Life at Istari
and the
Clarence Valley
Observations
One of our goals is to record and learn as much as we can about the living world around us.
This website is part of that goal allowing us to extend people’s understanding of the Australian bush.
We record all our photographs and some sounds using the iNaturalist platform. This has the advantage of both recording life here and giving us an enormous resource of people who are specialists in order to identify the organisms. You an follow us on iNaturalis through this link - https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations?user_id=istari
We also participate in various citizen science programs like Bats in Backyards and FrogID. The Bats in Backyards program allows you to record micro bat sounds, which humans generally can’t hear, and get back a report of the bats picked up in the recordings. The FrogID program allows you to record frog call and get an expert to determine the species.
We also keep records of all the fauna, plants, birds and frogs. See our Observations List.
We also make observations on the coming and going of fauna such as what do our macropods eat. You can see a summary of species below.
Istari Species Summary
Fauna 208
Flora 337
Birds 137
Micro bats 18
Frogs 26
Fauna is a summary of all fauna recorded at Istari over the years.
Flora is a summary of all plants recorded at Istari over the years.
Birds have been recorded over several decades from direct observation, bird calls and wildlife cameras.
Micro bats come from the microbat project, Bats in Backyards, where we put out a micro bat recorder which records the sounds of bats. A group of experts interpret the sounds and provide a report back to us. This has been run for three rounds.
Frogs have come from the app FrogID produced and managed by the Australian Museum where we record the frog call using the app and an identification is made by the Australian Museum.
Last updated 1 Jan 2026
The species summary is determined by lists of species recorded over the last two decades.
Some, but not all, has been added to iNaturalist
iNaturalist
Over the years we have prepared lists of flora and fauna, often incorrectly or with a lot of problems identifying species. We managed to find some amazing people who helped with identifications.
Today we use a wonderful platform, iNaturalist. Here we load up photos and literally have a world of experts identify each species. We highly recommend its use.
If you would like to see a list of our observations you can go to
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations?user_id=istari
Or go to inaturalist.ala.org.au and search for “Istari”
