JOHN L. READ - ECOLOGIST AND AUTHOR
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31/7/2022

sharing the secret (4) shades of green power

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WUPPA CHUPPA CHUPPA CHUPPA

The unmistakable sound of a helicopter banking through the scrub cut through our dawn chorus of white-fronted honeyeaters, scrub robins and crested bellbirds.
I scanned the horizon searching the row of shiny new pylons that emerged, offensively, from patches of low-lying fog. But the chopper stringing the new Eyre Peninsula High Voltage transmission line was hidden. To Mecanno enthusiasts and power infrastructure nerds, the towering beacons represented ‘Stairways to Heaven’. But for us as landholders, these taller, shinier pylons were aesthetic and environmental insults, reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s song about how we ‘Paved Paradise to Put up a Parking Lot’.

NIMBY
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Katherine and I were aware of the ecological risks of carving corridors through native vegetation. We’d seen horehound and onion weed spread along the original powerline and were concerned about buffel grass establishing and irreversibly changing the mallee.  I’d followed fox and feral cat tracks along the corridor and even seen one of these foxes kill an endangered Peregrine falcon chick. Trespassers using the powerline access track had shot a wedge-tailed eagle and a malleefowl. Our best fruiting quandong tree had been mulched to smithereens when Electranet’s contactors removed ‘encroaching regrowth’.  

Like most people passionate about their property or cultural or environmental jewels, we opposed the new powerline traversing our patch. “NIMBY” (Not In My Back Yard!), we declared valiantly but unsuccessfully. The economics of re-routing the powerline along the cleared Lincoln Highway or edges of farming land instead of ripping another line through one of the last strongholds of the nationally threatened sandhill dunnart, malleefowl and chalky wattle didn’t stack up.

Not all bad

WUPPA CHUPPA CHUPPA CHUPPA.
Surprisingly though, I was actually pleased to hear the chopper, one of the very rare anthropogenic noises audible at Secret Rocks. Through using the chopper-stringing technique, Electranet had avoided clearing a new line. Instead they built short spur lines from the existing powerline track to their new megapylons. A couple of weeks ago their environmental staff had taken me to inspect their stringing plans and  proposed rehabilitation work.  Gangs of High Vis workers in cranes and trucks dutifully pulled over into demarcated passing areas as we passed. Other areas defined by bunting prevented potential damage to environmental or cultural sites.

As expected, Electranet had also thoroughly surveyed the powerline corridor for important sites and had arranged offsets for unavoidable damage to vegetation or threatened species habitat. I’d also been impressed with how their principal contractor, Downers, had arranged the prefabricated pylon segments on the carefully demarcated pads like a Tetris, keeping disturbance to a minimum. But just because they were doing a good job minimising their impacts didn’t mean that Electranet deserves an environmental award, yet.

Bunnies or bilbies?

Twenty years ago, whilst working as an ecologist at Roxby, I had been encouraged to answer a provocative question “Are miners the bunnies or bilbies of the rangelands?” Before myxo and then calicivirus decimated their numbers, rabbits were environmental enemy #1 in Australian deserts. By contrast the rare bilby, was a conservation icon and an important ‘ecosystem engineer’ that helped the environment.

However, in some important ways rabbits had replaced the digging role that bettongs and bandicoots once played. Likewise, the powerline track created firebreaks, breaking up the country and helping to reduce large scale wildfires. This is something that the Barngala used to do more efficiently and expertly to refresh the country using patch burning. Several important ‘islands’ of unburnt scrub were saved by the powerline track during our Christmas 2019 fires.

Ironically one of the rare plants Electranet was required to survey for actually benefited from the powerline. Swainsona pyrophilla means ‘fire loving’ but it also loves bulldozers. Although not found on the preconstruction surveys, several plants flowered spectacularly on the pylon pads after the big January rains and their seeds will sit dormant for decades until the next fire or bulldozer stimulates germination.


















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Just as an underground mine was not the main threat to the desert environment around Roxby, the powerline construction alone is unlikely to be in the top ten threats to mallee animals or plants. Unnaturally large and severe fires, too many feral or native herbivores, weeds, invasive foxes and cats, climate change and possibly chemical spray drift from neighbouring farms may all represent greater long-term threats than a sensitively-constructed powerline.  

Strive for Positives

Whilst the expectation and requirements on developers is to minimise their disturbance, they have an opportunity to leave a positive legacy by helping to address more significant threats. Two decades ago I argued (at that time) that Western Mining acted like bilbies by leaving a net positive environmental legacy through their control of regional pests and supporting research that benefited the environment well beyond their minesite. Electranet could have, and still might, plant other disturbance-liking rare plants under their pylons. They could take advantage of their resources to leave other positive legacies. ‘Bean counters’ with short-term budgetary concerns may protest at slightly more expenses, but visionary leadership will reap rewards and maybe awards.
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Our transition to renewable energy will require more powerlines. Some will traverse wild and beautiful places with endangered plants and animals. Again the NIMBY cry will be heard. But would-be opponents will be far less vociferous and demanding of companies with a track record of exceeding compliance and delivering benefits to regional environments and cultures. The challenge of electricity producers, distributors and retailers is to convince us how ‘green’ their power really is.

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31/7/2022

SHARING THE sECRET (3) oUTBACK FAIRIES

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Outback Fairies
The delicate hopping mouse paused momentarily, transfixed by the beam from my headtorch, as the sunrise smudged the horizon. After being weighed and measured, I’d just released the mouse where she’d been trapped with two others, not far from where keen golfers playing “Tri-State Golf” at Cameron Corner and chip balls from Queensland, over NSW and into South Australia. The ghost-like 32 gram female appeared impossibly pale, almost translucent in my torchlight. Nick-named ‘kangaroo rats’ for their bipedal gait, long hind legs and tail, the dusky hopping mouse tentatively bumbled along until orientating itself on an invisible trail though the dune. Then, as if whisked away by an extra-terrestrial puppeteer, she vanished into the darkness like a nervous fairy, quickly evading the oncoming dawn.
I’d first seen dusky hopping mice 25 years ago, when Montecollina Bore on the Strzelecki Track was one of only two places these critically endangered rodents could be reliably found. Montecollina, where resident dingoes kept most foxes, cats and kangaroos at bay, had provided a refuge for these outback fairies, from whence they expanded once rabbit calicivirus drastically reduced cat and fox numbers. Two decades later they had spread over 150km to the dune in NSW where I was trapping.
Mini-Tassie Devils
A couple of minutes later, at the same monitoring site, my monitoring team captured a guinea pig-sized ampurta in a baited cage trap. I’m guessing that fewer than a thousand Australians have ever heard of ampurtas, and less than a hundred have ever handled one of these voracious marsupials. Upon seeing their first of these ‘mini Tassie devils’, the University graduates appropriately responded with ooohs and ahhhs as the recaptured female bounced off and then paused, black, crested tail erect, near her burrow. 
18 months earlier our team had moved this ampurta from South Australia, not far from the unlikely Montecollina refuge. She was one of the pioneers for “Wild Deserts” https://www.unsw.edu.au/research/ecosystem/our-research/wild-deserts in Sturt National Park, a conservation restoration project partnership between NSW Government, UNSW Sydney and Ecological Horizons,  reintroducing 7 locally-extinct mammals back into the New South Wales desert and featured in the recent  Australian Story https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-11/into-the-wild-wild-deserts-saving-animals-from-extinction/100967314 . By the end of the week the five trapping teams had caught 11 other founders and 20 of their Wild Desert- born ampurtas, within the feral cat and fox free paddocks we had built three years earlier.
Like the fairy-like dusky hopping mouse, ampurtas originating from these white sandy deserts are also much paler than their brush-tailed mulgara cousins from red sand deserts. One of my favourite little lizards is the feisty narrow-banded sandswimmer, with dark purple lines on burnt orange background. But in white sand deserts these skinks have virtually no pigmentation and are now recognised as a distinct species, the appropriately named ‘Phantom skink’. Animals can adapt to their environments within a few generations. Many rabbits and cats out here in the deserts are already paler than their cousins from woodlands, despite only arriving less than two centuries ago.
Master Diggers
Later in the week I caught ‘Flamethrower’, named by the students at Tibooburra Outback School, a particularly aggressive 1.8km male bilby who had ripped out of its bag, Incredible Hulk-style, and then crushed my index finger, which is still numb and hindering my typwing. Flamethrower was one of the Wild Deserts founders from other refuges like Arid Recovery and Taronga Zoo. Nine months ago I had spent a night running down bilbies on Thistle Island, near Port Lincoln, to add to these founders. Already these bilbies were pock-marking the desert with foraging digs that were trapping seeds, nutrients and water and helping restore the desert.
Only the beginning
Wild Deserts braved the driest two years on record in 2018 and 2019 before thriving during the current El Nino rains. The second and third generations of reintroduced mammals are now evolving and contributing to the restoration of their outback refuge.  But Wild Deserts is more than just fenced islands enabling threatened wildlife to persist in a sea of degraded land and invasive predators. The bourgeoning populations of threatened mammals are part of an elaborate longer-term plan to restore Australian deserts and culture over a much broader scale.
Wild Deserts’ predator exclosures are joined to the Dingo fence, creating another 100 square km zone with low densities of cats, foxes and kangaroos.  We are expecting our outback fairies to breed faster due to less competition from overabundant herbivores.  But we have higher hopes too. During their journey from their dingo-protected refuge at Montecollina, the fastest, smartest hopping mice would have survived. In turn, their progeny may be slightly safer from cat predation. Wild Deserts is now providing more desert mammals an opportunity to adapt their appearance and predator-evasion skills. These savvy fairies will hopefully then be prime candidates for natural dispersal and distant reintroductions, restoring ecosystems, and productivity to other deserts. Maybe if they spread west into the white sands of the Strzelecki Desert, white chocolate Easter Bilbies will eventually be crafted in their honour.
 

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    John L. Read, PhD, author-ecologist

    Wakefield Press, Dear Grandpa, Why? Reflections From Kokoda to Hiroshima

    Praise for Dear Grandpa, Why?


    'This is a most unusual book but an insistently interesting one ... This book’s strongest virtue is in Read’s wrestling with the past and his initial desire for accountability over the death of his grandfather, giving way to something akin to forgiveness.' - ~ Christopher Bantick, Weekly Times

    'This compelling book is written from the heart, and easily draws the reader in on the journey with Read seeking answers about his grandfather's sacrifice. I recommend it to all readers. It provides a personal entry-point for understanding the events that led to the war in the Pacific and raises many questions about what causes war and what we should do in the future to prevent such terrible loss and waste of life.' - ~ Helen Eddy, Read Plus

    'Lovely and heart-warming story.'
    ~ Nic Klaassen, Flinders Ranges Research

    'John L. Read's odyssey provides a historical insight into the cause of the war against Japan and a graphic portrayal of the cultural grief experienced by families who lost loved ones.' - ~ ~ Charlie Lynn, Kokoda Treks

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