Birdwatchers crowdsourced to help save endangered black cockatoos in WA

Western Austrlaian researchers to recruit up to 1,000 volunteers to conduct population surveys of the Baudin’s and forest red-tailed cockatoos

Calla Wahlquist

Tuesday 20 January 2015 01.07 GMT

Researchers in Western Australia are crowdsourcing population surveys about black cockatoos in an effort to save two rare species.

BirdLife WA received $255,000 from the West Australian government’s Lotterywest fund on Monday to conduct population surveys of the Baudin’s and forest red-tailed cockatoos.

Dr Jessica Lee, threatened black cockatoo project officer at BirdLife, said both species were endemic to the forests of south-western Australia, stretching from Bunbury to Albany, and their large range made it difficult to get an accurate count.

She aims to recruit up to 1,000 volunteers to survey the black cockatoo populations in their local area to build up an estimate of the surviving population.

“The idea is to develop a volunteer base who are able to go out and survey the birds on their own property in their own time to give us a snapshot of the birds that are there,” she said.

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The Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project is using crowdsourcing to raise funds for rat traps to help protect endangered native birds

By Dan Nakaso 

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Dec 27, 2014

After quickly reaching its goal of raising $10,000 to help save endangered birds on Kauai, the first-of-its-kind, crowdsourced fundraiser by the Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project has now doubled down on its ambitions while reaching people from as far away as Bulgaria and India.

Lisa "Cali" Crampton, project coordinator of the Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project, had little success in the past raising money through grants to buy "humane" traps to kill three species of rats that prey on Kauai's rare, colorful and endangered birds and their eggs in the Ala­kai Wilderness Preserve within Kauai's Na Pali Kona Forest Reserve.

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Crowdsourcing funds long-term seabird study

In the space of just two weeks, zoology professor reaches crowd-funded target to maintain his long-term study of guillemots on Skomer

“The whole crowdsourcing experience has been exhilarating,” says Tim Birkhead, professor of behavioural ecology at the University of Sheffield. “I want to say an enormous thank you to everyone who has donated to my guillemot monitoring research on Skomer,” he wrote last week in an update to his JustGiving page as he reached his crowd-funded target of £12,000. This is enough to keep the project going for one more year until a more stable source of funding can be found.

Birkhead began working on guillemots on Skomer in 1972, for his PhD. Every year since, he has been back to collect data from several breeding colonies on the island. But in 2013, the Countryside Council for Wales(which had been supporting the project) was taken over by Natural Resources Wales and funding was discontinued.

In February this year, winter storms made it difficult for guillemots and other seabirds to feed, resulting in the death of some 40,000 ocean-going birds. With the “seabird wreck” making the case for the guillemot study even more compelling, Birkhead wrote to NRW’s chief executive Emyr Roberts in March asking him once more to reconsider the decision to withdraw funding but says he has received no reply. “They should have taken responsibility, and reinstated the funding so the full impact of the wreck could have been evaluated.”

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