Green Adelaide has invited members of the community to join a new monitoring project to help understand better the Australian white ibis in Adelaide.
Launching the project, Green Adelaide said it would provide an insight into the way the birds were using the city’s landscape to develop strategies to reduce potential conflicts while still conserving the iconic and protected native species.
It invited the community to help with the monitoring project by reporting sightings of any ibis via the Big City Birds app and website.
Ecologist with Green Adelaide, Jason van Weenen said the monitoring project involved applying leg bands and wing tags to identify individual birds, moves that had been shown to have minimal impact on the birds.
“The bands and tags provide a unique identifier for each bird, allowing the community to report individual sightings and helping us to interpret movements of particular birds,” Mr van Weenen said.
“Building knowledge about their use of the landscape is important in informing management of the species, ultimately to reduce the risk of potential conflicts in the future,” he said.
According to Mr van Weenen, the ibis face challenges in their natural environments due to changes in habitat quality and in some cases habitat loss.
“Previously, ibis would forage and breed in natural wetlands, but as the quality and extent of these habitats have changed, ibis have had to be adaptable, and find a way to adjust to our urban environments instead,” he said.
“An increase in presence of ibis in metropolitan areas has led to the birds coming into conflict with humans, with complaints raised about the noise, mess and smell associated with some of their breeding sites.
“This project will help land managers develop strategies to reduce these conflicts early on,” he said.
According to Green Adelaide, South Australia is one of many states monitoring the species with similar projects underway in New South Wales and Queensland.
It said the project relied on the help of citizen scientists to record ibis sightings via the Big City Birds app – photographing, remembering and inputting, wing-tag or leg-band details, will benefit the project.
More information about the nation’s Big City Birds website can be accessed at this PS News link.
