The Pondcast

We are back out on the Tyrendarra flora reserve with Robin Adair controlling Italian Buckthorn. This introduced exotic plant is playing havoc in the reserve, and as Robin points out in this episode, managing takes some integrated solutions – herbicide is one, but fire might be one of the best.

On a drizzly windy spring day, we found members of the Friends of the Forgotten Woodland on a roadside, planting banksia, sheoak and sweet bursaria plants. They were establishing a new seed orchard to ensure the remnant native vegetation will always be in the landscape of the Victorian Volcanic Plains. The group GPS plots and note the provenance of every tree they plant, which is how they know on this day, they planted a plant which is had genetically been on the plains for hundreds of years. 

Italian Buckthorn - the woody weed with tasty red berries is beginning to encroach on our landscape. In this episode, Glenelg Hopkins CMA's Tania Parker is our in the field with expert Robin Adair and his offsider Kym, discussing how to control this entirely unpalatable introduced species. 

In this episode we are out in the grasslands tossing golf balls into quadrats with researchers from the Arthur Rylah Institute. Brad Farmilo loves talking grassland ecology, and he’s passionate about the projects being undertaken not just ticking boxes about how many kilometres of fences have been put up or plants planted. Instead, he is all about creating and providing useable and useful information and data for land holders, land managers and the people making the decisions about investments to make sure practice change doesn’t just happen at grass level, but also at policy level.

In this episode we meet Victorian Landcare Awards Australian Government Individual Landcarer Award winner Don Rowe, from Maroona.   This award acknowledges the significant contribution made by an individual who has demonstrated outstanding leadership and commitment to Landcare.   Don Rowe is a local landholder, community member and leading Landcarer in the Upper Hopkins area around Ararat. He has been involved in the Landcare group since it began 30 years ago, but even before the Landcare group was formalised, Don was actively carrying out Landcare work on his own property, transforming it from windswept paddocks to an agricultural landscape with biodiversity corridors and land class fencing. As a school teacher – he was also pretty quick to get kids out into the paddock planting trees to begin the education about the importance of Landcare early … and now, most exciting for his grandkids – he has a trophy for tree planting. But his key message to other landholders is: just start planting.

In this Pondcast we are talking all about bitterns. We talk to project manager Jacinta – who explains the project behind finding the elusive Australasian Bitterns. These shy, long-necked birds who sway with the rushes, fly south for the winter each year from the NSW rice fields. And meet siblings, Riley and Macey from Portland, who noticed a weird noise coming from the swamp at the bottom at their garden, and for the last couple of years, they’ve been actively reporting and recording them for the CMA project.

Find out why the coastal area of south-west Victoria is so internationally important, not just for its geologically significant wetlands, but also for the role it plays as a round-the-world holiday destination for a group of birds from Siberia. Glenelg Hopkins CMA's Glenelg Estuary Discovery Bay Ramsar site coordinator, Gavin, takes us for a wander on the sand dunes and around the wetlands.

Native grasslands on roadsides are often driven past without a second thought, but a passionate group of people are taking an active role in restoring these endangered plant communities and having great success balancing the ecological, community and agricultural values of the region.

Soil used to be seen as the enemy in natural resource management (NRM), and there was once a great divide between the farming community and those authorities who sought to improve the environment. But things have changed - and now agriculture and NRM can work hand in hand for beneficial outcomes for everyone - with Richard taking care of the admin.

We met the dynamic duo getting stuff done along the waterways of the Glenelg Hopkins CMA region – Steve and Alex. These two are responsible for putting things IN the river, like fish hotels and ladders, delivering environmental flows along the waterways, and probably most importantly, talking to people about the river and engaging with the communities along it.

Meet Jarred, the man with the job of trying to manage the competing needs of our environment where the river meets the sea.  Managing coastal estuaries with the competing needs of the environment and the community can be tricky, but he also gets to spend a lot of time outdoors in some pretty spectacular environments, learning from traditional owners, helping landholders and working with community and school groups.

We sit down with Aggie and Ben, the Glenelg Hopkins CMAs natural resource management planners in the Biodiversity team who are charged with protecting an area known as the VVP. We learn how locking up and leaving native grasslands is the worst thing you want to do if you want to actually look after them, and why they’ve been clocking up the kilometres playing cupid to an oddly named little yellow flower.

The Glenelg Hopkins CMA protects and enhances the land, water and biodiversity across about 26,000ha of Victoria's south-west. But, does anyone really know what GHCMA stands for? In this episode, we meet Adam Bester, the CEO of the Glenelg Hopkins CMA and ask him what his organisation does, how it does it, who funds it, and who does all the work.