Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Is this the best [that is, worst] year ever for the Oxalis weed? Since autumn we’ve seen the dense mats seem to get denser, to spread more widely, and to cover areas the weed’s never been strong in before. And now that it’s spring, those pretty yellow flowers seem to be everywhere.

Oxalis: among other things, it is, or should be, a challenge to fire managers

There are 800 species of Oxalis world wide, including six that are native to Australia: we have two in our region—O. exilis [Shady Wood Sorrel] and O. perrenans [Grasslands wood sorrel: it’s the host plant for the Grasslands Copper butterfly]. The commonest local species is the introduced—and very feral—Soursob [Pes caprae]. It was introduced into this country in 1839 as a garden ornamental, a fact which adds a bit more weight to Tim Lowe’s claim [in Feral Future] that gardeners have done more harm to our environment than miners…

Any gardener will tell you Oxalis is hard to control. According to a 2012 DSE report, it’s also likely to increase in threat after fire, its bulbs allowing it to spread into bare ground. This, we hope, will be in fire managers’ minds when they’re conducting reduction burns in areas where Oxalis is already rampant [the proposed burn on Mount Tarrengower, for example].

The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) will submit the Final Report on its Historic Places Investigation to the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change on Wednesday 31 August 2016, rather later than originally planned.  The report will be publicly released on Wednesday 7 September and will be made available on that day at www.veac.vic.gov.au.

Readers will recall FOBIF made a critical submission to the draft report in December last year. We’ll be curious to see if any of our criticisms have resulted in changes to the document.

Two information sessions on the report will be held not long after its release. One is in Melbourne. The other is in Chewton on Friday 9 September from 10:30 am to 11:30 am at the Chewton Senior Citizens Centre, 201 Main Road/Pyrenees Highway, Chewton (Car park access off Mount Street).

If you want to attend, you need to register with VEAC by phone [1800 134 803 (Free call outside Melbourne)] or email:  veac@delwp.vic.gov.au

The State Government will give its response to the report within six months.

As we have previously reported, funding for the very worthy Box Ironbark mosaic burning project has been ceased. But we had been led to believe that this all too brief project would be continued in some reduced way by DELWP staff who could monitor a restricted range of post fire effects.

This hope is now gone. We’ve been informed that no further monitoring is planned–DELWP doesn’t have the staff to do it.

This well designed project lasted only two unusually wet years, and obviously needed further work to give its findings solid credibility. A depressingly familiar pattern is being repeated. There isn’t enough money to run land management properly: so DELWP fire operations will continue to be run without serious, detailed knowledge of their ecological effects.

The minutes from the 2016 minutes which was held on July 11th can be found here.

Details from the night can be viewed on our earlier post here.

FOBIF committee meetings are held on the second Monday of each month at Continuing Ed on Templeton St, Castlemine at 6pm. All are welcome to attend these usually short and often jolly affairs.

A strong turnout rocked up for FOBIF’s July walk in bracing winter sunshine on Sunday. The walk took in several unnamed ridge tops and hidden valleys in a loop around the Helge Track area. Temperatures during the day were low, but the bush presented well in bright sunshine, and a bit of sweat was generated on a couple of the climbs.

Walkers surrounded by Golden Wattle. Photo by Liz Martin

Four species of wattle were in flower, hillsides were covered in rich moss carpets, and there was plenty of interesting fungi about.

The three photos below were taken by Liz Martin. You can see more photos of the walk on Dominique Lavie’s facebook page.

Next month’s walk will be led by Paul Hampton in the Walmer area. For details check the walks program.

As we’ve previously reported, draft DELWP fire maps have shown an area along the Loddon River between Vaughan and Glenluce as Zone 2 (bushfire management): this would require management burns to cover 80% of the defined area at uncomfortably regular intervals.

We questioned fire officers at the June meeting of the Castlemaine Field Naturalists about the safety value and ecological impact of such a plan, and  have since been informed not only that the area has now been changed to Zone 3, Landscape Management (a gentler system of fuel management) but that the Department will not deliberately burn River Red Gum zones like this one. FOBIF is extremely wary of any plan to deliberately burn this steep river valley, and will watch the future planning of fire along the valley to see exactly what is intended for this area.

Readers will be familiar with our repeated complaint that DELWP’s fuel reduction exercises frequently destroy valuable old hollow bearing trees. This is unintentional, but often seems to us to be plain careless. It isn’t just a local problem: Gippsland research has shown that hollow bearing trees are 22 times more likely to fall down in fuel reduction zones than in unburnt areas.

In response to questions about this, Simon Brown, senior DELWP fire management officer for Murray Goldfields, has informed us that ‘standard operating procedures’ have been adopted to try to avoid such disasters in the future. [The most recent one was in an otherwise mild burn in Kalimna Park in 2015].

Among other things, fire zones will be checked the day after the operation to make sure no large trees are burning at the base. It’s frequently been observed by local residents that DELWP fires smoulder on unattended for days, and we have had assurances before that sites will be more attentively monitored.  We’ll watch this one great interest.