Mike Newman has been systematically monitoring woodland bird communities in Clarence for the last decade. He regularly covers twenty-nine sites: six in the Meehan Ranges, five around Acton and the rest on the South Arm Peninsula.
Local conservation efforts take flight
‘I spend twenty minutes at each one, usually early in the morning when the birds are active,’ he said, ‘and try to get to them once a month. I have to collect the information very methodically so it will stand up to scientific scrutiny and be taken seriously.’
Mike, who has been interested in birds since he was four years old, sees two significant threats to vulnerable bird species. The first is loss of habitat.
‘If we have a lot of isolated patches of woodland, the birds can’t relocate when they’re under stress. We can plant vegetation corridors, but we need to make sure those plantings are effective. At the moment we don’t do much to measure how useful the restoration is.’
He notes that while the Meehan Ranges and South Arm still have significant woodland, the area around Acton is highly degraded and dominated by noisy miners, which thrive in open spaces. ‘With limited tree cover and no shrub layer, the smaller birds have nowhere to shelter and are vulnerable to attack,’ he said.
‘The risk is that, as new areas are opened up for development, the noisy miners will take over there, too. It doesn’t hit overnight, but as people cut down old nesting trees for firewood, and bring in cats, there’s a creeping degradation that allows the bigger birds to move in at the expense of the small ones.’
The other major pressure on birds is a drying climate. ‘We recently had three years of La Niña, and we could see an immediate response in bird populations as the increase in rainfall improved conditions. Then, in 2023, the dry El Niño cut in again and populations dropped by about 32%. It was quite staggering.’
However these short term fluctuations are normal. Of much greater concern is the longer term analysis which shows a decrease in bird populations of approximately 21% per decade.
‘Some species, like the yellow wattle bird and the pallid cuckoo, are flourishing,’ he said. ‘But on South Arm, the beautiful firetail, the striated field wren, and the Tasmanian scrubwren are already very scarce and possibly lost.’
The dusky robin, which is found only in Tasmania and is one of the most rapidly decreasing birds on the peninsula, is also in trouble.
Mike applauds Clarence Council’s recent efforts to restore native grasslands at Mortimer Bay, an environment that is attractive to the very scarce blue-winged parrots, and hopes the council will commit to ongoing maintenance.
‘The most important thing,’ he said, ‘is to identify the problems early, try to find the causes and see what we can do to fix them. Feral cat control and domestic cat management is an example, as well as education on behaviour that benefits wildlife. It needs buy-in at the local council and community level.’
Mike Newman has been chosen by Clarence Climate Action as this month’s Climate Champion.
Eastern Shore Sun, January 2025, page 6