Three Hummock Island project update Feral cats are a big threat to Hooded Plovers. We have wildlife cameras in place, monitoring for cat activity around the island, and we also have two feral cats fitted with GPS collars. These two will give us valuable data about the habitats that feral cats use, and also let us know how effective our planned cat control activities are next year. This project is supported by the Cradle Coast Authority with funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program.
Our project working on protecting Hooded Plovers on Three Hummock Island is starting up again after a delay because of travel restrictions. Three Hummock Island is a wild, remote place, managed by Tasmania PWS as a State Reserve, but even so, there are many human impacts. The invasive weed, Sea Spurge, has been mapped on all the island’s main beaches – we plan to remove it before it takes over all the space that Hooded Plovers need to nest. Check out this golf ball collected during a marine debris clean-up. The marking indicates that it spent time at Seabrook Golf Course at Wynyard, about 100 km away, before being washed up on Three Hummock Island. Plastic travels a long way, and as you can see from this photo, it breaks down into tiny pieces that can kill marine and coastal animals.
Two cats were trapped, sedated by a professional wildlife ecologist, and fitted with GPS collars.
One of the collared cats photographed near a trap.
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