Your Society
At the beginning of the nightmare 2019–20 bushfire season, in early November last year, the Society pledged $50,000 towards bushfire relief. At that stage we could have had little idea of the devastation that lay ahead. So far, we have disbursed funds to the RSPCA Wildlife Hospital in Queensland, and the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife to fund its wildlife carers program. Our next recipient will be the Forktree Project, led by Tim Jarvis.
Tim was the first person to be awarded the Society’s gold medallions for both adventure and conservation, for his work as a polar explorer and in bringing attention to climate change by trekking to the world’s equatorial glaciers to show the extent that ice had retreated in recent decades. The Forktree Project aims to rehabilitate a degraded
53ha former pastoral property on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula, returning it to nature. Presently, the charity is involved in re-establishing tens of thousands of native trees and shrubs on the property. These will, in turn, bring back native mammals, reptiles, frogs, birds and insects and also sequester thousands of tonnes of carbon. Forktree has now been included in a Conservation Volunteers Australia grant application to the federal government to establish 8ha of glossy black-cockatoo casuarina woodland habitat. This will be on a section of the Forktree site and is part of an initiative to aid the species’ recovery following last summer’s bushfire disaster. If successful, Forktree will be the northernmost habitat for glossy black-cockatoos on the SA mainland, providing a lifeline for these threatened birds.