21.5 C
Montserrat
Thursday, March 28, 2024
May has definitely been the wettest month of the project so far. As we begin to move into the rainy season in Montserrat storms have been brewing, ghauts have been running and the frogs have moved to seek higher ground. It is believed that this behaviour is the result of a natural instinct to escape the monstrous volumes of water, mud...
For those of you interested in island life and the workings of Montserrat as an overseas territory, we had the initiation of our new Governor, British Economist Mr Adrian Davis, this month. His Excellency the Governor, is the representative of Her Majesty The Queen and is the Constitutional Head of State in Montserrat. The Constitution gives the Governor certain responsibilities...
With the volunteers merrily on their way I wanted to give a brief summary of the progress here in Montserrat and to highlight the immense achievements of the project recognised so far. To date, this project has achieved a successful release of captive-bred mountain chickens bred from a population rescued off island by Durrell and the Montserrat Department of...
Radio-tracking released mountain chickens
The past four months have been epic beyond compare for the team in Montserrat: laughing, crying and sweating their way from January to May. January saw the captive-bred critically endangered mountain chicken return to Montserrat. The release of these precious animals happened over several days, and with great success. After the release the team spent six nights a week, every...
Forest bananas being collected
In this blog I (Payana) am going to ignore the frogs. Yes that is right, no frogs. I am going to focus on the other things that happen in the forest at night. I'd better start with admitting the fact that I am quite addicted to food (well I guess everyone is, but my addiction seems a bit more intense)....
Forestry staff help with mountain chicken swabbing
Local knowledge of the forest is key to us being able to work efficiently and constructivelyon Montserrat. The Montserrat Department of Environment’s Forestry team helped us a lot when we were building the temporary ponds to house the frogs when they arrived on island, and now, they are helping us to find them again in the forest. As local men...
Hidden pool in the dry ghaut
Today was a day of following ghaut (excuse the pun) feelings. We were exploring new areas of our release site ghaut to try and find the frog utopia we’re sure must exist, to explain why we can’t find certain frogs on our normal searches in the main release site area. The release sites are all positioned on the main Sweetwater...
Finding different frogs late at night
We’ve been radio tracking for over a month now, so have decided to try and track at different times of night / early morning in case different frogs move around more at different times. So now we are larks as well as owls and coming up with some interesting finds… We did our first late night search, going out at...

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Examining a mountain chicken
Quite an exciting night! Blacka and I (Payana) went to Pelican Ghaut to look for surviving mountain chickens. This was my first trip to Pelican and having been warned about the massive slippery rocks I would be climbing, I had pep talked myself (and my boots) into holding tight, on the way towards the ghaut. It turned out to be...
Removing stitches from transmiter implantation pre-release
From reading this blog, it’s pretty evident that we’ve employed radio tracking as one of the main elements of the release. But, how do we do it? How do the frogs transmit signals? What are the signals like, and what do we do when we pick one up? In this blog we’ll try and answer some of those questions. So...