Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The FOBIF Annual General Meeting will be held at the Ray Bradfield Rooms on Monday July 11 at 7.30 p.m.

Our guest speaker will be Martin Scuffins from the Leigh Valley Hawk and Owl Sanctuary. This impressive organisation has a two-part focus:

The Sanctuary offers mobile raptor displays with an elite team of trained birds of prey. Presentations are conducted by highly trained staff with an established track record in environmental science and teaching. Our programs are offered within the Central Highlands and south-western regions of Victoria. We also rehabilitate injured birds of prey under our Department of Environment, Land, Water and  Planning shelter permit.

Some images from The Sanctuary website

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A motion will be moved to update the FOBIF statement of aims, which is now ten years old. The proposed new statement of aims is set out below. [For comparison, the current statement of aims is in the ‘About us’ section of this site].

More details on the meeting agenda will be published on this site in the coming weeks.

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Here’s the proposed new statement of aims:

Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests (Mt Alexander Region) was formed in 1998 by people in the local community interested in working towards highlighting the significance of the Box-Ironbark Forests and Woodlands. There are over 100 members with a committee elected yearly at the Annual General Meeting.

We believe that the health of the land is intimately linked to its vegetation cover and the wildlife it sustains: that forests, soil and water are ‘an inseparable trinity.’ That’s why we work to encourage and support sound land management practices, on private and public land.

The Friends Exist . . .

To promote respect for Indigenous culture and understanding of Indigenous land management practices.

To work towards a common community approach to a healthy, sustainable and productive landscape through conservation of natural vegetation on public and private land in the Mount Alexander Region and in particular to:

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The May 24 information session was followed by a briefing by researchers who produced the Box Ironbark mosaic burning project [see our Posts here, here and here].

As we reported last week, possibly the biggest question raised by this project is that it simply is not enough: a project run over only two years—and two unusually wet years at that—necessarily has limitations. This problem was raised at the information session, and we were told that DELWP workers would continue some of the project’s monitoring. This is better than nothing, but is obviously not the same as continuing a rigorously designed and managed research program of the kind that could form a reliable foundation for fire managers in the future.

One encouraging thing to emerge from the session, however, was the statement by fire managers present that the research project [in which they had been involved] had been a ‘learning experience’ for them. There’s an interesting idea: that fire operations should be integrated with ecological research, and should always have ecological outcomes in mind.

The opening of our Trees of the Mount Alexander Shire photo show at the Newstead Railway Arts Hub will take place next Saturday (4 June) at 10.30.

Bernard Slattery will open the show and Julie Patey from The Hub is bringing along home made scones. As well, Andrew Skeoch from Listening Earth, will play sound recordings of local birdsong during the opening and at other viewing times.

Everyone is welcome to the opening. More details and sample images from the exhibition can be found here and here.

The exhibition was recently displayed at TOGS cafe in Castlemaine. At the Newstead show there will also be a slide show of tree photos that people sent into FOBIF after our ‘call for photos’ in January this year.

One of the photos from the exhibition: Red Box (Eucalyptus polyanthemos) Golden Point. Photo by Bernard Slattery, August 2015

Noel Young sent these photos to us after we we had posted our walks article.  They provide a terrific record of the walk so we decided to post them in the gallery below. We are not one hundred percent sure of the identification of the fungi in the first photo. If anyone thinks our identification is incorrect please let us know. Click on the thumbnail image to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

The FOBIF exhibition, Trees in the Mount Alexander Region, is being held in 2 locations this year, TOGS and the new Newstead Railway Arts Hub. The TOGS show which finished recently was a great success with lots of positive responses and sales of photos. Now it’s time for the move to Newstead.

The show in Newstead will run throughout June. It will include the photos from the TOGS show and a slide show which will have at least one image from people who sent in photos for our Flickr site.

The Gallery will be open at weekends and the Queens Birthday holiday on Monday 13 June. Opening hours are 10am to 4 pm. The address is Dundas Street, Newstead (directly across from Railway Hotel). If you would like to view the exhibition outside these days/hours, or help with staffing the show, contact Bronwyn Silver on 5475 1089

The opening will be at 10.30 on Saturday 4 June. There will be refreshments and everyone is welcome. Bernard Slattery from FOBIF will open the show.

In late 2015, a group of people came together at a symposium, called Managing Victoria’s Biodiversity under Climate Change, in Melbourne. More than 200 scientists and audience members with years of practical experience discussed the state-of-play and options for the future. The symposium was organised by VicNature 2050 which includes input from the Victorian National Parks Association, The Royal Society of Victoria and The University of Melbourne’s Bio21 Institute and is sponsored by the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning and Parks Victoria.

One outcome from the symposium was the development of a website called “10 things we can all do to help nature adapt to a new climate”. The suggestions are for everyone and include actions which consider people, nature, science and politics. Some of the “10 things” are new, some are old and Vic Nature 2050 are open to revision as we learn more and move into a new climate future. To view the site and find out more click here.

There is another symposium tabled for June 7th this year titled ‘Our changing landscapes: acting on climate impacts’. This one day symposium will follow much the same format as last year’s symposium: a series of short presentations by experts in the field, followed by discussion periods to which all participants are invited to contribute.To register an interest in attending subscribe to the VicNature 2050 mailing list here.

FOBIF has made a brief submission to the Biodiversity discussion paper. The substance of the submission is set out at the end of this post.

The discussion paper is worth a look, tossing quite a few provocative ideas. Among them:

‘Tourism Victoria and public land managers such as DELWP, Parks Victoria and local councils will work in collaboration with the community to ensure that our iconic natural and built assets keep offering opportunities to connect with nature. Recent projects like the Grampians Peaks Trail, the Harcourt Mountain Bike Trail and the Shipwreck Coast Master Plan represent a concerted effort to strategically look at opportunities to maximise access to nature.’ page 39

In Happy Valley: are kangaroos like rabbits? Is mountain biking a connection to nature? Should reveg projects move away from ‘local provenance’ plants?

To help biodiversity adapt, the paper proposes to ‘Encourage gene mixing (where appropriate) to increase the genetic “fitness” of populations to adapt to a changing environment. This could lead to reduced emphasis on the use of “local provenance” material in revegetation projects or mean we are more likely to favour translocation of individuals between populations.’ page 50

‘Examples of native species that sometimes require management intervention to protect other biodiversity values include: Kangaroos, which in some rural areas have increased in numbers due to the increase in reliable water supplies (e.g. stock watering) and pasture for grazing. High numbers of kangaroos can exert high grazing pressure on native plants and wildflowers, a bit like rabbits, and can destroy habitat that ground-dwelling native animals may need to survive.’

Here’s the substance of FOBIF’s submission:

‘We support the directions this draft paper proposes. We are unable to respond to the questions proposed in the consultation paper, but wish to make the following general comments:

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