The night following our monitoring beside the Mary River, we were frog monitoring along Obi Obi Creek on the Maleny Plateau. This particular section of the creek has been cleared extensively in the past for cattle grazing and is now beginning to be re-vegetated along the riparian zone of the creek, which is part of the work occurring on the Maleny Community Precinct. Eva and I were joined by Matt Bateman from Barung Landcare who is heavily involved in the work.
This night’s monitoring was going to become the baseline monitoring for several sites along the creek, so it’ll be interesting to see how frog populations and richness changes from here. A month earlier Eva and Matt had been doing frog surveys at the sites and had found the first ever sightings recorded on the Maleny Plateau of the two adult endangered Mixophyes iteratus (Giant Barred Frogs)! So I was determined to find another whilst I was out with them.
We found Litoria wilcoxii (Stony-creek frogs), heard L. fallax (Eastern Sedgefrogs), found and heard Limnodynastes peronii (Striped Marshfrogs), heard a Uperoleia fusca (Sandy Gungun), found and heard a few M. fasciolatus (Great Barred frogs) and only a few Rhinella marina (Cane toads).
The last monitoring site we did is the least disturbed site and was one of the sites they found a Giant Barred frog at last time. Eva and Matt monitored along the transect while I intensively searched around the beginning and off the transect for a Giant…and you guess it – I found one, and it was a juvenile too, the first ever recording of it’s kind! That’s encouraging to know the adults are breeding in the area.
We were all very excited to now have a third recording of this species at along this section of the Obi Obi. I look forward to future nights out frogging there, particularly once the rain arrives.
Well this brings you up-to-date with my latest outings frogging around – and yes, three posts on Christmas Day night – I’ve been working over-time 😛