Drones find injured wildlife
ANIMAL welfare agencies are turning to drones to gauge the extent of wildlife losses in the wake of the bushfires.
NSW WIRES partnered with tech company Australian UAV yesterday to fly drones with infra-red cameras into inaccessible areas around Batemans Bay and Mogo.
The Ripper Rescue Alliance drones started at about 3am – optimum time, group co-ordinator Ben Trollope said, “for the infra-red cameras to track the heat signature of the wildlife on the ground”.
The drones covered about 100ha that was “extremely burnt out”, he said, but they also found unburnt pockets where as many as 20 kangaroos and wallabies were seen.
“There were areas where you just think ‘How did that not get destroyed’?” Mr Trollope said.
While the first wave of drones have cameras to identify injured wildlife – enabling rescue teams to access them more efficiently – Mr Trollope said there was also the potential for drones to drop water and food to assist wildlife if there were known feeding stations for individual animal populations.
WIRES volunteers and wildlife specialists have so far been able to attend to 3300 callouts across NSW, and the organisation has had a year’s worth of calls from prospective volunteers – 700 – in the first week of January alone.
“A majority of the calls we’ve had here on the (NSW south) coast is for kangaroos. They haven’t necessarily been directly been hit by the fire, but instead entered the fire zone too soon and have burns to their feet,” Kasey Turner said.
“Some of them are so badly affected there’s exposed bone, severe infections and that’s when we find them lying in random spots.
“Some have even had maggot infestations in their wounds because they’re at the stage where they can’t get up. It’s awful.”
The drone tech pioneered by the Ripper Rescue Alliance may help reveal details of species lost to the bushfires, as some habitat areas are hard to access, others are still burning, and levels of monitoring vary significantly between states.
News Corp contacted environment departments in all states for information on wildlife species impacted by the bushfires. Few estimates of death tolls for individual species were provided, but some states had data on the percentages of known habitat area that had been burnt.
Federally, an expert panel chaired by Threatened Species Commissioner Dr Sally Box has met twice and determined a series of “first actions” as well as a list of 50 key threatened species (47 of which are plants).
The panel will also advise the government on how to spend half of the $50 million “initial commitment” for wildlife recovery announced by the government last week.
Asked yesterday whether she was seeing the need for more funding on top of that, Federal Environment Minister
Sussan Ley said: “I’m seeing a lot of needs”.
Ms Ley said she wanted to involve local communities in the wildlife recovery process and warned: “It’s a marathon not a sprint.”
Many people have been moved to donate to services looking after injured animals.
But Chris Dickman, Professor in Terrestrial Ecology in Sydney University suggested there may be more effective funding priorities.
“Donations … for the injured are well and good, but it’s probably a bit of a pinprick in the bigger picture,” he said.
The immediate priority should be to go into the “unburnt patches” of regions hit by bushfires, particularly areas where threatened species were known to occur, and “find out if there are remnant populations that need assistance,” he said.
Ms Ley said treating injured animals and preserving the habitat of survivors were both worthy tasks.
“We can and should do both,” she said.
A primary concern is to protect survivors from feral predators, she said.
Prof Dickman said feral cats were a big threat, as they were known to move 15km from their normal range to pick off survivors at the edge of fireravaged areas.
But a “cat assassin trap” had shown promising results in controlling them, he said.
The trap works by flicking a dob of poison-containing gel at cats, who, being fastidious cleaners, then ingest it – but because the substance (1080) is native to Australia, local species have a high tolerance for it, Prof Dickman added.
Both Prof Dickman and Dr Stuart Blanch from WWF Australia said there was a role for cool-season prescribed burning to help protect native wildlife habitat – but both noted the extremely limited conditions for doing it in 2019 because of hot dry conditions throughout much of the year.
WWF wants a two-year moratorium on logging and clearing to protect habitats.
While experts believe it will take years for some animal populations to bounce back, a statistic provided by South Australia’s Department for Environment and Water might offer some hope.
Koalas on Kangaroo Island grew from just 18 individuals introduced in the 1920s to a population that some estimated to be as many as 100,000 before this bushfire season.