Upcoming Gang-Gang breeding season - monitoring needed

Gang Gang breeding season is not that far away, with August and September being the months when Gang-gangs are most actively and nosily looking for hollows. It would be great if you could continue to keep and eye and ear out for Gang-gangs and to record on iNaturalist any activity of Gang-gangs looking into, entering, leaving or within a hollow.

Your assistance is required to record any mating observed or where Gang-gangs are chewing bark around a hollow. Michael Mulvaney will monitor new iNaturalist sightings. See other post for summary of what the Gang-gang hollow search project achieved last year - it demonstrates that your efforts are yielding conservation results.

Gang-gang breeding habitat has traditionally been thought as Tall Wet Forests with nests in tall trees 18-25m off the ground in a dead spout off the main trunk. However nearly all of the 60 nests that we have recently located are in woodland - open forest situations with the nest hollow on average 6.5m from the ground. . Nearly all the nests are also within 250m of the urban edge. This may be related to the availability of food in urban parks and gardens. When feeding records close to nests are compared to those further away, close to nest feeding includes a higher proportion of Gum Nut, Cone and insects than records further away. I suspect that the ideal nesting habitat includes hollow bearing gum trees that are near to an abundant supply of eucalyptus nuts, green calllitris or cypress nuts and many wattles bearing green pods in October-December.

Michael has collated all breeding records to help us focus where in the Budawang coast area may be worth searching. He has ranked the breeding records according to the following:

1. 3-10 Gang-gangs feeding together during breeding season Sept-Jan (the rational being that breeding birds tend to congregate and do forage together)
2. A Gang-gang looking into, entering, leaving or within a hollow
3. Mating (seems to only occur near nests), bark chewing around a hollow or repeated observations of hollow activity
4. Probable nest but chicks not observed or heard
5. Known nest

This rating is reflected in the maps by the higher ratings having larger blobs. I am thinking that it would pay to search in areas where rating 3-5 records have been recorded or where there is a cluster of records.

If you would like access to maps/data please email budawangcoast@gmail.com as we can't attach that data here.

• a map of the collated 950 records across the Gang-gangs range;
• a map of records in the wider Budawang area; and
• a close up map of the most likely breeding locations based on recorded knowledge.

由使用者 barv 在 2022年07月23日 23:49 所貼文