How far would you go to catch a wild brolga? Would you consider retrieving a dead brolga from a freezer, defrosting it and stuffing it until it looked life-like?
Ecologist Inka Veltheim did. In fact she had two of the statuesque cranes taxidermied for use as "decoy brolgas", in order to catch and study the wild brolgas of south-western Victoria.
But it didn't end there. Ms Veltheim also had to look the part. So she dressed head-to-toe in camouflage gear while on stakeouts – crouching in purpose-built hides waiting for the notoriously shy birds to land.
"Brolgas are surprisingly understudied in Victoria and no-one has attempted to track them before," Ms Veltheim said.
A PhD candidate with Federation and Melbourne Universities, Ms Veltheim went to extreme measures to attach GPS trackers and identity tags to the 1.5-metre-tall grey birds, which are listed as vulnerable in Victoria.
It's the first time such fieldwork has been done with brolgas, Australia's native crane of which very little is known.
American crane expert Felipe Chavez-Ramirez was also called in to advise on catching and handling the birds, not least because their long sharp beak and adult body weight of up to nine kilograms which makes them difficult to handle.
"We don't know anything about their movement at all," Ms Veltheim said. "How far they travel, the paths they travel, the movement patterns in breeding and non-breeding times – it's all a bit of a mystery."
Ecologists, conservationists, state and local authorities need the information to manage the birds and their environment. Ms Veltheim said some planned wind farms in south west Victoria overlapped with areas frequented by brolgas.
"It is a population potentially in decline and therefore any threat may be of concern," she said.
Since 2010, the research team has caught 32 brolgas and attached "GPS backpacks" to 23 of them. Chicks, which weigh between three and four kilograms, have also been caught and had colour bands attached to their legs as part of the project.
Ms Veltheim said this year had proved a productive year, with a high number of colour-banded birds re-sighted.
"For the first time we are getting a sense of how long brolgas live in the wild," she said. "Cranes can live up to 15 years in the wild but we don't yet know about the longevity of wild brolgas."
Ms Veltheim said the decoy brolgas were crucial in convincing wild brolgas it was safe to land in a paddock set with noose line traps, which tighten around a bird's' leg when stepped on.
The decoy brolgas came from a captive population at Serendip Sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary 60 kilometres south-west of Melbourne.
"They just happened to have two dead brolgas in their freezer that had died of natural causes so they were kind enough to provide them," she said.
Defrosted and taxidermied by Museum Victoria senior preparator Dean Smith, the birds were then placed in the paddock while brolga calls were played over the loudspeaker, apparently giving wild birds the all-clear to land.
Mr Smith said the birds were a challenge to work with because of their size. The freezing of the birds had also dehydrated them slightly.
"It's like when you're cleaning out the freezer and find an old steak and it's almost freeze-dried," he said.
But it was nothing that a mix of water, glycerin and anti-bacterial solution couldn't fix. Feathers bent out of shape were also coaxed back into place using the steam from a freshly-boiled kettle.
There are between 600 and 650 brolgas living in Victoria, with the south-western population accounting for up to 550 while a smaller population in the state's north-east numbers no more than 100.
