One of the koalas seen making its home in Eurobodalla Shire by a drone in 2024. Photo: Coastwatchers Association.
Signs of more than a dozen koala populations have been detected on the NSW South Coast, after conservationists located the marsupials by tracking the noises they made.
The Eurobodalla Koala Recovery Project works to protect the Eurobodalla’s koala population and sought grant funding with the Coastwatchers Association.
Spokesperson Candace Wirth says work on their latest research project started more than a year ago when they sought a government grant.
“We’re a volunteer citizen scientist group, and that’s the way we always kept it, but we’ve always, always worked with Coastwatchers in various ways,” she says.
“Because they’re an incorporated association, we were able to apply for the grant funding and do it under their umbrella.”
Part of the grant money went to their earlier work, which used a drone equipped with a thermal camera to find three koalas in Eurobodalla Shire.
Biologist and wildlife researcher Doctor Mike Fleming has been working with the Eurobodalla Koala Recovery Project to find where the animals were living in the region.
For him, the results of a recent survey that found more signs of the marsupials were “much better than we had anticipated”.
When they set out to search for koalas in the recent survey, Dr Fleming said the team turned to an indirect method to find them: tracking their noises.
In November, a series of small devices, called Song Meters, were set up across the Eurobodalla to record the bellows of male koalas over two weeks.
“These are simply a digital recording device that you place in the bush,” he says.
“They turn themselves on at dusk and turn themselves off at dawn, so you get a full 10 hours of nocturnal recordings.”
The 12,000 hours of recordings were put through a computer program developed to identify the male’s bellows before the findings were reviewed by human ears.
“[They could record] things like cows bellowing or even pump noises from pumps in rivers, which can also sound like koala bellows,” he said.
“They sorted those out from the real findings, and then we ended up with a list of locations where between one and eight bellows were recorded.”
Once they sorted through the false positives, the recordings led them towards 18 new locations in southern Eurobodalla.
These new detections were clustered into three groups: the southern Bodalla State Forest, the eastern edge of the Moruya State Forest and in Deua National Park just west of Moruya township.
“Now you know where a population is you can go back and monitor it again, using the acoustic monitors or the drones,” he said.
“Once you know where the animals are, you can then monitor them for their health and monitor them for whether their breeding success is continuing.
“You also start to look at some of the other areas where we didn’t find koalas and say, ‘What’s the difference between the places where they’ve been located in Eurobodalla and where we know they used to occur [but aren’t there now]?’.
While the citizen scientists of the Eurobodalla Koala Project are celebrating the findings, Candace says their work isn’t finished yet.
“We have, in the Eurobodalla, a documented history of koala presence,” she says.
“We did expect that we would pick up someting – [but] perhaps not as much as we did. There are still areas that we will be continually researching and investigating.”
The group is calling for the revised NSW Koala Strategy to include Eurobodalla as an area of regional koala significance (ARKS) and have Eurobodalla Shire Council carry out a koala management plan for the shire to protect habitat and the remaining koala populations.
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