Wildlife

Vic Jurskis. Koala plagues and megafires go together. Koalas are breeding faster than ever on all the soft young growth generated by Black Summer. The scrub development is unprecedented. Our next extreme fire season will kill more people and animals than ever before. But the koala is in no danger of extinction.

A recent inquiry into Victoria’s duck hunting had more than 10,500 submissions, a record for a Victorian parliamentary inquiry. Labor chair Ryan Batchelor said Victoria should end recreational native bird hunting on all public and private land from 2024 ... The report did also recommend transforming hunting reserves into state recreation reserves, and excluding non aboriginals, whilst allowing traditional owners to continue to hunt ducks.

Here kitty, kitty – here’s the thing – there are almost five million cats in Australia. Research by the  Invasive Species Council  found that 70% of cat owners let their cats roam freely outdoors. An average roaming cat kills 186 animals a year...

Clever use of water for the environment in two northern Victorian wetlands is helping a critically endangered fish thrive.   The Murray hardyhead is a small native fish that has suffered from degraded habitat, altered flows, introduced predators, climate change, and water regulation.

The NSW Government has announced the process to establish the Great Koala National Park, as well as a halt to timber harvesting operations in the 106 koala hubs within the area being assessed for the park ... ARR.News asked some questions of the Minister about koala surveys and research indicating that properly conducted forestry does not adversely impact koala numbers. A departmental spokesperson responded.

Travel to Rottnest Island is free for kids aged 12 and under this weekend and island admission fees have also been waived as part of the Little Quokka's Big Birthday event. The annual event … celebrates the arrival of new quokka joeys with a program of free activities for the whole family…

What would it cost? And what is the carbon footprint of the physical effort to remove the footing of one of the many 200m tall wind turbine towers soon to be seen scattered across the Wheatbelt? ... I wonder how many of the Greenpeace activist types have watched the doco Thrown to the Wind about the whale deaths off the East Coast of the United States?

The mass frog mortality event occurred at the lagoon last week, prompting the immediate closure of the popular nature park near Naracoorte. While DEW has confirmed a suspected chytrid fungus outbreak in the area, it has cautioned the public to stay on paths and help reduce the potential spread of the disease.

With help from recreational anglers, long term tag-and-release programs ... have revealed a level of connectivity of kingfish between states across mainland Australia, as well as offshore sites such as LHI and NZ. However, the frequency of such long-distance movements and the whereabouts of spawning-sized kingfish ... between release and recapture remain a mystery ... Project Kingfish aims to fill these knowledge gaps.

The Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) is urging the Victorian government to renew the highly successful Wild Dog Management Plan that has seen an enormous drop in wild dog attacks on livestock since launching in 2012.

An endangered native mouse species that nests in forests around the New South Wales Tablelands is showing strong signs of recovery post the Black Summer bushfires. The Hastings River Mouse, Pseudomys oralis, a small native rodent with brownish-grey fur and white feet, was one of NSW’s most severely impacted endangered species following the 2019-2020 fires.

Felicity Howard. The reach of the Kangaroo Art Auction which closed on Monday 31 July as part of the Maldon Inc Maldon In Winter Festival, was far and wide ... The lovely June Kiff of Reservoir Melbourne was the highest bidder of ‘Goldie’ created by the Mount Alexander Girl Guides.

The revival of the Nymboida River, which was devastated by fires then floods over the past three years is well underway and the endangered Eastern Freshwater Cod are already benefitting from work by the Clarence chapter of Oz Fish … 5km of exotic weeds being removed from the riparian zone and 1000 local native plants established in their place. 

Chlamydia is a significant and widespread threat to the koala, impacting their reproductive health and causing infertility. This project will trial a new vaccine implant which would allow for koalas to receive their ‘booster’ dose of vaccine via the implant.

From eBird.org, we learned that the long-billed visitor to Donald last week is identified as Threskiornis spinicollis – or more familiarly, “the straw-necked ibis”. A flock of forty of the feathered fliers alighted in the grassed area across Byrne Street from St. Mary’s School playing area.

Australia’s iconic grass-trees – aka yaccas – are hardy, drought-tolerant, and strikingly beautiful. Now, new research has revealed another, far more important, feature: their ability to protect wildlife from deadly weather extremes.

Vic Jurskis. Laura Chung from Sydney Morning Herald tells us “Members of one of the healthiest koala populations in Sydney are dying at an alarming rate, as chlamydia-infected koalas and housing development” get closer. Makes you wonder how many different koala ‘populations’ there are in our State Capital ... Premier Chris Minns has a terrible dilemma.

Their actions have saved countless native wildlife and where they go, the cameras follow. Conservation dogs are back on the Sunshine Coast, with up-and-coming canine Cooper taking the lead and his protégé Hakka in tow.

Researchers at Charles Sturt University are preparing to visit Lord Howe Island for the last time as part of a study on the impacts of a rodent eradication project on two native bird species. The study, ‘Effects of an island-wide rodent eradication programme on two threatened bird species’, was recently published after years of research both on and off the island.

Introduced foxes, dogs, cats, rats, and other predators kill millions of native animals every year, but what if they were conditioned to associate this prey with food that made them ill? A team of international researchers have shown the potential to do just that, burying baits containing capsules of levamisole, a chemical that induces nausea and vomiting when consumed by predators.

Sunshine Coast Council’s Environment and Liveability Portfolio Councillor Maria Suarez thanked the photographer for reporting the koala sighting at Palmview Forest through the Queensland Government’s QWildlife app and is calling on others to do the same. “There are some amazing images of Sunshine Coast koalas being uploaded to QWildlife”: Councillor Maria Suarez.