The Greater Murray Biodiversity Monitoring Program  has been running for more than a decade, and it is always exciting when new native species are found.

During this winter’s bird surveys, one of our Sustainable Farms ecologists was thrilled to discover the threatened Southern Bell Frog, also known as the Growling Grass Frog, while randomly checking under some corrugated iron (used to survey reptiles) on one of our sites near Moulamein. Finding this frog on a sand hill hundreds of meters from water is a good demonstration of how wide ranging frogs can be.

A nearby farmer involved in the monitoring program at Wakool had also reported a good number of Southern Bell Frogs, after her fenced out Black Box swamp had received some environmental water earlier in the year. Hopefully during our next round of reptile and frog surveys, in September this year, we will turn up some more of these awesome critters.

_{[Image] Southern Bell Frog Litoria raniformis (Photo: Dave Smith) - This species appears to have responded well to recent releases of environmental water and has been recorded breeding downstream following these releases. We detected this frog for the first time in our study in 2018.}