This is a chuditch from the best citizen science initiative ever: the Western Shield camera watch. (Yes I’m a month late finding out about this. Shoosh.)
Western Shield is a concerted effort to prevent endemic animals of the southwest from going extinct. If you’re a long-term follower, you know a lot of their target animals from my photos: woylies, numbats, dibblers, tammar wallabies and of course lovely spotty chuditches,
Ninety trusty Reconyx camera traps have been deployed in the southwest to assess the success of the program and to survey different sites with or without invasive predator controls in place. This has left them with about 200,000 capture sets of wildlife to sort through.
And this is where you come in.
You can help out by heading over to Zooniverse, getting registered and telling the nice website what you see in the pictures. (Fair warning 1: it’s mostly grey kangaroos and black-gloved wallabies, though the traps have captured plenty of cute joeys and an epic fight or two.) You can give it a shot for yourself here.
Fair warning 2: It’s superlatively addictive. But it’s for a good cause!