Help save Leadbeater’s Possum

The Association was established in 2000 with the aim of raising funds to help save and protect wildlife, and is named after Judith Kathleen Eardley 1939 - 1997, who asked that part of her estate be used for wildlife protection.Parks Victoria’s Joanne Antrobus, who heads up its major Leadbeater’s Possum program, made the funding proposal to the Association for help with preserving and protecting surviving native populations whose numbers have been decimated. As an example, only six Leadbeater’s Possums have so far been sighted in the Lake Mountain area, where once there was a population of up to 300 of these tiny creatures. So far the money has gone towards monitoring remaining populations for all three species, post fire, to determine how they have fared and survived the fires. Small numbers of each species have been recorded at key local locations.

For the Leadbeater’s Possum at Lake Mountain, new nest boxes have been purchased and installed, a carefully rationed supplementary feeding program established, and a video surveillance camera purchased and used successfully to monitor the feeding program now underway.

The money has also funded volunteer training for a number of local groups to enable them to assist with these monitoring and feeding programs long term. Approximately 25 volunteers have completed training to date with more to follow.

Faunal Emblem Threatened: The animal victims of Black Saturday

Transcript of ABC TV Broadcast: 22/05/2009    Reporter: Kate Arnott

TAMARA OUDYN, PRESENTER: When the February bushfires swept through the Central Highlands, millions of native animals were killed. Ten of Australia’s most threatened species were hit, including Victoria’s faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s possum. The tiny marsupial is now on the brink of extinction and an urgent recovery program is underway… Kate Arnott reports.

SERA BLAIR, FRIENDS OF LEADBEATER’S POSSUM: I’m very concerned that Leadbeater’s Possum won’t recover from this major fire. It is a very serious concern because their population was already on the edge of extinction.

KATE ARNOTT, REPORTER: Apart from some patchy new growth in the charred forests of the Central Highlands and Lake Mountain, signs of life are virtually non existent. When fire roared through this area, wildlife had nowhere to hide. The inferno was especially devastating for one of Australia’s most endangered species, the Leadbeater’s possum. It’s estimated that nearly half of the tiny marsupials’ habitat was destroyed.

SERA BLAIR: Before the fires, we thought there were probably only about 2,000 animals left. And when you lose almost half your habitat, you’re looking at probably half of your population loss. So there might even be less than 1,000 animals. And so that’s getting extremely critical.

KATE ARNOTT: A desperate search is now on to find out just how many possums are still alive.

JOANNE ANTROBUS, PARK RANGER: This tree is one of the few locations where the box was damaged but survived and a single animal survived at this box.

KATE ARNOTT: Researchers think up to 300 Leadbeater’s possum lived on the misty Lake Mountain plateau before the fires, either in tree hollows or specially installed nesting boxes designed to boost their numbers. Early signs are that few survived.

Because they’re a nocturnal species, infra red cameras were installed. For hours there was nothing. Then to the relief of park rangers, six possums appeared. Not many, but enough to indicate a breeding pair. No more have been spotted since.

JOANNE ANTROBUS: So here at Lake Mountain we’ve reinstalled all of our boxes. We’ve put up additional boxes where there’s been some vegetation survived the fire. We’ve erected boxes where there’s natural known tree hollows, hoping that the animals may have survived.

KATE ARNOTT: Those that did make it through the fires now face starvation. As winter sets in there’s virtually nothing for the possums to eat. For the first time, park rangers and volunteers have been forced to intervene. They’ve put up feeding stations full of mealworms, fly pupae and fruit.

JOANNE ANTROBUS: It’s never been done in the field before. It is the recommended diet for captive animals, but it’s never been trialled in the wild before. So we’re trialling it at three locations. We’ll be using surveillance cameras to monitor whether the animals use those stations.

KATE ARNOTT: Professor David Lindenmayer has spent the last two decades researching the Leadbeater’s possum as part of his work into the affects of fire on biodiversity. His team is part of the Leadbeater’s recovery program.

DAVID LINDENMAYER, ECOLOGIST: Many, many Victorians really do care about what happens to their faunal emblem. It’s a very charismatic animal and it’s a true Phoenix of the biological world. Leadbeater’s possum was thought to be extinct for most of the 1900s and in the early 1960s, the species was rediscovered. So it’s sort of risen from the ashes and we don’t want to see it basically become extinct again.

KATE ARNOTT: There’s no doubt the bushfires had a severe impact on the Leadbeater’s possum and surviving the winter will be tough enough. But environmentalists say there’s another threat facing the species: the logging of fire damaged areas.

Salvage logging, as it’s known, is the harvesting of dead trees after bushfires. It’s mainly done for economic purposes to provide jobs to fire hit communities and timber for the reconstruction effort.

LACHLAN SPENCER, VICFORESTS: Harvesting in certain areas is quite intense and certainly localized we have intensive harvesting regimes. Though across the broad extent of the fire there was 200,000 to 300,000 hectares of fire. We’ll be harvesting in only a 2,000 to 3,000 hectares across the next one to two years of salvage.

DAVID LINDENMAYER: Salvage logging won’t have a positive effect - let’s put it that way. And what we need to do is make sure that the way the salvage logging is done minimises the negative effect. And so, areas that were important habitat for Leadbeater’s before the fire shouldn’t be salvage logged after the fire.

LACHLAN SPENCER: We are committed to identifying all the habitat within the areas which we are planning for harvesting and excluding them from harvesting.

KATE ARNOTT: But some conservationists say it’s impossible to identify all of the sites where surviving possums may be and they’re concerned about the impact of salvage logging on future Leadbeater’s habitat.

SERA BLAIR: It has the same impact as a clear fell logging coup, which means that they don’t leave any big old trees to become stag trees, which are the trees that Leadbeater’s and a lot of other forest animals nest in. So, salvage logging’s pretty detrimental to their habitat and basically cancels it out for a couple hundred years.

KATE ARNOTT: The effort to save the possum in the wild is made more critical by the fact there are none in captivity. The animals have to be kept in colonies which take a lot of time and money to look after. So zoos like Healesville Sanctuary decided before the fires that it was better to put the money towards preserving the species in its natural habitat.

Since the fires, captive breeding programs have again been considered and rejected, meaning everything now rests on the success of this field recovery program.

DAVID LINDENMAYER: I’m very concerned that Leadbeater’s possum won’t make it after this major disturbance, and so it’s critically important to monitor the population. The hope is that they might begin to recover in the next 10 to 15 years, but we’ve got a lot of work to do. The way we treat the forests now for the next two, three, five, 10 years will make a big difference as to whether or not the species survives.

Watching the bush recover after fires by Sarina Locke Canberra , ACT       19/03/2009

Just two weeks after the devastating bushfires in Victoria, green shoots of life were poking through the soil. A team of US ecologists have toured the Kinglake and Marysville forest areas to assess the ecological damage and water quality problems. With them was the senior forest ecologist in the ACT. Dr Margaret Kitchin, with Parks Conservation and Land, was impressed with their speed in assessing the damage, saying such a rapid response is a first for Australia.

The Burned Area Emergency Response team is a group of ecologists from a number of US Federal Government agencies, including the National Parks, Natural Resources Conservation Services, the USDA Forest Services and the Bureau of Land Management. Their website lists them as professional hydrologists, soil scientists, engineers, biologists, silviculturists, range conservationists, archaeologists.

“BAER is ‘first aid’ - immediate stabilisation that often begins even before a fire is fully contained. BAER does not seek to replace what is damaged by fire, but to reduce further damage due to the land being temporarily exposed in a fragile condition,” it says on the US National Parks Service website.

They’ve been doing this for many years in the US, but this is the first time such a rapid scientific assessment has been made, even as the fire was burning in Australian conditions. The fire, in February 2009, burnt 250,000 hectares in Victoria, and this BAER team took just seven days to assess the ecology and water in 100,000 hectares of it. Dr Margaret Kitchin says it’s been great training for her, in preparing for ecological responses to another fire around Canberra. They worked on the western flank of the fire ground to look at ‘potential threats that unstable soils, unstable areas or immediate threats to those (ecological) communities or species. She says what was really refreshing, that just two weeks after the fires, “there was already 10 cm of growth on some of the xanthoreas, …..or grass trees.”

The fauna specialists looked at the threatened species, like the Leadbeater’s possum, with the local Department of Sustainability and Environment; and also two types of owl and fish; the Macquarie Perch; and the bard galaxia. They replaced the nesting box for a lonely Leadbeater’s possum that had survived the fires.

She says that demonstrates the benefit of speedy assessment. But what if that possum’s tree is targeted for salvage logging? She says they assessed an area of 3,000 hectares of mountain and alpine ash that can be logged over the next two years. She says most of the area is protected by National Park, and included riparian areas. Dr Kitchin says the mountain and alpine ash are unique gum trees - fire can kill the tree, they don’t produce epicormic growth and they must grow from seed. But the forest can’t sustain another hot fire too soon, or its survival will be threatened.

Dr David Lindenmeyer, from the Australian National University’s Fenner school of Environment and Society says they can take 20 years without another major fire to mature enough to recover as a viable forest, and produce seeds. Andrew Campbell, a natural resource management (NRM) consultant with Double Helix, wrote in a recent essay, mountain and alpine ash, “are difficult to ignite (because they are usually wet forests with predominantly smooth bark), but when the conditions are right, they burn ferociously, creating an ash bed suitable for their regenerating seedlings.” “As ash seedlings are shade-intolerant, they regenerate best after very hot fires that destroy the canopy,” he writes. “In the absence of such fires over their life cycle, they will not persist. “When fires are exploding through the canopies of 200 plus feet high trees with volatilised oils creating a superheated vapour, the ground layer becomes virtually irrelevant. “Witnesses described huge trees literally exploding,” he writes.

State’s emblem nearly extinct

“The Age” - Peter Weekes     August 5, 2007

THE tiny Leadbeater’s possum, Victoria’s state faunal emblem, could be extinct in a few years if its numbers continue to plummet.

The population of the tiny nocturnal animal has dropped sharply since it was listed as critically endangered in 1996 - despite a decade-long joint federal and state recovery plan to save it.

Research by Professor David Lindenmayer, of the Australian National University, has revealed that since the plan was imposed, the Leadbeater’s possum population has halved to around 2000.

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Lindsay Hesketh says unless logging bans are introduced to protect the Leadbeater’s habitat, Victoria will go “the same way of Tasmania, which lost its state emblem, the Tasmanian tiger, years ago”.

The possum, found only in a small area in the state’s Central Highlands, lives in the hollows of old mountain ash trees that can take 200 years or more to grow. An unknown number were killed earlier this year when VicForests bulldozed large firebreaks through Leadbeater’s monitoring stations following the Christmas fires.

The firebreaks and other clear-felled coupes prevent breeding with nearby colonies as the possums can only jump from branch to branch in the forest understorey.

Most people have never seen the Leadbeater’s possum. The last one held in captivity at Healesville Sanctuary died in 2006. Even in colonial days sightings of the possum, which has a distinctive black strip along the spine of its 20-centimetre-long body, were rare.

It was thought to be extinct after the swamps and wetlands around Bass River in south-west Gippsland were drained for farming in the early 1900s. The possum was rediscovered in 1961 near Marysville and adopted as Victoria’s faunal emblem.

Professor Lindenmayer, who has been researching the Leadbeater’s for more than 20 years, said the Government must improve the recovery plan, especially the creation of management areas and protection zones.

“If you have two fires in less than 20 years in a wet forest, then that forest is gone forever, and with it about $500 million in logging revenue every year. It’s been crucial to ‘act now’ on this for the last 20 years,” he said.

ABC National Radio: “Country Hour” 2009 program featuring Leadbeater’s Possum - interview with Sera Blair