These eye-catching birds are being reintroduced across the south-east of Australia in a bid to restore the species to its historical range.

Shoshana Rapley is a PhD candidate from ANU whose research is helping to improve the success of reintroduced bush stone-curlew populations across Australia’s south-east. For her PhD field work, Shoshana studied a population of curlews that were fitted with ‘GPS backpacks’ and released onto Orana Park Sanctuary, a fenced conservation reserve about 50km north of Bendigo in Victoria. The backpacks provided daily data about where the curlews roamed and how far they travelled.

“My PhD is looking at the reintroduction biology of the curlew,” Shoshana says. “We want to be able to put together a recipe of translocation tactics that will help the reintroduced curlews survive and thrive after release.”

Coupled with the Coexistence Conservation Laboratory’s research, this work might bring about a world where foxes and bush stone-curlews coexist in the wild without local extinctions. Importantly, the laboratory sees this work as complementary to current conservation and feral animal control measures – not as a replacement. 

But modifying behaviour requires good genes. The Odonata Foundation, a not-for-profit conservation organisation, has been actively involved in breeding and releasing curlews since 2019. The foundation is collaborating with researchers from Cesar Australia, an independent research and extension company, to broaden the genetic diversity of curlews in its breeding program by sourcing individuals from interstate populations.

“The genetic rescue of the Victorian population of curlews will be crucial to their survival,” says Dale Crisp, biodiversity project coordinator at Odonata. “Our focus is on introducing new genetics into our captive population to broaden the gene pool and make the birds more resilient to disease and more likely to survive and adapt to climate change. Perhaps one day we may even see the curlew resort to more of a flight response rather than the current freeze/lie-down approach to threats…The genetics of a species play a key role in exactly how predator-savvy a curlew can get.”