Emi Arnold

It just depends on the project.

For a lot of our clients, it's not just fulfilling an obligation as well.

They are required under Commonwealth and state legislation often to do these kinds of things.

But some clients do want to go a little bit further and like, okay, we've done the bare minimum, but, you know, can we do, you know, a little bit extra just to see if we can make the habitat better for, you know, a couple of extra species at the end of the survey or if we can avoid impacting a species entirely by, you know, just changing an alignment of something, you know, by 50 to 100 metres to avoid bigger trees or something like that.

Just trying to make everyone care about the birds.

So I am based in Melbourne, obviously.

So I work predominantly in the southeast of Australia.

So in Victoria, particularly, we've got some pretty big remnants of the box ironbark woodlands left.

But I also do a lot of work in southern New South Wales where you get more of that cypress pine woodland and still just a lot of grey box and kind of red gum, some riverine kind of woodlands there.

But I do also dabble in occasionally some mallee woodland.

But that's more for fun, more than for work.

Before I start the survey, often, you know, when I park the car and I'm walking into wherever my survey point will be or if I get to the survey point before I formally start the survey, I'll kind of just have a look at the different layers because it's different when you're surveying in a woodland versus, say, on the beach because the beach you've got, you know, you've got the sand and you've got the dunes and, you know, whatever vegetation cover is there.

But in a woodland, you've got all the woody debris on the ground and, you know, some birds specialise on foraging on the ground.

you've got any kind of shrub layer, if you've got grasses, if you've got anything flowering in there, that's got a whole different class of birds.

Your tree trunks, you'll get things like tree creepers and then obviously everything foraging around there, but then also the canopy itself.

So I just kind of look at

how many layers I'm dealing with there.

Think about if I've got any target species, what kind of layers they're more likely to be in.

And then go from there.

I'm always listening just for little signs of noise or any particular big calls.