Education Officer’s Report
Anne Williams
Well the year started with Childrens Day at the Hunter Region Botanic Gardens, Heatherbrae. We all enjoy our day working with the kids making a variety of craft items - pine cone animals – owls, turtles and echidnas; and cardboard bats with furry shoulders. They also have fun filling in crosswords, identifying shadow animals – colouring in various aboriginally drawn animals and more….
We conducted a stall on Permian Snake Day at the Museum and educated nearly 1,000 children and adults on many aspects of snakesbyhaving “Priscilla”our ‘live’ Education Diamond Python on show, a large display of frozen snakes for everyone to look at and compare with what they have seen in their gardens. Pieces of laminated sloughed snakeskin were handed out to the kids; they had fun cutting and painting paper plate snakesand playing with thin balloon snakes that sold like crazy. It was a very busy day but very rewarding and only briefly disturbed by a fire drill alert.
Beaumont Street Festival kept us busy as well – handing out heaps of our pamphlets, Priscillaperformed nicely again – hanging around my neck, crawling over myhead or just restingon myarm looking serpentine. Priscilla is a terrific attractant to get people to come over to our stall – she attracts many questions and we hear many snake tales as well. We had lucky dips and raffles and lots of cool drinks because it was quite a hot day.
We hada stall at the Myall River Festival in Hawks Nest where we are usually next to the National Parks & Wildlife stall – they always have a large range of taxidermied animals on display so we compliment each other in educating the public on our wildlife and I also do a talk in the hall as well on the work we do with rescuing and rehabilitating. There was also the Ash Island Fair and Morisset Festival and many others where we have promoted ourselves, gained new members and had a great time talking to very interested members of public. Unfortunately we didn’t get to participate in our biggest event which is the three-day Tocal Agricultural Show because of the devastating storm in April.
We will conclude this eventful last 12 months the same way we started with the Childrens Day at the Botanic Gardens, Heatherbrae on the 30th June as the School holidays begin in June this year and this event is always held on the first Tuesday of the holidays.
Orphaned Flying FoxReport
Anne WilliamsCo-ordinator
This year we had a quieter year than normal with our own orphaned flying foxes in the Hunter region. We only had 8 little Grey-headed Flying Foxes come in and one little Black Flying Fox. When a little Black comes in we all usually jokingly draw lots as to who is going to care for it. As we usually only get one in each year we tend to share by taking it in turns each year to enjoy raising a Black.
Well this year we didn’t have to argueabout who had a Black because unfortunately around Casinothey had a bad heat stress disaster and there were hundreds of fatalities. We agreed to take 14 orphaned Black Flying Foxes to raise and rehabilitate– sotherefore this year everyone had the chance of enjoying this experience. Unfortunately, one didn’t survive but the others came through with flying colours “i.e. black wings” successfully. Our foster mum Carers raise them to a stage when they are weaned off milk, eating large pieces of various fruits and usually flying by then too. Once they reach this stage of development we take them to Judy Hopper’s CrechePteropery Aviary. We found that these Blacks fly a bit earlier than the Grey-headeds. This was the first time that we had experienced raising a number of them to be able to make any comparisons in their development.
While in Creche they are tested for flight capability and are weighed regularly and measured to make sure they reach a “release standard” to be banded with an ID number. When most of them were ready for their next stage in life, Judy and I travelled to Wingham Brush near Taree, carrying 19of the orphans plus three adult females and their young that hadcome in injured after being tangled in barbed wire or fruit tree netting and had now recovered and were now ready for release. They were all successfully integrated into the resident colony.
We now have a wonderful selection of Flying Fox and Microbat rehabilitators to care for our orphaned juveniles and rescue our injured adults and juveniles. Please remember to arrange to get your titre levels checked next time you visit your GP and send me a copy of your results please.
MicrobatReport
Anne WilliamsCo-ordinator
We have not had as many microbats in as in past years. We did have a very major important rescue in the Maitland area though.
A partly hollow 8 metre branch fell of a maternity roost tree with 152 baby and juvenile White-striped Free-tail Bats in it. It was quite a dilemma! My brain had to work overtime to figure out what to do. The branch had ripped a 2 metre x 60 hole in the tree trunk where other babies and the adults were roosting as well. Jason Hodges and I gathered all the juveniles out of the fallen limb and placed them into a 1 metre hollow limb that John, the owner of property had put up a tree for parrots to nest in. He put a new end on it and we placed the bats in this new home and hoisted it upon ropes – 5 metres high – level with the hole in the tree. It was 5 metres from the maternity tree but we hoped that the mums would hear them calling and go in to feed them. Unfortunately 3 died before we transferred them across and one had a broken wing. I checked what sex they were as we put them in the new log and we found there were 76 males and 76 females; so 148 of them were safely housed in this new nursery log on Wednesday.
Nara, my son, was returning back home on Saturday so we, Judy Hopper came as well, then ventured back the John’s garden not knowing what we would find. John had not found any that had fallen out on the ground so we expected to find them all still in the log. We had no idea what state they would be in either- healthwise. Well we were very surprised to find that there were only 46 left. We had hoped that this might happen, but we had never had to deal with this sort of disaster before. To discover that 102 juveniles had been carried back into the maternity tree through the hole in the trunk was such a relief. Phew! Our next move was to now check the ones that were left to see if they were dehydrated or weak – but no they were absolutely fine.
We had to hire a cherry picker so that Nara could get up to the hole in the trunk – 5 metres up to place the hollow log inside the hollow tree trunk and screw it in place and then we closed the opening in the trunk with a large sheet of damp course covered in shade-cloth 2metres long X 1 metre wide. Now we had to just cross our fingers and assume the other young ones would climb out and join their mums inside the hollow trunk.
We were still unsure as to the final outcome but hoped that all was well.
Well the outcome was successful, unfortunately to the demise of the maternity roost as the whole tree fell down two months later. Fortunately, John had been regularly watching the roost tree and told us that the bats had not been there for at least a week before the tree came down. They appeared to have left when a very large 20cm crack had appeared down the length of the tree. We went over to John’s now to get a good look inside the tree. Wevery happily discoveredthere were only a couple of mummified(which were probably from many months before) bat bodies in the bottom and therefore it was confirmation that we could now celebrate that we had actually managed to save all 148 babies. They had finished growing up and left home with their mothers. These bats are not a threatened species but appropriate maternity roosts are hard for them to come by and therefore we had helped this species expand their population. Wow! What an achievement. Unbelievable.
Well that concludes my exciting Microbat Report.
Foodbank Report
Anne Williams, Coordinator
Our foodbank list of available products and live foods has grown dramatically. We can now provide 50% discounts on all the products to rehabilitators that have kept up to date with their fauna data entries. It is very important to keep up to date with data so that we have a good record of all the fauna we care for which helps us gain grants of money from OEH and other sources. Taking care of the live food keeps me busy – keeping up the food to crickets, woodroaches and mealworms and also making sure they don’t escape all over the house.
We gained a sizeable grant from NAB to helpprovide food and assistance after the storm so we are able to spend some of this moneyto give our rehabilitators a small amount of food free of charge.
We have very good suppliers of these products that deliver very promptly and we never have any complaints about the goods delivered.
Please make sure you take advantage of these bargains to help you feed our troubled wildlife.