Our Findings

Albert's Breeding Season - Success!

Albert's Lyrebird breeding season has now wrapped up and monitoring is slowing down. We gathered HUGE amounts of data with plenty of successful audios, videos and images captured. Albert's Lyrebird was recorded at eight out of nine participating properties, with some containing more than one calling male. 

Rare footage of three female Lyrebirds enjoying an afternoon bath.

Audio Acoustic Monitoring 

Acoustic monitoring provided the majority of Lyrebird records. Song meters were set daily to record two hours around sunrise and three hours at sunset, with calls proving most frequent around 7am. Lyrebirds are notorious for mimicking other sounds so identification was sometimes challenging! Our ecologist Dave Milledge over heard one performing a slightly off tuned Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo, Kookaburra and Pacific Baza during the Marbled Frogmouth surveys. The more species one can mimic and the clearer they are, supposedly attracts the most females. Easy as that?

Look at the spectrograms below. The green 'signatures' are visual representations of the various spectrums of frequency. Can you guess who is making the sounds? Take a listen using the audio files beneath each picture.

Camera Monitoring 

A minimum of two wildlife cameras were set up at each property and captured fantastic images. On properties where both male and female Lyrebirds appeared suggests breeding is likely in these areas. Hopefully we can confirm in the coming months when little Lyrebirds make their way into the cameras view (fingers crossed).

The Marbled Frogmouth!

Being equally elusive as Albert's Lyrebird, if not more, on-ground surveys were conducted by Dave Milledge at 10 participating properties. This confirmed a strong population in the Huonbrook area with 5 birds (4 male, 1 female) at one property and 2 more at another. Not far down the road, one more Marbled Frogmouth was heard at a property in Wanganui. Three more males were also observed at a property in Larnook.
"These are significant records (in Larnook) because apart from earlier surveys in Boorabee State Forest, there are no other records on Mackellar Range" said Dave. 

Song Meters were deployed at each property which also gave us some amazing records of the famous Marbled Frogmouth gobble. If you're not quite sure what they sound like then read up on their profile here Our Species and listen to their unusual call. Manual surveys will be conducted again over the summer of 2021-22 at each of the 10 landholders. We hope their populations have remained stable or increased over the last 12 months. 

Feral Animals

While trying to capture Lyrebirds we also wanted to monitor what feral animals were moving through each property. The cameras captured mostly foxes, a few cats and a couple wild dogs. Relying on camera footage and local landholder knowledge, it is assumed that ferals, particularly foxes, have increased after the 2019-20 bushfires. No evidence has yet found feral animals predating on Albert's Lyrebird but footage of a wild dog carrying a Red-legged Pademelon (threatened species) and a fox carrying a Native Brush Turkey is concerning. This data prompted a seperate project to be established that focused entirely on feral animal management at 8 properties that have Albert's Lyrebird and either foxes or cats. To read more on this project click here. 

These sites will continue to be monitored over the next year to try ascertain whether feral animals are impacting Lyrebird populations. 

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