FW: Military traing areas and Conservation – Unexploded Reality

From: angus.innes@environment-agency.gov.uk To: angus_innes@hotmail.com Subject: FW: Military traing areas and Conservation – Unexploded Reality From: Innes, Angus Sent: 20 August 2013 09:01 To: ‘birding-aus@vicnet.au‘ Cc: ‘pshute@nuw.org.au‘ Subject: Military traing areas and Conservation – Unexploded Reality In response to Peter Shute’s comments, I would agree that some military land-holdings are high quality from a conservation point of view and, if they had survived in other hands more or less intact, may well have been prime candidates for national park status (as understood in Australia). Their survival has been due to the military status of the land. Would the Shoalwater Bay area have survived the last fifty years of Queensland development otherwise? However, I wouldn’t agree with the proposition that military land tends to be of higher quality than national parks. Nor is the natural state of the land the whole story. I point to the following words in the extract from the Birdlife International IBA (Important Bird Area) listing for Shoalwater Bay that I quoted in my earlier e-mail: “(it is) managed equally for the purposes of military training and nature conservation”. “Management”! The reserve status of land can be illusory without appropriate management – even in vast tracts of land that are apparently in their natural state. In Australia, I point to the management issue of feral/exotic species elimination or replacing the absence of traditional aboriginal fire practices with replicated fire practices. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy is a prime , non military, example of the importance of conservation grade land holding plus appropriate management. When we went to Porton Down (in the UK), as I mentioned in the earlier e-mail, the Stone Curlews were nesting in a “stony” field of cultivation, especially managed within the military lands for their nesting purposes – and also in the interests of fast disappearing UK farmland birds and mammak species.The military when given objectives are trained to attain them. When those objectives include conservation, it becomes a win win situation. Angus Innes Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally privileged. If you have received this message by mistake, please notify the sender immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else. We have checked this email and its attachments for viruses. But you should still check any attachment before opening it. We may have to make this message and any reply to it public if asked to under the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act or for litigation. Email messages and attachments sent to or from any Environment Agency address may also be accessed by someone other than the sender or recipient, for business purposes. =============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au http://birding-aus.org ===============================