Dear Jennifer,
I was reading your blogs criticising the misrepresentation of the facts surrounding the Murray river floodplains and death of river red gums. I own a property on the Murray river floodplains, downstream of Echuca. My property has river red gum wetlands that have quite naturally not recieved any flooding since 1995.
For the last 15 years my red gum wetland and many other red gum wetlands in the region have suffered massive decline in tree health and in some instances all of the trees have been killed. It is changing the look of the landscape and is quite obviously a regional catastrophe.
But what is the cause? Ask any of the experts and they insist it is "drought", but in my district the average rain for the past 15 years has only been slightly below the long term average and in reality the redgums have probably had as much flooding as they ever did in dry periods.
The actual cause of the tree death is something much more cute and cuddly, common brush-tailed possum's. Brush-tailed possums are abundant in these hollow redgums. At times I have spotted up to 15 mature possums in one tree. Each summer the trees grow a few leaves and then for the remainder of the year the possums strip them clean. The trees can only take about three years of this kind of constant bombardment before they die. From the 200 large trees within my wetland at least 75% have died in the last 10 years, and the remainder are in poor health.
Prior to European settlement in the area, the local Aboriginals heavilly utilized brush-tailed possums for food, clothing etcetera. So much so that one of the early pastoralists in the area referred to them as the "possum-eaters".
As an experiment I possum guarded a number of random trees last November.
The following photograph I took this morning of one of the possum- guarded trees. The trees in the photograph were all in similar health at the time of guarding last November.
Possum attack is a widespread problem in the Murray flood plains now that possums are unable to be utilized and managed, and probably explains a lot of the premature death of red gums that people are witnessing in this natural dry period.
Regards,
Michael O'Brien
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Note from Jeff Yugovic, added 13th December, 2015
"Although my work is widely accepted by the general public and many practical conservationists, I am being ignored by academia and am regarded as a heretic by some ratbag ‘conservationists’.
My discussion paper is online and is updated periodically:
http://www.spiffa.org/do-ecosystems-need-top-predators.html "
This paper quotes the above blog post.
One of the worst attributes of restricted fire regimes is the formation and maintenance of hydrophobic soil layers that seriously impede soil moisture retention.
A good fire fixes this well.
By the way, Michael, there is a good cheap method of solving your possum problem and saving your trees for the cost of only one of your tree barriers.
But this is the kind of knowledge that myself and other disgusted farmers are no longer willing to make public to a community that has trashed the social contract. Please don't take it personally but when injustice becomes law then opposition becomes a moral duty.
Pity.