Crikey - a new course in wildlife conservation
 |
A sperm whale dives beneath the surface. The photo was taken by Associate Professor Rob Harcourt on a marine birds and mammals survey trip with students this month. |
If you're interested in taking up where Steve Irwin left off, Macquarie's new Master of Wildlife Conservation degree will give you hands-on experience working with some of Australia's most fascinating animals.
To be offered for the first time in 2007, the Masters (and the related Postgraduate Diploma and Postgraduate Certificate) aims to give students an intensive grounding in conservation theory and practice, says course convenor Associate Professor Rob Harcourt.
Who's it for?
"We've structured the Master of Wildlife Conservation as a one-year, full-time course that will introduce people to a whole range of things to do with wildlife conservation biology," says Harcourt.
"It's aimed at people who have got a degree in ecology, but you don't have to have one - regardless of your background you'll be taking your skills further. But it's not just for people who want to be conservation practitioners, it's also for those who want to work, for example, in an environmental consultancy doing environmental impact assessments and that sort of thing. It's also designed for people coming from overseas - we've had a lot of Americans interested in this because you get to work with our unique flora and fauna.
"Unlike the Wildlife Management (Habitat) course which was designed in the main for people who are already practitioners but who don't yet have the theoretical skills, this degree is not taught online, you have to come in to do it. It's best done as a cohort because then you meet people that you're going to go and work with later in life."
What's taught in the course?
The new degree includes lecture-intensive units such as World conservation biology, which bring students up-to-date with major conservation issues arising around the globe, and discusses how people are addressing them as practitioners. There are also subjects dealing with technical expertise, such as Research technologies in conservation biology which looks at the how of conservation, investigating hands-on tools for genetics, telemetry, GPS and so on.
But one of the course's real strengths is its use of practical subjects which give students invaluable experience applying their skills directly with animals either in the University's fauna park or in the wild. One of these units is Management of Wild australian mammals, taught by Harcourt.
"This unit has two components: the first one is about teaching the students about marsupials," explains Harcourt. "They do a two-day handling course here on the campus, where they catch small wallabies, learn how to bleed them, do radiotelemetry, learn how to anaesthetise animals and the dangers that are involved in that, and learn about diseases and husbandry and so on.
"Then we do a two-day course on marine mammals, where I teach the students all about the conservation issues, and talk about research which is allowing us to understand these animals. We then do a survey for marine birds and mammals, where I generally take some researchers along and we do some genetic sampling of dolphins and potentially whales, if we see the right species."
For more information, email Associate Professor Rob Harcourt robert.harcourt@mq.edu.au