“As cassowary habitat is increasingly encroached on by human modified areas, their role as seed dispersers supporting plant diversity and rainforest regeneration may change”, Skye says. “They will also be more exposed to threats from humans such as dog attacks and road accidents. The camera trap surveys we are conducting in Paluma National Park with Wren and Jim allow us to investigate the edges of their habitat and understand how cassowaries are utilising these highly modified areas.”
Here, Skye tells us more about her first fieldwork experience in the Australian Wet Tropics.
The field work was amazing; it was my first experience doing fieldwork in the Australian Wet Tropics! I flew up to Townsville and was picked up at the airport by Wren Mclean, who I’ve been collaborating with on cassowary studies. Wren did her Honours project on cassowaries, and she has been very involved for many years in projects throughout the Wet Tropics to study their populations. Jim Tait also came along for this field trip; he is the technical assistant, and he owns a property in Rollingstone, which is 45 minutes north of Townsville and backs onto Paluma National Park.
Townsville/Paluma is the very southern extent of cassowary range and Wren wants to bring attention to the population that is present in this area. She has been collecting historical sightings and documented sightings from eBird and other online resources to try and get an idea of cassowary presence. For the past year, Wren and Jim have been setting cameras in Paluma National Park to document the presence of cassowaries – and they have been seeing cassowaries turn up on their game camera images! The aim of my trip was to set cameras in the edge habitats of Paluma National Park to determine whether cassowaries are using the narrow riparian corridors to access lowland rainforest where there are abundant resources for them (fruiting trees, wetlands). Wren and Jim want to find out whether the population of cassowaries in Paluma are a disjunct population from the northern extent of the Wet Tropics and if they are moving into the lowland areas that have been heavily modified and are populated by people.
Our first day of fieldwork
The first day, we drove through a pineapple plantation to arrive at the start of our hiking track. We spent a full day rock-hopping up rivers and traversing thick rainforest and deploying game cameras along the way. We chose areas that looked like natural conduits of movement for animals, were near water sources and had many fruit resources that would attract a cassowary. Wren was using “bait balls” along with her game camera deployments. She had wooden balls that were painted red and blue that she wired around trees and pointed the camera at in the hopes it would attract a foraging cassowary. I was also deploying cameras I had brought with me but mine were not baited. This will provide another interesting question we can look at in terms of the difference in animal detections when deploying baited versus not-baited cameras.
A run-in with the iconic stinging tree
The forest was teeming with fleshy fruiting trees that Wren and Jim pointed out along the way, such as blue quandongs and black sapote, otherwise known as the chocolate pudding fruit. I also had my first up-close encounter with the stinging tree. I spotted it because it had a cluster of beautiful purple raspberry-looking fruits. Luckily, I recognised the distinctive heart-shaped leaves and Jim confirmed my identification of the stinging tree, so I kept my distance. Despite Jim assuring me you could wash the berries thoroughly enough to remove the stingers, I assured him I would not be attempting that process. We camped by the side of the river at a deep swimming hole where we could refresh ourselves after a long, sweaty day of walking.
Jim also caught us a fish from the river that we roasted over our campfire for dinner. Although we never saw any cassowaries during the field work, we did find a scat along one of our trails that Wren identified as a cassowary scat. It was old and had been disturbed by rodents and weather but there was the tell-tale sign of whole fruit seeds intact in the scat.
Other wildlife we saw along the way were a big black snake that slithered across the path in front of me, many different spiders of all shapes and sizes, noisy pittas, topknot pigeons, king parrots, white- throated nightjars, cockatoos and many other unidentifiable bird species. Another highlight were the numerous gigantic fig trees we saw in the forest. The sheer size and intricacy of their shapes takes your breath away!
I will be returning to collect the game cameras I deployed in a few months, and I look forward to seeing what critters may have passed by. Wren and I will continue to collaborate to answer questions of how cassowaries are moving through Paluma National Park and about cassowary occupancy, habitat associations and key threats throughout their entire range.
Read more of these stories in Issue 19 of the CBCS Newsletter and follow us on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.