Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

‘In 1980, there were an estimated 50,000 feral deer in Australia. By 2002, the estimate had grown to 200,000. In 2022, the population is likely to have reached 1–2 million in Australia.’

That’s from the recently released draft National Feral Deer Action Plan. You can find it here

If ever there was an illustration of the rule, ‘Tackle a problem early, don’t let it get out of hand’, those figures supply it.

Deer, Campbell’s Creek: no, it’s not cute, it’s a pest. Photo: Naomi Raftery, 2018

Exploding deer populations have been compared to the rabbit plagues of the past. They destroy crops, turn healthy streams into mud heaps, and are increasingly dangerous in peri urban areas:

‘Australia’s feral deer problem costs land managers and governments tens of millions of dollars every year. Land managers are paying more each year for measures to protect the land, through activities such as deer culling or exclusion fences. Transport departments are also increasing culling and fencing along highways and railways to reduce vehicle collisions with feral deer. Local governments are struggling to cull feral deer in urban and periurban areas, gardens and ovals.’

The draft strategy offers a number of approaches to deer control. It doesn’t discuss recreational hunting, but does say that this method of ‘control’ has failed. Further, it makes the point that ‘Landscape-scale management of feral deer can be hampered when neighbours have different, or conflicting management goals (game management or pest control).’

In other words, giving deer protected species status as game animals is an actual impediment to control. This puts a bullet, so to speak, into the Victorian Government’s incomprehensible policy of pandering to the hunting lobby on the deer problem. [You can check out our comments on this subject here, here and here]

FOBIF members sighted deer on the Porcupine Ridge Road last week: they’re increasingly common, and have been sighted in every corner of our region.

The draft policy is open for comment till March 20. Have a go. [You might want to take a look at a comment by the Invasive Species Council here.]

Check out the two photos below, taken at the same point on the Porcupine Ridge road, 11 years apart:

The top photo was taken in August 2012, at the height of a Cup Moth infestation. The bottom photo was taken last week. Notice the difference?

In 2012 the charmingly attractive and very unpleasant Cup Moth (Doratifera sp) was laying waste to our bushlands, and especially the Red Stringybark eucalypts. The bush was pretty dismal, and it wasn’t hard to find people wondering if the forest was actually going to die.

As you can see from the above photos, predictions of doom were at least premature. Tree recovery has been good. You can still, however, see signs of the past crisis, in the number of  trees which have only partly recovered, and the number which didn’t survive the attack.

Porcupine Ridge Road, February 2023: skeletal branches and dead trees are reminders of insect attack ten years ago, but forest recovery has been good.

These observations are necessarily crude. What we’d really like is to see the detailed monitoring done by managers over the last 20 years as part of their fuel reduction program. This forest has weathered a long drought, serious insect infestations and management fire over this period. What has been the result, in detail? We don’t know, because we haven’t seen the abovementioned monitoring, if it exists.

The bush on the right of the photos above is scheduled for a management burn in the next couple of years [see our posts here and here].

In case you’re confused, DELWP has changed its name: it’s now the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.