Friday, 18 March 2011

hooded Plover report

On the 26th of March he headed out to Innes national park to find out more about the unique and nearly extinct "hooded plover".

Aim- Our aim was to find out where about’s the Hooded plovers can be located. Others things we aimed to find out about the Hooded Plover is what are some of their behaviours, how they react when we get close to them and their size.

Method-

Task one (Scribe)- The Scribes Job is to write down all information given by the observers on the Hooded Plovers and are required to write down all of the exact locations given of the Hooded plovers recived by the GPS operator. Other things Scribes are to write are things like what the weathers like and some of their activities.

Task 2 (GPS Operator)- The GPS operator is required to find out all of the exact locations of where Hooded plovers are found through their GPS system. All info gatherd must then be given to the scriber.

Task 3 (Threat observer)- The threat observer has the job of observing some of the ather predetors on the beach which could be considerd as a threat to the Hooded Plover.

Task 4 (Photographer)- The Photographers job is to take photos of any Hooded plovers spoted. The Photographers are also expected to take photos of any Hooded Plover tracks found.

Symnopthsis- During todays search we hope to uncover hidden facts about the Hooded Plover in hope to regain their species. The Hooded Plover is a bird which is 10 cm in stature and 20cm long. Some of the other details about the Hooded Plover is it hads a grey body, a black head, red legs and a red ring around the eye. Hooded Plovers can usualy be found near beaches where they breed.

 The Hooded Plovers are small little birds which have said to been only 500 birds left in the world. 50 of them located on the yoke peninsula.

On the 26th of March 2011 it was our objective as a group to observe and write down some of the habits of the birds, where they are located, how many there were and many more things. By doing this we are aiding in helping keep these wonderful creatures alive due to many people are not aware of these birds and these birds going into extinction.

We started the day on a nice start. The weather was a maximum temperature of 22, a minimum temperature of 15, there was no rain, it was 45% humid and the wind was going at 6kmph. The weather was perfect in search of the birds.

  One problem we did encounter during our search was a similar type of bird called red cap bird which looked almost identical to the hooded plover. This was made things very hard due to the only way to tell them apart is the red cap is slightly bigger.

 During our search we went to pondalowie bay to begin our search. Moff who was taking us during the search, told us that it was very unusual to see one considering there aren’t many of them left in the world. But instantly as soon as we hopped out of the bus we spotted a few just along the beach. The locations of these birds found are (S)35.14.077 (E)136.50.403 At this location there were two hooded plovers wondering around together. The next pair of Hooded Plovers we found was at S)35.14.039 (E)136.50.507. Moff was very happy that we saw so many birds, for this told us that they were starting to regenerate as a species.

Some of the threats we noticed along our walk was some human footprints. This can be very dangerous for the birds eggs as they are laid among the seaweed and very hard to spot which results in us stepping on the eggs and crushing them.

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