A fantastic opportunity for you to give something back to nature is just around the corner! Bio·R is looking for volunteers to help plant habitat for native wildlife as part of our Frahns Farm Planting Festival at Monarto on Sunday 18th June. This restoration project is a wonderful way to get outdoors, lend a helping hand to a very important cause, and have some fun whilst you’re at it!
Frahns Farm is 550 hectares of retired farmland that has been set aside for conservation and is jointly managed by Bio·R. Our upcoming Planting Festival is part of a larger project that aims to restore the open grassy woodlands that once covered the property before it was cleared for livestock grazing. The new revegetation will also augment the surrounding Monarto Plantings which are over 30 years old and home to many declining bird species. By joining us at the planting day, you’ll also be helping with several research projects that tie in to Bio·R’s restoration efforts. We’ll be planting blue gum saplings so that their nectar production in years to come can be monitored to improve food resources for honeyeaters. Native perennial grass plots will be established to test whether certain combinations of species provide seed for Diamond Firetails year-round. Different planting arrangements will be trialled to test how they affect seed production in revegetated woodlands, and research into the resilience of revegetation to fire will contribute to our planting design. All of the researchers involved in these projects will be at the Festival, so you can meet them and ask them more about their studies.
The day won’t only be about putting plants in the ground, though. Everybody who comes along will have the opportunity to participate in a long-term bird study that uses capture-and-release techniques to tag birds and look at their movements and habitat-use in the landscape. You’ll be able to get up close and personal our precious woodland birds in the hand!
And if all of those exciting activities aren’t enough to tempt you out to Frahns, you can get involved with installing “pitfall lines”, which catch all the little critters that are especially difficult to survey by observation alone, such as reptiles and small mammals. These traps will help us understand more about which species are using the area. We’ll also be installing nest boxes to encourage more birds and mammals back into the area; these man-made nest-boxes are vital for hollow-nesting wildlife whilst they wait for our newly planted trees to grow old enough to provide natural hollows.
So what are you waiting for?
Here is where you can find us on the day (please click on the map to be taken to Google Maps):
