Gouldians in the Nothern Territory

[Diane]

Just found a link from the ABC, it dosent say any more that desertbirds already posted but for those going up there to see for themselves it asks for pics and details to passed onto the Parks and Wildlife Office

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/nt/content/ ... 110594.htm

[desertbirds]

Without doubt the single most damaging thing for the wild Gouldians is fire.
So pressure must be used to stop setting fire to the grasses.
I can remember Mike Fidler showing me a photo shot from the air of a fire deliberatly lit,its fire front
extended 300kms. .

A similar fire scorched the Tanami Desert several years ago and it was due to lack of burning.No fire breaks or recently burnt pathces of scrub and spinifex. A strong hold of the Striated grass Wren was lost along with several isolated populations of Bilbies.Fortunately there seems to be a lot more work being done with regard to fire management both in the top end and down my way.

[Jayburd]

you can always stay with us ;)

[VR1Ton]

We get the same around here with the National Parks & WILDFIRE Service, we've got one of the biggest colonies of Ground Parrot in the national park out the road, but in the 20 years I've been here we've had 2 major fire through the middle of their breeding grounds, but never had a hazard reduction burn. Just goes to show how poorly managed & how little knowledge is possesed by the "experts" in charge of our wildlife, not to mention our licence & their enforcement.

[jusdeb]

A lot of our fauna and flora cope well and some even need those quick fires that only burn the leaf litter while not harming taller shrubs and trees , leaving the litter till it gets too thick and dry produces the damaging hot fires that destroy everything in their path .

Not to mention the quick fires usually revegetate very quickly .

[spanna]

the problem is the altered burning regimes. it used to be that lightning would spark a fire, and a patch of land (sometimes big, but not nearly as big as today) would burn. this would reduce fuel loads in that area, so when a future fire started to spread to this area, it wouldn't have enough fuel to continue, creating a "safe zone" of sorts for animals and plants. these patches of burnt/unburnt and high/low fuel areas created a mosaic over the landscape with young, old, dense, sparse, shrubby, grassy, forested etc etc etc habitats that birds could use for what they needed. but instead of these smaller fires with burning around every 10 years (as is supposedly natural) they are now much larger, much hotter fires that are far less frequent, resulting in more loss of nesting sites and less nutrient recycling of old plant matter available for grasses to go to seed.

i've said it for a long time, before white man came along there were no problems, aboriginals new exactly how to run this land, manage flora, fauna and fire, and now we have completely altered the regimes, and you can see everything suffering, humans included. nobody likes bushfires, but i'd sure as hell rather see many small controlled ones around the place than one HUGE one every 20 years. fingers crossed someone with the power to change things does something about this and we get more controlled burns nation wide. you'd be surprised how much of an effect it would have with a good management plan and consultations with the traditional land owners.

[GregH]

It would be nice if the birds could come back but since the land is largely in the hands of private graziers intent on managing their land for profit it’s unlikely the burning regime for maximum cattle grazing and that of native finch productivity is coincident. To manage the land with small-scale mosaic burns was possible when it was “run” by the Aborigines but no one wants to go back to that degree of intimacy with nature unless “we” are prepared to pay them for it. Let’s not also forget that the Australian landscape seen in 1770 was not untouched by human activity or managed by those in balance with nature – the Aborigines dramatically changed the flora of Australia with their burning and sent many species extinct and the resulting balance suited them. Before the Aborigines Gouldians were probably a rare bird too and it's likely Aboriginal activity probably sent a few finch species extinct too.

[spanna]

i'm not saying we need to go back to the way things were entirely, just listen to what the traditional land owners have to say regarding management and fire regimes. and the aboriginals use of fire was introduced over a long period of time and the flora and fauna had a long tim to adapt, especially compared to the 2 centuries we've managed to ruin everything in. remember time frame and evolution and adaptation; aboriginals may have drastically changed things overall, but they did it over an extended period of time (very extended) where we did it extraordinarily fast, giving mother nature no time to adapt. sure, some species may have become extinct because of them, but have a look at extinction rates now to show just how insignificant that is. aboriginals were a nomadic people, utilising the land then moving on when they needed and when the land needed it. we are a greedy greedy people (not everyone, but you know what i mean) and use the land until it can't be used for or by anything else, and only have ourselves and our back pockets in mind.

fact is, they may have altered things, but we have done much worse, so why not listen to them and make things as they used to be, the way many surviving species are adapted to?

[GregH]

Definitely we could do worse than listen to them if that knowledge still exists. While we are unlikely to see the vast tracts of freehold & lease hold land go back to a pre-European management system there are Natioanl parks where the government carries teh responsibility to manage and maintain teh biodiversity of this continent in perpetuity - that's what will cost the tax payer especially those eating grass-fed free-range meat from the top end.

[E Orix]

From memory there has been quite some Grader work creating fire breaks.
The reasoning is that old methods are hard to break so by creating a fire break there is a limiting factor.
I should make more of an effort to remember these discussions