Bird map work ‘vital’
ORGANISERS of this year’s Mission Beach Cassowary Festival are halfway to their goal of raising $6500 to map the birds’ movements throughout the region.
Works on the vital land conservation plan started in 2008 with Terrain NRM and CSIRO but needs completion.
Cassowaries often use very narrow nature strips associated with creeks and drains to move from one large block of rainforest to the next.
Two projects were carried out after 2008 – The Wongaling Creek Habitat Linkages and the Wongaling-South Mission Beach Habitat Linkages.
The mapping from these projects was incorporated into the local Planning Scheme but funds ran out before the mapping was completed for the northern section of Mission Beach.
The corridor is essential to ensure access to seasonal feeding sites and for gene pool diversity of cassowaries and other wildlife.
Festival committee member Liz Gallie said the Federal Government relied on the habitat linkage mapping to identify a 25ha block near Wongaling Beach as a crucial cassowary corridor linking the Wet Tropics and the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Areas.
“Without the mapping, the large habitat corridor in the heart of Mission Beach would now be cleared and subdivided into 40 residential lots,” she said.
“The announcement recently by Transport and Main Roads Minister, Mark Bailey, that a dedicated cassowary land bridge is to be incorporated into the Bruce Highway upgrade at Smiths Gap is most welcome.
“Smiths Gap is part of the longest and widest rainforest corridor in the Wet Tropics and was identified as one of four landscape scale corridors targeted for priority action when the cassowary was placed on the list of 20 birds to have improved trajectories by 2020.
“It demonstrates the importance of corridors being recognised in planning documents. If they are mapped then available funding can be directed to where it is needed most.”
Ms Gallie said no funding was available to identify and protect the smaller habitat corridors on the coastal strip of Mission Beach.
“Many corridors are known to support cassowaries but not identified in our local planning scheme and therefore not taken into account when developments are being assessed,” she said.
Find more information on tomorrow’s Cassowary Festival and how to donate to the mapping project at www.cassowaryfestival.com/mappingfundraiser.html