A young Forester kangaroo investigates a newly installed camera trap. Credit: The Quoin team.
An adult wombat and a joey climbing down a sandstone escarpment. Credit: The Quoin team.
This Tasmanian devil is likely scavenging for food, although devils will hunt if the opportunity presents itself. Credit: The Quoin team.
A group of Forester kangaroo feeding at Stocker's Bottom. Credit: The Quoin team.
A wombat and joey shuffle alongside The Island's boundary. Credit: The Quoin team.
A rare daytime snap of a typically nocturnal quoll. Credit: The Quoin team.
In addition to native animals, hundreds of deer also call The Quoin home. Credit: The Quoin team.
Latest
>>> When and where do we see different species?
Locations
Property-wide
Benefits
Monitoring species’ movements, health and behaviour
Monitoring landscape interventions
Technology
Swift Enduro camera traps
Wildlife Insights for species identification
Aim
To better understand the behaviour, health and movements of The Quoin’s resident animals, as well as how they interact with and are affected by changes we make to the landscape.
Context
Motion-activated cameras, known as camera traps, are an essential tool in our kit. Because of their low energy consumption, camera traps can be used to monitor an area for 4 weeks or more on one battery charge, in which time they might take over 20,000 photos.
We try to position our camera traps to avoid tall grasses or thin tree branches or moving shadows, so we don't snap 20,000 photos of grass swaying in the breeze — typically attached to a star picket or a tree.
How they’re used at The Quoin
We have multiple camera trap programs operating in parallel.
The most formal is an annual survey, conducted in summer, in which we deploy 20 cameras in the same locations. These locations were chosen in 2022 for their likely appeal to Tasmanian native animals, and include river and creek access points, grassland and sedgeland intersections where Southern brown bandicoots (linira) (Isoodon obesulus) and similarly shy macropods frequent, shallow caves and overhangs where Tasmanian devils (purinina) (Sarcophilus harrisii) raise their joeys, and open savannah grasslands where Forester kangaroo (tara) (Macropus giganteus) feed.
These camera traps are usually baited with a little splash of tuna oil to send out a scent signal that there's something worth investigating. Devils — our most fearless little opportunity seekers — are quick to check out a newly deployed camera trap.
We also deploy camera traps to monitor changes we've made in the landscape, such as newly installed leaky weirs and caged plantings. We’re interested in learning which animals visit these novel additions to the landscape, and what they do when they get there. Are those newly caged Leptospermum truly safe from browsing, or are Bennett's wallabies (payathanima) (Notamacropus rufogriseus) squeezing through the fencing to get a mouthful of young growth? Are the deer chewing on those leaves or is it a possum?
Next steps
Once we've collected a camera, we use object-detection software to find all the photos of animals, and then work with the software to identify which animals are present. There's still a long way to go before we can expect machine learning to tell the difference every time, in a blurry nighttime photo, between a large wallaby and a small Forester kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), but it's a big improvement over clicking through 20,000 photos and typing logs into a spreadsheet.
Then, it’s time for data analysis and visualisation. We’ve written scripts to help us understand the relative abundance of different species across our multiple ecosystems, and we’re able to standardise results to allow comparison across time and between deployments. We now know that open deer and kangaroos prefer grasslands, whereas devils and spotted-tailed quoll (luwayina) (Dasyurus maculatus) like denser bush — however, in both ecosystems, wallabies are the most abundant species.