ABC Radio Interview – Black-cockatoos

Sustainability & Environment Lead Linda Metz speaks with ABC South West Rural Report’s Kate Forrester about an opportunity for landholders in the Katanning area to participate in our project to benefit the Carnaby’s black-cockatoo and malleefowl.

Kate Forrester

Landholders are being asked to fence off areas to increase Carnaby’s black-cockatoo and malleefowl populations; Linda Metz is from South West Natural Resource Management. She says, they’re on the lookout for farmers in the Katanning area who would be willing to section off parts of their land for re-vegetation works.

Linda Metz

We’re putting a call out to farmers or agricultural landholders out in the Great Southern area around Katanning who might be interested in giving up a little bit of their land, quite small portion of their land to undertake some re-vegetation specifically to create habitat for Carnaby’s black- cockatoo and for malleefowl.

Kate Forrester

Why that area in particular are you targeting? What makes that area special, I guess?

Linda Metz

Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons. So, for the black-cockatoos, a lot of people would be familiar with the black-cockatoos, particularly the Carnaby’s flying over. Local noisy, sort of bird.

They do eat a lot of their food around the Swan Coastal plain, so on the west coast, but during the course, of the year, they actually move into the Wheatbelt area, and that’s where they do most of their breeding. So, really important for them to have food resources, available close to where they’re breeding.

Carnaby’s are in the parrot, family, they’ve got those great, big strong bills, so they’re very good at eating things like nutty fruits. They really like nuts with woody capsules. So things that you would typically see are like banksias, hakeas and eucalypt species, but also sometimes they don’t mind sort of exotic food, so things like pine trees and macadamias but of course in the area we’re talking about, we’re really hoping to establish things like hakeas and banksias, so native species to help support those foraging.

Kate Forrester

How much area would landholders be fencing off?

Linda Metz

So we recognise that farmers have got a lot of competing interests for their land and so we’re actually only asking for quite a small area. We’re hoping to re-vegetate around three hectares of land and install about 12 kilometres of fencing around properties.

So this might include where they have, for example, remnant vegetation and they just want to do add in some extra vegetation around that remnant or fence off that remnant and do a little bit of infill re-vegetation to help sort of bring up the quality of that habitat.

Kate Forrester

Would farmers be out of pocket if they did decide to jump on board.

Linda Metz

We’ve got funding to be able to cover the entirety of that cost. What we do find though is farmers are usually pretty keen to do some kind of in-kind contribution. Now for the revegetation that might be, we supply the plants and do some weed control and they decide to plant the plants themselves. But we can also cover those costs as well. So we’re hoping here to not have a situation where farmers are out of pocket. We understand it’s a commitment from them in terms of looking after that revegetation into the future. And that’s really important to note because a lot of these species particularly for you know, foraging habitat, they take a long time to grow and the Carnaby’s (black-cockatoos) won’t actively be able to feed on those species for maybe five or so years.

And so, it is a more long-term commitment from the farmer, but we don’t want them to be out of pocket up front.

Kate Forrester

How’s the interest or the uptake been so far?

Linda Metz

Well, we’ve had some different interests. We have run workshops in Kittanning and we’re working with Katanning Landcare who are a great regional group that we work with out there. We’re hoping to increase though. We’re really keen to see if we can get some good uptake. We know, again, that because the areas are not massive. We’re not asking for large, sort of tracks of land to be taken over for this purpose. But yeah, if there’s people out there, we’d be very happy to talk them through the project,

Kate Forrester

Linda Metz is the Sustainability & Environment Lead at the South West Natural Resource Management. If you are interested, you can always search for the South West Natural Resource Management website, online to find out more. Or you can email [email protected] and you can get in touch with Linda and her team there.

Thanks so much for being part of the program this morning. I’ll chat to you tomorrow. It’s news time, 6.30.