Preparing for the next phase of saving the mountain chicken
A new three year plan funded by the Darwin Initiative is now in place to aid the long-term survival of the mountain chickens on Montserrat. One of the first major events under this project ‘Enabling Montserrat to save the critically endangered mountain chicken’ is to prepare for and undertake the...
Pond construction - update 1
As part of the mission to save the critically endangered mountain chicken, our first milestone is to bring the captive bred mountain chickens back to Montserrat, as part of a reintroduction programme. During the run up to this very exciting moment of being able to release healthy, disease free animals back into their natural habitat,...
Pond construction - update 2
Having scrubbed the pond liners clean the next stage was to actually fix them to the wooden frames. This was a big job and it took us a little time to work out the best method of actually doing it. We did one prototype pond and decided that simply attaching the liner to the frame...
The arrival
After many weeks of waiting and preparing, the big day when we could finally welcome the frogs back to Montserrat was here.
During the morning we had been busy with all the final preparations, such as putting fresh leaf litter into the frog ponds. There was a lot of nervous tension the closer we got to late afternoon, when...
The first release of captive-bred mountain chickens back into the wild.
Today was a very special day. At about 2pm we all headed to the holding facility and began the task of getting a group of 17 frogs ready for release. Javier removed the stitches from each in turn, we took pre-release biometric data, checked the frequency and strength of...
The Honourable Easton Farrell, Minister of Agriculture, came down to the holding facility today and officially welcomed home the mountain chickens.
Minister Farrell gave a speech to thank everyone involved with bringing back Montserrat’s critically endangered species and implored people not to be tempted to hunt them. The speech was broadcast on the local radio station several times: radio is...
Driving through Brades at about 6.30pm we could already see Montserratians gearing up for a night of revelry for Valentine’s day, many dressed to impress in red. We on the other hand (in scruffy field clothes) were gearing up for our own action-packed evening at the release site…
Tonight was the night to start swabbing all radio tracked frogs. This...
The mountain chickens spend their first night in the wild and the release continues...
The team was eager to see where the frogs had settled down for the night after their release so headed out to do some rough fixes on the frogs’ positions during the day. We were avoiding working at night at this point because the frogs were...
The final day of release, and introducing 'Maverick' the frog...
‘Maverick’ is the first of the frogs to disperse out of the immediate area of the release. During our morning tracking we found him up the hill, not too far away, but far enough to remind us that these animals will disperse quite a distance to find their own territories....
With the release completed the focus now was to train the team remaining in Montserrat in everything they would need to monitor the released frogs successfully. This included a lot of frog catching practice in the field, practice in tracking radio-tagged frogs, learning more about the biology of these animals: life cycle, behaviour etc. and learning how to map...