Welcome home!

As the Gurdies forest begins to recover from fire, the animals are returning

​A CURIOUS wallaby cranes its neck to peer into the camera. A wombat is caught wide-eyed in the flash. Butcher birds, grey fantails and yellow robin check out the bait traps. A fox puzzles over the bait trap and returns more than a month later to have another look. 
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All were captured by trail cameras placed in the council’s native vegetation offset reserve which was virtually razed in the Gurdies fire on December 19.  
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In late January the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) and the Save Western Port Woodlands Group began camera trapping to monitor the post-fire recovery.

Under the watchful eye of Dr Sera Blair from the VNPA, a group of local volunteers set out cameras in March. Late last month they returned to replace the batteries, bait traps and SD cards and check what they had captured.

Gurdies local Marg Lee took home the SD cards to check literally thousands of images captured over the past month.

As anyone who has used a motion-sensor camera knows, they are set off by things blowing in the wind, especially now that plants are germinating and resprouting after the fire.

But among thousands of photos of blades of grass, Marg found these jewels.

Marg is an orchid lover, so she was delighted to observe the emerging leaves of four different orchids, and other plants.
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There were plenty of birds around, including grey fantails, a yellow robin, three brown thornbills and several kookaburras, and some fresh wombat scat outside a burrow.
 
“It was a marvellous day!” Marg said.