The Wedderburn Conservation Management Network - Conserving Biodiversity

The Wedderburn CMN covers an area of approximately 170,000 ha between the townships of Wedderburn and Wychitella, in the North Central Catchment area of the state of Victoria, Australia (see Map1). The area includes fragmented public land blocks and freehold properties important for conservation of Box-Ironbark forests and woodlands. Recently, members of the Wedderburn CMN were instrumental in the purchase of the 245 ha Nardoo Hills Reserve by Bush Heritage Australia, Australia’s largest nonprofit private land conservation organisation.

A planning meeting of the Wedderburn CMN aimed at discussing the uses for an $80,000 Caring For Our Country Grant. It’s a great result for the Wedderburn CMN to receive an $80,000 Federal Government grant. We believe the success of the grant is related to the wide variety of partners in the group including Parks Victoria. The Wedderburn CMN is now committed to undertaking a wide variety of activities over the next few months. These include fencing and direct seeding wildlife corridors, ecological thinning on both public and private land, fox control to reduce predation upon malleefowl, control of rabbits, control of wheel cactus, bridal creeper and Patterson’s Curse. We also plan to develop a fire protection plan for the bushlands around Wedderburn and Wychitella. The funding will also cover an information bus trip for Wedderburn CMN and Wedderburn community members. The actions were all derived from the Wedderburn CMN Community Biodiversity Plan aimed at improving the quality of the local bushlands. The group is now looking ahead to a further funding application to help deliver even more ambitious plans for larger biolink projects.

The Central Murray Environmental Festival for Schools was held at Charlton on the 24th of October this year with a fine showing of environmental groups giving presentations to over 120 students from eight schools. The students were generally speaking in the grade four to six ranges. Five members of the Wedderburn CMN took part in our presentation which was designed to convey to students the need for wildlife corridors between fragments of remnant bush. These remnants which exist on both public and private land are habitats to many indigenous species. Students were assigned roles such as eagles, kangaroos, malleefowl, dunnarts etc. then confined to a given fragment of bush which was then subjected to the vagaries of Mother Nature i.e. drought, bushfire, predation by foxes and so forth. It did not take the students long to realize that a wildlife corridor of trees would be a very handy thing to have in order to move from one fragment where they were under stress to another of relative safety.

The malleefowl Leipoa ocellata is found exclusively on mainland Australia and is a member of the megapode family. Megapodes are unique in the world. They do not use their body heat to incubate the eggs like most other birds; rather, the eggs are buried in a mound then incubated by external heat sources. Malleefowl use the heat generated by decomposing leaf litter and the sun to heat their mounds, and constantly manipulate the soil depth and mound shape to regulate the temperature. Amazingly, despite a wide range of day and night temperatures over the seasons, malleefowl are able to keep their egg chambers at a constant temperature.The malleefowl is listed as a nationally endangered species.

Maybe its time to consider the future.