A bit of local news. As part of their celebrations of Her Majesty The Queen's Diamond Jubilee the Earl and Countess of Essex visited Montserrat today. The schedule consisted of a visit to the Public Market, an opening of the new museum and a Steel Pan Celebration Concert performed by the local schools. Our little island shined and the...
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)....
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...
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...
The project has had a busy week this week with Montserrat Science Week. Originally set up by the Montserrat Volcano observatory to outreach to local Montserratians about the active volcano this week has evolved to include all aspects of science including terrestial and marine biology and of course the famous mountain chicken.
So the team has been busy this week...
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...
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...
Things are really getting back into the swing of things as we prepare for the next release which is due at the end of this month. However, before we could concentrate on our new group of release frogs we had some guests visit Montserrat to take part in the third quarterly Project Steering Committee meeting. Dr. Reginald Thomas, the...
Just when things were coming to an end here on Montserrat for me as a volunteer, another adventure took off! I got the opportunity to spend a week with our sister mountain chicken project on Dominica, run by ZSL. The project members on Dominica have put a lot of work into setting up a facility for captured wild frogs...
So the frogs are now safely in the forest. Now what? Well we need to find them of course. Some of you may remember this time last year with the last set of frogs when we started the radio-tracking. Basically all the frogs we have released this year are implanted with tiny transmitters which give out a signal. The...