The Central Victorian Fungi Ecology Workshop Series is running again this coming autumn.
If you would like to know more about this curious kingdom, workshops include interactive displays, illustrated seminars and exciting forest forays deep into our local forests.
Full details are listed at www.alisonpouliot.com
Workshops book up fast so perhaps don’t delay making a reservation if you’d like to attend.
The endearing creature below is a Peron’s Tree Frog, sometimes uncharitably called the Maniacal Cackle Frog, owing to its distinctive ‘machine gun’ cackle. It’s not uncommon for frogs to be seen in household gardens in our district, and for that reason alone North Central Waterwatch’s recent publication Frogs Field Guide is welcome. It contains detailed info on the twelve species of indigenous frogs known in the region, and systematic and helpful advice on how to recognise them.
The little booklet isn’t only informative, it’s very readable as well. Each frog has a double page of info, including notes on habitat, breeding habits, conservation, and an ‘interesting facts’ section. It can be obtained from the Connecting Country office at the Hub, on the corner of Templeton and Barker Streets in Castlemaine–and it’s free.
Peron's Tree Frog in a household garden at Golden Point. Photo: John Ellis, February 2012
The flower below is St John’s Wort [Hypericum perforatum], a pretty plant which has been used for over a thousand years as a herbal remedy. Flowers are sparse, but seeds many at this time of the year on Mount Alexander. [For a picture of the plant in full flower, see the weeds section of our picture gallery].
St John’s Wort was introduced to Australia as an ornamental plant and for medicinal reasons in the 19th century, and is a perfect example of a plant which is virtuous in its native situation and a raging menace when exported: when it becomes dominant it radically alters the vegetation community and destroys important habitat. It currently infests over 200,000 hectares of land in Victoria and NSW, particularly open woodland. It is a noxious weed: if ingested by stock at the wrong time of the year it can weaken the animals and even result in death. About 80% of the infested area is in native woodlands.
A single St John’s Wort plant can produce 30,000 seeds annually, and these can last in the soil for 12 years—so it’s obvious that control is difficult. Even fire, if not used correctly, can increase infestations. The only serious possibility of control is by biological means, and a mite [Aculus hyperici] was released on the Mount some 20 years ago, with initially very encouraging results. It seems however that this weed, like many others, is having a boom year.
Following the release of ANU research showing that current fuel reduction practices are not improving public safety [see our post below], the press has reported that DSE has been burning widely in remote bushland, but has neglected to effectively reduce fuel loads close to settlements identified by the CFA as being at risk from major fire.
The Age reported on January 23 that ‘both Labor and the Coalition adopted the royal commission’s recommendation to burn 5 per cent of public land, or 415,412 hectares annually, by 2013-2014, tripling planned burning across Victoria. But one of Australia’s leading fire experts has told The Age the target has little to do with protecting human life and assets and he would like to see it ”disappear in due course”.
Tarilta Creek, in the Upper Loddon State Forest. DSE is preparing to burn this remote area as part of its current fire operations plan. FOBIF believes that the Department should concentrate its resources on using a variety of methods to reduce fire risk closer to settlements.
‘Melbourne University’s Kevin Tolhurst, one of the commission’s expert panelists, told The Age that while the government’s planned burning program factored in the most fire-prone parts of the state, the target itself was not directly linked to protecting communities.
“The unintended consequences of [the target] will be that prescribed burning is done with minimal benefit to the protection of human life and property. It may reduce the extent and severity of major wildfires, but it may not directly reduce the impact on human life and property,” Dr Tolhurst said.’
Calls for more ‘fuel reduction burns’ have been insistent for years, particularly since the Black Saturday fires which burned over 2,100 homes and killed 173 people. The pressure for more management burns culminated in the Royal Commission’s recommendation that at least 5% of the public land estate be burned every year.
Most conservation organisations, including FOBIF, questioned the value of this policy, accurately predicting that it would force land managers to mindlessly burn vast tracts of country causing significant environmental damage with no improvement to public safety.
Now new research by the Australian National University seems to back up most of this case. Researchers looked at the homes destroyed on Black Saturday and assessed what had been the main factors contributing to their destruction.
The research showed that prescribed burning was only half as effective at protecting houses as clearing vegetation around buildings.
On ABC radio on January 19 ANU’s Dr Philip Gibbons said: ‘Prescribed burning is not the silver bullet that some people suggest it is… When the weather gets up to the extremes that we experienced on Black Saturday then we know that…the effect of prescribed burning becomes diminished…Prescribed burning is typically done distant from houses…The average distance from a house of prescribed burning on Black Saturday was eight kilometres. But we found that at that distance from houses prescribed burning had virtually no effect in terms of protecting houses.’
The researchers also looked at the effects of logging in making forests less flammable.
In Dr Gibbons’ words: ‘We found that indeed a house that is close to forest is at greater risk. But it didn’t matter if that forest was national park or state forest that was managed for logging. In other words logging had no effect in terms of protecting houses on Black Saturday. They take out all the really big logs. They take out the trunks of trees and they leave the leaves on the ground. They leave the fine fuels, okay. So they’re the ones that contribute to the intensity of the fire.
‘And also if you log an area heavily you end up with a young forest that’s very dense and that can also add to the fuel in a forest. It’s like having a big thick layer of shrubs in the forest and the crowns are all connected. ‘
The full ANU research report, ‘Land Management Practices Associated with House Loss in Wildfires’, can be found here.
About 70 people crowded into the small Chewton Town Hall on January 16 for the launch of Ken McKimmie’s Chewton Then and Now, a collection of articles written over a number of years for the Chewton Chat.
These articles are remembered with great affection and interest by readers of the Chat, and the publication of the collection is welcome. It’s a series of photos, paintings and drawings showing selected sites around Chewton, usually about 100 years apart. As such, it is a set of snapshots in time, and is a poignant and instructive illustration of how things have changed in our district since white settlement. Though of course centred on the Chewton area, it will be of interest to anyone keen to look at how things have been happening in the whole goldfields area over the last hundred plus years.
Although most of the interest in the book is in the areas of work, and social observation, there are some remarkable images of the natural environment, the most striking of which is the photo of the Expedition Pass reservoir taken in 1878. The stripped hills around the reservoir are a reminder of the reckless exploitation of timber in that era, and show just how dramatic the recovery has been.
Expedition Pass reservoir, 1878: the stripped hillside provides a striking contrast to the regrowth vegetation we can see today. Illustration from Chewton then and now.
The plant below is Spear Thistle, Cirsium vulgare, the most widespread plant in Victoria and, according to naturalist Ern Perkins, by far the most common thistle in this region. It’s commonly but wrongly called Scotch thistle. That ‘honour’ belongs to a vaguely similar looking plant, Onopordum acanthium which, interestingly, isn’t of Scottish origin at all, and is not even common in Scotland–unlike Cirsium, which is. Figure that out: or, if you can’t, check out the Viridans data base, which has some curious facts about the legend surrounding the name ‘Scotch thistle.’ [As far as we know, the Scots never refer to themselves or anything in their country–even whisky– as ‘Scotch’, anyway.]
Cirsium was one of the earliest plants to be declared a weed in Victoria, in 1856. Our photo was taken in a management burn zone at the south end of the Diggings Park, where FOBIF members have pulled out many plants vigorously regrowing in the ash.
Spear Thistle, Wewak track, Castlemaine Diggings NHP, December 2011
FOBIF has written to Parks Victoria to clarify some questions arising from the Quartz Hill, Chewton, Asset Protection management burn of a few weeks ago.
What interested us was that the burn was pretty severe on native undergrowth [as was indeed its purpose], but relatively feeble on the blackberries, gorse, bridal creeper and pampas which infests the area in question [see photo below].
Members who have read our post on DSE’s new code of conduct will know that we are at a loss to know why the Department cannot be more systematic in using fire to clear out what we all agree are unwanted–and flammable–elements in our bushlands.
Singed but not seriously: blackberry near the Quartz Hill track after the management burn. A couple of hundred metres behind the photographer, the native undergrowth is flattened.
In the case in question, the management fire burned deeply into Sailor’s Gully, but somehow failed to clear out gorse along the gully; and it completely failed to make an impact on large patches of blackberry in the lower gully. Obviously this is a function of the relatively low flammability of this vegetation at this time, but at the end of a hot summer this stuff is just as much fuel as a stand of Dusty Miller: we believe that the Department should be as enthusiastic to get rid of it now as it appears to be to get rid of native fuel.
We’ll publish Parks Victoria’s reply when we get it.
The State Government has released its response to the Victorian Environment Assessment Council’s Remnant Native Vegetation report [see our May 24 Post on this].
VEAC made 13 recommendations, all designed to improve ecological connectivity between small parcels of land, encourage community involvement in management, maximise knowledge of biodiversity values and protect waterway frontages. The Government has supported twelve of the recommendations ‘in principle’, the exception being recommendation 12, to investigate the creation of new protected area systems in the North Western Victoria, Gippsland and the Central Victorian Uplands. What the in principle support means in practice remains to be seen.
VEAC’s recommendations and the Government’s responses can be found here. All are of interest. Among other things, the Council recommended that within 10 years ‘at least 75 per cent of public stream frontages abutting private land be managed, under grazing licence or other arrangements, primarily for biodiversity and water quality’ via measures like fencing out of stock, revegetation, and management incentives.
The Government also accepted recommendation 6, that ‘Managers, contractors and on-ground workers are made aware of their responsibilities and appropriate work
Lichen--probably Xanthoria sp--on a Cassinia stem in the Guildford Bushland Reserve. Such small parcels of public land are often unknown or hard to find, and their values unrecorded. VEAC has recommended that their ecological value be identified, mapped and made public. Photo:Bernard Slattery, December 2011
protocols whilst working around native vegetation, and that mandatory formal education and training be incorporated into all accredited training courses.’ Such training programs already exist, though they are patchy in their effectiveness, if we are to believe the evidence of road works and other activities in our local bushlands: but we can hope that the State Government’s ‘in principle’ acceptance of VEAC’s recommendations will bring about some improvement in the culture of land management.
White Everlasting Daisy (Chrysocephalum baxteri)
Slime Mould
Dunns Reef
Tall Greenhoods
Gnat Orchid
Blue Caladenia
Downy Grevillea (Grevillea alpina)
Coliban river upstream of the Gibbons bridge
Coliban river upstream of the Gibbons bridge.
Coliban river upstream of the Gibbons bridge.
Sailors Gully ruin
Loddon River near Vaughan
Cortinarius archeri
Mycena subgalericulata
Cortinarius rotundisporus
Cortinarius cystidiocatenatus,
Ramaria sp.
Pink Heath
Mount Alexander
Mount Alexander
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