Field Notes on Trees and Hollows
Created: 2018-12-31 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-11 (14:16:35)Status: completed
In 2018, I spent a lot of time looking into tree hollows on Black Mountain in Canberra.
In the Australian ecosystem, hollow trees are vital places for amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and bugs, for foraging, sheltering, and nesting.
I wanted to make a digital work that would create a sense of roaming about the mountainside, peering into its hollows, and wondering what kinds of animals could live in them. The end result was something this text generator built in Twine, Field Notes on Trees and Hollows.
Field Notes generates its texts from two lists: first a list of hollow trees on the mountain and second a list of the local animals that use hollows. I compiled the list of trees from my own field notes. The list and descriptions of animals are drawn from several databases and sources, listed in the references below.
The latest and probably final version of Field Notes describes fifty species of amphibians, birds, lizards, and mammals, containing information on the types of hollows they are known to inhabit, the times of year in which they are present, and whether they use hollows for foraging, nesting, or shelter.
See also
References
- Australian Museum
- Birdata
- Birds in Backyards
- eBird: An Online Database of Bird Distribution and Abundance
- Kukolic, Kruno, 1990, A Survey of the Vertebrate Fauna of Mt Ainslie, Mt Majura, and Black Mountain, 1975-76, ACT Parks and Conservation Service
- Gibbons, Philip, and David Lindenmayer, 2002, Tree Hollows and Wildlife Conservation in Australia, CSIRO Publishing
- Goldingjay, Ross L., “Characteristics of Tree Hollows Used by Australian Birds and Bats,” Wildlife Research, 36, 2009: 394-409
Endmatter
Tags: @cybertexts @completed @twine @virtual-spaces
Return to: Ormulum