Plan to protect 'miracle' eggs found in Aussie bush labelled 'woefully inadequate'
The coastal emus are on the brink of extinction and conservationists want the logging of its habitat stopped.
The “miracle” discovery of ten of the world’s rarest eggs by NSW forestry workers has led to calls for workers to stop felling trees around the nesting site. While a 100-metre exclusion zone has been set up, it’s feared the measure will not be enough to protect the rare coastal emu chicks inside.
“I really am aghast at this,” ecologist Mark Graham told Yahoo News as he stood at the edge of the logging coup where the eggs are located. “The nesting male emu sits on the eggs and is extremely vulnerable to disturbances, and will frequently abandon his eggs.”
Photographs taken by Graham highlight recent logging activities in the wider region that conservationists want stopped. The Greens argue the population is being put at further risk by native forest logging.
Loggers maintain egg find proves regulations are 'effective'
Fewer than 50 coastal emus are left on the NSW North Coast, and the population is on the brink of collapse with the state government aware they could be extinct in decades. Although the giant flightless birds were once widespread they've been wiped out because of habitat loss, bushfires, floods, cars and invasive predators.
The eggs were discovered at a secret coastal location near Grafton during a search for threatened species by Forestry Corporation NSW, a government owned company that manages 2 million hectares of the state’s remaining bushland. “To discover a nest bearing eggs is a significant moment for that endangered population,” its senior ecologist Chris Slade said last week.
In a statement to Yahoo News on Monday it said the forest where the nest site was found had been cut down and regrown before. “This discovery in a forest that has been actively managed and harvested for many years demonstrates that the systems and regulations in place are effective in identifying and protecting habitat,” it claimed.
100-metre buffer slammed as 'woefully inadequate'
In the face of increasing scrutiny by conservationists, record fines for breaching regulations, and a finding by the Land and Environment Court that it has displayed "a pattern of environmental offending", Forestry Corporation has championed the egg find as proof its methods can protect the land it operates on.
It noted the 100 metre buffer zone around the eggs meets legal requirements that were drawn up by the NSW Government to manage native timber harvesting. But Greens MP Sue Higginson isn’t convinced the measure is enough to protect the site, calling it “woefully inadequate”.
“A minimum 1,000 metre exclusion zone should be implemented to ensure that the loud and destructive logging of nearby native forests does not cause jeopardy to the safety and care of this nesting site by the adult animal,” she wrote in a letter to Forestry Corporation, the EPA, and the Ministers for Environment and Agriculture.
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Speaking on Monday with Yahoo News she said, "it is a miracle that this nest was discovered at all, it is reckless in the extreme that a State-owned Corporation, the Forestry Corporation with heavy machinery and industrial logging threatens to log just 100 metres away. Native forest logging is extremely intensive and traumatic, at both a local and a landscape level. The fact that our public forest estate has become refuge for so many of our State's most threatened species means that logging is simply no longer viable.”
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