Rescuing the mountain chicken: 08/04/09

After the frenzied activity of yesterday, today was relatively quiet - we had a rare chance to catch up on emails and administration. Mid morning we received the good news (along with emailed photos) that ZSL have received all 12 frogs safely and they are having a refreshing shower before receiving their first antifungal treatment in London.Everybody in Montserrat was very pleased to hear the news and to know that their hard work and commitment has paid off.

 Arriving in London

Ian Stephen, Assistant Curator of Herpetology for ZSL writes that it has been a frantic couple of days, preparing the new home for the Montserrat mountain chickens. Due to the numbers involved, we had to do a bit of chopping and changing with our biosecure areas to accommodate these precious new frogs. After an agonising wait, Ian finally got a phone call saying the frogs had arrived. With the perfect excuse to duck out of a meeting, Ian headed over to meet keeper Ellie and help unpack the frogs.

Gerardo and his team had obviously been hard at work making the long journey for the frogs a comfortable one. The crates were well made and the frogs were packed beautifully. Screw after screw was removed and the anticipation in the air increased. Trios (one male and two females) of frogs were allocated to four separate pens, and the time to open the bags arrived. And boy was it worth the wait. The frogs were simply stunning and really huge! Every bag that was opened was followed by a “wow” or “oh my God have you seen this one?” from either Ian or Ellie. Only two of the females looked a little sick (sloughing skin), but not at bad as Ian has seen in the past on Dominica. The animals were placed in containers with water, in order to rehydrate. They all remained calm, and didn’t seem to mind when asked to pose for a photo or two.

Meanwhile in Jersey

A few hours later the flight to Jersey arrived and the entire Herpetological Department was there (Matt, Kay, Ben and Charlotte) with huge expectation to open the 3 crates containing the 6 pairs of frogs from Montserrat. The frogs destined for Jersey had a longer journey than those staying in London and every minute longer that the animals have to spend in transit is a concern. However the frogs arrived in good shape. As with London as soon as the animals were unpacked they received an immediate bath and the fungical treatment and were then left to explore their new facilities. Now we hope that the frogs recover well from their long journey, settle down and start feeding.

Back in Montserrat…

One of the more positive side to this story is that two of the frogs collected in Fairy Walk had microchips in them already. Today Gerardo was able to check back through the records to see how long ago these had been implanted. We had been assuming that it was on the earlier trip this year so we were all amazed to learn that they were in fact both chipped in 2005 – four years ago! And they were still doing well in the wild. This is a great vindication of individual identification techniques such as microchipping; to find animals in the same place, four years on is really encouraging.

Mark/recapture programmes require a lot of efforts to get some results but the information you get is priceless. Frogs were marked with internal transponders during 2003 and 2005 when Gerardo was participating in the annual survey. Very few individuals have been recaptured since then but all of them were found in the same place. No movements between ghauts have been recorded by adults although we suspect that juveniles may migrate to other ghauts during dispersion at the end of the wet season.

Looking in our archives we also found the past photos of these recaptures and we could see how these two females looked four years ago. Comparing photos of different ages we found the juveniles lose the lovely orange colour, the different marks in the mouth and their arms become slight darker. But their lateral body marks remain the same. It's the perfect photo identification as reinforcement for their microchip. This is also interesting because it can provide a validation for the use of certain body patterns as a non-invasive long term identification technique; something that is used for many other species.

The other job (and a much less glamorous one at that) for today was to go through all the frog bodies and body parts we have been collecting in the two freezers here in Montserrat – determining which are needed for further analysis and reseach. All these have to be numbered and the information recorded on the computer.

Javier and I made our last visit to Pelican tonight. The ponds are now almost all completely dry and we just saw two live frogs in the whole ghaut. It was a strange feeling leaving there for the last time and imagining that that will be the last time that I will ever see frogs in the wild there.

Meanwhile Gerardo was busy working in the transit facility – cleaning out all the enclosures ready for the next set of frogs at the weekend and putting the final touches to the frog boxes to get a head start for the next shipment in a few days time.