Author Archives: AWPC

Carnage of native birds and animals on Hamilton Island, called “management”

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There’s a dark and bloody side of the Whitsunday’s, Hamilton Island!  What’s meant to be a dream, an idyllic dream island, of relaxation and luxury, has been exposed.  Some of the feathered and four-footed native residents are being slaughtered because some of the tourists and residents are not “safe” from native species such as the Agile Walllabies and overly-friendly cockatoos!

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(image: Hamilton Island, an natural holiday resort where not all the natives are welcome!)

From November 2014 to May 2016, permits to kill native animals on Hamilton Island allowed for 393 agile wallabies, 599 common brushtail possums, 35 sulphur crested cockatoos, 36 pied currawongs, three torresian crows, and one laughing kookaburra to be destroyed. The permits were for the “ongoing management of some wildlife species to prevent unacceptable levels of damage, and to protect public safety at the airport and in the resort itself”.

So native birds and animals are now a “safety” threat to the resort itself! On the contrary, the “resort” has been imposed onto the habitats, and that itself is a threat!
The sulphur-crested cockatoos are famously friendly, as seen in singer Taylor Swift’s tweets during her visit to the island last year. But 35 of the birds have been killed in the past 18 months, along with 36 pied currawongs and a kookaburra. Sulphur-crested cockatoos and possums could harass guests — removing food off plates and tables at outdoor eating areas. So, these tourists only come to see sterile and controlled, artificial resorts, with any ad hoc visitors and unwanted inhabitant shot and killed!

Sulphur crested cockatoos are a much-photographed native species on the island, known for their mostly friendly interactions with holidaymakers. “Sulphur crested cockatoos are resident on the Island but some birds become used to human contact and scavenge for human food sources and become aggressive (this is called habituation),” a statement read.  Aggressive cockatoos?

Rochelle Steven from Birdlife Australia said killing birds was a drastic move.

The resort island’s managers have Queensland Government permission to kill an unrestricted number of agile wallabies, which were introduced to Hamilton in the 1970s. Between November 2014 and May 2016, 393 agile wallabies were shot dead.

In another clanger, a statement from Environment Heritage Protection said that “Agile wallabies are not native to Hamilton Island and their numbers have exploded since their introduction in the 1970s.” Neither are non-Indigenous humans, or resorts! Seems that other legitimate animals also are not part of the “environment” or “heritage” – in an Orwellian contradictory titles.

Hamilton Island chief executive Glenn Bourke, stated that introduced species such as the agile wallaby caused “unsustainable damage” to the island and the resort’s facilities. How do agile wallabies come to be “introduced’ species when they are Australian native animals? So, no flying or swimming animals, or human, have a right to be there?

 Nearly 600 brushtail possums were eradicated in the same time period, but Queensland’s Environment Department allows up to 5,000 to be killed over three years.

More than 70 percent of the Island remains preserved as natural bushland, even though it is the largest resort island in the Whitsundays. The Island and surrounds are home to a unique and beautiful array of flora, fauna, birds, mammals, and reptiles. The tourist spin advertises the island’s natural features, but then kills off any interaction with visitors?

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(image: Agile wallaby – considered to be an “introduced” species!)

Planning approvals are in place to develop neighbouring Dent Island and we are looking at potential residences on the island, including an apartment complex, a luxury hotel and exclusive home enclave.

Dent Island currently houses the 18-hole championship Hamilton Island Golf Club, a $30 million investment designed by Peter Thomson, arguably Australia’s greatest golfer, and which opened in 2009.

The Island has substantial infrastructure in place, including a $1.8 million pipeline installed between Hamilton Island and Dent Island to supply power, water and utilities to the Golf Club.

No doubt with property developers and tourist operators relishing in $ in tourist dollars, any unwanted native guests will continue to be lethally “managed” to prevent threats to “property and tourists”!

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Carp bowfishing raises concerns

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The Baird government has made a decision to allow a trial of the popular US-style hunting activity known as bowfishing in an effort to curb the population of the noxious carp fish.

DPI Game Licensing Unit Director, Dr Andrew Moriarty, said the trial follows a review of recreational saltwater and freshwater fishing rules in 2013, which included the proposal for bowfishing for carp in inland waters.

“Carp are an introduced freshwater species that have been declared a noxious fish in NSW and this pest species can have a significant impact on freshwater ecosystems through their detrimental impacts on native fish, aquatic plants, erosion and water quality.”

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(image: Cyprinus carpio carpio (European carp) on the dry bed of Lake Albert in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia)
It would allow the trial in inland waters to target the overpopulation of carp which are a well-known pest because of their destructive bottom-feeding habits.  Like the decision to introduce cane toads into Australia from Hawaii in June 1935,  in an attempt to control the native grey-backed cane beetle (Dermolepida albohirtum) and Frenchi beetle (Lepidiota frenchi), the solution could be worse than the initial problem!

 The 18-month trial includes sections of rivers, creeks and streams in the Riverina, Central West, North West and Murray regions.  How would the success or not of this trial be evaluated?  The eventual success of the trial to be judged on the “feedback from the participants” – not the ecological impacts!

Ecologists have have expressed concerns about the difficulty in distinguishing carp from wildlife or native fish species, especially in turbid waters.  Wildlife such as the platypus, the native water rat, the water dragon, turtles and diving birds could be mistaken for carp.  They would be considered “collateral damage” or dismissed as “by-catch” and these accidents not reported!

Greens MP David Shoebridge said that “killing fish with bows and arrows is about as stupid and pointlessly dangerous as it sounds.“This will have no impact on the overall number of carp in our inland waterways and is clearly being put forward as some new ‘sport’ not as a serious control measure.” 
Sounds suspiciously like this new “sport” is using the overpopulation of carp fish to justify it’s launch, but will actual fact to little to reduce their numbers.

 The Australian Platypus Conservancy says the activity is merely an extension of hunting that could hurt platypus and the native water-rat.  Biologist Geoff Williams says
“It really is just an extension of hunting activities and in this particular case we really think the risks certainly outweigh the benefits, if any.“We certainly think it’s something that in this day and age is just unnecessary.”  He said carp and platypus were often mistaken. 
(featured image: "Platypus" by Stefan Kraft - Selbst fotografiert am 20.9.2004 im Sydney Aquarium.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons )

Petition:

Urge the NSW Government to Overturn its Decision to Allow a Bow Fishing Trial – Natives Species Could be Put at Risk

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Cassowary – the decline of the World’s Most Dangerous Bird

The southern cassowary is the world’s third largest bird. It is one of Australia’s largest land animals and plays a unique role in the ecology of the World Heritage listed rainforests of tropical Australia. They stand between 1.5-2 metres in height and both sexes are similar in appearance. Adults are striking with their glossy black plumage and bright blue neck with touches of red. The female is larger than the male and is also the more aggressive of the two.

If you can see them that means you are too close and should take immediate protection. If you turn your back and run the bird will take that as a sign of weakness and will come after you at 50km ph (30 mph), which is faster than any human can run. The Guinness Book Of Records lists the Cassowary as the most dangerous bird in the world.

In evolutionary terms, the flightless birds (or ratites) were some of the earliest types of birds to develop. The cassowary, emu, rhea, kiwi and ostrich are still around today, but others, like the moas of New Zealand and the elephant bird of Madagascar are now extinct.

Cassowaries are very difficult to study because they lead solitary lives and live in dense tropical rainforest and remote and rugged terrain, so there is still much we don’t know about them.

Until recently, the remaining wild population was thought to be at around 2000. However, new research by the CSIRO estimates that the cassowary population may be more than double that at around 4400.

Threats:

Roads

Queensland government data shows that this year alone at least 10 cassowaries have died because of human involvement. Six were struck by cars and four were killed by dogs.

Rainforest vegetation has been extensively cleared, particularly in lowland areas. By 1997, 81% of native vegetation had been cleared, and remaining rainforest habitat was substantially fragmented.

Roads are a major cause of direct cassowary mortality due to vehicle strikes. Roads can also fragment and degrade cassowary habitat; impose barriers on cassowary movement patterns; and hasten the spread of invasive species.

Property Developers

Land is being cleared by property developers, the precious “Daintree rainforest is for sale on the open market with the guarantee of destruction from property development with DA approval already granted and council approved house plans included with the sale,” says the group. “Rare and endangered species such as southern cassowaries have been identified here”.

Urban Sprawl

Urban sprawl and coastal development along the aptly named Cassowary Coast now threatens the Cassowaries that have survived agricultural land-clearing. There have been in excess of 60 cassowaries killed by cars over the last 20 years in the Mission Beach area alone. Five recent reported deaths in three months attest to this.

Population growth

Cairns and the Far North have been tipped to become home to more than 500,000 people by 2050 – double today’s population. The region is the most populous in Northern Australia with 278,064 people and it is expected to more than double to 550,887 by 2050.

Liz Gallie is the president of Mission Beach Cassowaries says “the cassowary is a keystone species of the rainforest,” and “the current planning scheme would allow Mission Beach’s population to reach 18,000, which is incompatible with the survival of the cassowary. Development is still seen by the local authorities and tourism organisations as the economic driver and is encouraged. It is an oxymoron”.

PETITIONS:

Save the habitat of Australia’s ancient Cassowaries

ForceChange: Save Rare and Beautiful Cassowaries from Extinction

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Celebrities and Scientists lobby to reinstate Californian ban on kangaroo products

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Media Release 24 August 2015

JM Coetzee (Nobel Prize Laureate) and Dr Brian May (astrophysicist and Queen guitarist) join 72 other scientists, academics and public figures urging California to reinstate its ban on imported kangaroo products.

Over 70 scientists, academics, educators and other public figures from Australia, the UK and the United States, including Nobel Prize Laureate JM Coetzee and astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Dr Brian May, have signed an open letter to Californian lawmakers urging reinstatement of the Californian ban on imported products made from kangaroos.

California banned importation of kangaroo products when the United States listed the commercially shot kangaroo species as threatened in 1974. This followed Australia’s own 1973 ban on exported kangaroo products, based on evidence of serious decline in kangaroos.

The US delisted the species in 1995 and California’s import ban temporarily lifted in 2007 after intensive lobbying by the commercial kangaroo industry, Adidas and the Australian Government.

“California’s import ban is due to resume at the end of 2015. The industry is seeking permanent unchecked importation of kangaroo products,” said letter coordinators Helen Bergen and Teja Brooks Pribac.

“Kangaroos grow and breed slowly with high juvenile mortality, and suffer major declines during drought. Intense hunting and systematic eradication programs since British settlement in 1788, and decades of industrial-scale commercial killing beyond reproductive capacity has seen local extinctions of populations.

“Australian government policy favours the commercial industry, despite growing concerns about the science used to justify the commercial kangaroo shooting and export industries.

“Population estimates over-inflate numbers from which unattainable inflated shooting quotas are extracted. This reinforces the myth of kangaroos as abundant and as pests, despite current science indicating otherwise.

“ There is also increasing concern about the known cruelty issues for shot kangaroos and their joeys; and about the risk of pathogens that continue to be found in kangaroo meat,” said scientist Dr Dror Ben-Ami.

“Supporters of the commercial kangaroo industry are quick to deride these concerns, however signatories to the letter are educated and critical-thinking people, who well understand the seriousness of the questions being asked,” added Mses Bergen and Pribac.

“Government custodianship of wildlife should never be driven by commercial interests or mistaken common perceptions. It’s like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse,” they said.

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“We are urging Californian lawmakers to carefully consider the concerns in the letter and not take their advice from the very industry profiting from the massive harm visited on Australia’s kangaroos every night.

Read or download the letter at www.kangaroosatrisk.org

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Charles Darwin’s finches on the brink of extinction

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The birds naturalist Charles Darwin saw on the Galapagos Islands during his famous voyage around the world in 1831-1836 changed his thinking about the origin of new species and, eventually, that of the world’s biologists.

On his visit to the Galapagos Islands, Darwin discovered several species of finches that varied from island to island, which helped him to develop his theory of natural selection.

The 13 major islands of the Galapagos are home to an amazing array of unique animal species: giant tortoises, iguanas, fur seals, sea lions, sharks, rays, and 26 species of native birds––14 of which make up the group known as Darwin’s finches.

It was Darwin’s job to study the local flora and fauna, collecting samples and making observations he could take back to Europe with him of such a diverse and tropical location.

The research performed there and the species Darwin brought back to England were instrumental in the formation of a core part of the original theory of evolution and Darwin’s ideas on natural selection which he published in his first book On the Origin of Species.

Their beaks had adapted to the type of food they ate in order to fill different niches on the Galapagos Islands.

Wide, slender, pointed, blunt: The many flavors of beak sported by the finches that flit about the remote Galápagos Islands were an important clue to Darwin that species might change their traits over time, adapting to new environments.  The Galápagos finches are ideal subjects for observing the drama of evolution. The islands kept them isolated from competition with other birds on the South American mainland, and each island became its own little world.

But Darwin failed to note which islands each particular finch came from. He tried to make up for the deficit by borrowing some finch notes taken by the Beagle‘s Captain Robert FitzRoy, but Darwin hardly mentioned the finches in his later writing. It was not until Darwin’s Finches were properly identified and studied by the famous ornithologist, John Gould, that Darwin began to realize that a more complex process was going on.  Some developed stronger bills for cracking nuts, others finer beaks for picking insects out of trees, one species even evolving to use a twig held in the beak to probe for insects in rotten wood. Each small adaptation gave a competitive advantage and so the characteristic spread through the population.

Darwin himself used the finches in the The Voyage of the Beagle to quietly announce the theory of evolution.

“Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

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(image: Small Ground Finch Geospiza fuliginosa, from the island of Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands.)

Parasitic flies could wipe out the Galapagos Island birds in just 50 years.

An estimated 270,000 medium ground finches live on the island of Santa Cruz, and it is thought 500,000 live throughout the archipelago.  Researchers were able to document how the flies have damaged finch reproduction between 2008 and 2013.  The fly, known by the scientific name Philornis downsi, lays its eggs in finches’ nests. The flies lay their eggs inside the birds’ nests, and the hatching maggots feed on the young birds.

A frog named for Darwin has already gone extinct!

However, the researchers also found the problem could be solved by more advanced and widespread pest-control efforts. Using insecticides, including placing pesticide-treated cotton balls where birds can collect them to self-fumigate their nests, may be used to counteract the parasites.

The threat the finches face as a result of the invasive flies illustrates how “introduced pathogens and other parasites pose a major threat to global diversity,” especially on islands, which tend to have smaller habitat sizes and lower genetic diversity, researchers write.

Surely, we can do something for the very birds that the famous Charles Darwin studied, in a protected and isolated highly conserved and protected archipelago?

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Chlamydia- new hope for koalas

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Where koalas are able to live in undisturbed forests free of human interference, the colonies tend to be much healthier and do not suffer the diseases and problems that koalas face that live at the human/bush interface such as urban and rural areas. Like other native animals, they are prone to stress.  A common disease is a bacterial disease called Chlamydiosis. This bacterium can affect the eyes of the koala and/or the urogenital tract.

 

Koalas mask their illnesses very well – sick koalas are very sick koalas.  Chlamydia commonly causes ocular and urogenital disease manifested by keratoconjunctivitis (pink-eye), infertility and urine staining of the rump caused by cystitis (dirty tail).  Secondary infections, with other bacteria and fungi, is exacerbated by a number of factors including chronic stress, poor nutrition and immunosuppressive diseases. The weaker animals succumb to the disease, become sick, infertile or die, leaving the genetically stronger animals to continue breeding.

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(image: koala with dirty tail - http://www.koalaresearch.net.au/Research_Results/Entries/2015/4/8_Koala_Disease.html)

Chlamydia is stress related. Symptoms can extremely painful, highly contagious to other koalas and life threatening if left untreated.

Koala numbers had dropped dramatically in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT over the past 20 years.

The Australian Koala Foundation states that chlamydia may serve as an “inbuilt control mechanism” that helps limit koala population and to ensure only the strongest of them will survive to reproduce.  With numbers severely compromised, and added stress from today’s contemporary threats, it could “control” to extinction.

 

Last year, researchers from Queensland and New South Wales published a study recommending that koalas be culled in the name of conservation.  The study found that, to grow the Koala Coast population, around 10% (or 140 individuals) of koalas would need to be captured and culled or treated each year.  Culling to stop the spread of disease is controversial, and not always successful. The koala is the only native Australian species for which culling has been consistently dismissed as a management option.

 

Lead researcher Professor David Wilson said in some areas, over half the koala population had the chlamydia disease.  Given its rate of spread, and considering how painful and debilitating the condition is for koalas, some conservationists are calling for a massive cull in order to get the disease under control as researchers feverishly work on a vaccine.

 

It’s a bit like surgeons performing a successful operation, but the patient died!  It’s a Pyrrhic victory, of killing the host animal to kill a disease.   In 1997, culling was proposed as a component of an integrated strategy to manage high density populations of koalas on Kangaroo Island,  but it sparked much outrage and ultimately led to a decision at the Commonwealth level that culling will not be considered for management of koalas.

Scientists at the University of the Sunshine Coast said they had successfully vaccinated koalas against the disease, which was responsible for about 50 per cent of the marsupial’s deaths. A vaccine trial involved 60 koalas from the Moreton Bay region, with 30 koalas given the vaccine and 30 koalas used as controls. Those given the vaccine showed good immune responses with overall infection rates decreased.

 

The vaccine is currently the newest and most advanced vaccine composition in existence and the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital hosted the world-first administration of the new version. It was the first full medical trial following a smaller test that took place in Lismore last year – building on efforts over the past seven years to develop a successful vaccine for koalas.

 

Redland City Mayor Karen Williams said Council had provided $30,000 to the joint University of the Sunshine Coast and Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital trial aimed at finding a vaccine to fight devastating chlamydia disease.

Flann the koala at Australia Zoo was the patient who received the injection of the new vaccine and will be the first of a study of 30 animals in the ground-breaking trial.

Vaccine control- Media Release

 

 

 

 

 

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