Background

The Superb Fairywren Project was established in 1987 and run by Prof. Andrew Cockburn with the aim of understanding the reproductive ecology of this cooperative breeder. In 2024 the project was handed over to the Farine group. We are now focusing on a suite of other questions including thermal ecology and social behaviour, extending the focus to their year-round ecology.

approaches

Our main aim is to keep up the long-term project, maintaining the banded population, monitoring survival and reproduction to obtain fitness measures.

We conduct daily visual observations of foraging behaviour, group membership, social interactions and leadership events.

To obtain a fine-scale thermal landscape, we deploy temperature loggers and collected thermal images across the Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Who is working on this project?

The project is currently part of the PhD projects of Franziska Hacker, Samuele Ramellini and Xingyi Jiang.