Kat was on the school run that morning, she had just dropped her son off in Blackheath when on her way back she was caught in traffic - it had been backed up in an earlier oil spill - when she saw something. "Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move on the side of the road that's looked over - I was quite amazed. I was like, 'is that a koala?'," she said.

"It was lucky that the traffic was going slowly. I flashed my lights to warn cars in the other direction."

She watched the animal amble across the road into the bushes and that was it. Kat later posted about her encounter on social media and to her surprise she was contacted by Dr Kellie Leigh, Executive Director of a group called Science for Wildlife who are currently deep into a koala-tracking project they're calling Backstreet Bellows.

Backstreet Bellows aims to assess how koalas are doing across the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area following the devastating bushfires of the last couple of years.

The project is supported by a Commonwealth Government Landcare Led Bushfire Recovery Grant, and the research team is working in partnership with Dr Brad Law, who developed a method to survey for koalas based on listening for the male koala bellows.

Keen to be a part of the project, Kat was excited to install a small listening device for one week as part of the citizen-science project that will listen for and record the bellows of any koalas in the area.

"If you haven't heard a koala bellow before, it's a bit unexpected coming from such a cute looking animal, it sounds something like a wild boar up a tree" Dr Kellie Leigh said.

"We've got a recording of it on our website, where you can also download it as ringtone for your phone if you're looking for something different."

According to Dr Leigh, there have been no recorded koala sightings in that particular area since 1967.

"The recording devices need to be somewhere a bit quiet, so not right near a busy road, or a pond of noisy frogs which would drown out the koala bellows" said Tina Gallagher from Science for Wildlife, who is coordinating the citizen science project.

"If you have a place with a quiet backyard that is connected to nearby bushland that would be ideal".

The first round of surveys has just been completed in the Lower Blue Mountains and now residents on the western edge of the Blue Mountains are encouraged to join. The research team is calling on private property owners across two sites to register to be part of their Backstreet Bellows Project. Those who live south of the Great Western Highway including in Little Hartley, Kanimbla Valley and Megalong Valley, Lowther, and south to Ganbenang.

The second round of surveys will include properties north of the highway including Hartley, Hartley Vale, Clarence, the outskirts of Lithgow. If you live in these areas and would like to be part of the study all you need to do is register to have a small acoustic recording device on your property for seven days. Once the recordings are completed, the data is sent to a lab that uses a special algorithm to identify koala bellows from the many thousands of hours of sound.

"It's all very exciting for us up here. I think it's... especially so because the fires were just so devastating. And I think the sentiment from the community was - it was a real feeling of hope," Kat said.

If you'd like to participate in the project, you can register online at www.scienceforwildlife.org/BackstreetBellows

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