Gliders of the Scenic Rim

Surveys of gliders

squirrel glider

We have been searching for gliders, with volunteers from our membership and the wider community, since 2014, with special emphasis on squirrel gliders, in the Scenic Rim:

  • where they are
  • what trees and other resources they are using (for food and shelter), and
  • what apparently suitable habitat areas they seem to be absent from.

Squirrel gliders prefer low-altitude open woodland, not the mountain forests that other gliders tend to live in, and which are better protected by national parks and council land.

Our overall aims were (and still are) to indicate:

  • where we might usefully enhance habitat (e.g. by planting more of their food trees or installing nest boxes in sites that lack suitable hollows) and
  • where provision of corridors is especially important (we have access to poles to erect for traversing empty paddocks where re-vegetation is not desired by the landowner)
  • where glider populations are doing well (but may need watching to protect from future threats)
  • what some of the causes of mortality are (e.g. predation by cats, roadkill)

In 2019, the central branch of WPSQ, though the efforts of Amanda Little and Matt Cecil, has raised $5000 towards the corridor project, and Council has offered free trees and shrubs, and payment for she more intensive surveys along the initial potential corridor routes. A further, federal grant application, supported by our local MP Scott Buccholz, to further extend the corridors and establish fencing between grazing and planting areas, has also been approved, giving us a further $10,200 for this project. For further details visit https://scenicrim.wildlife.org.au/projects/wildlife-corridors-for-the-scenic-rim/

The weather right now is not at all conducive for planting, so we’re waiting until September, hoping frosts are over and we get some good rain to do our first bit of planting in places we are already sure of, while continuing to seek other possibilities for filling in the gaps between habitat fragments.

Email scenicrim@wildlife.org.au if you’d like to join us on any citizen-science surveys, tree-planting and protection of young trees, or if you have land on which you’d be happy to plant some glider-friendly trees and shrubs to help connect fragmented habitat patches.

Also see https://scenicrim.wildlife.org.au/projects/gliders-of-the-scenic-rim-an-on-going-study/glider-surveys-coming-up-soon/ for an overview of surveys coming up, as we zero in to the optimal places to establish corridors.

For more details peruse: