Categories
Walks and Talks

What a Wonderful Day – Berowra Fauna Fair

On Sunday the 12th March , at the Berowra Community and Cultural Facility (Berowra Community Centre) we held the Berowra Fauna Fair.

The Fair opened with a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony by Uncle Laurie a Traditional Owner in the local area.

Uncle Laurie Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony

The event was designed to engage all ages in experiencing our native wildlife and also to learn from experts in their field on 30 min talks ranging from fungi, spiders, koalas and platypus, marine life, birds, native bees and native orchids.

Echidna from Australian Walkabout Wildlife Park
Red-bellied Black Snake from Jabiru Wildlife
Flying Fox from Sydney Bats

Over 350 people enjoyed the stalls featuring many organisations that work with our local flora and fauna. The greater Hornsby area is a native animal hot spot and home to some of Australia’s most iconic animals. Learning about these animals is a great step towards making sure they are still here for future generations to enjoy.

A big thank you to Uncle Laurie and all of our speakers:

  • Vanessa McPherson and Michael Gillings, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University who spoke on Fungi.
  • Wendy Grimm from the Australian Native Plant Society on Native Orchids.
  • Jenny Sistrom from Sydney Wildlife Rescue on The Benefits of Wildlife in our Gardens.
  • Dr Helen Smith from Australia Museum on The Secret Life of Spiders.
  • Judy Harrington from Birdlife Australia on our local threatened species the Glossies and Powerful Owls as well as some of the other local birds people can see in their backyards or surrounding bushland.
  • Sue Martin and Pat Schwartz from CHEN and Glenorie Environment Centre and Hills – Hornsby Rural Koala Project on detecting Platypus and Koalas in the local area.
  • David Booth and Gigi Beretta, Marine Ecologists from UTS on Sydney as a major hub of marine biodiversity but also a hotspot for climate change. They discussed their work in Sydney on seadragons, seahorses, invading tropical fishes and new subtropical coral beds off Sydney
  • Abbie from Kids Connecting Nature on our local native bee species and who also ran a workshop on how to make bee hotels that work.

We were also very fortunate to have many fabulous organisations contribute their local wildlife including:

Other stalls included:

Hornsby Shire Council Bushcare
A tree designed to show you the hollow sizes for various wildlife.

A very special thanks to Hornsby Shire Council for the community event grant that made the fair so much easier to run and Apex for contributing their entire takings on the day. Also to all of the members of Friends of Berowra Valley who contributed their time and effort in organising and running this community event.

Categories
Advocacy Westleigh Park

State Election Coming Up – No Plants No People

As the state election nears it is time to vote for a government that protects nature and stops the war on our natural environment.

The current state government implemented the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016. This act puts a value on our wildlife and natural environment and then lets it be destroyed anyway.

Did you know that one koala offset is currently worth $399, if a developer is destroying koala habitat then the number of offsets is determined, money paid and away you go.

The current state legislation is doing nothing to protect our natural environment.

Yet 7.7 million hectares of threatened species habitat was destroyed in Australia between 2000 and 2017, according to independent research commissioned by ACF. This is an area of forest and woodland larger than Tasmania!

Australia’s threatened bird species declined in abundance by an average of 44% from 2000 to 2016.

So why is Hornsby Shire Council ignoring all ecological advice and planning to sanction illegally built mountain bike trails through sensitive bushland at Westleigh Park?  This includes the critically endangered Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest and the endangered Duffys Forest.

The council has published the trails to be built, reducing the current ‘illegal’ 9km network to 7km. These trails apart from 2 are not shared, therefore excluding the local community from enjoying their own bushland. The vast majority of mountain bikers will not be from the local area.

Rather than working within the site constraints, such as sensitive bushland, critical infrastructure in the form a dam and traffic bottlenecks, council wants to build a regional sporting venue. This regional sporting venue will have three platforms, two platforms will hold 2 sporting fields each and one platform will be an athletics track.

Friends of Berowra Valley have been fighting this through helping to create Save Westleigh Park. Please help by voting for a state member with ecological literacy.

Categories
Walks and Talks

Berowra Fauna Fair

The Berowra Fauna Fair is coming up, bigger and better than ever. With the support of Hornsby Shire Council we will be celebrating all of the marvellous wildlife with whom we share our bushland home.

On Sunday the 12th March from 10am to 4pm, at the Berowra Community and Cultural Facility (Berowra Community Centre), The Gully Road Berowra, we will commence with a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony by Uncle Laurie. The centre will be a hub of fauna based activity including native animals, information from wildlife rescue, local plants for sale, a workshop on building a bee hotel and a BBQ run by Apex.  Throughout the event there will be continuous 30-minute talks by experts on bats, birds, frogs, fungi, marine animals, koalas and more. There will be plenty of opportunity to share experiences and ask questions, or just to sit back and learn something new.

The greater Hornsby area is a native animal hot spot and home to some of Australia’s most iconic animals such as the echidna, and threatened species such as the platypus and koala. Learning about these animals is a great step towards making sure they are still here for future generations to enjoy. Other familiar friends, including bandicoots, sugar gliders and glossy black cockatoos, will also be featured in talks at the event.

Speaker Programme

Time Talk
10am – 10.30am Uncle Laurie

Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony

10.30am -11am Fungi Biodiversity

Vanessa McPherson and Michael Gillings
School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

Learn about one of our most important ecosystem engineers in a fascinating talk about Fungi Biodiversity.

11am -11.30am Native Orchids

Wendy Grimm
Australian Native Plant Society

Genoplesium baueri  R.Br. (family Orchidaceae) is an endangered terrestrial orchid species endemic to the Sydney Basin, New South Wales, Australia. Genoplesium baueri was spotted by Wendy Grimm in 2009, as an isolated plant growing along a fire-trail in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, near Mount Colah with members of the Australian Plants Society North Shore Group. G. baueri was previously recorded in the 1940’s around Cowan and Mt Colah.

Wendy went on to monitor several populations of the rare orchid 2009-22 in local National Parks and nature reserves and published the results in Cunninghamia and was awarded a MPhil for her studies. Wendy has been part of the APS NSG Walks & Talks program at Ku-ring-gai Wildflower Garden since retiring as a hospital scientist in 2007 and has enjoyed a life-long enthusiasm for geology, flora & fauna and conservation of the environment.

11.30am -12pm Wildlife in our Gardens – the Benefits

Jenny Sistrom
Sydney Wildlife Rescue

12pm – 12.30pm The Secret Life of Spiders

Dr Helen Smith
Australia Museum

Helen Smith works behind the scenes at the Australian Museum in Sydney where she helps to look after one of the largest spider collections in the southern hemisphere. These spider specimens are for research, so they are carefully preserved and labelled. But Helen also loves to get out and about to see what spiders and other little animals are up to in their day-to-day lives. Have you ever wondered why there are silk lines across the bushes glistening in the sun, or marvelled as a huntsman spider defies gravity to run across a smooth window? Or maybe you spotted a white speck moving in your lawn then realised it was attached to a camouflaged spider – what was that all about?
Come for a peep into the secret world of our 8-legged friends and find out about some of the astonishing things they do every day as they live their spidery lives.

12.30pm –
1pm
Come Fly with Me

Judy Harrington
Birdlife Australia

A talk about your special Glossies and Powerful Owls as well as some of the other local birds people can see in the backyards or the surrounding bushland. Plus some hints on attracting birds to your gardens

1pm – 1.30pm Platypus and Koalas

Sue Martin and Pat Schwartz
CHEN and Glenorie Environment Centre and Hills – Hornsby Rural Koala Project

An update on the wonderful work in the local area to detect platypus and koalas in our local bushland.

1.45pm – 2.15pm Seahorses, seadragons, tropical fishes and corals: the Sydney scene.

David Booth and Gigi Beretta
UTS and FoBV

Sydney is a major hub of marine biodiversity but also a hotspot for climate change.  Gigi Beretta and David Booth are marine ecologists who study marine fishes and corals from the Great Barrier Reef to Sydney.  We will discuss our work in Sydney on seadragons, seahorses, invading tropical fishes and new subtropical coral beds off Sydney!

2.30pm – 3pm Native Bees

Kids Connecting Nature

Learn about our native bee species

3pm – 4pm Bee workshop – pre booked free for the first 18 participants ( 1 ticket per family)

Book Now
https://www.trybooking.com/CGKPL

Kids Events

Time Name
10am-2pm Australian Walkabout Wildlife Park and Sydney Bats

Meet our amazing local wildlife – grey headed flying foxes (the bats), turtles, lizards, pythons and an echidna.

10am-2pm Snake SafetyJabiru Wildlife – live snakes and snake safety demonstration
11am-1pm Insects and other Mini beasts

Australian Environmental Education and Nature Know Australia

Display of insect materials, and some live animals to interact with.

Outdoor program.

2 x minibeast hunts –

11.30am

12.30pm

25 minutes each

Discover local bugs and creatures and learn more about them. 15 to 20 children

2 x mindful moments in nature sessions – slow down and play with nature materials and sensory sessions

25 minutes  each

11am

12pm

12 children per session – Signup on the day

 

2pm-4pm Australian Wildlife Displays

Ringtail possum, Tawny Frogmouth, Bluetongue Lizard, Green Tree Frog, Diamond Python, Lace Monitor and Long-necked Turtle

2.30pm -4pm Bee Hotel Workshop – pre-booked

Kids Connecting Nature

Book Now

https://www.trybooking.com/CGKPL

 

 

Stalls

 

Categories
Advocacy Campaigns Westleigh Park

Westleigh Park Bushland Under Threat

Hornsby Shire Council is considering sanctioning the network of mountain bike trails that have been illegally built through Critically Endangered and Endangered Ecological Communities at Westleigh Park.

Council’s recent consultation culminated in a 3-day co-design workshop focusing on the main stakeholders – mountain bikers, conservationists and residents.

This $50K consultation outcome report has been unanimously rejected by the non-MTB participants. They felt the bias was strongly in favour of the mountain bike groups. The final set of 16 workshop participants were carefully vetted by council, 50% were mountain bikers, 25% were local residents and 25% were conservationists.

Council hired an independent mountain bike track designer to present to the co-design workshop and despite repeated requests there was no independent ecologist to explain the fragility and significance of these critically endangered communities.

The initial workshops included the option of no trails in the bushland but the final co-design trail workshops narrowed the brief to remove this as an option.

Hornsby Shire Council purchased the land in 2016 from Sydney Water to cater for the needs of the whole community. Council staff identified pristine bushland with large intact areas of the rare Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest and Duffys Forest.  Most of the community had obeyed the Sydney Water signs and fencing excluding them from the area. But mountain bikers were not deterred and by 2017 had built 5km network of trails.

Hornsby Council did not effectively prevent the building of illegal trails and by 2020 ecological consultants warned council that “No education program has been provided to mountain bike community regarding the impact of their activities on ecological values (and human health through asbestos movement). The length, width and construction activity of trails has noticeably increased since acquisition of the land by Council. As a result, soil erosion, soil and seed translocation and vegetation damage has also noticeably increased. These key issues threaten the integrity of the native vegetation to a point that some areas are currently at risk of approaching an ecological threshold.”

They also confirmed the vegetation mapping which includes significant areas of Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest (STIF) Critically Endangered Ecological Community under NSW BC Act 2016 and Commonwealth EPBC Act and Duffys Forest which is listed as Endangered under the NSW BC Act 2016. The mountain bike trail network traverses through significant patches of STIF as well as populations of Darwinia biflora and Melaleuca deanei (EPBC Act, BC Act), Tetratheca glandulosa (BC Act) and habitat that supports the Square-tailed Kite (BC Act).

In 2021 Council produced a draft master plan for Westleigh Park which was the subject of a community consultation. Unable to agree on the master plan for a mountain bike trail network in the critically endangered forest, they then ran another consultation culminating in the co-design workshops.

Environmental and Community groups are joining together under Save Westleigh Park to fight for a fairer and broader community perspective.

 

Categories
Advocacy Environmental Education

WWF Living Planet Report

This year’s edition is the most comprehensive finding to date and provides a platform for the best science, cutting-edge research and diverse voices on the impact of humans on the health of our Earth. More than 50 experts from academia, policy, international development and conservation organisations have contributed. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2022 shows the scale of the challenge – and highlights what we can do, both here in Australia and around the world, to change the way we live.

The future of the planet is in our hands.

Key findings from WWF’s Living Planet Report 2022 include:

  • Global wildlife populations fell by 69%, on average, between 1970 and 2018.
  • Australia continues to have the most mammal extinctions in the world. The report tells a disturbing story of continual decline of more than 1,100 wildlife populations in Australia due to pressures from climate change, habitat destruction and introduced predators.
  • Populations of sharks and rays have dropped by 71% worldwide over the last 50 years due to fishing practices.There has been a 64% reduction in Australian sea lion pups born each year in South and Western Australia.
  • Combined koala populations have plummeted by 50% over 20 years in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
  • Globally, landuse change is still the biggest current threat to nature, destroying or fragmenting the natural habitats of many plant and animal species on land, in freshwater and in our oceans.
  • If we cannot limit global warming to 1.5°C, climate change will likely become the dominant cause of biodiversity loss in the coming decades.
  • Australia must set strong nature laws, become a world leader in forest protection and climate action, and respect and acknowledge the stewardship of Indigenous Australians to care for Country. With the right conservation effort, commitment, investment and expertise, wildlife and wild places can be brought back from the brink.

The Living Planet Report includes the latest findings measured by the Living Planet Index, tracking 32,000 populations of 5,230 mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish from 1970-2018. This includes more than 1,100 populations in Australia.

Read the full report

Categories
Environmental Education Walks and Talks

The Great Southern Bioblitz

Friends of Berowra Valley ran a fun event as part of the Great Southern Bioblitz on Sunday 30th October. Around 25 citizen scientists recorded the amazing diversity of Stringybark Ridge, Pennant Hills using the iNaturalist app.

A combination of power users and people new to the app ensured that the beautiful surrounding area was recorded. Each of these observations is fed into the Australian Atlas of Living Australia. This massive database is an invaluable tool for scientists and researchers.

Check out some of the amazing biodiversity in our project for the Berowra Valley Catchment.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/berowra-valley-catchment

For more info on iNaturalist.

https://www.friendsberowravalley.org.au/citizen-science-inaturalist/

Categories
Advocacy Campaigns Westleigh Park

Westleigh Park Consultation Outcome

The Hornsby Shire Council has released the report on the outcome of the latest round of workshops to co-design mountain bike tracks through the Critically Endangered Ecological Community (Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest) and the Endangered Ecological Community (Duffys Forest.)

Westleigh_Engagement_Outcomes_Report

The report reflects the position of both groups however as predicted it is very difficult to reach a consensus when you have two diametrically opposing views.

Background

The council hopes to develop Westleigh Park into a range of sporting and other recreation uses to address the predicted sportsground shortfalls in the Shire. Westleigh Park will be a multi-purpose facility with three sports platforms. The latest round of consultations was to co-design mountain bike tracks in the special bushland in the area.

The Issue

We can no longer afford to ignore the damage being done to our bushland at a local level.

The Hornsby Council’s End of Term report outlines the failure of council to protect our threatened plants, animals and waterways.  Business as usual is no longer good enough.

What Can We Do?

Friends of Berowra Valley have highlighted our concerns at a local and state level. The next stage of our campaign for common sense is for community groups to join forces and work out a strategy moving forward – this is now happening.

If you want to be really depressed watch this video from the Environment Defenders Office on the NSW environmental legislation.

There is also a state election coming up next year and we need a fresh perspective with a government prepared to look after our environment. Not one that just documents the decline and watches on the sidelines as we lose our unique flora and fauna.

 

 

 

Categories
Environmental Education

Can You Spot a Platypus?

Australian Conservation Foundation are running a project to try and spot Platypus.

Sign up to take part

Platypus are very elusive and Hornsby Shire Council, Friends of Berowra Valley, Still Creek Landcare and Streamwatch are applying for grant funding to do eDNA testing in creeks in the Hornsby Shire.

Categories
Bush Regeneration

National Tree Day Planting at Stringybark Ridge

To celebrate National Tree Day we held a tree planting session at Stringybark Ridge in Pennant Hills, Berowra Valley National Park. This is a very special ecological community and home to many threatened species such as the Powerful Owl and the Grey-headed Flying Fox.

A huge amount of thanks goes to NPWS for including us in this exciting project and organising the fencing. Also a big thank you to the Warada Ngurang Community Nursery for supplying most of the plants.

NPWS now have a fence in place to protect plantings from the wallabies and the canopy layer, shrubs and ground cover have been planted out.

We are so fortunate to have a great team of people working together to restore and preserve our beautiful National Park. For more information on the project go to https://www.friendsberowravalley.org.au/stringybark-ecological-restoration/

Categories
Bush Regeneration

Tree Planting at Stringybark Ridge

A group of ‘friends’ got together on 11 July 2022 to make a start on restoring the small oval at Stringybark Ridge. Amazingly the sun shone and the rain stayed away until the next day. NPWS have installed a fence to protect the plantings from wallabies while they grow. A big thanks to Robin, Thomas, Ken, Madeleine, Mary and Karen.

Before shot