International travel brings into sharp focus the multicultural world of humankind. To visit Delhi from Melbourne is to dive into a strange new world of speech, mannerisms, lifestyles, food, and even scents. Move on to Newcastle (UK) and you soon conclude that the indecipherable Geordie accent should be reclassified as a foreign language. Take an Australian magpie from Main Creek to Sydney and it will wonder about those strange black backs and look on with bemusement as the locals attack…
A flurry of reports have appeared recently addressing our high level of diversity, how it is declining, and what we are doing about it. The short answer is that Australia is classified as megadiverse, this is declining rapidly, and we are doing very little about it. The good news is that we classify as one of the 17 megadiverse countries across the world (see image from Wikipedia), that collectively support >147,000 documented species (7.8% of global total, Chapman 2009): >8,000…
The Purple Eyebright (Euphrasia collina subsp muelleri) is an FFG and EPBC listed species. It was once widespread in damp heathland & damp heathy woodland across Victoria. Ten years ago the Mornington Peninsula and Jamieson had last known surviving patches. Since that time all known patches on the Mornington Peninsula have become extinct. Alex McLachlan from the Royal Botanical Garden is currently researching this species. It would be great if the Landcare community could keep an…
Another escellent brochure on Bird-friendly Farms from Birdlife Australia and the NSW Government provides a marvellous adjunct to Birds in the Burbs. Four sections address all aspects birds on farms: Why support a bird-friendly farm? Habitat features on rural properties. Managing threats & pressures for birds & their habitats. Getting started - making your farm bird-friendly. Although specifically addressed to NSW environments, the bulk of the brochure is completely generic and…
An excellent interactive brochure by Humphries et al (2024), examines the impact of urbanisation on backyard native bird species. The impact of housing density, importance of local protected bush areas, and importance of canopy trees all are addressed. In their words: "Urban areas can support a wide range of native plants and animals, including some threatened species. This is especially true for birds which are often widespread and abundant in cities and towns. However, it’s clear…
.... Public attention is firmly focused on bushland habitat destruction and its impact, and this is reflected in the many excellent revegetation programs such as our Linking the Mornington Peninsula Landscape. Much less attention is given to native grasslands. Yet, over the past 150 y or so, 99.9% of the once extensive Australian native grasslands have disappeared (Sustainable Farms 2024). Put another way, of native grasslands covering the area of the Shire only around 70 ha would…
"Buy land, they're not making it anymore." Mark Twain. Our societal addiction to expansion/inflation is doing neither us nor the natural system any good. A new study by Ma et al (2024) has examined the changing overlaps between humans and 22,374 other vertebrate species from the perspective of both climate migrations and human population expansion. The result is not pretty, with the spatial overlap predicted to increase (decrease) by 56.6% (11.8%) up to 2070. The changes are driven…
Given the implications from expanding human populations in the previous article, it is of interest to assess the related question of extinction rates thanks to us. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List has 908 extinctions since 1500, but this is considered to be extremely conservative and biased toward known birds and mammals. Other estimates vary between 100-1,000 times the pre-human levels of 1 Extinction per Million Species per Year (E/MSY) (e.g. Jurriaan et al…
Our rehabilitation and revegetation efforts at Carranya over the past decade or so have just passed a major milestone - 1,000 indigenous species fully documented, most with images. Details As shown in the accompanying table, the biodiversity covers pretty well the full gamut of living things. A couple of comments/caveats are in order: I have included all sightings, regardless of occurrence frequency - so, for example, a one-off visit from a pair of Sacred…
DEECA has just released the 2022 summary of volunteering contributions throughout Victoria - take a bow landscape volunteers, you are the champions. Statistics were collected on the number of: volunteers, volunteering organisations, and hours contributed to volunteering. These were then collated by type of activity. The statistic that stands out to me is how Caring for Landscapes (which includes Landcare and Friends-Group folks) comprise only 17% of the total number…
