Melbourne volunteers at the Nardoo Hills - Jeroen van Veen

With winter approaching, so do busier times at our area’s reserves. Not only do the native plants and animals spring to life once (or should that read “if”?) the rains arrive, so do the rabbits and the weeds. Rabbits start breeding as soon as there are the first green shoots on the ground and weeds pop up quicker than many of the natives.
At the Bush Heritage reserve in the Nardoo Hills there is one big extra weapon in the fight against the weeds: Volunteers. Bush Heritage Australia recruits volunteers for many of its reserves nationwide. They have an extensive list of members who contribute through regular fees and donations, but also through labour. At the more remote and larger reserves in outback Queensland or Western Australia volunteers usually work in small teams for spells of a week or longer, but at the Nardoo Hills the arranged volunteer weekends are usually two days, with an early finish on Sunday so people can still make it back home comfortably.
This year there will be six volunteer weekends with all of them booked out well in advance. The Nardoo Hills reserve is a popular destination for Bush Heritage volunteers as it is one of the few reserves within one day’s drive from Melbourne, where most come from. The main jobs they will be engaged in is weed control (Patterson’s Curse, Wheel Cactus and Horehound), fence maintenance, wildlife monitoring and tree planting, but the team supervisor makes sure there is also some time for a bit of bird or wildflower watching.
The first of this winter’s weekends will be at the end of April. The managers of the Nardoo Hills reserve are looking forward to welcoming these hard workers back for another season. Without them the task of bringing some of the runaway weeds under control would be so much harder. Also, some of the volunteers have been coming back for quite a number of years now and it is good catching up.