St Peters Billabong, Urban oasis

St Peters Billabong sits within St Peters Park, adjacent the Torrens Linear Park and situated between the River Torrens, eighth Avenue and River Street, St Peters.

The site was recovered previously being a dump, and has bee restored as an urban wetlands habitat providing a home to a variety of native birds, insects and reptiles. The habitat consists of River red gums Desert Ash and a Chilean pepper tree.

Our group arrived and we discussed our goals for the morning and decided that we would attempt to double the number of observations and increase the number of species recorded within the park. Our efforts resulted in an increase of almost 100 new observations and increased the number of species by 20 species and increase of 50%, check out the observations here.

The most common species also changed with the Eurasian Coot becoming the most common species, while the Dusky Moorhen Gallinula tenebrosa was religated to third most commonly observed species.

The group spent some time observing a group of trees on the opposite bank that held several nests and many nesting Birds including some Rufous Night-Heron. While most commonly observed species were birds the Eastern Water Skink Eulamprus quoyii and Blue Skimmer Orthetrum caledonicum also made the cut!

The group checking out the nesting site on the opposite bank of the billabong

Some of my observations of the day at the Billabong, check out the rest here.

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Our efforts in the overall project Activating Citizen Science - 2020 so far have been very interesting over the past few weeks have produced the following stats.

• 603 observations

• 225 species

• 149 Identifiers

• 10 Observers

you can check out how the project is going yourself, but I will give a brief summary of the top 5 most observed species are all birds! with the most observed species being Pacific Black Duck Anas superciliosa. The most common species of inverterbrate is the European Honey Bee Apis mellifera not a big supprise! while the efforts last weekend pushed the Eastern Water Skink Eulamprus quoyii into the seventh most observed species with 8 observations!

A great job by all keep it up!