7
September 2018 — 1:03pm
Masked
owls are endangered in Tasmania but very hard to monitor in forests.
One of
the largest owls in the world, details of their lives are unknown.
But they
do leave behind pellets of regurgitated food like hairballs
Zorro the
puppy will be trained to sniff out these pellets to help researchers.
Deforestation
is the major threat facing masked owls and other Tasmanian species.
To save
one of Australia's most elusive birds, scientists need a hero.
Enter
Zorro. He's young, charismatic and, like his namesake, never resists the call
to adventure. He also happens to be a four-month-old puppy.
But in a
last-ditch conservation effort, a crack team of Canberra researchers plan to
harness Zorro's superior canine nose to help find and monitor Tasmania's masked
owl.
While the
endangered bird plays a vital role as the state's largest nocturnal predator,
very little is known about its life.
The
problem, according to the Australian National University's aptly-named
Difficult Bird Research Group, is that masked owls are notoriously hard to
monitor in the wild.
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Not only
is the terrain rugged, but researchers must venture out after dark, scaling
ancient trees or straying far off road in some of the most remote corners of
Tasmania.
"It's
a logistical nightmare, it's just not safe," says Dr Dejan Stojanovic.
"We
know almost nothing about these birds, we don't know their population here, we
don't know their diet, their habitat."
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