Emi Arnold

I first got into birds through, probably through my grandmother particularly and then my parents.

I remember my grandma taking me around the backyard and pointing out different birds in the backyard when I was super young.

Then when we moved to Melbourne when I was about five years old, my parents got into bird watching.

because, you know, there's all these new and exciting birds in their backyard.

And so I kind of went along for the ride with that as well.

And they bought me the Pizzy Night Field Guide to the Birds of Australia.

And I could not put it down.

I just never really stopped looking at it.

I'm a consulting ecologist, predominantly a zoologist, working for an engineering firm in Melbourne.

So a lot of my day-to-day role involves fauna-targeted surveys, so a lot of bird surveys, traditionally the two-hectare, 20-minute bird count, BirdLife Australia method, but a lot of spotlighting as well for nocturnal species and kind of more specialist stuff for, say, orange-blade parrots or plains wanderers.

so survey is predominantly something that we do to see kind of the species assemblage or species richness so how many birds are there or for occupancy so if we've got a particular target species and we want to see if it's present in particular habitats so we'll go out and we'll either just make a big old list of everything that's there everything that we can see everything we can hear or we'll go out with a particular species in mind and we'll

Do call playback or spotlighting or look for nests or look for other signs like scats or, you know, for birds of prey, we'll look for big nests with bones or fish or anything underneath them and look for occupancy that way.

And this is where Emmy's work becomes really interesting.

So it depends on our client's project.

So some of them are to get baseline conditions before a project is being built.

So if there's going to be an impact on their habitat and we want to know what was there beforehand, because we often do before, after and control surveys.

So we'll do the before baseline surveys.

We'll do the during construction surveys to see if the birds are persisting in that area.

And then we'll do post-construction monitoring surveys

to see if birds are recolonising or if they're using the habitat that's created for them or if they've disappeared entirely, which is obviously something that we try to avoid as much as possible.