Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Finding your activities a bit restricted by new regulations connected to the pandemic? Well, there’s always reading, and as it happens the March issue of the Wombat Forestcare newsletter is out. As usual it’s full of good stuff. You can find it here.

Article topics include the Powerful Owl, the rare Bossiaea vombata, tree creepers and Greater Gliders. In these tough times it’s good to  get a bit of inspiration. Here’s Alison Pouliot at the conclusion of her article about fungi in Australia and North America:

‘I am constantly inspired by the Australians I work with from farmers to foresters to conservationists. I admire their flexibility and openness to innovation and new ideas, as well as their willingness to embrace change – that is, their response-ability. The conservation movement urges us to take greater responsibility for our actions. ‘Responsibility’ is sometimes misinterpreted in the context of blame and culpability, or power and control. However, a more positive take on the word revives our response-ability, that is, our ability to respond. We live in the most highly variable and unpredictable climate in the world. We live in an ancient landscape that has shifted and shaped through time and is unforgiving. It is the challenge of uncertainty that drives creative thinking, fuels response-ability and action. Australians’ resilience and response-ability could be our greatest contribution to climate change action within Australia and beyond.’

The pic below shows a stretch of the Railway Dam road north of the Fryers Ridge Road. Significant numbers of sizeable trees have been cut down: ‘hazardous tree removal’ in preparation for DELWP’s upcoming management burn.

This exercise is a reminder of the Department’s tree massacre on Mount Alexander last year, in which we were informed (after numerous enquiries) that all trees had been checked by an arborist before removal. And, further back, we had some bizarre lopping and felling of small trees along Forest Creek , supposedly for safety reasons.

With the best will in the world, we’re getting sceptical of the kind of expertise that waves a wand over these activities…

In the light of the upcoming management burn in Kalimna Park, here are a couple of photos to brood on. They were taken at a point on the Circuit Walk track last week. One side of the track was burned by DELWP five years ago, and looks like this:

Fuel reduced bush: plenty of flammable Cassinia and other understorey plants…

The other side was not burned, and looks like this:

Directly opposite the photo above: unburnt bush, with apparently lots less fuel.

On the face of it, the unburned section has less fuel than the ‘fuel reduced’ section. The photos illustrate the complexity of fuel reduction exercises. Contrary to widespread belief, fuel reduction burns don’t vacuum up all the fuel, leaving it nice and safe: they may provoke prolific regrowth, and even increase the fuel load. That’s why detailed research  should accompany every burn, to show all aspects of the exercise, ecological and safety related. This, of course, would cost a lot of money…

DELWP has put a lot of research effort into the upcoming burn, perhaps provoked by the efforts of community workers to document the presence of the Copper Butterfly. Its preparation works for this exercise have provoked some disquiet. We’ll report on these in future posts.

Here’s the latest in our never ending series on dumb rubbish dumping in our bushlands. That pair of display boards is very distinctive. They look like they’re designed to fit on the back of a truck for advertising purposes. Surely someone could recognise them and trace the dump to its source?

Rubbish dumped near the Fryers Ridge Road/Old Coach road junction, March 25: the display boards look quite distinctive…could they be recognisable?

The Tarrengower Cactus Control group has created a very short online survey to try to gauge how other community members and groups within the Mount Alexander Shire feel about noxious weed management within our Shire.

Are you concerned about the spread of noxious weeds in our local natural environment?

Do you think enough weed management is carried out by our local Shire?

Would you like our Shire to treat our natural environment with a greater priority?

Would you like to make a comment about local weed control?

You can find the survey here.

There are 10 simple questions and it should take only 5 minutes to complete.

The group will collate the answers at the end of May 2020. If there’s a general dissatisfaction with the work done by our Shire, then they’ll try to coordinate some action to persuade the Council to increase its priority of our natural environment in forthcoming budgets.

As the picture shows, the Kalimna Park loop track has a shiny new sign at the entry, making it much easier to find the start of the walk on the Tourist road. The metal box at its side contains copies of the new full colour walk brochure produced by the Friends of Kalimna Park, and launched last year.

Perhaps it’s a pity that DELWP has obscured half the sign with a notice about its upcoming fuel reduction burn, but the message is clear enough anyway.

The walk takes the visitor through a variety of vegetation zones, and the informative notes greatly enhance the experience. It won’t come fully  into its own till the wildflower season starts in a month or two, but even in autumn sparseness it’s worth a look…especially before that reduction burn takes place.