For several years, Green Skills has supported the restoration and management of wetlands across central Gondwana Link. Some of the aims are to restore bird habitat, assist migratory birds by maintaining important feeding sites, stimulate enthusiasm for their conservation within the surrounding community and to ensure birds like the threatened Hooded Plover continue to have safe breeding grounds.
Green Skills have organised school education programs, workshops on bird identification and investigating what lives in the lakes, as well as the fencing and replanting of natural ecosystems.
Last October, Basil Schur from Green Skills checked on the progress of salt lake conservation fencing and revegetation projects near Cranbrook. He was very pleased to see juvenile Hooded Plovers on Tom South Lake, beside the Katanning Road which was fenced in 2018.
A YouTube video of this salt lake work is available here. Green Skills have also commissioned a number of other videos, many related to wetlands, which can be viewed on their YouTube.
In February 2021 Green Skills working with Gnowangerup based farmer Wayne Pech, and fencing contractor Tim Saggers, will carry out a project to install 10km of fencing protecting 11.5 km of salt lake foreshores on 7 lakes on Bella Vista broad acre farm near Cranbrook. In addition 10 large fox and cat cage traps will be deployed on priority North Stirling lakes with the aim of reducing feral predators. This project will protect valuable feeding and breeding habitat for such threatened shorebirds as the Hooded Plover as well as many other shorebird species.
This work is based on a detailed survey of the Bella Vista lakes and remnant bushland undertaken by Green Skills and ecologist Melissa Howe in May 2020, with support of the Gillamii Centre and Wayne Pech. This report is available here.
These Green Skills projects are supported the Gillamii Centre, the Williamson and Jones families, Bella Vista’s owner ( Angus McLaren) and manager (Wayne Pech) and by Steve Elson, volunteer bird watchers and Birdlife Australia.
Project funding provided by WA State NRM office.