The Bunyah song meter Project has been a great success with over 800 koala bellows recorded over 10 days across 25 locations. Those boys sure can be boisterous and rowdy. Its great news as it further demonstrates the presence of a regionally significant koala population at Bunyah.
Each of the 25 audio recorders was placed on private land with a minimum distance of 400m apart to ensure that each bellow could only be recorded once. Every device we put out recorded bellows with some areas picking up more than a hundred calls over the 10 days while others only picked up a few. This information has proved really useful as it shows us where the koala high use areas are located allowing us to better target our lantana control programs in addition to the location and design of our wildlife corridor plantings.
The Department of Primary Industries has been provided with the acoustic data so as to conduct a statistical analysis of our koala population. This is a great news story about how citizen science can make material contributions to help identify and protect our unique native fauna.