Hi Bird-lovers,
Just a few thoughts to add to the discussion, after some useful and well thought out contributions on the subject.
Alan, you are absolutely right, the Weekly Times article clearly over-simplified the situation and ignored a lot of information that would have provided some balance to the debate ( as perhaps did my original posting written in a hurry late one night).
Keith kindly summarized some of the history of grassland management in the Terrick Terrick National Park, which paints a very different picture to that portrayed in the Weekly Times. As past secretary of the Friends of the Terrick Terrick NP, alongside Keith in the committee we both know how dedicated and well intentioned the park staff are, and this debate should in no way be a negative reflection on them.
However as Keith knows there have been a variety of ideas as to how to manage the grasslands, and all sides have not always agreed. Grazing was reduced considerably in more recent years, although since the floods I believe that all sides of the equation have realized that we have a problem when it comes to Plains Wanderers. Again, the Weekly Times article fails to acknowledge this fact, and the current progress being made in regards to new ideas for managing these grasslands was not mentioned.
Perhaps to summarize the crux of the problem is that the Plains Wanderer in more recent times has actually benefitted from broad-acre grazing of rarely ploughed grassland for economic return. Since they like a very sparse open structure, with grasses growing only up to 20cms in height, fairly intensively grazed grasslands do provide a suitable habitat for them. Grasslands managed such as this however have the potential to lose botanical diversity if grazing is too intense, and continuous when native plants, other than grasses, are seeding. Rare plants are important as well as rare birds.
Grasslands are an incredibly dynamic environment, altering greatly both in density and species composition from year to year as rainfall varies. Plains Wanderers are no doubt adapted to these vagaries, and have the ability to seek out more suitable areas to inhabit when conditions change. Trying to piece together how it all functioned before white settlement is tricky, and largely conjecture, but the forces helping Plains Wanderers would have been drought, ( we still get these), grazing animals ( kangaroos of which there were large numbers originally ), locust plagues ( which are now largely sprayed out in Victoria), and fire utilized by native peoples (possibly the most important of all particularly in better seasons ).
In just a few short centuries we have changed the effects all of these forces to varying degrees. The biggest change has been cultivation which changes a grassland forever. In Victoria never ploughed native grasslands are rare as hens teeth, and even in the twenty years I have been here, they are still disappearing. Ploughed grasslands, where the soil-surface layer has been damaged, support many more introduced grasses and are more prone to thickening up, particularly in winter/spring. Plains Wanderers do not like it when the inter-tussock spaces disappear.
Even if we returned to a pre-European style of management (if that were possible), I doubt it would be enough to keep sufficient habitat for the Plains Wanderer in Victoria except perhaps in the driest of years. And the fact that remaining habitats are so rare and isolated compounds the problem, as when Plains Wanderers have to move, it must be much harder for them to find somewhere else that is suitable to hang out.
For these reasons I believe that continued grazing is the most realistic tool available to keep sufficient habitat to support viable populations, with carefully managed burning a potential second string.
Growing up in Britain I am used to seeing conservation efforts that are based on continuing a particular land management practice from centuries past, to maintain a habitat which encourages a particular species or biodiversity generally. There are many examples of this. Grazing of chalk grasslands, coppicing of woodlands for Nightingales, and old fashioned hay making operations are a few that immediately come to mind. It does not seem to me, to be much different from the idea of grazing native grasslands in south-eastern Australia to maintain suitable Plains Wanderer habitat.
As a guide, who has shown people Plains Wanderers in the Terrick Terrick NP, on the Patho Plains and on the Avoca plains of Victoria for some years now I have had the absolute privilege to see the native grasslands in drought and in flood, with grazing and without, and with and without Plains Wanderers ! I am pretty confident now that this special bird will not be forgotten when it comes to grassland management.
However in saying that, I would like to address a couple of ideas that I encounter quite regularly, and which I think need to be put out there.
Firstly, and I still hear it , is the idea that when the grasslands thicken up, there are still a few Plains Wanderers hiding out there, it’s just that they are harder to find, so they are being missed. I am absolutely sure that this is not the case from my and others experience, and recent experiments using Plains Wanderer dummies placed at random in a grassland also debunk this idea .
Secondly, the line goes that given the huge rainfall and flood events that we had in the last couple of years, no amount of grazing would have contained what happened. So it’s a natural event and would have happened in the past, and Plains Wanderers will come back when it dries out again. To this I would just say that even through the wet years, there was still habitat suitable for Plains Wanderers on privately grazed grasslands, where grazing was continuous, plus given the fact that these birds now have dramatically fewer options of where to go in a wet year, perhaps they have not moved on, survived somewhere else, and will return ok. Perhaps the birds have perished due to having nowhere to go, and the population has crashed nationally ? Reserved grasslands on the Patho plains were thickening up too much for Wanderers after a couple of wetter summers, well before the really big rains came in 2010, because of the much reduced grazing regime that was introduced. When the big wet arrived, the scene was already set and in many places the grasses were 8 ft high.
Some properties on the Avoca plains west of Kerang, which were purchased for conservation reasons towards the end of the drought, and which had been heavily, perhaps too heavily grazed, and which supported Inland Dotterels (perhaps not a species that would occur as far south as north-central Victoria without human intervention ), are now after a couple of years of good rainfall and no grazing already growing grasses that well above the 20cm ideal maximum for grass height for Plains Wanderer. This shows how dramatically a grassland can change, and how without some intervention, the right habitat structure will disappear.
Finally, and I have no wish to speak for others, but recent contact with other plains wandering birdwatchers including some very well known ones, suggests to me that the situation as to their population numbers is similar across the wider riverina as it is in my small part of northern Victoria, and that is that they are extremely localized and in low numbers generally.
Interesting times !
Cheers,
Simon Starr.
Victoria.
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