00:00This way, yes.
00:04Bush stone curlews were originally in the ACT, but they went extinct in around the 1970s.
00:10And that coincides with clearing of this kind of habitat, as well as incursions of red foxes
00:16that became more and more common in the territory.
00:18So back in 2014, we started with a pilot release of 12 birds to see how they'd go.
00:23And in the first year, we only had one third of those birds surviving the first year.
00:28And so by adapting the tactics for bush stone curlews, we've improved the survival from
00:33a third in the first year to over two thirds in the second year.
00:38And our most recent translocation down in Victoria, we had 95% survival.
00:42So it's gone pretty well.
00:44So when we release those reintroduced founders, we fit a tiny GPS backpack on them.
00:51So we can find out what they're doing, check the survival rates, and also ask questions
00:56about the reintroduction program to improve the science of reintroduction.
01:00But when they come off the bird, because they're the size of a USB stick in this kind of habitat,
01:06they're really hard to find.
01:08Fortunately, the GPS units have their own scent signature.
01:12And so I trained my dog Koda to sniff out the GPS units and find them for us.
01:18Yes, there you go.
01:20Good job.
01:21So these are two units that I picked up from mortality retrievals where they'd unfortunately
01:27be killed by foxes.
01:28So we'd be able to find the evidence of what actually happened to the bird with the units.
01:33One of the coolest things about this reintroduction project is that it was community led.
01:37So it was started by a joint project between the Woodlands and Wetlands Trust, which is
01:42a non-government organisation, and the Canberra Ornithologist Group, now Canberra Birds.
01:47So now a decade on, off the back of its success, we've expanded it.
01:51So it's no longer just a Canberra project, but homegrown, shipping it out to Victoria
01:55to improve the trajectory of bushstone curlews across their former range in southeastern Australia.
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