Gliders at home

Sugar Gliders (Petaurus breviceps) readily take to nest-boxes and they have featured on this blog a number of times before. But we never tire of viewing remote camera images of these little creatures, and nest-box sites are a good place to record them.

Nest-boxes are a means of compensating for the loss of natural tree hollows due to land clearing, and give birds and small arboreal mammals like sugar gliders a better chance of survival and breeding.

However, in Tasmania, researchers are trying to develop nest-boxes for native birds that exclude Sugar Gliders, which are thought to have been introduced there early last century and have been implicated in the predation of endangered birds like Orange-bellied Parrots and particularly Swift Parrots. The sugar gliders, primarily sap, nectar and invertebrate feeders, have been found to eat eggs, nestlings and even adult female Swift Parrots, placing the species under severe threat of population collapse.

And if you think these cute and cuddly critters couldn’t possibly be so vicious, a friend who was bitten while working with them said it really, really hurt !