Co-operation

I hope this doesn’t breech copyright, but news items on Yahoo are there one minute and gone the next!

The following appeared there for a few minutes this morning, and I thought it was a good example of co-operation and realistic thinking on this farmer’s part.

The endangered cassowary population of north and far north Queensland is continuing to rely on volunteers and farmers for food after Cyclone Yasi.

Mission Beach fruit grower Peter Salleras has a Government-installed feed station on his farm that is supporting a mother bird and her two chicks.

The cassowaries would normally forage on forest fruit but most of that has been destroyed.

Mr Salleras says without the feeding station it is likely the birds on his property would struggle to survive.

“It’s probably a good move that they’re not using fruit that they’ll become a pest with once our fruit starts to come back on,” he said.

“There’s grapes and rockmelons cut up and apples and I understand it’s fruit shop and supermarket waste.

“It certainly looks pretty good quality a fair bit of it but it’s obviously doing the job because there’s not much native fruit in their droppings at the moment.”

Mr Salleras’s own fruit crop is still recovering but one soursop from his tropical fruit orchard got away.

“I saw a fruit that was half eaten quite high up a tree and I thought the flying foxes had come back and found it first,” he said.

“Actually I looked at the ground and there was a big patch of where the mulch had been well and truly shifted away from the cassowary jumping up and down, so it could reach it and yes it was clear what the culprit was.”

Sonja Ross ===============================

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