Shortsighted survey essentially toothless

THE state’s ongoing crocodile management survey will be shot full of holes before it gets off the ground if the Government maintains its “situation normal, nothing to see here” response to crocodile numbers in Queensland.

People who spend any time at all traversing our rivers and creeks know otherwise.

On Sunday morning the Townsville Bulletin was able to photograph in quick succession two estuarine crocodiles on farm land near Ingham. Two others, one a particularly large specimen, made for the water and disappeared before they could be snapped.

Last week the Mayor of the Ingham- based Hinchinbrook Shire Council photographed a croc on his farm from the cab of his tractor. The stories abound. Almost every farm with a river or creek running through it has its resident crocodile population. Even the large drains built to channel water away from farm land have become habitats not just for fish, but for crocs.

There is nowhere now that is safe to swim in the Herbert River downstream from the Herbert River Falls on Goshen Station south of Mt Garnet to its estuary near Dungeness.

The Burdekin River including the Burdekin Falls Dam has its own large and growing estuarine crocodile population. The State Government’s crocodile census- takers are operating with one hand tied behind their back and the other jammed in a vice.

They can get counts that might be semi- approximate in major waterways, but they can’t traverse the thousands of scrubby creeks and lagoons which are now safe havens for crocodiles.

Ramon Jayo got it right when he said: “The crocodiles are coming to us. We’re not going to them.”