Follow up monitoring
Moving the two frogs together, whilst the most important component, was just the first stage. As nothing like this had been done on this level with amphibians before we did not know what would happen. One of the major concerns was that the female would immediately try to get back to her original patch. For this...
Sunday success
Fortunately we did not have to progress those thoughts as on Sunday 26 June eleven days after I had arrived and the first day all of us - myself, Luke and Katy from Chester (who had just arrived the previous day) - were out together we had success. As usual we arrived in Fairy Walk, had a much...
Trekking into Fairy Walk and tracking down our frog.
On paper the plan was quite simple. Go out to Fairy Walk. Find the female frog. Move her down to the male’s location. Do regular post-move monitoring to check on how they are doing. As with almost all fieldwork though things are never that straightforward and just because the female was...
First thing’s first - finding the frogs
This translocation was initially planned to take place in 2015. However, that year saw Montserrat along with the rest of the Caribbean experience the worst period o
f drought for over 50 years. May to August, in what should have been the wet
season and breeding period for mountain chickens, saw the ghauts (local name...
As many people reading this will have have seen from the article published on the Guardian website we were successful in our mission to unite the two remaining wild mountain chicken frogs on Montserrat. This true life fairy-tale was made possible from funds raised through an online appeal run by Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and further support from the...
Machel Sulton from the Dominica Mountain Chicken Team lets us in on the nights out spent catching treefrogs for the project.
The impact of climate change is evident as this year’s weather pattern has been a strange one for most Caribbean countries, with Dominica being no exception. It has been relatively hot, dry and humid but this is no excuse...
I have some really exciting news to share with you today… Last weekend, we were out in the forest doing our regular tree frog catching and swabbing to monitor the presence of chytrid fungus. We had just started on the hike back to the car, after spending a few hours looking for tiny tree frogs hiding in the dry...
Whew, what a few months. 2014 has been an exciting and busy few months for the MC Team based in Dominica. This year has seen the start of the most intensive field surveying carried out since Chytridiomycosis first arrived on the Island in 2002!
The numbers of wild mountain chickens remaining in Dominica have been an unknown quantity for a...
My name is Laura and I have recently arrived in Montserrat to join the Mountain Chicken team here. I had the pleasure of seeing a mountain chicken on my first trip to Montserrat last year, and couldn’t believe how big they are. Especially when I was told that the frog I considered to be a giant was just a...
On Friday the 13th September 2013 Dominica hosted the first Annual Mountain Chicken Day.
This event was designed to help create awareness about the plight of the Mountain Chicken Frog (Leptodactylus Fallax) also known in Dominica as the Crapaud. The event was free so that all the public could attend and there were numerous planned activities throughout the day.
The day...