A large group of Bendigo TAFE students came to Wedderburn early March to help with the annual kangaroo count around the district. Each year the numbers are surveyed to determine how their grazing impacts on the other native plants and animals. Twenty TAFE students from the course, Conservation and Land Management (Cert IV), accompanied their lecturers and spent two days camping on one of the properties of Greenhouse Balanced near Mount Korong. On the first day of their stay they helped the WCMN ranger Wendy Murphy to set out kangaroo poo transect lines and on the second day they helped Parks Vic ranger Nic van den Bronk to stab Wheel Cactus (Opuntia robusta) at Mount Egbert (The Granites).
The kangaroo poo transect lines produce statistics on the amount of kangaroo droppings left behind by kangaroos over the period of one month. The area the lines cover runs between Mount Kerang to the North West of Wedderburn to Mount Brennanah in the South. From these figures it is possible to calculate the density of kangaroo numbers over the entire district. Another tool the WCMN uses is a series of grazing exclosure plots. The information from both monitoring methods gives the WCMN accurate information on the total grazing pressure in Wedderburn and informs the management of all environmentally sensitive areas as well as farming land. Setting up the transect lines is labour intensive work and it can’t be completed without the annual help of the TAFE students.
Mount Egbert is one of three hotspots for the Wheel Cactus in our district. This land, managed by Parks Vic ranger Nic van den Bronk, gets regular visits from volunteers from Wedderburn and beyond to inject as many cacti as possible. These plants receive an injection of undiluted Glyphosate which kills them so they can’t spread further through our precious reserves. The TAFE students did an excellent job sweeping through two sections of the Mount Egbert block to clean out the cactus there.
All students reported they had an excellent time in our town and that they learned a lot. They went back to Bendigo with an appreciation of the environmental treasures we have out here and some of them are sure to be back participating in research projects or work placement jobs in the future.
Article - Jeroen van Veen (Greenhouse Balanced)
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