ECU Masters student Nathan Yaschenko received a Highly Commended award for a poster about his research on the Mowls of Margaret River that he displayed at the recent Australasian Ornithological Conference in Brisbane. Well, the poster was successfully displayed but was in fact put up by his supervisor Dr Rob Davis because Nathan was confined to his hotel room with covid for the duration!
The research comparing use of call play-back by researchers at night with passively recording night-long vocalisation using multiple autonomous sound recording units (ARUs) attracted a lot of interest. This neatly complimented a well-received presentation by PhD candidate Nigel Jackett about his research on northern Australian races of Masked Owl.
Nathan and Boyd with equipment for two ways of surveying for Mowls – a passive sound recording unit and a megaphone for call play-back.
