13 February 2025
Inspired by recent fires which have destroyed significant amounts of habitat across our region, our Landcare groups are pursuing how we can use nest boxes to provide habitat to our local native animals. We want to ensure the work we do will be as ecologically valuable as possible! That's why Jallukar Landcare recently ran a science-backed nest box workshop.
Two of our leading experts on nest boxes in southeastern Australia are Dr. Ross Goldingay of Southern Cross University, and Karen Thomas of the Bendigo Field Naturalists. Together they have been running research which has monitored over 300 nest boxes, installed across 5 regions, since 1990. This has all been to find out how to build the best nest box! So who better to invite to our neck of the woods to help us design nest boxes which can help our local species recover from fire?
Karen joined us in person last week at a Jallukar Landcare workshop at Grannes Garden, and Ross via a video call, to share with us what they had learned. Karen and Ross where full of extremely practical tips on how to build your nest box, how and where to install it, and how to maintain and monitor it. We came with a list of questions we wanted to ask, and they answered that and more. We had so much good feedback from the 40 + attendees about how great our guests were.
After Karen and Ross's presentations, we enjoyed lunch and a bit of light nest box crafting. Local volunteers had made about 30 boxes of different designs and they needed a coat of paint and a a few extra bells and whistles. Karen had a wonderful suggestion to then bring these boxes along to ou next school sessin to let the kids decorate the boxes and write their names inside so we could share updates on who is sleeping in who's box! So we will be having the students of the Ararat Rural cluster group decorate them at our upcoming cluster day field trip.
If you want to find out more information and get a link to an online talk Ross has given in the past, as well as next box designs, visit our nest box resource page:
Banner image: Sugar Gliders © Mononymous, some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC) via iNaturalist
Elia Pirtle
Landcare Facilitator and Communications Officer