Well 2024 has been a big year for TWBBI with 2,800 trees planted over 20 properties across the island for the two threatened birds of Bruny Island – Swift parrot and Forty-spotted pardalote.
Volunteers have really supported the project – 130 people doing over 1,500 hours! If this help was performed by paid positions, the cost would have been an extra $100,000 on top of the $100,000 we’ve spent. It is hard to express our gratitude to each and every one of you.
Our benefactors – many individuals plus Dept of Natural Resources and Environment, NRM South and the wonderful Tasmanian Land Conservancy – have been marvelous in supporting us with money and technical advice. We could not have achieved want we have without them, so THANK YOU!
The growth of trees planted in 2023 down near Cloudy Bay is nothing short of remarkable: some are approaching 3m high already. This emphasises how effective our planting regime is. To date all the work has been done by hand – scalping the weeds and seed bank off, loosening the soil a good 300m down, careful planting of the well-grown seedling, installing a jute weed mat and 1.3m wire mesh guard with a star picket, then a generous watering in.
As usual, it is a team of vollies led by Andrew Hingston that do the work.
Dennis Thiele has been doing the mapping so we can keep track of where and what we are planting, so we can come back in future years to assess the levels of success.
Speaking of which, we have planted 39 replicates a white gum (E. viminalis) provenance trial and 50 replicates of a Swift parrot forage tree trial across both north and south Bruny. The intent of these is to assess how well different strains/species perform in real world conditions on Bruny. The results of these will emerge over the coming years, so it is critical that we know which tree is which provenance/species.
Our work on nest boxes for the 40spot is progressing slowly. Last year we tried out smaller entry hole sizes, which worked to a degree – we managed to exclude their competitors from boxes with 23mm holes where already occupied by 40spots, but other species still used those ones and ones with any bigger holes.
This year we’ve tried reducing the internal dimensions as well to see whether this will deter competitors. Again – it is sort of working, so we’ll continue to try options until we find a more ideal nest box design.
We have plenty of interest in further planting this year, so watch this space!
