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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/18/a-kangaroo-a-possum-and-a-bushrat-walk-into-a-burrow-research-finds-wombat-homes-are-the-supermarkets-of-the-forest>
"First came a picture of an inquisitive red-necked wallaby, then an image of a
bare-nosed wombat, followed by a couple of shots of the wombat’s burrow with
nothing else in the frame.
By the time research scientist Grant Linley had looked through a further
746,670 images, he had seen 48 different species visiting the 28 wombat burrows
that he had trained his cameras on.
Like a lineup of Aussie animals in a children’s book, Linley watched a parade
of wallabies and kangaroos, lace monitors and possums, bush rats, button
quails, echidnas and tiny marsupial antechinus hanging out at the burrows.
Some came to forage or take shelter, some to drink or bathe, and others to
partake in a little geophagy (a technical way of saying “eating dirt”).
“The idea of [the burrows] being like an Airbnb or a supermarket isn’t a bad
analogy of what we’ve observed,” says Linley, a PhD student at Charles Sturt
University.
The cameras were set up across Woomargama national park and the neighbouring
state forest, south of Wagga Wagga in rural New South Wales.
Less than 18 months earlier, the forest had been torched as six bushfire fires
merged into a gigafire during Australia’s black summer of 2019 and 2020."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
