mist net and we do something called call playback where we have a bluetooth speaker and we cycle through a number of the eastern bristlebird calls to try and entice one of the birds to come out of their habitat and fly into the net. We collect the bird and safely transport it from the net into a small bag. At that point, it's then taken to the tent where a health assessment is carried out on the bird. We have a number of experts that are collecting some data on the birds to make sure they're healthy and ready for a translocation. We're attaching a number of bands that allow us to monitor those birds. We're also attaching a very small radio tracking transmitter to the back of the bird to monitor the birds post-release.

[On-screen text: Leanne Wicker, wildlife health and welfare advisor, Zoos Victoria]

Leanne: There's complexity when you bring wildlife long distances and with lots of different people together. I think for me, one of the really, really wonderful points about this translocation, though, is that without doubt the welfare of the animals was always the priority, and so a lot of detail had to go into that.

Beau: They're critically endangered, so without intervention and with translocations like this, there are a last resort and they're expensive and there are a lot of work, but without that, the future of the species is not looking great.

[On-screen text: Booderee National Park to Wilsons Promontory National Park

  • 12-hour journey
  • temperature controlled vehicles
  • regulated humidity
  • no noise
  • no light
  • zookeeper on board to monitor birds every 30 minutes]

Emily: The transport team left with the eastern bristlebirds on board at last light and the reason for this was to encourage the natural circadian rhythm of the bird to ensure that the bird is well rested. In which it will be ready for release in the morning at first light.

[On-screen text: Dr Mark Norman, chief conservation scientist, Parks Victoria

Mark Norman: The reason the bristlebirds have come here is because Wilsons Promontory is a safe place, a buffer against the worst pressures of climate change. It's surrounded by the cool waters of Bass Strait, which means it's always five or 10 degrees lower temperature than the adjacent mainland. So it's an ideal place to have as a refuge and insurance option for these critically endangered birds.

Michael: Yesterday was idyllic conditions, today was classic Prom weather, and that's what these birds have evolved to cope with. And they'll be fine.

[On-screen text: Zannah Gubler, wildlife officer, Currumbin Sanctuary]

Zannah Gubler: So hopefully, we'll get a few more birds down here and they'll thrive their habitats. Fantastic. There should be heaps of food out there. And yeah, next breeding season, fingers crossed we have little babies in there.

Leanne: Sadly, translocation is now really important. And I think we'll only increasingly see them being used in species conservation. I wish that we didn't have to translocate species, but I'm very glad that we have the capacity, the resources, the will and the people with the skills to be able to do it safely. And in the way that we know is going to help those species thrive.

Beau: So this project wouldn't be possible without the funding from the Australian Government and the Victorian Government and it's been a significant investment into the future of this species. What success looks like to me is my grandkids coming out here and seeing bristlebirds at the Prom. I mean, that would just be fantastic.

[On-screen text: 7 days later]

Transmitter Operator: We've got a bearing of 67 that's 067 with high confidence and constant signal.

Beau: We weren't quite sure where they were going to go, but we knew the birds would tell us and they're certainly doing that. So we've learned a few things. One is that they're crossing the firebreak. We weren't sure if they were going to do that and they're freely moving back and forth. They're also foraging out into some of the burnt areas where we had a planned ecological burn, and they're utilizing those areas to feed.

Emily: To start with, I really thought I was seeing things. I thought, no, my eyes are playing tricks on me. And then I crept down and I stayed really quiet and I was certain I really did see an eastern bristlebirds in the wild for the first time in their new home, bouncing away between a shrub and a tree. It looked as though it was foraging to me and looked very healthy and happy in its new home.

[On-screen text: 17 eastern bristlebirds were released into Wilsons Promontory National Park in this round of translocations. A team of 40 conservation managers, Traditional Owners, vets, volunteers and other experts from across more than 10 organisations, were involved in this successful translocation.]

Jordan: So I hope you enjoyed the video. I know I never get sick of seeing those little brown birds jumping out of their boxes to their new home at Wilsons Prom. As you saw throughout the video, we had a lot of collaborators involved in this project for. Four government organisations over three government jurisdictions, over 40 people from 10 different organisations were involved in this project, and it just shows that with teamwork, collaboration, we can pull off something incredibly amazing by establishing a second population of the eastern bristlebird safely in Victoria.

Beau: So four months ago, we released these birds into the Prom. Now it doesn't just end with us opening the boxes and letting them out into the heath. That's just really where the hard work begins. So what we're going to do is take you behind the scenes and show you how we actually monitor these birds to make sure that they are actually establishing a viable population.

Jordan: Here we have one of our set radio tracking stations where we start the day from. We've got three of these stations throughout the release site. What the people are doing is they're trying to find the signal of the eastern bristlebird that's out in the heath, and they're trying to triangulate the signal at the same time. So once we've locked on the direction where we believe the bird is, we take a compass bearing and record that. Once we've got our compass bearing, we plot that onto a mapping system where we can see exactly the location of where the bird is on the map. By doing these simultaneous bearings every day, we can see how the bird is moving throughout the heath, if it's settled into an area and how it's using the various ecosystems and ecotones throughout the heath. When we find that the bird has stopped moving, we have to end up tracking into that transmitter and retrieve it if it's been dropped. It was really interesting seeing how the birds moved throughout the heath and some of the preferred areas where they settled down. Some of them like the newly burnt areas, which was really, really interesting. A lot of them liked the heathland riparian scrub interface. There were a few real hotspots of bristlebird activity around there.

Beau:  They definitely had different personalities and you got to know where they like to hang out and their movement patterns. They all sort of seem to do different things.

Jordan: There were some that liked disappearing from us and some we constantly walked into because we thought they'd dropped their transmitter, but they were just really settled in that one area as well, which was really interesting too.

Beau: They are very cryptic birds. So at times you'd be walking in thinking that's definitely a dropped transmitter and then at the last minute they'd scuttle away. It's truly the nature of these birds. They really do just hop through the habitat. They can fly, but they're more likely to locomote with their feet than their actual wings. We also were able to map the habitat in a fine scale, so we knew exactly when we overlaid the positions of the birds with exactly what was there as far as habitat and the quality of that habitat, then we could get a really good idea of what these birds preferred, which helps inform our future translocations and teaches us about the species in general. That's a really good opportunity, that we don't usually have to learn about these birds. Here we've got a heat map of where the birds actually spent most of the time. In the orange areas where the most hits are, you can really see some patterns emerging around their habitat preference. So those orange hot areas at the edge of the heathland and the riparian zones, this is ideal hunting area for these birds. You can also see from this map that the birds didn't go too far from the release point. So the release point there is almost in the middle of the map here. All the birds were released at the same point. And you can see that initially some did start exploring and zooming around the place, but really, they really settled into the habitat. Once they got their bearings.

Jordan: They were seen moving up to about 700 meters a day, but of all of our transmitter birds, we found that none of them moved further than 1800 meters from the release site. So it shows high site fidelity, which means it's a really great habitat, plenty of insects for the birds to survive on. They haven't had to disperse to find habitat and food and they seem to have settled in really, really well to their new home.

Beau: We also have a really cool technique that we're developing, which is called passive acoustic listening. So we have these devices that we can set out in the heath and we can program them to come on in the morning at sunrise for a couple of hours and then also just before sunset for an hour. These will record everything they hear in the environment, including the bristlebirds. Now, traditionally, this has been a really exciting method, but really time consuming to be able to actually go through all those sounds and try and pick out the bristlebird signatures on the computer. For the good folk at the Arthur Rylah Institute have been able to use machine learning to develop an algorithm that will actually pull out those bristlebird calls for us from all the background noise and that makes this a really viable technique now. So we can literally run SD card recordings through the computer and it spits out the bristlebird calls and we can work out exactly where they were at what time. That helps us estimate where the birds are and how they're going as well. But with these acoustic recorders, we can keep them going and we can get a really good picture of how these birds disperse through their environment, and especially with a novel population like this, it's once again a great opportunity to learn. I guess if you imagine look after a bushfire as well, the birds, how they spread back into the habitat as it recovers. This will help teach us about that.

Jordan: So now we're going to set up a call playback survey plot point. So what Beau is doing right now is he's getting an eastern bristlebird word call ready to play out into heath from a bluetooth speaker. We're going to want to try and get responses from any birds in the nearby area. So because these birds are quite territorial, we're hoping that they'll call back and potentially even be drawn and lured into the call.

[On-screen text: Permits are required to conduct call playback surveys. Please don’t use call playbacks at the Prom as we need birds to remain responsive to calls in order to monitor the population.]

Hopefully you'll be able to see any identification bands so we know exactly who that bird is. If we do get any birds throughout the years coming in with no band, we know that's a new recruit. So that's a chick that's been hatched at Wilsons Prom which also shows the success of the future generations as well.

Beau: So this is just phase one of the project and it's a three-phase project over three years. Initially we just wanted to make sure that this was going to work. The first thing was that the birds were actually going to survive the long trip. The good news is the birds were all fine. They all survived the trip and were 100% healthy on release. That's allowed us to now look at phase two and three of the project. So we've now got 17 birds out there, but the aim is to have 60 birds all up.

Jordan: Although this population is just starting off, we're hoping in 10 years’ time, eastern bristlebird will be regularly seen and heard throughout Wilsons Promontory. But in the meantime, get out and about in your local area. Learn about the local birds that you've got in your backyard and in your local reserves and think about some of the things that may be threatening these birds and could also threaten those species with extinction as well. We'd love you to have a think about the different ways you can do things at home to help protect these species.

Beau: Thanks, everyone for watching. Hope you've enjoyed the Victorian Nature Festival. Get out there and enjoy nature.

[End transcript]

Updated