Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for March 2006

Species Vulnerable to Extinction (Part 4): Incorrect Listings

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Following is a note from a reader on the subject of species incorrectly listed as vulnerable to exinction in Australia. The reader, who I will call Matthew for convenience*, makes the point that both state and federal lists of threatened speces are notoriously unreliable and tend to over estimate the number of rare, vulnerable and threatened species because they include populations at the edge of their natural range.

“Jennifer,

In your blog post titled ‘Species Vulnerable to Extinction: Part 1, The Daintree’ you asked for details of some fauna or flora species which are incorrectly listed as threatened.

The threatened species lists of the [Australian] states are littered to varying degrees with species which are incorrectly listed. New South Wales (NSW) in particular lists many species which are on the edge or beyond of their natural distributions in this Australian state.

Here are a few:

Black-necked Stork (E), Cotton Pygmy-goose (E), Magpie Goose (V), Red-tailed Tropic bird (V), Masked Booby (V), Collared Kingfisher (V).

These species aren’t under any threat in NSW. They just don’t occur in the state or are right on the edge of their distribution near the NSW border.

Most only ever show up in NSW as strays or birds blown in by large storms and do not require any protection in that state. Similarly Queensland lists the Common wombat as Rare. It only occurs in a tiny part of the state near Stanthorpe.

The Australian federal government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBS) listings are mixed up because the feds take their listings from the states and filter out most of the kind of listings mentioned above. Just to make things interesting they list some species differently from the states, for example the Queensland lungfish. It only occurs in Queensland and is not under threat or listed in that state, but for some reason is listed federally.

In general they are interested in the species as a whole but get confused with listings for a lot of subspecies and particular populations. So you get the glossy-back cockatoo not listed under the EPBC Act except on Kangaroo Island and many similar listings.

Your Tasmanian wedgetail eagle is another but the Tasmanian Azure kingfisher has managed to avoid EPBC listing so far and is only listed on the Tasmanian state list.

You’ve labeled Thinksy’s list as critically endangered bird species but this is misleading. Many of the birds are not critically endangered species at all. They are subspecies or regional populations. I note that Birds Australia have labeled it as critically endangered birds.

Other species are listed based on poor knowledge of the species originally followed by the states and Canberra being slow to update their lists in line with the real situation. One I have worked with is a Brachychiton vitifolius, a small shrub from Cape York Peninsula. It is reasonably common, spread over 500 km of the peninsula in most areas where Darwin stringybark woodland (one of the most common ecosystems in the region) occurs. It loses its leaves in the dry season so it looks like a bunch of twigs when most people visit the area and is difficult to find unless you know what to look for. It commonly grows on eroding creekbanks and thrives on road edges, fencelines and other disturbed areas. It was formerly listed by Queensland as ‘Vulnerable’ but nowdays has been dropped to ‘Rare’.

It should and probably will be dropped altogether but the process is slow. Meantime it is still listed under the EPBC act as ‘Vulnerable’.

Matthew*”

Thanks for this information, Matthew*. But if the Azure Kingfisher is only on the state list, why is it listed by Environment Australia as critically endangered?

Is the Tasmanian population really a distinct subspecies?

Interestingly the species has a distribution that extends from Papua and New Guinea right down the east coast of Australia but the map next to the listing at Birds Australia only shows it occuring in Tasmania. On careful reading it is evident that this listing only refers to the Tasmanian subspecies, but hey it could be construed as misleading.

How does the average person work out which species are really vulnerable to extinction – really needing of special care and attention?

Which species on Thinksy’s list are really critically endangered?

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* Matthew is the pen name that I have given this reader who wishes to remain anonymous.

Species Vulnerable to Extinction: Part 3, SW Western Australia

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Southern Brown Bandicoot, Image from Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

According to Professor Norman Myers earth is experiencing the largest mass extinction in 65 million years with the loss of species more severe than the five mass extinctions of the geological past.

As mentioned at a previous blog post, south-western Western Australia has been listed as one of the hotspots in Australia. I asked David Ward from Western Australia for comment and he replied:

“Hello Jen,

I am not an expert on extinctions, but I believe there have been a lot in south-western Australia, especially in the cleared wheat belt.

The forests have had, as far as I know, very few losses, despite logging and regular burning for many years. I would say that lack of regular burning, followed by very fierce fires, is the main threat to forest species.

Several times, plants have been reported extinct, or endangered, only to reappear profusely after a fire. Native animals are, if anything, making a comeback, due to CALM’s fox-baiting.

The supposedly endangered Brown Bandicoot is common in the semi-rural suburb where I live, and is even regarded by some as a nuisance, digging up gardens.

A nearby golf course is swarming with kangaroos.

There is a problem with loss of habitat and species, but we should take a balanced view.

Does Norman Myers mention inappropriate fire exclusion as a threat to biota? I would say it is at least as worthy of attention as clearing.

Oddly, few university researchers have tackled it, concentrating instead on the effects of frequent burning.

Scientists may be objective in a particular study, but the choice of research question is far from objective. Four legs good, two legs bad?

Regards
David Ward“

Alan Ashbarry

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Alan Ashbarry has a deep commitment to people in communities that depend upon the sustainable management of Australian forests and acknowledges the pride that forest scientists, professional foresters and timber workers have in providing a renewable resource and in creating jobs that have long term benefit for society, the economy and the environment.

Alan was a researcher for the 15 branches of Timber Communities Australia (TCA) in Tasmania and describes himself as more of a people person than a technician. He has told me that he got involved with TCA intially through “helping a mate”.

If you are trying to find a forestry related statistic, I discovered some months ago that an email to Alan was a good place to start.

When I first asked Alan to tell readers of this blog something about himself he declined. He said he prefered to stay in the background. But he’s since decided to come out and tell us that he occasionally posts a comment at this blog under the pen name “Cinders”.

Alan is concerned that the people who know the forest best and depend upon it for their daily family income are often dwarfed by the media coverage of well orchestrated campaigns.

Cinders posted the following comment last December at this blog:

“For those interested in propaganda icons by the extreme green movement this boastful extract from one of their books is worth a read.

THE REST OF THE WORLD IS WATCHING GREEN IMAGES
by Richard Flanagan and Cassandra Pybus

Innovation has been a hallmark of the Tasmanian Green movement, not only in its political orientation, but also in its appropriation of the marketing methods of capitalism to win its battles. Long before any other radical movement in Australia, the Tasmanian Greens were using market research, sophisticated advertising techniques, direct-sell catalogues and photographic images of the highest quality to sell their message. “We have grabbed ideas from wherever we could,” Bob Brown explained in a 1983 interview. “We looked at the way other people who sell cheese and paper tissues, how they do it, and thought that if that sells an idea then how much more important that [it] be grafted by us into saving wilderness”. In an era vaunted as the age of communications (and all the contradictions that this implies) the Tasmanian Greens have been a measure of their time.

… The campaign to protect Lake Pedder brought forth a range of aesthetic responses which drew from the Romantic tradition and also the newer modernist abstract aesthetics. The most potent expression of the beauty of Pedder was in the work of Lithuanian-born bushwalker, Olegas Truchanas, who regularly packed the Town Hall with his slide shows. Truchanas’ magnificent collections of photographs of the Tasmanian wilderness had been lost, along with his home, in the 1967 bushfires. He determined to rebuild his collection to show people just what it was that would be destroyed by hydro schemes in the south-west.

Truchanas returned again and again to the southwest. In 1972 he lost his life in the Gordon River he wished to save. “He had been destroyed by biblical simplicity by two of the elements: fire and water,” wrote his friend, artist Max Angus. “Classical mythology affords no stronger example of the drama of the incorruptible man who passes into legend.”

Olegas Truchanas became the Greens’ archetypal hero: the man who returns from of the wilderness with an aesthetic and a political vision which challenges the established order, and then is returned to the wilderness in the most profound and final way. It is a reincarnation of the great Romantic figure: the artist as hero, the essence of which is starkly captured in Ralph Hope-Johnstone’s photograph of Truchanas taken days before his death.

The posthumous publication of Truchanas’ seminal work in The World of Olegas Truchanas (1975) was an impressive beginning to the Greens’ role as a major cultural interpreter. Books, films, photographic ephemera poured out of the movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were the nub of a political-commercial-aesthetic nexus which the Tasmanian Greens skillfully nurtured, creating their own national distribution through the very successful Wilderness shops. The Greens made wilderness a commodity whose commercial nakedness they clothed in the Romantic aesthetic borrowed from Piguenit and refined by the wilderness photographers who followed in Truchanas’ footsteps.

The leading exponent of this school was Truchanas’ student and disciple, Peter Dombrovskis. The political Romantic vision has its apotheosis in his photo of Rock Island Bend, the most famous photograph ever taken of the Franklin River. It was used to illustrate a full-colour supplement in all major newspapers on the eve of the 1983 federal election. The ALP judged the Franklin issue to have been critical in the outcome of that election. In 1990, when once again Green issues looked to determine the federal election outcome, Rock Island Bend was prominent in glossy advertising promoting the ALP as the environmentally responsible choice.
Amanda Lohrey has suggested that in Tasmania the Greens have fused the Utopian and Romantic visions of Tasmania into a new vision that is greater and different from both of them. This new vision finds eloquent expression in a well-publicised photo of Christine Milne taken at the height of the Wesley Vale controversy. This high Romantic image – a solitary woman on a blasted heath – became charged, in the context of a highly charged environmental and political battle, with a whole new array of rich meanings.

In this image is also the idea of the Green leader as a solitary prophet, remote from the movement which creates and sustains such leaders. Images of mass action, such as the 20,000-strong rally in Hobart in 1983, have never fascinated the media in the same way as the image of a messianic leader.

Long-time Green strategist, Chris Harries, has written of the problems and contradictions of using the media during the Franklin campaign. Faced with a media “which demands superstars and which has conditioned society to think in terms of hierarchies and heroes … Bob Brown played out The Life of Brian. His pre-eminence in the media campaign was always understood as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and he was painfully aware of the contradiction”.

A media that creates a messiah must logically have its tale told in full, replete with a crucifixion. When forestry workers at Farmhouse Creek dragged Bob Brown (one of many protesters) away from the bulldozer, they were enacting their set roles in a passion play cum photo opportunity par excellence- The powerful image of this photo, shown over and over again across the nation and across the world, is full of falsities, not the least of which is the idea of the prophet being destroyed by a stupid and vicious common people.

The Farmhouse Creek photo does also point to a change in the political aesthetic in Green promotion in the late 1980s. Forests do not lend themselves to Romantic vistas in quite the same way as do wild rivers, but images of the violence done to majestic native forests do, and these became more prominent than the images of the forests themselves.

Stark monochrome vistas of burnt-over clearfells became the staple of Green publications throughout the forestry battles. Likewise, as the forestry industry and government strengthened their armoury against the Green protest, images of confrontation loomed large, both in the media and the Green press. The workers, not the bosses, are portrayed as the enemy in graphic close-ups of chainsaw-wielding forestry workers or alarmed police cordons.“

Alan left TCA at the end of 2007 and now is an independent consultant specialising in Tasmania’s forest and natural resource management sector

Alan Ashbarry lives in Tasmania with his wife and four inspirational children.

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This post will be filed under a category titled ‘people’. As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself. Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com.

This post was updated on May 14, 2008

Global Food Deficit in Just 40 Years?

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Hi Jennifer,

Attached is a recent speech from Greg Bourne in which he said:

“We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years due to the warming of the planet.

If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses and the world goes into net food deficit.”

Is he being over-dramatic? Perhaps you would like to mention it in your blog.

Regards Anon.

Attached: download speech by Greg Bourne (CEO of WWF) by clicking anywhere here.

Species Vulnerable to Extinction: Part 2, Tasmania

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According to Professor Norman Myers earth is experiencing the largest mass extinction in 65 million years with the loss of species more severe than the five mass extinctions of the geological past.

As mentioned at a previous blog post, Tasmania has been listed as one of the hotspots in Australia.

Thinksy provided this link to a list of critically endangered bird species. The list includes three species from Tasmania – the masked owl, the azure kingfisher and the wedge-tailed eagle. Habitat clearing including for pine forest (1), competition with brown trout which have reduced the availability natural prey (2), and shooting (3), are listed as the most likely reasons for decline of the three species respectively.

Alan Ashbarry who describes himself as a Tasmanian researcher with Timber Communities Australia sent in the following note:

“Recent media reports on a new list of 20 hot spots for species extinction of terrestrial mammals are based on a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately such an important report is available by subscription only and the general public has to rely on snippets fed to it by the media.

Lead author Marcel Cardillo uses phylogenetics to answer questions in ecology and conservation. Phylogenetics treats a species as a group of lineage-connected individuals over time. On this basis it is hardly surprising that the isolated islands of Bass Strait and Tasmania would have a “latent extinction risk”.

The media reports refer to the Convention on Biological Diversity to reduce the rate of world biodiversity loss by 2010, as part of this plan the Conference of Parties to the convention has adopted the following target:

Goal 1. Promote the conservation of the biological diversity of ecosystems, habitats and biomes

Target 1.1: At least 10% of each of the world’s ecological regions effectively conserved.

In Tasmania this target has been achieved and exceeded with the State having 42% of its land mass in conservation reserves. There is no indication that the authors of the Hot Spot report accounted for this outstanding achievement.

If there was it would be unlikely for the report to conclude that “Human population growth in hotspot areas is one of the greatest threats to vulnerable animals,” for Tasmania as human population development is banned in these areas.

The media reports also refer to an environmental scientist Professor Norman Myers claiming that Earth is experiencing the largest mass extinction in 65 million years.

The media report Myers as claiming 33 extinction hotspots around the world, 13 more than the report in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science.

Professor Myers says if governments do not do more, the planet will continue to lose 50 species per day compared to the natural extinction rate of one species every five years. Yet the Professor fails to state that his trip to Australia is partly sponsored by the Federal Government as part of it biological diversity program. He also fails to quote sources for this alarmist claim to determine if it is a real, or a theoretical claim based upon un-described and notional species.”

Alan also sent a couple of links that he said showed that Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands and those other hotspots have the lowest attrition rates for terrestrial mammals.

Maps here: http://audit.ea.gov.au/anra/vegetation/bio_asses/popup.cfm?case_no=fig_6_7.

And see also commentary here: http://audit.ea.gov.au/anra/vegetation/vegetation_frame.cfm?region_type=AUS&region_code=AUS&info=bio_asses.

Species Vulnerable to Extinction: Part 1, The Daintree

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I got off a flight from Albury to Melbourne on Tuesday morning, turned on mobile phone and there was a message from a journalist asking for comment on claims by Professor Norman Myer that we were losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. My first question was, who is Norman Myer? And my second question was, is he talking about Australia? The ABC radio journalist couldn’t answer either question.

When I turned on my computer I found this story at ABC Online:

“Scientists say Earth is experiencing the largest mass extinction in 65 million years.

Environmental scientist Professor Norman Myers says the loss of species is more severe than the five mass extinctions of the geological past.

“In the lifetime of many [television news] viewers we could lose half of all those 10 million species around the world,” he said.

There are 33 extinction hotspots around the world. The Australia Museum’s Frank Howarth says two are in Australia and up to 80 per cent of the crucial habitat has been wiped out.

“One [is] north Queensland rainforest, the other is in south-western Australia but in Australian terms we have a lot of areas where we have real competition between endemic animals that are found nowhere else,” Mr Howarth said.

Green groups say current measures to protect sensitive habitats are not effective. “The Australian Government is investing a lot of money in biodiversity but it’s not being invested in the most responsible way,” Nicola Beynon, from the Humane Society International, said.

Professor Myers says if governments do not do more, the planet will continue to lose 50 species per day compared to the natural extinction rate of one species every five years.“

Can anyone name me some of the 50 species that are going extinct every day?

Anyway, I emailed the link to a few readers of this blog for comment. I am starting with this response from Neil Hewett who lives in a north Queensland rainforest:

“Hi Jen,

Biodiversity hotspots are areas that are deemed BOTH rich in plant and animal species, particularly with many endemic species AND ALSO under immediate threat from impacts such as land clearing, development pressures, salinity, weeds and feral animals.

Along with Madagascar and New Caledonia, the rainforests of north Queensland including the Daintree are recognised as one of three centres of global endemism. They contain an extraordinary biodiversity; the majority of species which are classified as either rare or threatened with extinction, and undisputedly conform with the first-mentioned criterion as a Biodiversity hotspot.

But are they under immediate threat from impacts such as land clearing, development pressures, salinity, weeds and feral animals?

According to Cafnec, The Wilderness Society, Queensland Conservation Council and The Greens readers would almost certainly think so.

And yet, the Australian Government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee, with input from recognised experts in the field of biodiversity conservation from each Australian State and Territory, determined otherwise.

In respect to the contemporary popularity of tree-frogs, which are recognised as early indicators of environmental stress, I am advised from time to time that certain endemic species are thought to have become extinct, whilst others are disappearing.

The above image of a green-eyed tree-frog is one of the latter. I found one during the day, some time ago, when I coincidentally took balance from a tree and registered a cold, wet sensation under my grip.

Upon meticulous scrutiny and after several minutes, I finally recognised the curvature of the eye. Its camouflage was superb.

I have the very great privilege of scrutinising the central Cooper Creek portion of the ancient Daintree rainforest, on a nightly basis and have done so for over twelve consecutive years. Indeed, I believe that I have familiarised myself with the nocturnal landscape of the Daintree more thoroughly than any other person in human history. On those exceptionally wet and rare nights when conditions are suitable for green-eyed tree-frogs to congregate for communal mating events, I might encounter 2000 frogs in two hours and yet I have never seen a research scientist crossing the flooded watercourses to get into the real action.

The politics of places like the Daintree are as dark and complex and densely interwoven as the jungle understorey itself. I suspect that the exclusion from the country’s biodiversity hotspots reflects the federal coalition government’s contempt for the Queensland and local government’s popularist land-grab mentality.

Neil Hewett.“

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If you would like to send me information about one or more of the “50 species we are losing” every day and/or one of the ‘biodiveristy hotspots’ and/or a species of plant or animal that you consider vulnerable to extinction and/or that you believe has been incorrectly listed as rare, threatened or vulnerable to extinction, please email me at jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com.