Feral Thoughts

Bounties raised: foxes in Victoria; toads in the Northern Territory

The issue of bounties has come up again, as it often does in pest animal management. I've blogged before on why groups like the Australasian Wildlife Management Society don't support bounties. But there is no doubt it tends to be a polarizing debate - farmers like and support bounties but scientists in the field don't. Why such a difference of views? In my experience, farmers tend to know what's best on their farm and it is hard to find a farmer that doesn't support bounties. On the other hand, it would be hard to find a scientist that does support bounties.

ABC's Stateline program in Victoria did a story on the issue last Friday night, following a pledge from the Victorian Opposition to reinstate a bounty on both foxes and wild dogs in that State if they win the upcoming election. The story shows some of the complicating factors: for example, dogs are a major concern around baiting programs. The labour shortage on farms means that working dogs are critical and they can have a very high dollar value as well as the obvious other values to farmers. Another reason is probably that when you shoot foxes, you see the immediate result whereas baiting doesn't provide that satisfaction.

If you ever get the chance: visit Tasmania.

  
I visit Tasmania regularly for work because the Invasive Animals CRC funds a bunch of research down there.  CSIRO has perhaps the best position of any research lab anywhere in Hobart and, although it is a marine division, they undertake lots of work for us on common carp control.  The fox incursion also takes some time and generally the meetings are in Hobart as well. I rarely get any opportunity to see outside the capital, the second city established in Australia. So this year, our family decided to do a pre-Christmas tour of the Island, moving counter-clockwise after arriving at Launceston in the north. A week and a half wasn't nearly enough to even sample everything on offer.

Three-quarters of the family is wildlife-obsessed and Tasmania is known as one of Australia's wildlife hot spots. Twelve-going-on-twenty-four boy can take or leave the wildlife and landscapes and is more into fast-moving machinery. So jet-boating the King River on the west coast was probably the highlight: stomach churning spins then a walk through a Huon pine forest to an incredible lookout to mountains named for the protagonists of the evolution debate. The convict history of the west is fascinating - I knew the cannibal escapee story of Alexander Pierce to a degree (recently played by the CRC's Chair's son, Oscar Reading in Van Dieman's Land). But I had no knowledge of the ship-stealing convicts that made it to Chile depicted in The Ship That Never Was, Australia's longest-running play, showing every night in Strachan.

Another highlight was the penguin tour at Bicheno on the east coast. It takes a lot of people to organise night-time tours to see little penguins come into nests for the night: the tour guide, the bus-driver, the ticket-seller, the three or four people organising the movement of people. This is one of the industries that would be most affected if the red fox establishes in Tasmania.  Bicheno is one of many places in the State where penguins can be seen in a relatively undisturbed environment. But unfortunately they can't co-exist with foxes - we see that in Phillip Island in Victoria where only one colony remains of about a dozen originally (apparently worth something like $80 million to that State's economy).

A Parliamentary Accounts Committee has recently reported on the fox issue in Tasmania and concluded that the cost of the program is insignificant compared with the cost foxes would incur if they establish.  A couple of dozen species could disappear, which makes the fox issue one for anyone with an interest in biodiversity, not just for Tasmanians.

Tasmania is proud of its position on the edge of the world (there is even a place named Edge of the World). We need to preserve its biodiversity values - but it is much more than a museum or wildlife park - it's a vibrant, fun place to visit if you ever get the chance.

Posted by Tony Peacock, founder of 'Feral Thoughts'

Ferals in the Capital - fox and hare control

The "Bush" Capital of Australia, Canberra, is developing a range of environmental projects that will be icons in the future.  Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve is slowly recovering from the devastation of the 2003 bushfires and two new projects are underway: Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary and the Canberra International Arboretum.

I've written a little about the Mulligans Flat project before. It has an obvious focus on feral animals with the recent completion of an 11 km feral-proof fence.  The rangers have begun the task of ridding the sanctuary of cats, foxes, rabbits and excess kangaroos (the last are herded out of the sanctuary). The job is almost done, with rangers Peter Mills and Grant Woodbridge trying to determine if they have dispatched the last fox. They estimate there were 8 or 9 foxes within the fenced area at the closing of the sanctuary and most likely all have been successfully baited.  Baits have stopped disappearing now but that isn't absolute proof of eradication - the guys are using remote cameras near likely fox habitat and the "super bait" of young rabbit to try and determine if the last fox has been eradicated.

Feral Peril: foxes, devils, cats and scats. Tasmanian issues explored on ABC1 16 July.

As Tasmanian devils disappear at an alarming rate and Governments spend money on a fox eradication program in the island State, a number of characters emerge: those saving devils, those trying to get rid of foxes and those that have their doubts.  Feral Peril, showing at 8.30pm Thursday 16 July on ABC1 explores these characters.

The documentary tries hard to intertwine the devil and the fox stories, using a murder-mystery approach, including a smoking detective figure that appears mainly in the fox bits but adds little to the devil bits of the program. The show ends up a bit schizophrenic trying to have fun with the elusive fox but then struggling to make a gross-looking ecological disaster like the demise of the devil look either fun or mysterious.  One gets the impression that there wasn't quite enough material to make a full-on fox mystery story nor a full hour of nature documentary, so the film makers have tried to do both.

Dogs work better than cameras or hair snares for low level detection - finding the fox "needle" in the Tasmanian "haystack".

From personal experience, I know that a trained fox scat detecting dog is better at finding fox scats than me.  Which is good, because I didn't want to take it up as a career anyway.  In the small demonstration I described in an earlier post, one dog was actually better than more than a dozen people working together to find fox scats.  The dogs, magnificent black labradors, have been employed in the effort to rid Tasmania of a small number of foxes.

Some people in Tasmania have asked why use scat-detecting dogs?  It seems a complex way to find a fox - why not just trap the foxes or use traditional methods like sand pads (a layer of sand is raked and smoothed, usually where you'd expect animals to be, like a trail or near something attractive like food or scent markings, then you look for the tracks)?

The reason is that trained scat detecting dogs are better at detecting the presence of animals in low-density than other detection methods.  Remote cameras are nowadays often employed in wildlife management.  In recent years, the price of cameras has dropped dramatically and their efficiency has improved so they now form part of the toolbox of many wildlife people.  A group of researchers in Vermont compared detection of black bears, fishers (the North American marten, which actually rarely eats fish) and bobcats using scat detecting dogs, cameras and a third method, hair snares.

Another reminder of what's at stake in Tasmania's fox hunt

The Tasmanian Government has released some further information today on fox scat samples collected in the State.  They serve as reminder of what's at stake.  Foxes have been introduced to Tasmania from time to time for well over a century, but never established.  Some people, Tim Flannery is one, have speculated that Tasmanian devils prey on fox cubs, which has stopped the fox becoming established and doing the damage they've done on the mainland.  Of course, the Tassie devil is now in serious threat itself, but we probably couldn't rely on the devil providing a biological control for foxes in any case.

Is a Faecal Fooler at work in Tasmania?

If you found a fox poo in a paddock in Tasmania, would you think there was a fox in the vicinity somewhere?

Not if you were Ian Rist.

Mr. Rist is the most vocal of a small band of conspiracy theorists that seem to believe a faecal fooler is at work. He is an ardent critic of the people charged with ridding Tasmania of foxes: the Fox Eradication Branch of the Department of Primary Industries and Water. For years, Mr. Rist has written to newspapers throughout the island State dismissing fox sightings and fox carcasses and calling for disbanding the effort. Constantly calling for evidence of foxes in the state, he is the first to dismiss it when it doesn't agree with him.

His claims are looking more desperate as he struggles to dismiss the findings of foxes scats, confirmed by DNA testing at the University of Canberra. It's pretty easy to dismiss sightings, even if there have been hundreds of them. It's harder to dismiss carcasses but Mr Rist can do that - "planted" he usually screams. (And I do mean screams: on one site he generally gives about one third of the posts, roundly abusing anyone that disagrees with him, and exhausting other commentators by almost always having the last post on the topic).

But how do you dismiss fox scats? Well, you need to dismiss the obvious: that a Tasmanian fox scat came from a Tasmanian fox bum. You also need an alternate explanation so hatch a conspiracy. A Faecal Fooler. Maybe several Scat Scammers. Heaven help us if there is a plethora of Poo Plagiarists out there!

I should stop here because surely no one needs an explanation of how silly this conspiracy theory is? But let's point out some of the weaknesses in the theory:

Firstly, it's surprisingly hard to find a fox scat in the wild (see earlier post). You have to be motivated. So if you are gathering fox poos for export to Tasmania, you'd need a bit of time and energy. Maybe the Dodgy Dumpster has trained a dog to help, or found a fox marking site.

Secondly, it's a weird thing to do. I reckon if I took up Shit Shifting my wife would stop me. She might even have me see someone about my affliction.

Thirdly, the Faecal Faker doesn't know where DPIW staff are going to look. So they've got to shift a lot of shit. They've got to become a bit of a "Johnny Scatseed" and sprinkle it all over the State. Gives a new meaning to the Apple Isle.

When I put the silliness of his position to him, the crap conspirator stuck to his guns "the detection of fox-DNA positive scat in Tasmania in the absence of any other crroborating (sic) evidence does not and cannot preclude the liklihood (sic) that fox scats were planted at the sites where they were found." Mind you, if sightings, tracks and carcasses are not corroborating, what would be?

So he really believes someone is planting poo? I'm not sure why this guy is so angry all the time at the staff of DPIW trying their best to face up to a really serious and worrying conservation issue. Why wouldn't he direct his angst to the Poo Planter?

In other web posts, Mr Rist hints that he will reveal all at an upcoming Public Accounts Committee Inquiry by the Parliament of Tasmania. I personally couldn't wait if I knew. Or maybe these claims are just full of crap?

The evidence points to a small population of foxes resident in Tasmania. The Tasmanian and Federal Governments deserve praise for trying to protect what mainland Australia has already lost.

In the hunt for poo - humans 1: dog 5

Timmy the scat detecting Labrador is one of three dogs helping in the fight to find Tasmania's foxes.

For the first 200 years of European settlement the island state remained free of the fox, enabling it to become a sanctuary for a whole range of wildlife no longer found on mainland Australia.  A small number of foxes are now present, but finding them in the 6 million hectares of Tasmania is a bigger job than finding a needle in a haystack.

If you can't find a fox, maybe you can find what it deposits in the landscape.  That's where specially trained fox-scat detecting dogs come in.  They've recently taken up the job of helping to find scats, enabling Tasmanian authorities to target the eradication campaign more effectively.

Yesterday I took part in a demonstration of how effective the dogs can be.  Sixteen humans lined up to search for five hidden fox scats in an area probably the size of three backyards.  In 10 minutes, we found one out of five.  Timmy came out and found all five in probably less than two minutes - and he seemed to enjoy himself a lot more than the humans.

It's a novel approach, but its a novel situation.  There's a heck of a lot to lose if foxes take off in Tasmania, so it's worth trialling every tool in the armoury and developing a few new ones.  The Tasmanian authorities are not leaving any stone unturned in trying to keep their State fox-free.  Good on them.