I’m currently in the middle of a week of night-time invertebrate surveys, but last week was a week of trapping at Keralup. For those unfamiliar with the area, Keralup is a Department of Housing property near Karnup, which is planned to become home to 90,000 people by 2050. Having worked out there for a while with the trapping that I’m doing I really can’t understand why anyone would want to live there, unless you really, really like mozzies.
The captures for the week included the usual suspects of 6 quenda, 1 brushtail possum, 32 bobtails, 5 black rats. the numbers of quenda were down a bit on the numbers captured back in the winter, but this may have been partly due to the bobtails taking up the traps.
I also had the not so usual capture of 4 King’s skinks and 1 dugite. Keralup is the only site so far where I’ve captured King’s skinks, which is most likely due to their preference to coastal or riparian habitats.
King’s skink (Egernia kingii) capture at Keralup.Dugite (Pseudonaja affinis) captured at Keralup.
Back in 2010 I was lucky enough to be trapping with some undergraduate students in Paganoni Swamp Reserve in Karnup, when we captured a chuditch. This was only the second confirmed sighting of a chuditch on the Swan Coastal Plain in the previous 20 years and as such we were pretty excited. It was a young male and my theory was that it had probably come down to Paganoni Swamp along the Serpentine River from the Darling Scarp. Today I got a bit of evidence to back up that theory with the capture of another chuditch on the opposite side of the Kwinana Freeway on The Department of Housing’s Keralup property. This was another young male chuditch and hopefully he might stick around in the area, although given the apparent lack of females in the area his hormones may have something else to say about it.
Chuditch captured at Keralup on May 22nd 2012
Update: It turns out this little guy has quite an appetite for universal bait and chicken necks and was waiting for me in a trap everyday this week. Another couple of photos added below.
Brian Chambers - Wildlife Research Blog 