Six Nannas headed to southern NSW to see and learn about greater gliders, the importance of habitat and how to save it. We learnt that patience is a virtue if you want to see and save a glider.
On the last weekend in August six Sydney Nannas travelled to Cooma and Braidwood to visit the Glenbog and Tallaganda Forests. We saw old growth forest, logged areas and “thinned” forest and learned heaps about the struggle to save the habitat of greater gliders – nocturnal creatures that live in hollows in large old eucalypt trees. Listed as endangered in 2022, their populations have plummeted due to habitat destruction from deforestation and bushfires. If this destruction continues, the greater glider could be extinct within the next 20 years.
Glenbog Forest is 60 km south from Cooma. Andrew Wong of Wilderness Australia was our host and our guide, and he had prepared a great programme for us. He took us to Glenbog on the Saturday night and assigned us in pairs to trees he had identified as having glider dens. He lent us powerful torches and showed us how to swipe them up and down the trees with the aim of spotting two glider eyes watching us. Two nannas with Andrew saw a pair of gliders that night, four others didn’t have any luck.
On Sunday we met Dave Gallan of National Parks Association, a photographer. We enjoyed a long morning walk in the northern part of Glenbog State Forest, a zone slated for logging in the next six months. Also, it’s open to hunting and had a sign saying that 1080 poison for wild dogs had been laid. This was wet sclerophyll native forest and though parts of it had been logged previously, we saw various species of large old trees and magnificent tree ferns.
Andrew told us of a theory that tree ferns can reproduce by moving… they grow tall, bend and fall over (headfirst), and from that fern head a new plant grows. A marvellous image of linear tree fern caterpillar-movement over centuries.
Andrew and Dave put the nannas to use as “talent”. We were filmed walking through the forest by day and by night, especially we thought, at difficult parts, like walking along a narrow log to cross a creek, or negotiating a series of fallen trunks. We were interviewed about our nanna interests and experiences and we chanted: STOP the Logging of Native Forests NOW… SAVE Glenbog Forest.
Dave told us about grandmothers who joined campaigns to save the forests in the 1980s and 90s. That pleased us, to know of the nannas fighting before us, being arrested to save forests. And saddened us at the same time… we still have to do this…
Years of forest actions led to the creation of the South East Forests National Park – only half of the area environmentalists at the time had demanded and been promised by the Bob Carr NSW government. The other half remained State Forest, open to logging, hunting and even mining. Some but not all National Parks are protected from exploitation of their resources “right down to the centre of the earth”.
After that walk in the wonderful old growth forest, Andrew took us to an area that had been logged and we walked there in the debris and silence. We could see that the remaining forest nearby has lost its habitat too, now it is more exposed to wind and sun and will become drier and more vulnerable to fire. Especially as the loggers’ debris is lying there as fuel: the stripped bark and small branches. Nearby were areas where the forest had been “thinned”. Loggers take only some of the trees but they still destroy the forest habitat.
We returned to the northern part of Glenbog for our nocturnal glider lookout. Andrew used his thermal drone to detect glider presence in a particular tree he’d previously identified as a glider den tree. Then he and two nannas set off for another tree. Meanwhile Dave Gallan and four Nannas set up the photography equipment – tripods, cameras, lights red and white. And then we waited for darkness to fall.
We started using the torches as the first stars appeared, concentrating on that one den tree. Dave left us to it and went off looking for gliders elsewhere. He soon came back with news of a sighting and then we too went to look at the glider on a tree branch under torch light, and on Dave’s camera screen. For several of us, this was the first time we’d ever seen a greater glider.
For every glider recorded as sighted emerging from its hollow, 0.78 hectare of forest will be excluded from logging. It’s not enough that eight of us that night saw a glider and watched it for perhaps an hour moving along a branch of a gum tree (sadly, we didn’t see it glide). The creature has to be recorded emerging from its hollow to meet Forestry Corporation regulations. Only then will the area be marked for exclusion from logging.
After moving north to Braidwood, we spent Monday in Tallaganda State Forest – site of 29 charges against the Forestry Corporation filed in late August by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) in the Land and Environment Court for illegal logging. Dr Kita Ashman, a greater glider expert with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), arrived from Melbourne and gave us a great potted history of the two years of hard work culminating in the EPA prosecution. The case is proceeding, and we hope for a good outcome – hefty penalties for NSW Forestry Corp and ultimately, of course, the cessation of native forest logging.
Aiming to film gliders in flight, Dave spent the afternoon setting up a complex array of tripods and remotely controlled lights pointed at two trees. One, an old dead tree (pictured below blue circle are the den holes), was known to be a den, and the other nearby was a favourite landing place.
As darkness fell, we waited with keen anticipation for the emergence of a glider, torches at the ready. Probably because of the unusual amount of activity below, it took some time for this to happen, but eventually the eyes of one, and then two, gliders appeared. It was fascinating to watch as the first glider quickly scrambled from its hollow to a convenient branch high in the tree. It waited there for a while and then took off swiftly and dramatically for the expected landing place on the nearby tree. Andrew kept his red-light torch trained on the animal the whole time, giving everyone a spectacular view. The second glider took a very long time to repeat the performance and waited so long on the high branch that everyone was starting to think that it must have already taken off. We turned off the torches and were preparing to pack up when those of us who were still hopefully watching were rewarded by the silhouette of a gliding glider against the pale moonlit sky.
An incident during packing up, when Dave fell and badly punctured his hand on a sharp stick, was a very bloody reminder that citizen scientists risk life and limb as well as suffering the discomforts of heat, cold and long hours to do the extraordinary work that they do. Andrew and Dave put a great deal of time and thought into giving the nannas a wonderful experience, and for this we thank them heartily.
We put the following scribbly gum message into google translate…….
