Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The photo below shows two out of the three ponds created in Victoria Gully Castlemaine, by the Victoria Gully group. The ponds are designed to take runoff from nearby streets, and are to be planted with rushes and tussock grasses suitable for frog habitat.

Two of the three ponds in Victoria Gully: long term frog prospects are hopeful.

The chain of ponds is designed to be intermittently full, and it will play a small part in reducing runoff to Forest Creek in times of heavy rain. The group has been working in the area for several years attacking broom and gorse infestations, and has created two exclusion plots in the degraded gully. The Vic Gully group is auspiced by FOBIF.

Heavy rain over November 16 and 17 over the town of Castlemaine [falls were localised and variable] made a small dent in an otherwise dry prospect, and filled the ponds to overflowing. Falls this year are significantly below long term averages. Apart from big falls in April [141 mls, a hundred more than the average!], nearly every month has been significantly down, the worst being 6 mls in June, 50 mls below average]. Gloomy prognostications aside, however, we live in hope.

On Monday 11 December Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forest is having a BBQ at Bronwyn Silver’s place in Walmer.

It starts at 6 pm and the address is 1036 Muckleford-Walmer Road, Walmer. 

BYO
*  food to share, including something for the BBQ if you like
*  crockery – plate, cups, cutlery
*  drinks 
*  a chair

All FOBIF members are welcome but please RSVP to Bronwyn: 0448751111 or bsilver@mmnet.com.au 

Gold Dust Wattle and eucalypts reflected in the dam near the BBQ area

While we’re on the subject of encouraging good bird habitat, readers may be interested in these two events:

First, you can do your bit for the pardalote! Earth to pardalote is a workshop on how to create win-win gardens for people and wildlife. It’s being run by Cassia Read next Saturday from 10 to 12 at the Diggers Store, 61 Main Road Campbell’s Creek. She’ll be talking about the essential elements you can add to your garden to build backyard biodiversity and garden food webs; and will then run a workshop to guide participants through how they can nudge their own garden in a wildlife friendly direction. The cost is $15, and bookings can be made via this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/earth-to-pardalote-tickets-39631849930  UPDATE: THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Second, Either side of the big wet is a free seminar being run next Monday at the Arthur Rylah Institute [123 Brown Street Heidelberg] from 11 am. Southern Australia is expected to experience long sequences of severe rainfall deficits under climate- change models based on IPCC emission scenarios. These droughts, such as occurred from 1997-2010  (the Big Dry), are projected to be punctuated by short periods of above-average rainfall (e.g. the Big Wet of 2010-12).

The seminar will present research on the prospects for Box Ironbark flora and fauna under this scenario. And if you can’t make it to distant Heidelberg, there’s a webinar: details can be found at https://www.ari.vic.gov.au/seminars

It seems there’s a niche market for whom there’s nothing quite so enticing as sitting in your $85,000 4WD on a remote beach somewhere, enjoying the sight of your own tyre marks and muttering ecstatically, ‘How pristine is that?’

It’s this niche, apparently, that the editors of the Age Drive supplement had in mind last Saturday when they did a feature on four different brands of these vehicles. These were pictured nicely posed on a beach, and the text noted, among other things, how well they handled sand.

Come to think of it, the drivers may not be examining the formerly pristine sand, but each other. Certainly they wouldn’t be thinking about the creatures they might have crushed on the way down.

We had a go at the RACV a few weeks ago for a similar piece of crassness. The RoyalAuto editors were pretty impressive in their response. Maybe it would be a good idea for readers of the Age to ask its editors what values they think they’re promoting in features like these.

FOBIF has received an answer from the RACV to its letter about an article in RoyalAuto magazine promoting the irresponsible—and idiotic— practice of driving on beaches (see below).

We complained that the article should have been corrected online, as the editors had promised, but had not.

It appears we were half right: unknown to us, there are two online versions of Royalauto: the article in question was corrected in one, but not the other.

The relevant parts of the letter from the assistant editor of Royalauto  read as follows:

‘RACV RoyalAuto magazine and the photographer have both acknowledged the errors in this story and have apologised for not better checking the facts and the images.

‘As soon as the error was raised, the RoyalAuto editor updated the online story, removing reference to driving on the beach, and he wrote a fulsome apology.

‘However, the story in the flip book was not altered. This was an oversight that we are fixing today.

‘Once this work is undertaken, all online references to 4WDs on beaches will be removed and the fulsome apology will appear in both places.

‘We also followed up with this article in print in the November edition:

‘https://www.racv.com.au/membership/member-benefits/royalauto/travel/news-and-information/how-to-travel-gently-in-australia.html’

Here’s the apology referred to:

‘EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was amended on 29 June 2017 to take out a reference to driving on Snelling Beach. Local by-laws state that you are only permitted to drive on a beach up to 250 metres from a constructed access road for the purpose of launching and or retrieving a vessel. Once the vessel is launched the vehicle should be parked off the beach. It was RoyalAuto’s intention to bring attention to a wonderful part of the world and apologises for appearing to encourage driving on this wonderful beach. Please do not drive on Snelling Beach.’

The November article referred to above includes the following sensible advice:

‘Stick to tracks designated for travelling. Leaving tracks can cause compaction and wheel ruts and damage vegetation. Wheel ruts may not repair, and in some ecosystems such as coastal saltmarsh they can alter tidal patterns and damage larger areas. Birds, such as the endangered hooded plover which nests on sandy beaches, are especially vulnerable.’

This small media kerfuffle is important because it’s a tiny step in the direction of changing Australian driving culture. Of course, it remains to get manufacturers and retailers of off road and adventure equipment to stop actively encouraging silly driving practices.

And it’s not only relevant to beaches either. Inland bush is not immune to destructive driving. And FOBIF is aware that during the recent VEAC Western Forests consultation there was some agitation in Castlemaine against the idea of any new national parks in the region. One of the objections was that in national parks, you have to drive on formed roads, and that this is a terrible restriction on our liberty. Of course, you are supposed to drive on formed roads in state forests, too, so it isn’t really clear what that fuss was about.

FOBIF has written to the RACV asking for clarification on its view of 4WD practices, in particular the practice of driving along beaches and other off road places [see our post].

In connection with the article we complained about in the July issue of RoyalAuto, we asked:

1. Where is the apology/retraction of the offending parts of the article?
2. What do the editors of RoyalAuto understand by the word ‘pristine’, when they can apparently accept that it applies to a scene with a car and numerous tyre marks on the ground?

We also pointed out that the Code of Conduct for off road driving for Four Wheel Drive Australia includes the following points:

‘3. Respect our flora and fauna. Stop and look, but never disturb. 4. Keep to formed vehicle tracks.’ [our emphasis]

And we asked: ‘does the RACV not endorse these protocols? Ninety percent of 4WD drivers are sensible and law abiding. It is a source of great irritation that advertisements for these vehicles regularly show them plunging recklessly through creeks or churning through vegetation: this encourages the minority of cowboys who think that trashing our environment is great fun. It’s a pity that in this case the RACV seems to be on their side.’

We’ll let you know if we get a response.

The State Government is currently running a number of online public consultations under its Engage Victoria process. You can sign up for this easily by going to https://engage.vic.gov.au/

Two current consultations are of interest to us: one is on the decision to phase out single use plastic bags, and the other on the banning of e-waste from landfill. Both are on the face of it good policies, but as in everything the implementation could make or break them. For example, the government has allocated d $15 million to design and implement a program to upgrade Victoria’s e-waste collection network, and $1.5 million on public education on e- waste. Is this enough, or will we see an increasing number of TV sets and computers dumped in our bushlands?

When you register, you can find out about current consultations at https://engage.vic.gov.au//waste

Consultations on these matters close on January 25.

Connecting Country set 150 nest box sites in 2010 to provide habitat for this species through the Mount Alexander Shire. They have since monitored many of these nest box sites every two years, and now have a number of years of data on this species occurrence in the region. I selected 50 of these 150 sites, stratified according to landscape context (ie. the amount of tree cover surrounding each nest box site). Between April and June 2016, while Connecting Country conducted their nest-box checks, I set two cameras at each of these 50 sites.

In this study, I model the occurrence of Brush-tailed Phascogales in the Mount Alexander Shire with landscape attributes, such as the size of a forest patch, and a number of habitat attributes collected in the field, including forest productivity, forest structure, logs and leaf litter, and tree size and species.

One  property near Axe Creek was home to a particularly active population of Brush-tailed Phascogales, and you can watch a video of the sort of footage we detected” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTklMGskLyYc

Tuan in nest box at Welshmans Reef. Photo by Jess Lawton.