Return of the birds

Join our staff as they chat about revegetation efforts underway to protect habitat critically important to native species in south-west WA.

In south-west Western Australia, an incredible diversity of plants sustains an incredible diversity of pollinators. So what happens when both are under threat?

Reveg work for endangered Carnaby's Cockatoos is benefitting from a good wet year.

Did you know that there can be more organisms in one teaspoon of soil than there are people on the planet? The microscopic communities that live in the soil beneath our feet are critical to the health of the planet and ourselves.

It was a proud day for us in south coast WA yesterday as we hosted the launch of our Fitz-Stirling Fauna Recovery Project! This ambitious five-year project spans about 40,000 hectares, making it the largest integrated fauna recovery program involving private landholders in the region’s history. 

Ecologist Angela Sanders and Alex Hams (Healthy Landscape Manager in South West WA) discuss our Fitz-Stirling reserves. Botanist Libby Sandiford  presents  floral assessments.

Botanist extraordinaire Libby Sandiford has spent the past few years striding across our properties in the Fitz-Stirling in south-west Western Australia. She's documented an incredible 934 species of flora in just under 4000 hectares, which is highly biodiverse by anyone's reckoning.

Bush Heritage’s efforts to connect remnant patches of bush in the fragmented but ecologically diverse landscape between the Stirling Range and Fitzgerald River national parks have been given a boost with support from Loro Parque Fundación.

As we prepare to start a first-of-its-kind feral control program in the Fitz-Stirling, Noongar Traditional Owner Aunty Carol Petterson reflects on the changes seen in her lifetime.

When writer and self-confessed city-slicker Jane Caro takes an opportunity to venture west, it leads her to experience all the highlights and some of the lowlights of life in the field.

Back in the 1970s, the skies over Perth used to blacken with the sight of Carnaby’s Cockatoos. The big noisy parrots flocked across the horizon in their thousands. These days they are few and far between.

It had been 16 years since our last visit to Chereninup Creek Reserve, for a National Tree Day planting. That cold and blustery day was the start of a revegetation program in the mega-diverse region between the Stirling Range and Fitzgerald River National Parks in southern WA.

There’s some conjecture around which tiny marsupial is the cutest, Honey or Pygmy Possums. After seeing both popping up in the pitfall traps and nesting boxes blanketing the reserve, I can understand the debate. Over the course of five days myself and four other volunteers interacted with a broad cross-section of animals that had made homes for themselves in the newly revegetated areas.

Pygmy Possums quickly took up residence in the nest boxes we erected in restored habitat at our Monjebup North reserve in southwest WA. What we didn't expect were the large colonies of social spiders that also moved in!

Carnaby's Cockatoos are returning to restored farmland in Western Australia to feed just 5 years after planting.

How we’re working beyond our boundaries to control foxes and feral cats in south-west Western Australia.

The recent opening of the Michael Tichbon Field Station heralds a new era for Bush Heritage’s conservation work in the species-rich Fitz-Stirling region of the south-west.

Completely unaware of being watched, a pair of Malleefowl have been practising courtship displays on their new mound. We're very excited that they've made their home in 6-year-old revegetation on our Monjebup North property in south-west Western Australia.

Bush Heritage’s revegetation of 420 hectares on Monjebup North Reserve has seen the return of the poorly studied Western Brush Wallaby, known locally as the Black-gloved Wallaby or Kwoora.

Our restoration on Monjebup North Reserve is bursting with life. This 450 hectares of former farmland sitting in the Gondwana Link pathway on the south coast of WA was revegetated over 3 years from 2012 to 2014 and we're now seeing some measurable benefits for wildlife.

In January this year volunteers Annie and Ian Mayo put up 20 Pygmy Possum nest boxes in the vegetation restoration area on Monjebup North Reserve in south-west Western Australia. The boxes were funded by a generous donation from a supporter to provide shelter and nesting sites for these tiny possums in the developing vegetation.

We're transforming bare paddocks into bush as part of one of Australia’s most ambitious revegetation projects – and the animals are coming back.

Through the past three years we've had well-known and highly-respected South Coast botanist Libby Sandiford running a rolling vegetation survey across some of our Gondwana Link reserves. The information Libby has collated has surprised even us - we knew that what we're protecting and managing here is pretty special, but we didn't know quite how special.​

A wide variety of birds are returning to our Monjebup North property, in the Gondwana Link pathway in southwest WA, just 4 years after the paddocks were seeded with native plants.

The few hundred hectares of original bush on Monjebup North turn out to be what's almost certainly the world stronghold for the little-known Priority 1 species Kunzea newbeyi, which grows there in abundance. And it's the only one of the fewer than 5 sites from which the species is recorded that's secure.

Restoration on our Monjebup property in Gondwana Link, southwest Western Australia, has received a boost with donor support to establish food plants for the threatened Carnaby's Black Cockatoo. Eva Palmer is supporting a 3-year project to put more proteaceous plants back into the landscape for these birds. The initial phase was a trial of direct sowing by machine of proteaceous seed, which in the past has proved to be a big challenge because of the difficulty in collecting, treating and distributing the large seeds.

Yes, this is a waterfall, and yes this is the middle of summer in the southwest of Western Australia. Bill and Jane Thompson (our partners, whose Yarraweyah Falls​ property adjoins our Monjebup Reserve) had strict instructions to let me (Angela Sanders, Gondwana Link Ecologist) know if the waterfall on their property ever got going.

With huge financial and other support from South Coast NRM, and bolstered by generous contributions from private donors, we've now all but completed 400 hectares - that's 1,000 acres - of restoration on the Monjebup North property we bought in 2009.

Ecologist Angela Sanders has been working on our Gondwana Link properties in the Fitz-Stirling region of Western Australia for 10 years. Monjebup Reserve is exceptionally rich in plant species and, in a twist of logic, poor soil (that is, low in nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorous) is one of the reasons.