Week 1 + 2 of the big year

The big year has begun


This year i have decided to attempt the infamous big year, inspired partly by the awesome Owen Wilson / Jack Black / Steve Martin movie, but mostly as a really good excuse to get out and see some new places. With our push into robotics the amount of field work we get to do has been less than would be ideal, for a biologist like myself whose main training has been out in the field.
But the year started with a bang. With the Help of Taylor Dick (UQ) I managed to see 50 species in the first two weeks.
Week 1 was helped by a trip to Oxley Common. Taylor and I were crook from a flu we had picked up in the cold wasteland that is canada (no offence canadians). I was feeling so weak that i didn't bother bring along the DSLR camera to get any good photos. Could barely carry the bird field guide. BUt lucky we did. The highlights were the red-backed fairy wren, and the superb fairy wren.



numbernamesiteweek
92pelicanStrathpine1
323Crested pigeonOxley Common1
526Noisy minerOxley Common1
685Australian MagpieOxley Common1
636Willie WagtailOxley Common1
453Red backed fairy wrenOxley Common1
446Superb fairy wrenOxley Common1
564Brown honeyeaterOxley Common1
730Red browed finchOxley Common1
723Double bar finchOxley Common1
754Common MynaOxley Common1
8Brown QuailOxley Common1
693Torresian CrowOxley Common1
228Masked lapwingOxley Common1

Week 2 was much more successful. This time we managed a trip to the Enoggera Dam. I finally took the DSLR out and got some great shots. The bird of the week was the comb creasted jacana! 

Comb crested Jacana












Australasian Grebe























leaden flycatcher 


















little shrike-thrush














grey shrike-thrush














Fan-tailed Cuckoo



129Australian wood duckLandsborough2
166Australian white ibisToowong2
698welcome swallowLandsborough2
420laughing KookaburraLandsborough2
522Blue faced honey eaterBeerwah2
344rainbow lorikeetglasshouse mountains2
113Black Swanlake Kawana2
154cattle egretSippy Downs2
649magpie larklake kawana2
153White faced Heronlake Kawana2
148purple swamphensippy downs2
167straw necked ibissippy downs2
149Eurasian cootsippy downs2
147dusky moorhensippy downs2
156little egretsippy downs2
341sulphur crested cockatoosippy downs2
120pacific black ducksippy downs2
312rock dovelake Kawana2
720house sparrowlake Kawana2
106little pied cormorantsippy downs2
111Australasian Grebe (728)enogerra reservoir2
638leaden flycatcher (674)enogerra reservoir2
620little shrike-thrush (715)enogerra reservoir2
108little black Cormorant (738)enogerra reservoir2
103Darter (739)enogerra reservoir2
623grey shrike-thrush (754)enogerra reservoir2
674varied triller (758)enogerra reservoir2
128hard head (white eyed duck) (691)enogerra reservoir2
645Spectacled monarch (756)enogerra reservoir2
222Comb creseted Jacana (659)enogerra reservoir2
605Eastern yellow robin (760)enogerra reservoir2
386Fan-tailed Cuckoo (767)enogerra reservoir2
529Lewin's honeyeater (782)enogerra reservoir2
586Eastern whip birdenogerra reservoir2
157Intermediate egretenogerra reservoir2
6Brush turkey enogerra reservoir2






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dissection of the hindlimb of monitor lizards: V. varius and V. komodoensis, Part 1 of 4, Superficial Dorsal aspect.

Image
One of the major questions I am trying to determine in my research is how muscle and bone strains change with body size and habitat among Australia’s giant lizards the Varanids (aka monitor lizards aka goannas aka large uncooperative lizards). When I first attempted to dissect the hindlimb muscle of monitor lizards I was amazed about how little information there was on the topic. In the end the two most helpful bits of literature was the Snyder paper from 1954, and the book chapter, The Appendicular locomotor apparatus of Lepidosaurs, by Russell and Bauer, (2008), in Biology of the Reptilia, Vol 21.  Luckily I had a visit from muscle expert Taylor Dick, from Simon Fraser University Canada, and we were able to dissect some big lizards.  As a guide to help anyone else who might also be silly enough to want to follow along this line of inquiry we have made a guide below to help you identify some of the major muscles in the lizard hindlimb.  There will be 4 posts in total, th
Read more

Lizard tricks: overcoming conflicting requirements of speed versus climbing ability by altering biomechanics of the lizard stride

Image
So recently I managed to publish a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology about my dissertation work looking at the locomotion in Australia's biggest and baddest lizards the monitor lizards. I called it 'Lizard Tricks', not only cause I think they are doing something neat, but because I think what we see in these lizards would be a nice little engineering principal we could use in the design of robots or something else equally awesome. Ignoring for now that it took me over 6 years to figure this all out, I'd like to try and explain how I finally got to this point, and where we are with our understanding of locomotion in these beasts. All good studies should always start as simply as possible, and this is certainly where we began. In our earliest studies we compared the morphology of different species with their retreat site (Thompson et al. 2008). What we saw is that burrowing species tended to be different, from those that retreat into tree hollows, as sho
Read more

2020 is going to be awesome!

Well 2020 is finally here. My plan for this year is to start posting more. Looks like i haven't posted much for the last two year. Not for lack of will, but rather a complete lack of time. However this year i am going to assign a higher priority to posting more, it it becomes more of a habit. 2019 was a great year. The Clemente biorobotics and biomechanics lab exploded in size and we saw lots of new members joining. We moved into a new room, and now have an extensive system of rapid prototying, laser cutting and more. We have pushed into the field of machine learning, both in our work on animal movement using accelerometers but also into machine vision markerless motion capture, mostly thanks to the hard work of Jojo Schultz. We only got out five papers, i hope we can do better this year. Brunton, E.A., Clemente, C.J. and Burnett, S.E., 2019. Not all urban landscapes are the same: interactions between urban land use and stress in a large herbivorous mammal. Ecological
Read more