Dr Liz Reid
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Dr Liz Reid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There was no other big animals.
Well, it's not quite true.
Because they're hunting to their prey range.
So we have to understand what they're going to get us.
Tend to, you know, get small to medium-sized animals, particularly mammals.
From a point of view of biological surveying, the owls are kind of doing that for us.
They're surveying what's abundant in the landscape and collecting that.
And that can change over time because the abundances of those animals changes over time as well.
So they do give us a really precise window on fauna change and particularly the smaller vertebrates.
While the big ones are very exciting, we always love to find megafauna.
If we've only got two diprotodon in our deposit, but we've got 40,000 rodents, the 40,000 rodents are going to tell us a lot more about the past environment.
And today, biological surveyors use our pellets, use modern pellets to work out the range of small mammals, for example.
Absolutely.
And they can also reveal some rather uncomfortable truths.
One of the things about these bone deposits is they do tell us a lot about the past before there was any destruction of the habitats or extinction of species as happened in recent times since European colonization.
And
One really poignant example is from the Nullarbor, where we see modern owl pellets.
Now, if you see some barn owl pellets that have just been dropped, they only contain house mice now, whereas even 40, 50 years ago, there were still other small mammals.
The youngest dated deposit we have at Narragud is only about 280 years.
That's just prior to European colonization.
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