Responsible cat ownership.

Cat with Major Mitchell's Cockatoo. Photo: Lisa Wilson, Wikicommons.

The cooler weather has arrived and this brings a lot of changes. Most of the reptile life that Alice Springs is famous for has gone underground to sleep out the cooler months. The small birds and mammals that are nocturnal or less active during the hot summer days, are now much more active through the middle of the day.

Unfortunately, this can sometimes bring wildlife into more frequent contact with diurnal pets, yielding predictable results. To understand the local side of this issue, the Alice Springs Town Council has some relevant information for pet owners available on their website - here.

Animal Welfare Week is approaching, and seeks to highlight the responsibilities of pet owners. These include all the usual things like making sure your pet is adequately fed, exercised, vaccinated, cleaned, and otherwise well-treated and looked after. An often overlooked responsibility of being a pet owner is confining your pet. In some parts of the country this is starting to appear in legislation - see here - but it really comes down to common sense. Cats have evolved as predators and, let free in the neighbourhood, will sometimes exercise their instinct to hunt.

There are now many companies online which construct cat-proof enclosures in cat owners' homes. These are fantastic looking structures which amount to an adventure playground for kitty, while keeping him from stalking possums and birds. The Victorian State Government has an excellent site - here - with information about constructing your own cat-proof enclosure which will still allow your cat plenty of exercise, stimulation, and outdoor access. For a great example of this sort of thing with a local flavour, you need go no further than the Garden for Wildlife story about "Jessie; The Enviro-cat". Jessie is owned by a long-standing Garden for Wildlife member who has constructed a safe and wildlife-friendly enclosure for her.

Also, the Land for Wildlife website has a fact sheet - here - which outlines the impact that feral cats can have on our wildlife once they have well and truly ceased to be domestic pets.

So if you must own a cat, I would urge you to ensure that it is well confined - day AND night. It's worth it to avoid the unpleasantness of having to explain the dwindling population of the neighbour's chook house.

Of course, if you will let your pets roam, it's not beyond some of our native wildlife to give as good as they take!

SCRUB PYTHON EATS FAMILY PETS

Animal Welfare Week

Animal Welfare Week is approaching at the end of the month to raise awareness of caring for and protecting the Territory's animals - pets and wildlife.

The good folks at Animal Welfare have just released a program of events for the week which includes plenty of fun and educational activities, down here in Alice, for animal lovers of all ages.

The program is available by clicking HERE.

More information is available on the Animal Welfare website...

...or by phoning; 1300 720 386.

Territory NRM Infonet - a great land management tool

Choose your site - choose the information you need - the website does the rest.

This week the Land for Wildlife coordinators were invited to an information session about the Territory NRM's very useful Infonet website.

This is a tool which has uses for many people, from managers of very large properties, down to interested folks keen to get species information and maps for their favourite camping or birdwatching spots. This is a powerful tool which is sure to save some people a lot of time. I'd urge any interested LfW and GfW members to get on the infonet site and have a poke around. It's very intuitive and easy to navigate.

It's another in a growing number of websites which are being set up as accessible databases for our collected information about surveyed areas. The long term goal is for many of these sites to feed off each other and be fully interactive, enabling ecologists and amateurs alike, to upload biological surveys to the database and thus flesh out our picture of the Territory's ecosystems - this fully networked capability is still a little way off though.

The infonet website currently works in conjunction with the NAFI system, providing up to date fire information for all areas. It is also linked in realtime to the NT Herbarium's database, so the botanical lists are very extensive and right up to date.

Once you get on the site there are detailed tutorials available to enable you to learn how to get what you need out of the site. You can get detailed flora and fauna maps, lists of threatened species for particular areas and you can isolate your search area according to a number of different parameters. Of particular interest is the "sites of conservation significance" search feature. In this drop-down menu, all of these sites are listed and comprehensive reports have been pre-drafted in PDF format. Otherwise you can select your search area by land parcel number, indigenous protected areas, IBRA bioregions, catchments, and several other options.

Once you generate your report, which includes management guidelines for the included species, the website will collate the information for you in a few seconds and then it is provided as a downloadable and saveable PDF file. This can be stored on your computer or printed out and consulted at your leisure. The information is beautifully presented and a particularly attractive option is the "threatened species booklet". If you select this option for your area, the website will compile a booklet of all the threatened species listed - again, packaged in an attractive booklet for printing or storing on your computer.

The infonet website can be visited at:
http://www.ntinfonet.org.au/reports/

The designers are interested in your thoughts, so make sure you let them know if you have any suggestions. Some aspects of the site are still in the late stage of design and may be further refined based on user feedback.

Brodifacoum - an interesting case study of when poison programs go wrong



The Bald Eagle - National Bird of the USA

 An interesting and topical article has appeared in Nature this year. The article details a disastrous rat eradication program on an Alaskan island which resulted in the deaths of 420 birds including 46 endangered Bald Eagles. Click here to read the article.

We have already warned of the potential dangers of using poison to control mice on your property, and this article refers to the same chemical found in household rat poisons - brodifacoum.

Of course, the complicating factors of a large scale eradication program like the one detailed in the article (and this one was also spectacularly mis-managed with several poor and inexplicable decisions made) are completely different to small-scale use in the home, but some principles remain the same.

Once the chemical is present in the food chain, it can accumulate and have unexpected effects.

Food for thought - the effects of Buffel Grass in the Sonoran Desert

Perhaps a biased piece of journalism but an interesting look at another community facing it's own problems with Buffel Grass.

The value of botanical gardens - are we preaching to the choir?

Eremophila christophori at OPBG

Chances are, if you're a Land for Wildlife/Garden for Wildlife member, you are already well and truly aware of the value of botanical gardens.

With that in mind, there is a free podcast available from ABC Radio of a fascinating chat between Richard Fidler and the curator of the Mt Coot-Tha Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, Ross McKinnon. One of the main topics they cover is the medicinal value of plants. This seems quite relevant in light of the abundance of traditional plant remedies on show at Olive Pink Botanic Gardens here in Alice.

Click this link to listen to this very entertaining and enlightening conversation.

Black-footed Rock Wallaby Workshop - 25/6/2011, all welcome!

Environmental scientists and volunteers in the forests of Gippsland in eastern Victoria are currently experiencing the first glimmers of success in their battle to bring the Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby back from the brink of extinction. You can read about this by clicking this link. Here in Alice we have our own rock wallabies, not quite as scarce as their southern cousins, but threatened nonetheless by habitat fragmentation, changes in vegetation communities, and introduced predators.

Black-footed Rock Wallaby, Petrogale lateralis.

The Land for Wildlife coordinators are busily setting and checking dog traps at the moment. We're monitoring four LfW properties which have BFRW populations in the hope of removing some introduced predators and giving the wallabies a chance to spread out and breed up.

The culmination of our trapping program, will be a workshop at the end of June. This is a chance for you to come along and learn more about this fascinating species and how we can look after and rehabilitate their habitat around town.

Expert mammalogist Clare Ciechanowicz from the Alice Springs Desert Park will be on hand to discuss the biology of the little wallabies and the LfW coordinators will have information about the successes of the dog trapping program. We'll be discussing habitat regeneration for all Central Australian gardens, so even if you don't have wallabies on your property there'll be plenty to learn about and take home to your garden.

Stay tuned for venue details, but the workshop will be on Saturday the 25th of June at 10am.