To think (or fly) outside the bush

We’ve all been encouraged to “think outside the box” from time to time. But try instilling that mental mindset in a bird. That’s literally one of the Walters’ research projects.

The brown treecreeper is a small brown bird found only in Australia. It lives in the drier, open forests and eucalyptus woodlands of the eastern part of the continent. It spends a lot of time on the ground and is able to “creep” up trees, although not as well as most woodpeckers. It probes cavities and under loose bark in search of insects and their larvae.

Some of Australia’s eucalyptus forests were chopped up by a government land management program that went awry, leaving the forest with treeless patches. Scientists discovered the brown treecreeper population in these fragmented habitats was doing poorly.

Similar to the red-cockaded woodpeckers in the southeastern United States, the brown treecreepers live in family groups. Most of them spend their lives within a specific neighborhood, and most males start their own families on a piece of their father’s territories. When too few females move into the neighborhood, which Walters discovered was happening in fragmented forests, the population starts to decline.

By studying movement patterns, including the patterns of some male treecreepers that were moved across a patch of bare land to another woodland territory 150 yards away, Walters and his research team were able to figure out the problem. Incredibly, he discovered that the birds simply would not fly into the open patch of land to return to their home territory, a leap of bird faith that might have taken them 10 seconds to complete.

Instead, these fine-feathered warriors spent two weeks making a circuitous route through the brush and unfamiliar forest to return home.

“It was the most amazing thing,” Walters says. “We would watch them hop 40 yards out into the open land to feed, but they simply would not fly those 150 yards across the open area.”

The solution was to bring in female treecreepers from other areas who settled down and reproduced.