When we clean up neglected areas which have been over-run with weed species and we replace them with natives, our restoration work should have the aim of restoring habitat and food supplies for the birds and other animals that presently live in the area. Ideally our work should also aim to encourage species that may have resided there before it was allowed to degenerate.

The problems we’ve reaped

No-one denies that invasive species need to be controlled.

The wholesale removal of weeds such as Lantana, however, often results in a heavy loss of wildlife. This is due to the loss of established habitat. It can be very difficult to get the resident wildlife back, even several years after the restoration work has been carried out.

Somewhat surprisingly, prolific invasive species are often the main support for wildlife in the Brisbane area. The proliferation of weeds such as Lantana is overwhelmingly due to the wholesale clearing of native species in the past. Removal of these weeds before adequate native replacements are established is common practice. It results in some species not re-establishing for many years – if ever!

The most vulnerable species are small insect eating birds, small mammals and reptiles.

Female Red-backed Fairy-wren – a prolific insect eater. It needs dense thickets to breed as it nests close to the ground.

Weeds such as Lantana often provide excellent protective habitat for these animals as well as a huge variety of insects on which the birds feed. The removal of Lantana and similar invasive species before adequately replacing a suitable habitat can result in them simply leaving the area, often for good.

Birds such as Fairy-wrens, Willie Wagtails, Flycatchers and Monarchs will only return when there is dense shelter for them to escape to when threatened by cats and predatory birds. These small birds are very important for the natural control of pest insects that damage fruit and vegetables.

Restless Flycatcher – a specialist at catching insects on the wing

It is commonplace during restoration to see Magpies, Currawongs, Butcherbirds (Black & Whites) and Noisy Miners move into the cleared areas in such numbers that they prevent smaller insect eaters returning.

Conversely, larger fruit and nectar eating birds and medium sized mammals such as possums tend to return relatively quickly.

So what do we do?

The answer lies in simple planning

The restoration of habitat can be achieved by concentrating on establishing replacement native plant species to the stage where they are supporting the small insect eating birds, mammals and reptiles before you commence large scale removal of the existing weed habitat.

It would be prudent to make an inventory of the existing species before starting the project to see the effect the restoration is having on wildlife.

Temporary habitat can be established using pioneering species such as wild tobacco and crotalarias that can be mulched down.

Using annual grasses such as millets and canary grasses to cover areas cleared will support insects until the replacement natives establish a suitable habitat. These grasses die out naturally and stop the invasion of weeds. They also enrich the soil when they die down. Their seeding supports finches, doves and rosellas.

Concentrate on establishing small shrubs and ground covering natives in the early stages of your restoration. This is essential for retaining small animals. Covering cleared ground with bark mulch provides very little habitat and encourages the “Black & Whites”.

While many of the small birds and mammals will feed in open areas, they cannot compete with cats and “Black & White” bird species unless they can retreat to areas dense enough for them to evade capture. They also need these areas to nest safely. Thus, we need to plant a density of replacement natives with the aim of producing a thicket similar to that established by Lantana.

The Willie Wagtail is one of the few small insect eaters that will stand up against the Magpie and other “Black & Whites”

Restoration is best done slowly by planting an area adjacent to the invasive species and when that has established, removing a similar sized patch nearby and establishing natives to replace the weeds.  This cycle can then be repeated, leaving enough intact habitat to support the small birds and mammals while your restoration is taking place.

The main message here is:

Don’t wholesale clear weeds such as Lantana until you’ve established a replacement, or you will lose your beneficial small insect eaters, probably for ever.

Let’s protect habitat for the Black-faced Monarch – an excellent destroyer of insects on fruit trees

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The long dry spell has mixed blessings for the wildlife on our Brookfield property.

The numbers of some species of birds are well down and the drought has had an impact on the insect eaters such as Monarchs, Flycatchers and Whistlers.

Some of the larger Honeyeaters have decreased and even the Rosellas, King Parrots and Lorikeets seem to be in much smaller numbers.

This used to concern me, but there is a flip side to this situation.

Once the rain arrives and the trees, shrubs and weeds start growing again, the flowering begins. The insects build up and there will be plenty of food that will support lots of wildlife.

In fact, there will be such a surplus of food, because of the low numbers that have survived the drought, that new birds will come in to fill the empty niches and probably we will even get some new species.

The drought has actually favoured some species. The last really big drought brought in the Plumed Whistling Ducks for the first time and because we keep our dams full, the numbers of water birds has actually increased substantially.

We have also had larger numbers of Reed Warblers than I have ever seen here before and even a pair of seldom seen Little Grassbirds, another species closely associated with wetlands.

Some of the more aggressive species still seem to do well during dry periods. The Willie Wagtails are in their usual numbers though they are nesting later than usual and will probably only do so once this season.

Scrub Turkeys are another aggressive species which seems to be thriving right through the drought and increasing in numbers whilst Butcherbirds, Magpies and Crows always do well in the open areas, probably at the expense of the more timid birds.

Another species that is flourishing is the Bell Miner, which has moved back onto the west facing slopes.

One species I am not happy to find is doing well is the Indian Myna. We had one pair of this pest species, but recently I counted 18 sitting on the powerlines! They probably moved in because their usual haunts ran out of food and water.

One bonus is that the Red-necked Wallabies are coming down around our houses and dams where they can always find some green grass and their favourite Milk Thistle. We are even seeing the shy Swamp Wallaby more often.

Our native Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) makes a wonderful habitat and is one of the best food resources for a large number of birds, insects and flying foxes.

We have a number of them, but one, deep in an area of native bush, has not been touched since it was logged for Red Cedar about 100 years ago.

It is a beauty! It has a huge crop of fruit, usually in February, and another crop in winter.

This tree started life as a seed deposited by a bird on a tree the loggers probably didn’t want. The dead tree is still visible. It was a Eucalyptus about 80cm in diameter at its base. The fig seedling grew up and strangled the Eucalyptus and now the Moreton Bay Fig has a massive buttress and at chest height it is more than a metre through and more than 30 metres tall. It has a huge canopy and stands well clear of the other trees.

The Fig attracts masses of flying foxes that come in at dusk and feed noisily right through the night. During the day the birds take over and the range is impressive.

Most interesting to me and my birder friends is a pair of the rarely seen Barred Cuckoo-shrikes that come in to feed on the fruit. They quickly feed on a number of the orange fruit and then move to a horizontal branch on a nearby tree where they sit quietly while they digest their meal. That takes about 25 minutes and they return to the Fig for another feed.

They are joined by lots of Figbirds, Orioles, Rose-crowned Fruit Doves, Currawongs and Lewin’s Honeyeaters. Sometimes a flock of Topknot Pigeons comes in and also the odd Bowerbird.

Underneath the fig, Emerald Doves, Wonga Pigeons and Brush Turkeys pick up the figs dropped by the birds above them. 

Even when the Fig is not fruiting it provides a safe habitat for a lot of small birds including Superb Fairy-wrens, Spectacled Monarchs and Willie Wagtails. Possums also play in its  branches.

The figs have an interesting pollination method involving Fig Wasps and there are a few moth caterpillars and a Longhorn Beetle found on the foliage.

Olive-backed Oriole eating Moreton Bay Fig

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The steep hill behind our home runs north-south between the valleys of Gold Creek and Savages Roads. There is a continuous run of vegetation from our place past the Gold Creek Reservoir through to the Enoggera Forest Reserve.

MCCG Chairman Jim Pope has shared these photos taken in his garden on 4 July 2018. 

They show a carpet python (Morelia spilota) devouring an  unsuspecting Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala). 

The python had caught and was constricting the bird on the pathway next to Jim’s house. Over a period of about 2 hours it gradually swallowed the bird head first. 

Jim thinks that the python may have been slightly injured in the battle, but it soon disappeared into the bushes after it had consumed the bird.

 

For more info about pythons, visit the Queensland Museum website. 

To read up on Noisy Miners, which are sometimes referred to as Mickey Birds, check our Digital Field Guide. 

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It has been objective of the MCCG to restore the flora in the Moggill Creek Catchment to pre-settlement conditions.

In accordance with this,  the MCCG has a policy of planting seedlings raised from seed collected in the catchment area. These seedlings are considered to be the local forms of species that are best adapted to the area and are species which would have been prevalent around pre-settlement. 

Bryan Hacker has advised that the Nursery does sometimes use seed from outside the catchment when collecting local seed is impracticable. Often, species that were previously in the catchment are now in very small numbers or have been lost.

One of the side effects of climate change is that the zones expected to be suitable for various local species are expected to move South as the temperature warms. For birds and animals this should not be difficult as they can walk or fly South, but with plants it is a different matter. 

Climate change has happened in the past and plants have been able to adapt. Although some species were probably lost, most were able to gradually move to more suitable climes. But this time it is expected that the climate will change much more quickly and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that only 75% of species could make the move. This means a huge number of extinctions. 

There is a varying amount of genetic diversity among individual species. Diversity is beneficial: greater diversity means increased ability to adapt to changing conditions.

Perhaps our policy of only propagating local forms when available should be reconsidered in light of present theories about climate change.

Should we consider bringing in seed from plants of species that we have locally from more Northern areas in order to gain diversity?  Could this help our local plants adapt as the climate gets warmer?

A case in point is the Grey Gum (Eucalyptus punctata). The Brisbane region is located near the Northern boundary of where the Grey Gum grows. There are odd locations of this species up to about Bundaberg and inland to Monto, and an isolated population occurs in the Barakula Forest. This magnificent tree is very selective in where it grows and seed from more Northerly areas may be a trigger to bring in the additional genetic diversity that will allow us to keep this important Koala tree thriving in the catchment as the climate warms.

Trunk of a Grey Gum, (Eucalyptus punctata) at Adavale St, Brookfield, showing scratches from koalas.   This is one of the koalas’ favourite food trees in the catchment.

 

A dilemna for us all to ponder:

If we are messing with climate shouldn’t we give nature a helping hand to make up for the damage we are doing?

Or would we just once again be interfering with nature and should we simply accept the extinctions we may be causing?

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The most common large native land snail found in the Moggill Creek Catchment is the Fraser’s Banded Land snail (Sphaerospira fraseri).

In the upper reaches of Moggill Creek and most of Gold Creek there are very few “Water Weeds”,  but the same is not true of the lower reaches of Moggill Creek.

Water weeds need two things to prosper – light and nutrients.

In the upper reaches the creeks are mostly covered by vegetation. Some are native trees and there are some areas with a fair number of exotics such as Privet, Camphor Laurel and Chinese Elms, but they all contribute to the shade over the creek.

An open area along Moggill Creek at Tuckett’s Farm with several different water weeds. It looks like there is also some algae in the water. Actually the path alongside the creek in this estate is well treed with very few water weeds except near the bridge where it is open.

 

The fertility of our creeks increases as they descend through areas of open paddocks and past houses and then by large establishments such as the Brookfield Retirement Village. The run-off from paddocks with livestock,from roads, and from seepage from septic systems results in increased phosphates and nitrates in the creek water.

By the time it gets past the junction of Gold Creek and Moggill Creek the water has picked up substantial levels of nutrients and in times of low water flow can be quite turbid.

Added to this, the clearing of the banks of the creek in some areas along the lower Moggill Creek has in effect supplied all the nutrients and light required for the growth of water weeds.

These nutrients have to go somewhere! They are either flushed out into the Brisbane River in strong creek flows, result in dense algae growth or they promote the growth of water weeds.

This photo is of two large water holes that were part of the Dart Farm. They were regularly used for many years up to about the 2nd World War.  They are about 8m wide, 500m long and up to 3m deep in places, and extend from the end of Adavale St nearly to Jones Rd. The vegetation on the Northern side was removed when it was the district swimming hole. It has since regrown but mainly with Chinese Elm (Celtus) although there are some good size Sandpaper Figs and some other natives. The other side has always had a good variety of natives and a few exotics.  There is now a full canopy and virtually no water weeds.

The choices of how to handle this depends on what amenity is desired. 

It is very difficult to stop these nutrients entering the creeks. We cannot expect all the residents to return their paddocks back to native bush, nor can we close down the retirement village.

We could allow the water weeds to do their job of using up the nutrients or plant more efficient water plants along the creek in artificial wetlands to strip out the nutrients. This would would be better than algae blooms that contribute to the turbidity or worse, mats of stringy algae.

The other alternative is to replant the edges of the creek to reduce the light levels so the water plants won’t grow. This approach would rely on the creek flooding to flush out the fertile nutrient-rich water into the Brisbane River. Unfortunately this only works in big floods and small creek flows actually increase the fertility by washing the nutrients from the paddocks into the creeks.

In the meantime we probably have to accept that most of the “Water Weeds” we have in the creeks are probably doing a good job for us in reducing the nutrients in the creeks

We do need to be vigilant, however, as we do have some Elodea (Egeria densa) in the Moggill Creek. It is a fully submerged weed and is renowned as the weed that clogged up the Hawkesbury River in NSW. It will be washed out in really big floods, but can clog up the creeks in low flows.

Unfortunately it is not a noxious weed in Queensland and Victoria and it is often planted in fish ponds and farm dams and can be washed into the creeks during heavy rainfall periods.

There are very few native water plants that are adapted to water with substantial phosphorus levels. Those natives that are capable of handling the high nutrient levels can often grow so rampantly that they become weeds themselves. Bullrushes and Hydrilla are examples.

Some natives that will assist a little are Twig Rushes (Baumea spp.), Club Rushes (Bulboschoenus spp.), some Flat Sedges (Cyperus spp.), Spike Rushes (Eleocharis spp.) and Sedges Rushes (Juncus spp).

Avoid planting waterlilies, especially the yellow flowered Nymphaea mexicana (N. flava) which some years ago was a rampant weed in Gold Creek. Waterlilies have little effect in reducing the nutrient levels in the water.

Overall, however, we are very lucky in the Moggill Creek Catchment as we have some of the best vegetated and best water quality creeks in Brisbane!

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Which wallaby?  Some time ago we published a Bush Bites article called “Which Wallaby?”

In that article, Ed Frazer shared photos of wallabies he has photographed around his property over the years.

Ed has shots of Swamp wallabies and Red-necked wallabies, but in the article he stated his belief that Pretty-faced wallabies and Red-necked pademelons also live in the catchment.

During evenings at home, Ed often hears a very distinctive single thump. This is the sound a pademelon makes when it is disturbed: it sends a warning to predators by thumping its hind feet.

Whilst Ed was certain that the little marsupial lives nearby, he had never been able to get a photo of the animal. They are particularly cautious, easily frightened and notoriously difficult to spot.

So he set up his Infra-red triggered camera and was fortunate enough to pick up the following shot:

Living proof!

You can see Ed’s original Bush Bites article here.

To learn more about the Red-necked pademelon, visit the Queensland Museum website or take a look at the Rootourism fact sheet.

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Recently, Ed Frazer was fascinated by some wonderfully colourful insects he frequently encounters on his Brookfield property.

It is quite likely that you may also have seen these little bugs!

Ed was so intrigued that he took some photos and sought the advice of Geoff Monteith, a respected local entomologist.

Geoff kindly identified the insects and filled in some fascinating details about them.

They are Mallotus Harlequin bugs.

We soon learned that these little bugs have some intriguing and highly developed behaviours. There is an explanation for their vibrant colouring as well.

We contacted Prue Cooper-White, an MCCG member who is a keen wildlife photographer.

Prue graciously contributed some of her own shots. Combined with Ed’s photos, they give us a good understanding of some of the intriguing behaviours of these little bugs.

Here is the info provided by Geoff, together with some wonderful shots from Prue and Ed!

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This is a common bug out in the Moggill Catchment way.

It’s name is Cantao parentum or the Mallotus Harlequin Bug.

It breeds on Mallotus trees, mostly on Mallotus philippensis but also on the smaller Mallotus claoxyloides, which looks like the one the nymphs are all sitting on in Ed’s picture below:

Females lay batches of eggs on the undersides of leaves and guard them by sitting on top of them until they hatch.

All bugs have tubular piercing and sucking mouthparts (called a rostrum) under their head and they insert that into the plant to suck out the sap as food, as in the following photo:

Here’s a different type of bug. We’ve included it because it is showing off the rostrum beneath it’s head very well:

This is a bug called Stilida indecora and it feeds only on trees of the family Sapindaceae. It seems this one is feeding on a Cupaniopsis, which is the right family. This bug is cleaning its rostrum by wiping the sharp tip of it with its front feet.

Most bugs have a smelly secretion which they can squirt out through gland apertures which open on the back of the nymphs and on the underside of the thorax of adults.

Cantao is no exception and they will readily squirt this out when handled. It is designed to prevent predators, especially birds, from eating them.

Their bright colour is “warning colouration” designed to make birds, who get a mouthful of burning smelly secretion, remember not to try to eat another bug that looks like that!

But Cantao has another spectacular trick!

Most insects hide away during winter to avoid being eaten during their hibernating non-feeding winter siesta.  By the time winter comes all Cantao have progressed from the nymphal stage to the extra brightly coloured adult stage, as in the one feeding on the fruit in the photo below:

In winter all these adults come together into big clusters of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of individuals which all cling to the top foliage of a tree where they form a big round brilliantly coloured ball which can be the size of a soccer ball.

They then sit quietly in this position all through winter until spring comes and they disperse and go back to Mallotus trees to mate and lay their eggs for the next summer generation to get under way.

What they are doing in these big winter clusters is practicing ‘safety in numbers’ where, with their combined defensive smell capacity, no bird or animal would dare attack them. The trees they cluster on are not usually their Mallotus food plant trees and more usually are some taller tree. I’ve often seen their clusters in the high branches of hoop pines.

Editor’s note: Many thanks to Geoff, Ed and Prue for providing such an insight into just a small part of the microscopic world that surrounds us. Not sure what our readers’ reaction is, but I find it somewhat remarkable and gratifying that such tiny insects have such highly developed and sophisticated behaviours!

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