Pardalote Box

Not long after we bought this land we put up a lot of birdboxes. This is a box designed for spotted pardalotes:

It is showing its age now, but as it's about 15 or 16 years old that's not surprising. There are plans for a similar box here: Birds in Backyards nest box plans. Their plan points out, "spotted pardalotes burrow into clay or soil banks...their nest box requires a tunnel-shaped entrance which can be fashioned from PVC piping."

The spotted pardalote is a tiny bird, as seen in this post from last year:

A couple of years after we put up all the boxes, we checked them to see if they had been used, and the pardalote boxes each contained a ball of eucalypt leaves. What was living in them was not pardalotes, but something much more amazing. Today we finally got to see the critters, thanks to the wildlife camera.

These pictures aren't super-clear because they are captures from a video, but this is what made those balls of gum leaves, and lives in them in small social groups:

Not a pardalote! A common but rarely-seen creature, especially since the One Cent coin was withdrawn from circulation in the early 1990s:

It's the feather-tailed glider, Acrobates pygmaeus.



Added later -

Here's what the balls of gum leaves look like:

Not my photo - I don't climb ladders!