By JAMES WOODFORD
Sometimes, no matter how much your family needs you, going straight home is not an option.
In Tasmania masked owls are an endangered species – as few as 650 pairs are left.
But on Lord Howe Island the Tasmanian race, the same sub-species of this raptor are absolutely thriving, living in densities unheard of elsewhere.
Perversely, however, that is a bad thing because Tasmanian masked owls were deliberately introduced by humans to World-Heritage-Listed Lord Howe between 1922 and 1930.
Like the old lady who swallowed a fly, the owls were set free to control black rats, which in turn had been introduced to the island from a wrecked ship in 1918.
Picture: Dave Milledge on Lord Howe Island’s Mount Gower, radio tracking masked owls
[Read more →]
Tags: lord howe·owls·pest species·rats
May 24th, 2010 · Blog
About four or five years ago I got invited to attend a seminar to mark the impending arrival of Biobanking. It was supposed to mark the dawn of a new future for the development/conservation compact in NSW but even back then it looked a whole lot of hooey.
Today I got this baffling e-mail from, David Nicholson Manager Biodiversity and Vegetation Programs, Department of Environment, Climate Change & Water, NSW:
‘The good news
As you may already know, the first biobanking agreement has been finalised. The biobank site is part of a property known as St Mary’s Towers, located two kilometres south of Douglas Park in the Wollondilly local government area. It is owned by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. The site comprises 80 hectares of high conservation value Cumberland Plain forest, which created 607 ecosystem credits. Four hundred of these credits have been purchased and retired by the Growth Centres Biodiversity Offset program, which collects levies from developers in the north-west and south-west Sydney growth centres. The program will purchase and retire the remaining 207 credits later this year.
The bad news
Unfortunately, in association with the announcement of the signing of the first agreement, there has been a considerable amount of mis-reporting in the media. The incorrect assertions include that with BioBanking:
- the government buys land for conservation
- a biobank site can become a development site after a few years
- volunteers are expected to manage biobank sites
- indiscriminate bulldozing of high conservation value vegetation is allowed
- the offset ratio is 1:1
- there are 37 agreements about to be finalised.
None of these points are correct. As most of you would be aware, BioBanking requires a rigorous, scientifically-based assessment of both development sites and conservation sites and enforces strict trading rules to ensure an ‘improve or maintain’ outcome. A biobanking agreement is in perpetuity, with the landowner retaining ownership but agreeing to manage the site for conservation and, in return, receiving annual management payments after they have sold their biodiversity credits.
We will continue to update you with our regular Biobanking Banter email newsletter however we felt a one-off email was necessary given the events of the past week.’
That’s all fine David but the REALLY BAD news is that if there has been only one of these Biobanking deals finalised after so much hot air and so many staggeringly appalling new developments then clearly the model is flawed?
Tags: biobanking·conservation·developers
Stuart Kininmonth is a marine ecologist and sailor based in Townsville. He has a fascination with the perfect breeze, well forecast. Here is his take on the highs and lows of wind predictions…
There is nothing like good planning to make a cruise enjoyable. You study the tide charts, check the food list, measure the fuel levels and then begin teasing apart the wind forecasts. The forecasts can let you know a week in advance what conditions are likely to be but do they? Our use of the internet has placed the world’s weather forecasts at our fingertips yet we are never sure just how well they might apply to our local cruising ground.
Recently I was all ready to cruise out to our favourite coral reef but the forecasts predicted doom and gloom. I looked at the 3 day then 2 day then next day predictions as the weekend approached. Finally we decided to delay the departure by a day. Waking up on Saturday morning to clear skies and favourable winds prompted me to have a hard look at the forecasts available over the month of April 2010. Every day at 4pm I duly noted the 1 to 3 day upper and lower wind speed predictions for 10 AM and 4 PM time slots. Later I compared these to the real data recorded at two marine weather stations. I was surprised at the results and believe extra knowledge of wind forecasting is essential to cruise planning.
Picture by James Woodford – Stuart Kininmonth at the helm of a tender at Davies Reef on a windy day
[Read more →]
Tags: bureau of meteorology·forecasting·sailing·wind
May 4th, 2010 · Blog
I don’t much like pumpkins and I don’t much like the end of Summer. I always know when winter is coming because Prue harvests all the pumpkins and we have a mountain of them placed somewhere inconvenient. This year they have been turned into a sculpture in the exact spot where I like to sit and watch the sun go down, over a glass of wine.
It is also the time of the year when the angle of our solar panels has to be adjusted in order to efficiently harvest the energy from the sun. If that’s not enough of a sign that soon the ocean will be too cold for swimming, our last sunflower is beginning to wilt and look hopelessly glum. Peaches and apricots are a memory from long ago. What is left of summer is now in the freezer or preserved – except the damned pumpkins.
[Read more →]
Tags: climate change·kevin rudd·local food·pumpkins
April 28th, 2010 · News
This week two of the nation’s leading fish scientists, Professor David Booth and Dr Will Figueira, representing the Australian Marine Sciences Association, gave evidence to the NSW Parliament on marine parks…here is an edited extract of their submission.
Despite the claims by many critics of marine parks, there is at this point, overwhelming evidence that the establishment of marine reserves (especially no-take “Sanctuary” zones) will result in increases in the diversity and biomass of organisms within the reserve.
The recently completed report on the science behind marine parks in NSW has indicated studies conducted in Australia are consistent with these world-wide trends. These increases in biomass can translate into fisheries benefits as marine parks serve as refuges from fishing mortality and as areas where the risk of extinction is extremely low.
Photograph by James Woodford: Galapagos whaler shark, Lord Howe Island Marine Park [Read more →]
Tags: conservation·marine parks·recreational fishing
April 19th, 2010 · Blog
On a Monday morning at the start of a busy week it’s hard to find a few minutes to just enjoy something wonderful and beautiful. A friend, Stuart Cohen, sent me his link to his work documenting the National Folk Festival, which was held in Canberra over the Easter weekend. Before I began my day I took some time to enjoy Cohen’s distillation of this year’s festival. I was truly taken with what he has captured. There is so much life and joy and beauty in his photographs, so slice a moment out of your crazy day and enjoy the spectacle of what happens when people gives themselves to music. Check out the slideshow here
Tags: music·national folk festival·photography
Janice Lough is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and one of the nation’s leading climate scientists – her work on cores from ancient corals has confirmed that dramatic, unprecedented climate changes are underway right now. Lough’s message at the recent Coral Reefs Symposium, held in Brisbane in August, was that climate change is happening fast and it’s going to get faster. Her blog will be one for Real Dirt readers to watch…Clim8Delta.
Tags: climate change·coral reefs·Janice Lough
Headline-grabbing floods in towns like Roma, Charleville and St George have slightly obscured a massive water event that has been quietly snaking its way through far western Queensland. This week Adam Kerezsy flew over flooded Central Australia and has this report on one of the biggest ecological stories this year.
Story and pictures Adam Kerezsy
In late February and early March torrential rain fell in the desert and channel country in far western Queensland. Daily rainfall records tumbled in places like Birdsville and Windorah, and many districts in central Australia received their average annual rainfall in a single event. Coming on the heels of an already wet summer, there was nowhere for the water to go but over the banks of channels, out onto the floodplain and slowly down towards South Australia and Lake Eyre.
The Georgina is the most westerly river that is characterised by what is commonly known as ‘channel country’, a complex system of river channels that are mostly dry, occasionally wet, ever-changing and generally unpredictable. But to the west of the Georgina, the big low that was generating the rain was also letting go over one of the driest areas of Australia – the Simpson Desert. [Read more →]
Tags: central australia·desert ecology·fish·flooding
February 15th, 2010 · News
For over a year the NSW south coast has slowly cracked and dried.
A little over a week ago a neighbour and his friends tried to save native fish as they struggled to survive in a coastal lagoon that had gone so rank everything living in it was starting to die. A few days later it began to rain and the lagoon smashed open to the sea. And then, for a few days, it was dry again. Last Friday it once more started to rain, soft and gentle at first. But today a low pressure system formed on top of us. I watched kangaroos, which a week ago were searching for fodder, being swept away in floodwaters into a coastal lake. [Read more →]
Tags: drought·flood·kangaroos·rain
February 11th, 2010 · Blog
‘Dad look at this,’ my nine-year-old daughter said to me in awe. Polite, silent, internalised groan. Was it Bindi Irwin on television again? Some new lyric she’d finally heard in a Taylor Swift song? No, in her hand was an apple.
‘It’s the perfect apple,’ she said as proudly as if she was the smug chicken that had laid a glorious double-yolker egg.
All week she had been picking apples from our apple tree which, being a youngster itself, is producing its first crop this summer. Sometimes she has been eating three or four in a row and she’s stuffing her lunch box full of them. The whole time I have been thinking she is a matyr for health – the victim of some new Department of Education good food campaign. [Read more →]
Tags: apples·good food·organic gardening·supermarkets
