Landcare is often thought of in terms of our ‘doings’ and that’s fair, but sometimes, it’s important to focus ones attention on being – being quiet, being alert and being in the right place at the right time.

Last week I received a call from our daugher. She’s staying at our Box Gum Grassy Woodland block out near Woodstock at the moment and had been watching squirrel gliders moving about our ‘home’ paddock all evening – she was very excited at having caught the performance!

When we moved to the land about ten years ago we erected a lean-to on an old shed so we could sit out at night. Back then we had witnessed gliders landing on the structure from time to time, but as they realised we were staying, they changed their route and left us well alone.

Our next encounter with these cute fluffy creatures was July this year when we found two squirrel glider tails – one large, one smaller, under what we now know to be the nest tree and the first ‘glide’ tree out on our home paddock. Owls are a natural predator of Squirrel Gliders and it’s possible we’d stumbled upon the unwanted part of their dinner – a reasonable explanation given the evidence and more hopeful than thinking they’d fallen foul of a ferral cat or fox (both of which are also entirely possible)…

Fast forward to this last two weeks and things, including our eyeballs, are looking up again and as is often the case, two sets of eyes are better than one! This week we sat out at dusk to observe the nest tree in the hope that we’d spot the gliders emerging and taking their first glide. Well we were in luck, and after a patient (and quiet) twenty minutes of watching we caught our first glimpse, with three gliders coming out and gliding away from us towards our neighbours property and one gliding right towards us!

Squirrel Gliders need tall old trees both to nest in and glide from. According to research published by the Australian Journay of Zoology in 2009 (1), they glide at an angle of around 28.5 degrees and generally launch from a horizontal position just under 2m from the top of the tree. This certainly fits with what we observed, or at least it appeared to given we were equip only with our eyes and phone cameras (no flash). The glider we tracked travelled 28.8m, 14.3m and then 21.2meters per glide before we lost track of them!

I’ve captured our squirrel glider evening in this short video presentation. You can pause the show to read the slides if needed. At this moment in time, squirrel gliders such as these are classified as vulnerable but not endangered. I am not aware of any specific citizen science projects monitoring glider behaviour in our area at this time but that doesn’t mean to say there won’t be something in future so we’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, why not spend a few minutes around dusk or dawn and see what you can spot!

Here’s a short look at the angle of glide for one of the Squirrel Gliders we observed.

Reference:

1. Goldingay, Ross & Taylor, Brendan. (2009). Gliding performance and its relevance to gap crossing by the squirrel glider ( Petaurus norfolcensis ). Ross L Goldingay. 57. 10.1071/ZO09003. Gliding mammals occur worldwide and many are subject to increasing levels of habitat fragmentation. Knowledge of their ability to cross tree-gaps by gliding is quite poor. We describe aspects of the gliding performance of the squirrel glider (Petaurus norfolcensis) based on recorded parameters of 85 glides of 73 individuals. Animals launched from a horizontal position ~1.7 m below the top of a tree and 2.3 m out from the main trunk. All but one glide was to the trunk of a tree, landing 5.7 m above the ground. Animals glided a mean of 21.5 ± 0.9 m (range 9–47 m) in a horizontal plane, with no significant difference between the sexes. Horizontal glide distance appears to reflect tree spacing where individuals were released. The mean glide angle was 28.5 ± 0.8°, with no significant difference between the sexes. We predict that trees beside roads that create a tree-gap of 20 m (two-lane road) or 43 m (four-lane road) will need to be a least 13 m and 25 m tall, respectively, to enable animals to safely glide across a road. Where trees are absent, 12-m-high wooden poles could be installed, requiring some in the median strip of four-lane roads.