More than 120 bird species identified in Umbagong Park

Lucy Wenger started documenting birds as part of a Year 9 project while attending Telopea Park School.

While other students spent the year making recipe books or designing dresses, Ms Wenger kept a year-long log of bird species in her backyard, at Goodwin Hill and at Umbagong Park creek.

Following the Canberra Ornithologists Group Bird Survey Method, Ms Wenger recorded the maximum number of species she saw throughout the week at all three locations.

The project didn't stop at the end of the school year either, with about 120 bird species recorded at Umbagong Park over several years.

Having since turned her passion into a career with Greening Australia, Ms Wenger has worked on habitat restoration projects for several species native to the ACT, including the Superb Parrot.

She said the amount of habitat being lost in the ACT was concerning, particularly in some of the areas where new suburbs had gone up, as sparsely forested paddocks provided important connectivity for birds.

Ms Wenger said with the expansion of suburbs like Gungahlin and Molongolo, which disrupts connectivity between nature reserves in the north and Namadgi down south, populations of double-barred finches and scarlet robins had declined.

"A lot of birds will fly over those areas from tree to tree, but they don't tend to do that in urban concrete jungles," she said.

Ms Wenger was involved in a study with the CSIRO several years ago, which monitored connectivity paths for birds in the ACT.

The project was led by Veronica Doerr, with researchers picking isolated paddock trees at different distances between habitats.

Based on prior observations, researchers chose some trees likely to provide connectivity and some unlikely to provide connectivity.

Dr Doerr said the team then recorded every time a bird flew into them and which direction they came from.

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"We found those real woodland specialists, the birds that you tend to find in our nature reserves, but not necessarily in the more human dominated areas, they were using those trees to move through and across the landscape," she said.

"They have to be close enough to each other so the birds can use them as kind of stepping stones and hop and skip and jump their way across."

Dr Doerr said the research also found some of the more generalised woodland species preferred the scattered paddock trees for nesting.

"That suggested we really need to pay attention to these scattered tree areas in our landscapes, it's not just about where you see full tree cover in our nature reserves," she said.

Their work was used to inform the details of the Majura Parkway, due to a bird path across the Majura Valley.

"Similarly, you've got a whole area around Kama Nature Reserve and down to the Molonglo River that is a really key part of connections in our in landscape in the ACT," she said.

"It's really about having a finely detailed mosaic patchwork of habitat and tree cover.

"We really need that sort of messy variety all through the ACT."

The ACT has set ambitious targets to protect existing trees and plant new trees, as part of an effort to reach 30 per cent tree canopy cover in Canberra by 2045, which will require 450,000 extra trees.

The government released its Urban Forest Bill 2022 for public consultation on Thursday, whereby regulation requirements would be placed on all trees on public land and more established trees on private land.

Under new laws, homeowners will need to plant two new trees for every removed tree, or pay $600 a tree if planting is impossible and property developers will be required to replant trees they remove or make a payment based on its value.

From a different MacGregor backyard to the one she grew up in, Ms Wenger is still keenly observing the birds in her backyard.

"There's definitely good things that are happening in terms of restoration and restoring habitat within the ACT," she said.

Ms Wenger said she believes the pandemic helped everyone notice the "musical and intelligent" creatures in their parks and backyards a little bit more.

"I remember lots of my friends sending me pictures, 'Oh, I found this in my backyard, do you know what it is?'" she said.

The now 27 year-old has remained faithful to her favourite childhood animal.

"They're just such lively, vibrant creatures, with such energy and personality," she said.

"None of the other animals really do it for me quite as much."

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