The captured animal is weighed and examined by veterinarian Carol Esson, and then the Crittercam collar is fastened into place. (All right.) And then the animal is released. For the next few days the animal will have a new role as a Crittercam videographer. (Nice.)

 

What the researchers found was more than they've ever dreamt of seeing.

 

“It is way beyond my wildest imagination. It actually brought tears to my eyes. When these animals go so high up in the, huh, in the trees that you can not know what they do unless you have a camera on them and now we can see that.”

 

The Crittercam recorder is on a timer so as to record short segments at different times of the day. Scratching, grooming, eating, as he scales one old tree branch to another, you can see the lush（苍翠繁茂的） vegetation, mosses and orchids that serve as a smorgasbord（自助餐）. Some 9 different species of plants the Tree Kangaroo eats.

 

“See you get this view all the way down to the ground from, it's probably about 100 feet up. And then it was sunrise. It was about 6 am or so. Cause that's when we think that they feed and in fact that’s when we saw in the video that he was feeding but then he looked out and it was the sunrise which was amazing.”

 

The team captured the second Kangaroo, this one, a female they've been tracking for three years, named Trish. And this time she has a baby Joey developing in her pouch(袋). When Trish was set free with the camera she collected video from a female perspective, including one segment where she is seen cleaning her pouch.

 

The forest where these tree Kangaroos live is pristine and it would hopefully stay that way, as the local population has agreed to set it aside as a Conservation Area. Dabek help enlist the local population that she says is crucial to the efforts to save the species.

 

This first Crittercam Tree Kangaroo Project was funded through the National Geographic Society Waitt Grants program.

 

"This is an incredible tool. We can now see what the animals are eating up in the canopy which we never could do before. We can see what, how they are moving in the trees at what time of day." (Oh, it is great.)

 

The project was a success for Tree Kangaroos research and also a crucial test for the new Crittercam, with this smaller system, Crittercam would be opening windows into the hidden lives of many new species.